http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WereStillRelevantDammit

Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope. Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab.

Chris's Invincible Super-Blog [see image] [see image] "At only a year and a half since the event being referenced, this is the most current pop-culture reference that Archie Comics have ever made, beating out the same issue's American Idol joke by a good five years."

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Suppose you've got yourself a Long Runner. And while your Long Runner hasn't really wavered in popularity, not significantly, you still want to connect with the youth of today. Perhaps you'd also like to comment on current pop-culture and political events.

Well, you'd better tread carefully or you might sound like you're just screaming, "We're Still Relevant, Dammit!"

The parent trope of both Totally Radical and Fad Super, this happens when a series that is gettin' old decides to make an attempt to stay current. Of-the-moment pop-culture references (that usually end up dated by the time the work of fiction makes its premiere) are certainly most common. Inserting or referencing memes is a common variant of this trope, especially if the meme is already way past its prime at that time the writer just decided to use it. The writers might also decide to change a character radically or create an "updated" Expy of an older character. A number of times a character has been made Darker and Edgier easily fit the bill. Another popular tactic is to make the character suddenly become a member of a newly-emerged subculture, fandom, or similar group. The result, especially if the writer is not part of said subculture and doesn't do the research, is often laughably embarrassing instead of the bold new direction for which the producers were hoping.

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This often heralds the beginning of a Dork Age. Can very often result in an Unintentional Period Piece since "current events" are usually short-lived, and worse if the older parts of the franchise that didn't try this still look fresh.

See also Popularity Polynomial, Mascot with Attitude, Discredited Meme, Follow the Leader, Two Decades Behind, Long-Runner Tech Marches On, Society Marches On, Jumping the Shark, Network Decay, Magazine Decay, Pretty Fly for a White Guy, and more than a few Scrappies and cases of Misaimed Marketing. Contrast Growing with the Audience. Its inversions are Disco Dan, Anyone Remember Pogs?, and "Mister Sandman" Sequence, which are dated references to show how something isn't hip and modern (or in the former two's cases, irrelevant).

Tropes Are Tools aside, this is usually a kind of writing pitfall, especially if you're a TV or movie writer trying to make your current long-running show more hip or trying to revive a long-dead franchise for a new generation. On the other hand, sometimes it works, and, if the alternative is leaving your story looking decades out-of-date.... The trick is to update the right things, update them the right way, and leave the timeless things that people liked about the franchise in the first place alone.

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Examples

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Anime and Manga

Asian Animation

Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: It's minor, but Darker can be briefly seen doing the dab in the first episode of Mighty Little Defenders. This scene is also featured in the season's intro.

The Simple Samosa episode "Toast Malone" has Dhokla discovering and becoming addicted to Toast Malone's music after searching for "dank music tracks" on GheeTube. This episode aired in 2020, several years after usage of the word "dank" as a meme was popular.

Comic Books

Confectionary

In the 1990's the messages on Sweethearts candies were updated to things like "E-mail me".

In 2014, Love Hearts (UK counterpart to Sweethearts) were updated to such messages as "Tweet me a selfie", "Snapchat me" and "Swipe right".

The iconic chocolate Easter bunny....now with selfies.

Fanfiction

Parodied in the Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! fanfic "The Sinister Selfies ". When Earth-C suddenly gets updated from 1986 to 2015, Dr Hoot comes up with an evil plan involving selfies, as well as two memetastic new henchmen who are a doge and a LOLcat.

Films — Animation

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Live Action TV

Magazines

Cracked (which was a print magazine until it went online in 2007), despite usually being pretty good about avoiding this trope, would occasionally stumble into it. One of the worst examples was in 1995, when they attempted to parody some of the new video games that summer and came up with something called NBA Gam — "the slammin'est, gammin'est game of them all!" (Groan.) The joke was that it was basically NBA Jam, but with the teams' cheerleaders playing, and the "cover image" showed screaming bimbos in shorts and tank tops hurling each other through the air (the cartoonist apparently having confused basketball with wrestling). In addition to the obvious Values Dissonance of the premise ("Look at these girls elbowing and shoving each other! They think they're guys! Ha, ha!"), the pun was an obvious reference to "gams," the early 20th-century slang word for women's legs (itself derived from the French word jambes, meaning....well...."legs"); problem was, that word had been outdated for nearly two generations by the time Cracked used it (and worse, most kids who were reading probably just assumed they had misspelled the word "game," thus nearly ruining the joke). In any case, the joke became discredited the very next year, when female basketball players launched their own version of the NBA.

Newspaper Comics

Professional Wrestling

Puppet Shows

Radio

The Archers lives and breathes this, being as it is an extreme Long Runner that was originally a wartime Edutainment serial. New episodes continually reference modern farming life and developments, as well as contemporary pop culture and even weather events (such as flooding arcs during periods of heavy downpour in real life).

Tabletop Games

Theatre

Andrew Lloyd Webber is fond of this sort of thing, much to the general dismay of fans of his work. A prime example is his decision to change Cats character Rum Tum Tugger from a Mick Jagger-esque rockstar to a hip-hop "street cat". Tugger's update was met with criticism . Both critics and theatre fans condemned the re-working of the character, and so in the end it was phased out in favour of the original.

. Both critics and theatre fans condemned the re-working of the character, and so in the end it was phased out in favour of the original. A new production of the one-woman song cycle Tell Me on a Sunday (with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Don Black) opened in London in 2003, starring Denise Van Outen. Revisions were made to update the show for the early 2000s (whereas it had previously been set in the 1980s). The girl writes home to her friends via email using a laptop, keeps urging her mother to buy a computer as mailing letters is "so old-fashioned", and also uses an online dating service. However, as one fan said , Tell Me on a Sunday works better as an Unintentional Period Piece because with the instant communication we have today the girl would not feel so isolated from the world she left behind. Leaving one's family and moving to another country would have been a much bigger deal in the 1980s (and earlier) when the cost of long-distance phone calls was high and it took days to receive a letter in the mail. Friends and Frasier are also mentioned; ironically references such as those and even sending emails on a laptop (as opposed to, say, texting on a smartphone as has become more common) now date that version.

Theme Parks

Even the Disney Theme Parks are not immune to attempting this. Just about every addition and/or change that Disney has ever made to the parks involving contemporary IPs (even if it's one of their own) has provoked accusations of this from hardcore old-school fans. Although they're not entirely wrong because there has indeed been more than a few times where they were guilty of this trope... The entire Disney Dance Crew show. They even turned "A Pirate's Life For Me" into a rap and changed one of the lyrics to "Drink up me Gangstas Yo-Ho!" The Enchanted Tiki Room (Under New Management), an updated version of The Enchanted Tiki Room starring Iago and Zazu that ran at the Magic Kingdom from 1998 until 2011 has to be one of Disney's worst attempts at a modern update of their attractions in history. The combination of "hip" showbiz and popular culture elements of the time combined with Iago's cynical attitude towards the classic characters angered so many Disney fans that they saw the fire that ended that version's run as a godsend. Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, the Magic Kingdom's annual Halloween event, turns the Diamond Horseshoe into a character dance party playing various family friendly "party music", only to suddenly switch to "Tik Tok" by Kesha that's poorly censored either by cutting out the "bottle of Jack" part of the lyrics or the DJ desperately shouting into his microphone to cover "plenty of beer."



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Real Life