My personal sign is when you start seeing awkward collaborations start cropping up. One time when I was thrifting, I picked up a graphic novel that had the Justice League, team with the Power Rangers of all things. I glimpsed into what the plot was about out of morbid curiosity and it was just a plain generic time and dimension thing.
Nothing ever connected between the teams at all. DC Comics, while fledgling at times with how they go about their series and movies, still have far more relevance than Power Rangers do. I think the Power Rangers are just grasping at straws to keep being relevant when people have largely moved on from them.
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It’s less of an issue in comedies, but main characters becoming Flanderised in drama series is where it becomes obvious they’ve run out of ideas.
For example, at the beginning of Stranger Things, Hopper had basically given up on life, and over the course of the first two seasons he finds purpose again through helping find Will, and later, raising Eleven as a surrogate daughter… And then in season 3 he becomes ANGERY MAN WHO FIGHTS PEOPLE - and that’s about it.
It runs in parallel with a show getting too many characters to handle. It accelerates the Flanderization of characters who don’t have a lot to do. Stranger Things had that problem as well, with a far too bloated main cast by the end.
When they introduce time travel to fix the CF of plot holes.
Gods, I fucking hate time-travel/multiverse plots. They’re so overdone.
They’re basically used for when the writers are too cowardly to stick to decisions they want to make. Like killing key comic book characters. Nobody stays dead! Except for characters nobody cared too much about or has lost popularity. Spin-offs are different and can be used to tell stories of maybe what things would be like if X character isn’t around anymore. That’s fine.
But interjecting lazily implemented multi-verse, alternate universe, time traveling wrenches in on-going mainline stories? Fuck no.
Depending on the kind of show it is contextual, but here’s some.
If it is a tight self contained story that ends…and then more things happen. Stranger Things for example pretty much perfectly ended in season 1. There was a tiny dangling mystery regarding Eleven’s fate. Such things do not need to be a sequel hook, they can simply exist to tantalize and never be expanded on. This is like if Inception 2 was made and it answered the questions about Cobb’s spinning totem; it would utterly miss the point that the story was over and the ending was intentionally ambiguous.
If the actors or voice actors are simply getting too old for the part. Personally I have a good ear for animation’s voice acting. It drives me absolutely crazy when I hear noticeably aged actors reprising role or continuing them as if nothing has changed. Obviously some performers can last longer than others but for example modern Simpsons is unwatchable to me entirely on the basis of the voices. Even if somehow the writing turned around I simply can’t get past the voices. Similarly I could barely sit through The Incredibles 2, which supposedly picks up right as the first movie ends but all the voices are aged 14 years and I can hear it.
I’m kind of ambiguous about the first point. I think you can expand on a tightly-written, concluded story… but not repeatedly. Furthermore, it requires you to - to some degree - shift the focus of the following stories. Continuing the meta-story is all and just fine, but the immediate story can’t be about the same theme/issue/encounter indefinitely.
Normally when I see that, it is a signal to me that the show as intended ended but it was so popular/lucrative that moneypeople demanded it keep going, so the writers have to take an already concluded story and and un-conclude it. I’m sure shows in this situation have worked, but I’m struggling to think of one.
I suppose certain animes, especially shonen essentially do this, but they are designed from the outset to be nearly endless if successful. I’m thinking about shows like Stranger Things which clearly had one intended season, and then four seasons of whipping together something to put on screen.
Like I disclaimed at the top, it is contextual to the type of show, but I get a Spidey-sense when a show essentially restarts. Even Stargate SG-1 did it near the end, and it was overall a pretty weak few seasons.
Modern Marge sounds like Julie Kavner’s been fronting a death metal band for the last 30 years. Let the poor woman rest.
I mean her net worth is estimated around 90million (and she makes about 400k per episode.), she could easily quit if she wanted to. She’s also in her mid 70s.
That’s why young boys are usually voiced by women
That’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about actors that have already been cast who then play the same role for decades as if nothing about their voice has changed.
Have you heard Bart Simpson’s voice recently?
It seems like you’re both saying the same thing! The other person might have been suggesting that women’s voices tend to change less dramatically than men’s as they age. And hey, Bart Simpson is voiced by a woman!
That’s why I specifically mentioned Bart. Bart sounds absolutely terrible now.
I’m well aware adult women are often cast to play boy children. That has less to do with longevity compared to casting men as it does their ability to better mimic the higher pitch of children. Over a significant time period though, the voice talent ages no matter the gender.
By the powers of pedantry, I have been summoned!
That has less to do with longevity compared to casting men as it does their ability to better mimic the higher pitch of children.
What the heck are you talking about?
they were saying “that’s why child characters get voiced by women instead of men”, they said “that’s why child characters get voiced by women instead of children”
Because that choice absolutely does have to do with the longevity of the voice.That’s a wild way to misunderstand them lol.
women’s voices tend to change less dramatically than men’s as they age.
Point to the child actor being discussed in this sentence.
Not cosmOS, Crunchy. The person who said “that’s why young boys are voiced by women” to which you replied “that’s not really what I’m talking about”
I could have replied directly to that but I didn’t wanna fork the thread, since it’s more or less the same convo. Although in hindsight I should have.
But generally I feel like y’all are talking past each other
When the potential long-term impact of the events keeps increasing, but the actual long-term impact keeps decreasing.
Sounds like life right now
I’m afraid you’ve jumped the shark
The “clip show” is a good sign the writers are running out of ideas. The writers write 10 minutes of dialogue and the rest of the show are scenes from previous episodes.
I liked the clip shows from Community because they showed clips from “episodes” that weren’t shown. They would just reference events that we didn’t see happen and show a clip of it. Idk if that counts though.
a parody of a thing is not the thing itself.
Clipshows were a necessary evil on broadcast shows, especially scifi ones that cost a lot of money. Sometimes the show would have to do a clipshow or a noticeably cheap bottle episode to save up for an expensive episode. Also, in the pre-streaming era, people couldn’t just watch all the episodes in order on demand so an occasional episode summarizing what was going on was actually useful.
I think clip episodes are actually when the production runs out of money so they force the writers to make something very cheap. Usually at the end of a season.
There’s usually a large chasm between the good episodes and the low quality of a clip episodes, rather than a gradual decline.
Loose ends start accumulating and there comes a point where you realize there’s no way they could possibly be resolved coherently in the time the series has left. I was feeling this in a big way during seasons 6 and 7 of Game of Thrones.
Everyone has that show they can bring up and they’ll tell you how one season derails the momentum a series has gone.
That shark is so cute.
Superhero comics are one of those things where I don’t think it’s possible to jump the shark.
The Justice League itself was kind of an awkward collaboration starting back in the 60s where they brought together a bunch of disparate different comic characters into a shared universe.
That being said, I think a series has jumped the shark when it becomes entirely unrecognizable from its original iteration to the point of absurdity. You would never expect to see a scene where The Fonz jumps over a shark while water skiing if you only saw the first episode of Happy Days
I think with long running superhero comics it is more like, if a specific run has jumped the shark and gotten too stupid.
What is simultaneously good and bad about long running comics is that the continuity is so convoluted that the writers can reset it after an especially bad run, or they can go do stand alone stories; and readers can just ignore entire chunks of continuity they don’t like.
Which is fair, but you could also say the same thing for the Avengers. They both started out weirdly like making you think “what the hell do these guys have in common with eachother?” at first. Overtime, as comics developed, they became more established. Then it became more accepted and the rest is history.
But sometimes just pairing them up with say, my example, it makes it even weirder to where nothing meshes.
I would argue that the Power Rangers are not that odd of a pairing for the Justice League.
Quality of the work aside, both are superhero teams with complicated lore. They could use that highlight differences/similarities in ideology or methodology between the characters to create drama, before setting aside their differences to come together against a shared evil. The bones of a good superhero story are there.
jumped its shark
…. Is this a thing? Origin?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
The phrase was coined in 1985 by radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom “Happy Days”, in which the character of “Fonzie”(Henry Winkler) jumps over a live shark while on water-skis.
Basically any time a show goes on too long and tries to introduce a stupid, attention-getting gimmick to try to stay relevant.
In the old sitcom “Happy Days,” after far too many seasons, a new episode featured The Fonz, blue screen water skiing, a crappy looking shark prop, and the Fonz literally jumped over the shark.
Its from the show Happy Days (1977) where Fonzie jumps over a shark while water skiing. Its considered the point where the show took a dramatic turn down hill and the term is still used in that manner today.
It’s from Happy Days when the Fonz literally jumped over a shark while water-skiing. Seen as a sign that the show is out of ideas and using crazy stunts or out-of-character actvities to shock some life (money) out of a dying franchise.
The power rangers are still around? I stopped watching after the movie in 1995.
Somehow. Then Hollywood decided to go and revamp it in 2017. Then when the damage has been done, the IP has been releasing retro stuff to try and recover.
The shows dialogue becomes bloated with convoluted bullshit lines such as “The DOW is over 50,000 right now! It’s over 50,000 dollare, you should be GRATEFUL, and we shojld be talking about that!”
