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Media/things that the creator CLEARLY wasn't prepared to see succeed

Deleted member 4461

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Oct 25, 2017
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I've been thinking about Pokemon GO and season 1 of Attack on Titan. Both became cultural phenomenons in their own right, extending beyond the intended audience & reaching mainstream status.

Both weren't prepared for that success. Attack on Titan suffered from a massive amount of time between seasons 1 & 2, and Pokemon GO had frequent server issues as more and more people downloaded the app.

So, I want to ask you ERA - what kinds of media (or anything else) was seriously unprepared for the success it would receive?
 
CountAntonio

CountAntonio

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Oct 25, 2017
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Rocket League. It was such a success that the servers were exploding at launch thanks to it being Free on PSN and blowing up on twitch. It was the fact that Steam money came in at the right time that Psyonix was able to get it all sorted in time.
 
Aurongel

Aurongel

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Oct 28, 2017
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The Lion King...?

Probably a fit for this thread considering that the "A List" animation talent at Disney were working on Pocahontas anticipating that to be the mega-hit. It gave a big boost to the talent associated with that film.

Fucking. Pocahontas. Tho.
 

Rijapega

Banned
Dec 23, 2019
440
Kimetsu no Yaiba. Sure it was a decently popular manga running in the hottest manga magazine, but no one expected to get to the level of insane popularity it has right now (It went from 3 million volume sales total to 120 million in the span of 18 months).
 
Elegant Weapon

Elegant Weapon

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Oct 31, 2017
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Cross-Section said:
lol you don't write an entire season's worth of scripts before even pitching the show if you don't have any faith in it
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Yeah, I believe they purposely avoided Grogo merchandise as not to spoil it- not because they didn't they it would be successful

The show was probably more popular because baby yoda wasn't spoiled beforehand
 
RedVejigante

RedVejigante

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Aug 18, 2018
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DC Comics told Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that the rights to Watchmen would revert to them once it went out of print. Then it became one of the most universally acclaimed works in the medium of comics...
 
ViewtifulJC

ViewtifulJC

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I think I can safely say nobody involved in the production of Evangelion had any idea what the reaction was gonna be and the death threats Anno was gonna get for that tv ending
 

Deleted member 86105

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Nov 18, 2020
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Pretty much all novels from unknown authors are like that. Classic example being JK Rowling with Harry Potter. She was jobless, penniless, on welfare and wrote Harry Potter in cafes on an old manual typewriter, and received loads of rejections before someone finally gave her a chance.

Stephen King was another example. He worked three jobs at the time (janitor, gas pump attendant, and at a laundromat) and he wrote his first novel Carrie on a borrowed typewriter on top of his washing machine while living in a mobile home.
 

Deleted member 5359

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Oct 25, 2017
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Brazil said:
Nope on both accounts.

Game of Thrones had an insane marketing push from the get-go, not to mention the show's budget.

Regarding Mandalorian, you need only look at how calculated the Baby Yoda phenomenon roll-out was. They knew exactly what they were doing.
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George RR Martin couldn't finish more than one book during the show's entire run.

There was zero Baby Yoda merch when Mando came out.
 
KtotheRoc

KtotheRoc

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Oct 27, 2017
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Spider-Man. The origin was first published in the last issue of a canceled anthology.
 
Lord Fanny

Lord Fanny

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RedVejigante said:
DC Comics told Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that the rights to Watchmen would revert to them once it went out of print. Then it became one of the most universally acclaimed works in the medium of comics...
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You kind of trailed off in the important part lol. DC then basically created the graphic novel (or trade paperback) so the book would remain in print to make sure that never happened, something that had never been done to that extent before since even collections before that remained in print for only a short period. So what they weren't prepared for was that DC would literally change the market and how it operated just to fuck them out of ever having a property, which is pretty crazy
 
G_Shumi

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Minecraft. The original creator was so not prepared at how monumentally popular it would be to the point where he sold his game for an obscene amount of money to a multinational tech conglomerate and went crazy because he got bored.
 
RedVejigante

RedVejigante

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Aug 18, 2018
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Lord Fanny said:
You kind of trailed off in the important part lol. DC then basically created the graphic novel (or trade paperback) so the book would remain in print to make sure that never happened, something that had never been done to that extent before since even collections before that remained in print for only a short period. So what they weren't prepared for was that DC would literally change the market and how it operated just to fuck them out of ever having a property, which is pretty crazy
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Ha, true, I did kind of leave out the important part. But yeah, it's an amazing example of how no one involved truly understood just what they had on their hands, and unfortunately also an example of how far individuals will got to actively screw over others once they realize they just what they've got.
 
skillzilla81

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Oct 25, 2017
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Blade Runner said:
George RR Martin couldn't finish more than one book during the show's entire run.

There was zero Baby Yoda merch when Mando came out.
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Your argument is that because Martin hadn't finished a book, they weren't prepared for its success? That's...silly. We got 5 seasons before they ran into stuff Martin hadn't written yet, lol.

And, again, they didn't want to spoil Baby Yoda's existence with merch that would have leaked months beforehand. Baby Yoda made the show explode in a way it probably wouldn't if we knew of its existence way before. They knew what they were doing.
 
The Albatross

The Albatross

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Oct 25, 2017
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Blade Runner said:
George RR Martin couldn't finish more than one book during the show's entire run.
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I don't think that's because GRRM wasn't prepared for the popularity. Well at least a little bit but output for that series ground to a halt after book 3. He had been doing about 1 book every 18 months + edits for the first 3 books. Book 4, which became book 4 and 5 took 11 years to publish. We're only onto year 9 since then hahaha.

(As a person who got into this series in 2003 when I was ..... A teenager and now I'm almost 40, all I can do is laugh)

I think if your book gets optioned into an HBO mega series with major actors like Sean Bean and Mayor Carcetti you're expecting it to be pretty successful. He might not have anticipated how huge it would get, the #1 show on TV for several years, but his writing had already basically stopped by 2011. Also we're underestimating the affect of two Giants Superbowls followed by 3 patriots Superbowls on him.
 
Platy

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Oct 25, 2017
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Brazil
The Albatross said:
Think Nintendo w/ the Wii fits into this? The Wii was impossible to find for like 3 years, because (I've read) nintendo never thought the demand would be as high and couldn't get the supply to meet it.
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If console fits than absolutely the Nintendo DS counts

All points that they meant when they said it would be a 3rd pillar with the GBA... but the DS absolutely ATE the gba in one bite
 
Sketchsanchez

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Oct 25, 2017
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I doubt the writer/artist of The Crow expected it to become so big.
 
Anth0ny

Anth0ny

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Oct 25, 2017
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dragon ball lol

toriyama kept being told it was too popular to stop.... so he had to keep making shit up to keep it going. he had no plan
 
Chasing

Chasing

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Oct 26, 2017
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The most fitting recent example I can think of is Demon Slayer.

I think before the anime, no one would think it would've become THE defining media franchise of the decade in Japan. It was a great WSJ series, but sales-wise not doing anything special that makes it any different from the WSJ success stories.

Now it's generating $200B yen in revenue, has sold over 100m copies of the books in just this two years, and is within spitting distance of Spirited Away's ATH of Japan's box office.

Yet this all happened as the original manga was ending at the start of this year. I always wondered if they would've pushed for it to be longer if the success of the series was more apparent ahead of that.

Well, sooner or later, Shueisha's gonna try for a Demon Slayer sequel/spinoff, I can bet.
 
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Squid Bunny

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I know this is the Etcetera Forum, but so many indie games fall into this category. Stardew Valley and Undertale come to mind.
 
Shoe

Shoe

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Yu-Gi-Oh has to be one of the most absurd, because the main character just happened to be playing some random made-up card game at the start because he was a kid and needed to play a game like kids do, and then people wanted to know about how the game worked so a massive franchise was inexplicably built around it.
 
CorpseLight

CorpseLight

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Nov 3, 2018
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Noone thought that World of Warcraft would be the genre defining MMO for years to come when it launched. It was practically impossible to play for extended periods of time during launch because of server meltdowns from the game being more and more popular every minute and Blizzard not really knowing what they were doing yet.
 
SigmasonicX

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Oct 25, 2017
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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was an example of this. Hasbro definitely wanted it to succeed, but the level at which it did was a shock to everyone. Notably, the music writer, Daniel Ingram, uploaded a song ("Winter Wrap Up") onto YouTube well before the episode it's from aired, to share with his friends, because he didn't think anyone would notice. Lauren Faust also left as the show's creator before the show saw much success; one wonders if she would have stuck around if she knew.

There weren't any protocols in place, so random storyboarders and animators were freely posting behind the scenes information on 4chan and such, to get their 15 minutes of fame.

You can also see this in what Hasbro chose to market when launching The Hub, the network where this aired. Transformers Prime was the big focus of marketing, and Pound Puppies had tons of celebrity guests. MLP, meanwhile, got one celebrity guest in season 2 and didn't start getting them more frequently until season 4. Promos for The Hub barely showcased it.

And there were the toys. I won't blame Hasbro for not providing the more show-accurate figurines and plushes that the new fanbase desired at first, but they didn't even have unique molds for the six main characters; Fluttershy was stuck as a recolor of Rainbow Dash for years.
 
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