Back in 7th grade, this troper had to compile an anthology of short stories along with a few other students. One of the stories we could pick from was TheMonkeysPaw. It didn't get picked because it was so "overused", although I argued that... well, SeinfeldIsUnfunny.

Though he really likes Led Zeppelin in general, This troper has to remind himself of this effect whenever he listens to their debut album. The first time he heard it, his reaction was roughly "It's an album of really heavy blues. This is impressive...how, exactly?" He tends to forget that in 1969, ''no one had done 'really heavy blues' before'' and this was totally revolutionary.

This troper had to remind herself that the cliffhanger at the end of Best of Both Worlds Part I was really the first show to put in such peril to its lead character (and the TropeCodifier if not Maker for putting such a cliffhanger at the end of the season). Because watching it twenty years later, BrainwashedAndCrazy as a season-ender has been done. to. death.

My little sister tends to exclaim "You're not funny!" whenever she sees Jerry Seinfeld in the recent adverts for the Greater Building Society (it's Australian). I immediately thought of the trope page.

The networks also have a bad habit of picking the lowest common denominator of jokes in trailers.

I generally avoid this trope as much as I can, as I kinda look at things that were revolutionary for its time the same way it was years ago.

Would finding a work too similar to a better known project by most of the same people, only to find out it's slightly older than you thought qualify? I initially found Temple Of The Dog's only album to be good, but predictable due to sounding exactly like Pearl Jam but with Chris Cornell singing... Then I figured out the album came out a year ''before'' the first Pearl Jam album, and the same year Soundgarden had put out the much more metal-influenced ''Louder Than Love'': So at the time, it ''wasn't'' a self-derivative Pearl Jam/Soundgarden supergroup, it was a Mother Love Bone/Soundgarden supergroup (featuring backing vocals by some guy no one had ever heard of named Eddie Vedder) that actually sounded pretty different from either parent band.

I sort of have this problem with Bad Brains' ''I Against I'': I can't really get over its dated late 80's alt-funk-metal sound, despite the fact that there wasn't really a trend for combining those genres until a year or two later (although RedHotChiliPeppers and Faith No More were already around and covering somewhat similar ground). Earlier Bad Brains material manages to avert this: while they were very influential to hardcore in terms of speed and aggression, their songs were also generally more musically complex than their followers (the core of the band had previously worked together in a jazz fusion group, and it showed a little).

If you think about it, this happens a lot. Here's a few things that I only realized with some 20/20 hindsight...

Citizen Kane is boring to you? Well, nobody had ever done anything like it. At the time, it was riveting.

The Exorcist doesn't scare you? Well, at the time, it was groundbreaking. Nobody was doing anything like that.

I was just thinking about this. I was old enough to remember the hype about The Exorcist when it came out, but not old enough to see it. When I did finally see it on video in the late eighties, my reaction was along the lines of "This is what all the hype was about?". Of course, this was after seeing dozens of films inspired to a greater or less extent by The Exorcist, and knowing the outlines of the plot from cultural osmosis. It must have been very different to see the film in its original release. Perhaps a slot in the main entry is justified?

Jimi Hendrix sounds self-important, pompous, and not very entertaining to you? That's because every guitarist ever since has borrowed extensively from him.

This troper doesn't laugh when he considers that the cutscenes in ''{{Lunar}}'' were actually rather new.

This troper's cousins complained about ''OcarinaOfTime'' and how terrible its graphics were compared to ''TwilightPrincess'' (and therefore making the game itself a bad one). Both this troper and her brother wanted to smack them over the head with a couple of two-by-fours because way-back-when, those graphics were ''revolutionary''...and the graphics shouldn't even BE the sole defining factor of a game's quality.

This troper, who grew up on The original Zelda and didn't even get to touch OOT until she was in her ''thirties'', would have been very happy to help you introduce your cousins to the blunt end of a clue-by-four. Her family never went beyond the Super Nintendo when she was growing up, so it's only in adulthood that she's retroactively getting to experience the parts of the series that came out prior to TP. They're ''all'' glorious.

This troper, despite the risk of blunt cranial trauma, also feels this way about OcarinaOfTime, although not for the graphics. My first game was Oracle of Ages, didn't play [=OoT=] until I preordered TheWindWaker, and didn't finish it until just a few years ago. I realize that some (read: most) people think it's one of the best games ever, but I don't have the same nostalgia filter for that game like I do for games like SuperMarioWorld.

This troper, without giving specifics, influenced a type of Youtube comedy video that has been copied (probably) over a hundred times. This troper's videos are often criticized for "ripping off X or Y's jokes" when that particular joke originated with his videos.

When this troper watched ''Wrath Of Khan'' for the first time, all he could think of in some scenes (apart from "KHAAAAN!") was "Wow, this is like a movie of ''MassEffect''." Not so much unfunny or bad, as I still really enjoyed it, but that's still pretty backwards.

This (19-year old) troper has, for a while now, enjoyed rediscovering how ingeniously many tropes were used when they were new. Most recently, he was pleasantly surprised at the explicitness of the earliest {{James Bond}} movies.

This Troper loves PinkFloyd but finds ''TheDarkSideOfTheMoon'' SoOkayItsAverage (compared to other Floyd albums at least), even though the songs are still very good. He'd rather listen to ''Wish You Were Here'', ''Meddle'' or even ''Animals'' in one playthrough.

This is a pretty vicious circle for most equal rights/liberation movements. The minute you have some rights, the upcoming generation, who is already accustomed to having those rights, not only doesn't realize why continuing the struggle is important, they have nothing by which to gauge the struggle that has already taken place, and are likely to regard the oldsters banging on about it as tedious old farts going on about nothing, when they're the ones who made it possible for such a perspective even to exist. Feminist and LGBT rights movements, I'm looking at you. (''Especially'' the latter -- it is literally ungraspable to a lot of people that homosexuality was ''against the law'' in Canada within my dad's lifetime, or that we've only been in the Constitution since after I came out.)

Even more true with the US. Sodomy was illegal here in many states until like, six years ago.

This troper is an inversion. Having seen Seinfeld for the first time now, a few weeks ago it was much funnier than most of the other sitcoms airing nowadays.

This hit me when i had discovered David Bowie the man invented enough genres that amazing albums like Lodger and Station to Station lose a bit of their oomph.

I was talking to my father about Eagles (or is it TheEagles?) and I said that they turned rock and roll into old people music. He invoked this trope on me, saying they were revolutionary back in the late 1970's.

It's kind of annoying when the uber obsessed anime fans decry American animation as inferior, particularly Disney. I love anime too, but here's a news flash: the father of anime, OsamuTezuka, was inspired by the animation and designs of WaltDisney cartoons. Also note that if it wasn't for Disney, animation probably wouldn't be taken very seriously, AND he developed a lot of animation techniques that are even used today.

This troper just started watching {{Buffy The Vampire Slayer}}. Halfway through the first season and he has to keep reminding himself of this trope.

Some of my favorite works of art and entertainment are precisely the ones that fall victim to Seinfeld Is Unfunny. The reason? Often such a work was ''the only one of its era to be doing what it was doing'', so in hindsight it seems almost miraculous that it ever existed to begin with. This makes it revolutionary for me, and thus cooler. It can also help a great deal if you had never been exposed to a particular genre or fad to begin with; ''every'' example of that genre or fad, no matter its era, will seem fresh to you then. I, for example, didn't get into heavy metal music until college; up until that point, my favorite rock tunes had mostly been oldies, pop, and soft rock. So when in 2002 I purchased a CD reissue of JudasPriest's ''Sad Wings Of Destiny'' from 1976 (which in '76 was only available in Great Britain, and on a minor record label), I listened to some of the songs and thought: "This is ''awesome''!" Then, a couple of years later, I purchased a CD of BlackSabbath's ''Paranoid'' (which is from ''1970'', for goodness's sakes!) and was absolutely ''terrified'' by the song "Iron Man!" As I became more knowledgeable about heavy metal, these '70s albums no longer seemed so unique or daring to me - but I could still appreciate them for forging such uncertain frontiers during a decade when ''disco'' was the most mainstream form of music! I mean, that's almost anachronistic if you think about it.

I did a report on the cultural impact of the Jews on America using AndyKaufman as my prime example. I had to spend about five minutes explaining to the class that no, ''no one had done an Elvis impression in an act before''. (I also had to explain that Kaufman's foreign man persona was just a character, but that is not this trope.)

Kinda what I think of PokemonRedAndBlue... unlike many others, I didn't grow up with them from an early age, having Crystal as my first game instead. I actually only got to try Blue a few years ago, a while after Diamond/Pearl were released, and honestly... I didn't think it was very impressive compared to the new games. (The glitches were fun, though)

This troper's first Resident Evil title was ResidentEvil4, mostly because I heard it was great (and was it ever) and I was finally old enough to get it without any conflict. Then I decided I wanted to try the other games in the series out. Naturally, I started with the first Resident Evil (I skipped ResidentEvil0 because it wasn't available), or rather, the GameCube REmake. When I popped it in... I was confused and a little bit upset. What followed was one of the biggest EpicFail moments in gaming history.

The camera surprised me. I didn't know 4 was the first to use the Third Person POV until I went to this site (meaning I should have just looked on YouTube to find a video, or something) The constant changing camera threw me for a loop as well.

The control. This is COMPLETELY my fault, as I seem to have a CameraScrew and InterfaceScrew logged into my brain, or something. I dunno, at first it seemed like Chris/Jill would only run into walls when I wanted them to go straight (not knowing that I was an idiot and had to put myself in their POV)

Combat. I couldn't see if my bullets were even hitting the zombie. Wow, I'm stupid.

To add insult to injury, the store didn't even check the disks, as they were both damaged on the left side. In short, my younger self whined more than the IrateGamer until he buckled down and learned how to play. It's not as good as 4, but it's still a great game.