< It Will Never Catch On

It Will Never Catch On/Real Life

  • Humanity seems made to come up with statements like these, there's really just too many to list.

Media

Anime and Manga

  • After it flopped in Japan, many analysts doubted the viability of Bakugan succeeding in America. It became a huge hit getting new episodes before Japan did and even won an award for the best toy of 2009.

Comic Books

  • "Come on, Stan, people hate spiders. They're creepy. And everybody knows that teenagers are sidekicks, not superheroes. This Spider-Man idea just won't sell."—Martin Goodman, founder of Marvel Comics (paraphrased by Stan Lee), 1962
    • Speaking of Spider-Man, when Johnny Romita Sr. replaced Steve Ditko on penciling in 1966, he thought he'd only be working on the book for about six months, because he thought superheroes had overstayed their welcome. He has been involved with Marvel Comics' Earth 616 in general, and Spidey in particular, on some level ever since.
  • In 1933, two teenage comic book artists tried to pitch a character they had created. It took them six years to find a publisher who would take it. Every publisher they went to told them the character looked ridiculous and would never catch on. That character? Superman.
  • Originally, publishers at Marvel didn't think Storm of the X-Men would be popular because she had white hair and they thought people would think she would look like an old woman.

Film

  • Walt Disney himself was rejected by the CEO of Metro Goldwyn Mayer because his concept of a big, talking mouse might scare pregnant women.
    • Disney had to fight to get Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs produced. Both his brother and business partner Roy Disney and his wife Lillian attempted to talk him out of it, telling him that "nobody wants to watch a movie about dwarves." And the Hollywood movie industry referred to the film derisively as "Disney's Folly" while it was in production.
      • There were plenty of reasons to scoff: At the time, dwarfs were mostly associated with carnival freakshows, the only other feature-length animated film ever made (a German production) had been a tremendous flop, and Snow White was monstrously expensive - the film's cost overran the expected budget by 400% and production incurred debts that were, at the time, higher than the total value of Disney's studio.
  • "No Civil War movie ever made a nickel!"—Louis B. Mayer to David O. Selznick on Gone with the Wind.
    • Gary Cooper also turned down the lead role in the film, allowing Clark Gable to have it: "I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face, and not Gary Cooper."
  • George Lucas had this really stupid idea for a space movie, which most studios passed on, and the executives at 20th Century Fox were this close to pulling the plug to avoid losing money.
    • Steven Spielberg claims that when Lucas showed an early version of Star Wars to a roomful of friends, Spielberg himself was the only one who thought it had any potential.
      • Spielberg could relate: his own film, Jaws, faced a similar battle against the execs. Incidentally, both films were what helped jump-start the Blockbuster Age of Hollywood.
    • Doubly amusing about this is that 20th Century Fox had their hopes set on a cheesy B-movie they produced titled Damnation Alley which had a larger budget and better marketing. Today, Star Wars is one of the most well-known movies in the world and only people who want to see Hannibal, Stringfellow Hawke and Rorshach in the same movie have an interest in Damnation Alley.
    • Due to theater owners' reluctance to screen Star Wars at the time, 20th Century Fox threatened to withhold screening rights to the movie The Other Side of Midnight based on the best-selling novel by Sidney Sheldon. Ultimately, The Other Side of Midnight made only a tenth of what Star Wars made from 1977 to 1979. And to think that The Other Side of Midnight was full of sex and nudity...
    • Another twist: Fox gave Lucas the merchandising rights to his movie because, well, the rights to making odd posters and tie-in books weren't worth much. This movie became the reason you can get everything from action figures to promotional toothbrushes now, an industry that can bring in more money for a production than the film itself.
    • In an interview, Mark Hamill shared an anecdote about sitting in a movie theater and watching a preview for the first Star Wars film. After the thunderous John Williams score died down and the announcer told viewers, "Coming soon...," a heckler in the audience shouted back, "Yeah, to late night television in about a month!" Heh, don't bet on it!
  • And then there's Pixar, founded as a spinoff of one of the George Lucas companies, and this Computer Generated Images silliness which will surely amount to nothing. The company is largely a dumping ground for misfits like Steve Jobs (an investor of last resort, who turned up after being pushed out of Apple Computer Inc. during a 1985 internal power struggle) and John Lasseter (who was sacked by Disney in 1983 for continuing to push the idea of computer animation after the established studio had rejected it out of hand). Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for roughly $7 billion, at one point making Lasseter the chief creative officer for the company's two animation studios. By 2017-18, he was back in the doghouse – and ended up gone for good this time.
  • Back in the 1950s, critics in Japan panned a certain monster movie claiming that it would never be popular. 27 movies, 2 cartoons, and several different comic-book adaptations later, and you've got one of the biggest franchises of all time....
  • Harry Saltzman and Albert "Cubby" Brocolli were given a rather low budget for a little spy film starring an ex-bodybuilder, who nobody thought would be a hit...
    • When he became James Bond, George Lazenby had a 7 movie-deal. His agent convinced him to stop after one since said agent considered spy movies were becoming outdated.
  • The head of MGM showed M to his writers and directors and asked why the hell they weren't making movies like that...but also admitted that, if somebody had pitched M to him, he would've turned it down.
  • Back to The Future was passed on by practically all the major studios for not having raunchy enough humor,[1] while Disney passed it on for being too raunchy by their standards.[2] It was only after the box office success of Romancing the Stone when Amblin Entertainment started expressing hope in Robert Zemeckis' and Bob Gale's science fiction comedy...which would later become the highest-grossing movie of its year.
    • One executive in particular was quoted by the film's producers as saying "Time travel movies don't work. They just don't work."
  • As Dennis Hopper's wife was driving him to the airport, where he would fly to Louisiana and shoot Easy Rider, she said the film would bomb and he'd become a mockery. He replied by asking for divorce. (when settling the terms, she only didn't ask half his earnings from Easy Rider because Hopper was so drugged and paranoid those days that she thought he'd kill her)
  • According to Word of God, all throughout Halloween's development they were told the movie would never catch on; that it was "disgusting," "not scary" and it was "pretentious to assume it would do well." It ended up becoming the most successful independent film of its time.
  • After the film Manhunter flopped at the box office, producer/distributor Dino De Laurentiis sold the rights to make the sequel for a small price, fearing a similar outcome. After said sequel actually came out, he spent much more money buying the rights back for the rest of the franchise.
  • Planet of the Apes got this repeatedly before Fox okayed the idea.

Actors

  • Before making Citizen Kane, Orson Welles wanted to make a movie out of The Smiler With the Knife, a comedic thriller. The studio turned him down flat, because the actress he had chosen for the lead was thought to be a B-actress with no comedic talent. The actress's name? Lucille Ball, who later starred in I Love Lucy.
  • Michael Eisner, CEO of The Walt Disney Company at the time, remarked in response to an early preview of Johnny Depp's portrayal of (Captain) Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, "He's ruining the movie!". Depp was nominated for an Oscar for that role. Eisner had several moments like this, and that's the primary reason he's no longer the CEO.
    • More or less at the same time, an unnamed Disney casting director told Selena Gomez that she would never have her own show and that she "wasn't strong enough to be part of the Disney company".
  • H. M. Warner (who owned Warner Brothers) once said, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
    • Indeed, in the late 1920's many who worked in show business thought that sound film was nothing but a fad and would never work. Silent movie acting was a finely crafted art form by that point, and the inclusion of sound meant that everyone basically had to start over from scratch.
      • Not quite everyone, as e. g. in Germany it was quite common for stage actors also to appear in films from the start, which was why the change to talkies did not end as many careers there.
    • Keep in mind, however, that Warner Bros. released what's considered the first sound-film hit. In fact, Warner's full comment was, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? The music--that's the big plus about this."
  • You know that role in The Hangover that's played by Heather Graham? That role was supposed to go to Lindsay Lohan, but Lohan turned down the role because, apparently, she thought it would flop. Yeah, that was a bad idea.
  • Jack Nicholson in his first Oscar [acceptance speech: "And last, but not least, my agent, who about ten years ago advised me that I had no business being an actor. Thank you."
    • Harrison Ford had an agent who bluntly told him that he'd never make it as an actor. Ford promptly fired the agent and got a new one.
  • A talent agent early in his career said of Fred Astaire, "Can't sing, can't act, slightly bald - can dance a little." Astaire had that talent agent's report framed and put over the fireplace in his mansion.
  • In his autobiography, Jackie Chan says that the first director he worked under discouraged him from doing action comedies and actively blocked the release of the first couple of films that Jackie made. He is now one of the biggest movie stars ever, and that director is dead.
  • In one of his interviews, Arnold Schwarzenegger had told the audience that when he first voiced his desire to be a Hollywood actor people told him he would not catch on because of his hard-to-spell-read-and-pronounce-last-name, and because of his Austrian accent. On his first feature film Hercules in New York he was credited as "Arnold Strong" and his lines were dubbed over. But once he got the chance, he got to define the action star stereotype, people had begun to expect buffed up men to have Austrian accents, and his name has become anything but forgettable - so unforgettable that people voted for him to be the Governator of California!

Literature

  • H. G. Wells' scathing review of Metropolis notes that "That vertical city of the future we know now is, to put it mildly, highly improbable."
  • The first Harry Potter book was turned down by three publishers who thought it was too long for children. Not only was the series very successful, the first book ended up being the shortest one in the series.
  • Some believed that Twilight, with its Purple Prose and Family-Unfriendly Aesop would never catch on. Say what you will about quality, there's no denying its popularity.
    • Then again, the style of books that it was a part of ("Sexy vampire dudes seducing Hollywood Homely women and getting away with it", nowadays called Vampire or Gothic Romance) had been on-and-off popular for about 40 years, so it might have been the case of Twilight being published at just the right time.
    • The films themselves also faced this. Early plans for the Twilight film were not accurate to the book, it was far more action-y because it was believed that a film so heavily geared toward girls wouldn't be successful. They ended up sticking to a script more faithful to the book, and considering how much money they've made from that (not to mention the merchandise, you can find anything from clothing to bedsets to band-aids with the characters' faces on them) they probably don't regret that decision.

Live Action TV

  • An idea for a TV show was pitched to CBS, but a key executive hated it, saying it had no urban appeal. The first episode was sneaked onto the schedule while that exec was on vacation. He was angry when he came back to work and saw the show on the schedule, but he was helpless because that week's TV Guide had already been printed. That show became one of the biggest hits of its season.
  • Lewis Erlicht, President of ABC Entertainment, said in 1984 that TV comedy was "dead. Forever. Bury it." As such, ABC rejected a stand-up comedian's pitch for a domestic sitcom. The show was eventually greenlit by NBC, where it became a ratings giant (one of three shows ever to rank #1 in the Neilsen ratings for five consecutive seasons), as well as setting the bar for both African-American roles on television and intelligent family-friendly comedy.
    • Not to mention producers considered an educated, middle class, happy African-American family "unrealistic".
  • Sure, Jim Henson hit it big with Sesame Street, but success with more adult fare? Let's take a look. Many on Saturday Night Live looked down on his work. Granted, those segments are criticized by even die-hard fans, but his puppetry work in general was also generally derided as "not ready for primetime." And what about that skit show starring a frog, pig, bear and... whatever? Oh right, almost everyone took a pass when it was being shopped around. And a later movie based on those very same characters? Few thought it would work—let alone be a smash hit and lead to a successful, continuing series.
  • In 1963, the producers of Doctor Who planned to do a serial featuring a certain race of mechanical aliens, but were bitterly resisted by higher-ups (including the show's primary developer, Sydney Newman), who thought the show worked best as a purely historical-style drama and thought including "bug-eyed monsters" would cheapen and ruin the format. The Daleks went on to become one of the most popular and instantly-recognised things about the show.
    • Forty-odd years later, certain people in the UK TV industry were sceptical about relaunching Who. It wasn't like families watched television together these days. Even Jane Tranter, who commissioned the relaunch, thought at the time it was probably the riskiest thing she'd ever commissioned. Her gamble paid off beyond her wildest dreams.
  • NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff reluctantly allowed Michael J. Fox to be cast as Alex Keaton in Family Ties, telling the show's creator, Gary David Goldberg, that "you'll never see Fox's face on a lunchbox". After that show (and Back to The Future) became hits, Fox sent Tartikoff a lunchbox with his face on it and a note inside that read:

"To Brandon: This is for you to put your crow in. -- Michael J. Fox"

  • Tartikoff kept Fox's lunchbox.
  • Patrick Stewart was so convinced that Star Trek: The Next Generation would fail that for the first six weeks of shooting he refused to unpack any of his suitcases.
  • This was the prevailing attitude towards Power Rangers, Haim Saban's idea for adapting action footage from Toei Animation's Super Sentai shows for American audiences. It took him years to convince a network to give it a chance. It wasn't much of one, the show (which used footage and costumes from the recently-ended So Okay It's Average Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger) was only set to run for one short season of forty episodes. But Mighty Morphin Power Rangers proved to be a colossal hit, and FOX extended and renewed the show at the last minute (literally - they had to hurriedly alter the intended finale and it shows). Additional action footage was commissioned from Toei, with the handful of leftover monster fights being used to fill the gap until the first reels of this arrived. Power Rangers endures to this day, and has been Uncanceled multiple times.
    • Of course, that's only considering when the damn thing finally got on the air. There are sources that say Saban had been attempting to adapt Sentai all the way back to Bioman, eight years prior.
    • Played for Laughs by The Nostalgia Critic, when he admits he thought this about Power Rangers... then adds "And that's why I'm not in the stock market."
  • NBC said this when they were pitched an idea for a show about forensic scientists. They thought viewers would be intimidated by the science and not understand it enough. CBS picked it up and it and one of its spinoffs have both been the highest rated scripted show on TV at times.
  • Jerry Van Dyke was offered the lead in Gilligan's Island. He claimed it was the dumbest thing he ever read. He passed up this show for another sitcom called My Mother the Car. Remember that show?

Music

  • Georges Bizet's last opera, Carmen, was hated by the critics and struggled commercially when first released in 1875, with the theater giving away tickets in an effort to improve attendance. Today, it is one of the world's most performed operas, and an essential part of every opera performer's repertoire.
  • A review of UHF ended with: "Weird Al Yankovic, your fifteen minutes are up."
    • He actually gets this every few years in the form of people being surprised that Weird Al is "back." Perhaps because people associate him with specific eras and genres of music he has parodied (mostly the 1980s). By now, people have figured out that parody adapts.
      • He has been supposedly quoted as saying (Paraphrased) "I have been making albums consistently for several years, and each one is called 'Weird Al's comeback'. Comeback? I never went anywhere!"
    • "Weird Al" Yankovic had an extremely hard time finding a record deal due to this trope. When his manager would call people and say he was Weird Al's manager, the typical response was "Oh, that's too bad." Three Grammies and six platinum albums later...
  • When The Graduate first came out, Roger Ebert famously called the film's Simon and Garfunkel songs "instantly forgettable". He joked about it later in his life.
  • In 1954, Elvis Presley was auditioning for a musician called Eddie Bond. Bond said to him: "Stick to driving a truck, because you'll never make it as a singer." Elvis recorded his first hit a few months later.
  • Rock and roll music in general got this at first.
  • The Beatles got this a lot.
    • John Lennon's Aunt Mimi told him as a teenager, "Guitar is a good hobby, John, but you'll never make a living of it." In 1964, a group of fans had that quote put on a plaque and sent it to her.
    • The Beatles were turned down by Decca, Pye, Columbia and HMV, and that was just among the recording companies.
  • Dick Clark has confessed to having this reaction twice in regards to Kiss. The first time was in the early Eighties when it was announced that they would be taking off their makeup, and the second time when it was announced they would be putting the makeup back on.
  • Rock journalist Judy Willis cheerfully admits she once said of David Bowie, "He's not going to go far, is he? He's just not star material."
  • "Male vocal in the 1968 feeling--thin, piercing voice with no emotional appeal...dreary songs...one-key singer...pretentious material."—A panel review of a BBC audition in 1968 of Sir Elton John to promote his first single, "Lady Samantha", and curry favor for more BBC performances in the future.
  • Once, a guitarist was told that his idea for a band "would sink like a lead zeppelin." This turned out to be the name of the band.

Video Games

  • Famed video game designer Eugene Jarvis had this happen to him with his very first game, Defender. When the game made its debut at the 1980 AMOA expo, almost nobody thought that the game would do well, due to its complex control scheme. Instead, they thought that the maze game Rally X would be huge. Nowadays, nobody remembers Rally X outside of an occasional appearance on a Namco Museum compilation, while Defender sold 50,000 arcade cabinets and is fondly remembered.
    • Those same expo attendees also dismissed Pac-Man as too repetitive, too and again cited Rally X as the best game at the show. Makes you wonder what they saw in Rally X...
  • Hideo Kojima was apparently told: "Hiding from your enemies? That's not a game!" Then, well...
  • Sega's CEO hoped Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games would sell 4 million (for both versions of the first game). The gaming press laughed at him. So far, the first game has sold over 12 million copies for both versions.
  • When Satoru Iwata first joined video-game developer HAL Laboratories, his parents were furious. He would go on to be the president of Nintendo, the most successful video game company in the world.
  • In 1996, Nintendo of Japan actually said this about a certain pair of games, even writing it off as a loss. This was due to the rather unremarkable initial sales, in a market where 80% of the sales are made in the first two weeks. Instead it kept selling steadily, and 17 more main games, four Spin-Off video game series, a Long Runner anime series, multiple manga series, 15 movies, and many other things later...
  • ScrewAttack believed Sonic Colors would be a Franchise Killer after the polarizing reception to Sonic the Hedgehog 4. When it came out, they gave it a very high score.

Western Animation

  • Eddie Seltzer, the second producer for Looney Tunes, was notorious for this. He made a claim that a certain romantic French skunk wasn't funny, only to accept the Oscar for the Pepé Le Pew short, For Scent-imental Reasons. He claimed that bullfights weren't funny either, causing Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese to create what ended up being one of Bugs Bunny's more memorable cartoons, Bully for Bugs. He also felt that Taz was too obnoxious and order no more cartoons made featuring him. It wasn't until Jack Warner asked him to make more that he complied. Taz later got his own cartoon series.
  • When the cast of a now-classic newspaper comic first received a cartoon, they did so with actual children's voices, no Laugh Track, and even a reading of The Bible incorporated into the middle. CBS executives saw the special, and told the producers that while they already had a slot reserved for weeks, they would probably never air any cartoons of that comic again. After it was pre-screened for the critics to write reviews before the airing, nearly 50% of American TV viewers tuned in to the special, it would later win a Peabody, and several other Peanuts cartoons would air for decades.

Architecture

  • While the Lumière brothers are often credited with being the first filmmakers, they themselves claimed "the cinema is an invention without any future". The Horrible Histories spinoff The Knowledge parodied this with a drawing of the Lumières looking at a shop window advertising their "New! Sliced bread!" and saying It Will Never Catch On.
  • Gustave Eiffel designed his famous tower for the 1888 Barcelona World Fair but was turned down by the people in charge on the basis that it was ugly and expensive and didn't fit with the rest of the city. He submitted then the idea to the owners of the 1889 Paris World Fair and was accepted... with the condition that it would be dismantled after the fair was over. During the construction the project was heavily criticized by the French press and the famous writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils, together with composer Charles Gounod, wrote a public protest letter where they described the tower as "useless and monstrous", "shame of Paris" and "an unfunny skeleton". Novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans said that it was "a suppository full of holes". To top it, the fair was a public failure... yet the tower became popular among the Parisians and as a result it was saved from destruction.
    • Eiffel made a pretty penny, too: The fair's organizers let him have the revenue from visitors riding the elevators, figuring no one would want to climb the ugly thing.
      • Guy de Maupassant was known to eat in the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower daily, and when asked why he replied that it was the only place in Paris where he could eat without having to look at the edifice.
    • It's still not popular with Parisians; what saved it from destruction was the invention of wireless radio. A giant iron tower in the middle of Paris makes an excellent broadcast antenna. (This is why it gives you a free Broadcast Tower in every city when you build it in Civilization IV.)
  • The expensive and extensive Haussmann renovations of Paris were panned by all sorts of critics for a long time during and after the fact. Of course, some of what was being criticized was exactly what the renovations set out to do, such as making the city easier to control... France had had too many regime changes in recent memory, and Napoleon III was doing his darnedest not to butterfinger it yet again (N.B.: he did anyway, but in the urban planning dimension of the problem, it turns out he had the right idea). Today, its results define much of what tourists admire Paris for, such as the boulevards and parks.
    • To elaborate, the wide beautiful boulevards were designed to be hard to barricade and easy to move artillery on. It didn't work out; irate Parisians can barricade anything.

Politics

  • US President William McKinley died when he was shot at the Pan-American Exposition. Surgeons refused to use the new-fangeld x-ray machine exhibited there to find the bullet (they didn't know the long term effects), and had to operate with only reflected sun-light for visibility due to the inability to use candles (as their anesthetic was flammable), despite electric lights being everywhere at the fair.
  • After Arkansas governor Bill Clinton gave a long, boring prime time speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, pundits agreed that he ruined whatever tiny chance he might have of ever becoming president.
  • From 2015 to 2016, essentially every pundit, pollster, incumbent political figure, or mainstream news media spent the entirety of Donald Trump's Presidential campaign openly mocking the very idea that he could ever be elected to anything. From President Obama himself on down, the idea was held to be utterly laughable, and several prominent Democrats even wanted him to run so that they could be assured of victory. The number of pre-election political analysts who didn't agree that he was doomed could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. Apocryphally, his opponent Hillary Clinton was so confident of winning that she did not even prepare a concession speech for election night.[3] The punchline, of course, is that as of this writing Donald Trump is the 45th President of the United States.
  • In 1970, Margaret Thatcher was asked in an interview whether the United Kingdom would ever have a woman as Prime Minister. She famously replied, "No, there will not be a woman prime minister in my lifetime - the male population is too prejudiced." Nine years later, she became Prime Minister of Britain.

Science

  • After Darwin's paper on Natural Selection—the precursor to On the Origin of Species—was first made public before the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, Thomas Bell later remarked in the annual presidential report presented in May 1859 that "The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear."
  • When Robert Goddard pitched the idea that rockets could be used to fly through space, the editor of The New York Times (note: not a rocket scientist) thought the whole concept was patently ridiculous. After all, there's no air in space, so what's the rocket engine supposed to push against?
    • The New York Times later published a correction... in July of 1969.
    • Frank Whittle was told by the professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cambridge:

"Very interesting, Whittle my boy, but it will never work."

  • "Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible" - Simon Newcomb, 1902.
  • Lord Kelvin believed heavier-than-air flight was impossible and X-rays were probably a hoax. (He changed his mind about the second one after he saw the evidence.) In addition, Kelvin insisted that radio had no future in 1897 (he preferred to send messages by pony) and that it would take human beings two hundred years to land on the moon. Horrible Histories put it best in a section summarising this kind of phenomenon, noting in the section about the predicted short lifespan of talking pictures that "Lord Kelvin was dead by then, so he was not able to tell us that talking films were impossible anyway."
    • Kelvin's refusal to accept new ideas is shown in the 2004 movie adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, where he outright claims that science has reached its peak in his time, and any new discoveries are hoaxes.
      • This is one of Lord Kelvin's actual claims, at least with regards to physics.

Sports

  • "Possesses minimal football knowledge and lacks motivation."—early scouting report on NFL coach Vince Lombardi.
  • The NFL did a series of commercials for several years lampooning wild predictions made by fans and pundits.

Technology

  • Thomas Edison said the phonograph was "a mere toy, it has no commercial value." But he also admitted it was one of his personal favorite inventions.
  • "You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I have no time for such nonsense!" -- Napoleon Bonaparte to Robert Fulton, on the subject of steamships.
  • "Aero planes are interesting toys but of no military value"—French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, 1911
  • And on a similar note, Wilbur Wright remarked in 1906, "I do not believe it [the airplane] will supplant surface transportation. I believe it will always be limited to special purposes. It will be a factor in war. It may have a future as a carrier of mail." While it could be argued that the majority of transportation is still surface-based, it does seem that Mr. Wright was a little overly dismissive of his and his brother's accomplishment.
    • Their father, a preacher, once declared in a sermon that man would never fly, even using the old saw, "If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings."
  • "TV will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it." from the New York Times, 1939.
  • A review of the iPod at launch: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
    • Mind you, by the time iDevices really took over the world they'd picked up wireless and way, way more space than a nomad.
  • Similarly, the introduction of the Nintendo Wii motion-sensing controller invited lots of derisive skepticism from gamers at the time. Years later, both Sony and Microsoft created new peripherals that allow for motion controlled gaming on their consoles and the Wii is the best selling home console of its generation.
    • This happened even before this, When the NES was first proposed it was laughed at due to the video game crash of 1983 and that the system wasn't 'complicated enough' so they had to package it with R.O.B. the robot just to get a test launch for it! Two guesses which part of the package single handedly revived the home video game console industry and the first one doesn't count.
    • When the Nintendo DS was first revealed, everyone thought that the company's two-screened oddity would never work and that Sony's PSP would push Nintendo out of the portable market. Guess which caught on better?
    • Nintendo has built its entire console business on this trope. Remember the first time you saw the N64 controller with the analog stick on that awkward middle branch? Nintendo put it there because they industry experts predicted it never be used by third-party game makers, and so they left the directional pad at the "regular" left hand place.
    • Rumble packs? At the time, Nintendo made it an optional removable peripheral because they were worried players would find vibrating controllers too heavy and uncomfortable. This is now a such a staple of console controllers, gamers often don't even realise the functionality is there anymore.
  • During the HD-DVD vs Blu Ray the writers at Cracked.com said "HD-DVD format will win this format war handily. congratulations HD-DVD!"—but it was a comedic article, basing its choice on what format had the least stupid name.
    • Many other prognosticators gave HD-DVD the win much more seriously. Ironically, their analyses were generally based on pretty sound analogy between HD-DVD/VHS and Blu-Ray/Betamax (Betamax and Blu-Ray were both Sony's babies, offering higher quality at greater expense than the competition). It just goes to show futurism is hard.

Automotive Industry

  • General Motors executives once derided the Toyota Prius, thinking that the hybrid tech was too expensive to be profitable at the asking price Toyota set (about $20,000 to start), that it was too small for American tastes, and that the price of gas at the time (about $2 a gallon) was so low as to make any fuel savings moot. Fast forward to 2011: gas is $4 a gallon, Toyota sold 1 million plus Prii over three generations, and GM's hyped product launch of the year happens to be what they hope will be a a Prius-killer... If it's not too expensive to be profitable at their asking price of over $30,000.
    • A highly subsidized electric car market and a highly unfree (heard of OPEC?) and highly taxed world petroleum market might have something to do with that.
  • Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear is quite good at this. Comments include "What is the point of these new iPod things?" and "Gordon Brown will never be Prime Minister" among others.
    • This is Jeremy Clarkson you're talking about, keep that in mind.
    • In his 2007 DVD, he reviewed the then-brand new Audi R8. He mentioned that, whilst it was built on the Lamborghini Gallardo platform, it would never have its V10 engine, and even it did, it would be pointless as people would chose the Lambo anyway. Fast forward 2 years and...
    • Clarkson has recognised this tendency himself, often lambasting cars that go on to be some of the best-selling of all time or recommending those that sink without trace. At one point he advised his readers to do the opposite of whatever he told them.
  • Renault played with this trope in one famous ad: in this ad, each time they introduce a new car, somebody says "Ça ne marchera jamais" (It will never work) but all cars of this ad were commercially successful.
  • Volkswagen got a lot of this after the war, Ford, the Rootes Group, and a bunch of other companies from France, Britain and the USA. Sir William Rootes himself reckoned that it would fail in just two years. The Rootes Group was sold to Chrysler in 1967, and then to Peugeot in 1978.

Computing

  • Linux got this from its creator:

Linus Torvalds: I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones.[...] It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc.), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks.

  • Today, Linux has been ported to more platforms than any other kernel, and Linux-based operating system dominate nearly every area besides embedded devices and desktop computers.

Other

  • Engadget 1985, a showcase of Eighties technology written as an homage to BBSes, has both straight and inverted versions of this trope.
  • William Phelps Eno, the man who invented traffic laws, never drove a car himself. He assumed the automobile to just be a passing fad.
  • According to legend, a young economics student named Fred Smith submitted an essay proposing a business that gave fast, efficient overnight delivery service. Smith's professor gave him a C grade, stating that Smith would only have gotten an A if the business he proposed was actually feasible. Smith later went on to found the Federal Express courier company.
    • While this story is more or less true, Fred only got a low grade because he wrote a very bad paper, not that he had a bad idea. In fact, the teacher liked his idea. The article on Snopes explains it best,

"I don't really remember what grade I got. I probably didn't get a good one though, because it wasn't a very well thought out paper." - Fred Smith on his college paper.

  • In a similar example to the above, Gregory Watson got a C for his paper about reviving what would become (with his help) the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution as it was too unrealistic.
  • This Mad TV sketch lampoons people not believing in texting.
  • The upper intermediate .276 Pederson cartridge was almost the ammunition for the M1 Garand before Executive Meddling, citing logistics (everything else the US had at the time was chambered in 30.06 and replacing/converting them to .276 would be a massive undertaking. Remember this was the Great Depression), forced it to use the then current 30.06. After rejecting .280 British for reasons that largely amounted to "It's not American"[4] switched to the lighter (but still large) 7.62 then the intermediate 5.56. The US is again looking at cartridges larger than 5.56 and smaller than 7.62, which .276 Pederson and .280 British fall into.
    • The problems cited today with the M1 (such as unreliable parts and poor bedding hindering accuracy) were well known during its initial field testing, as were recommendations for fixing them, but they weren't considered important enough to implement.
  • Dave Thomas himself said in an interview once that he originally expected Wendy's to have, at most, five locations. As of 2017, he was off by about 6,500.
  1. ↑ This was the era that brought films like Animal House and Fast Times at Ridgemont High
  2. ↑ because of the subplot where the young version of Marty's mother is attracted to him
  3. ↑ Supporting evidence is that while she did privately call her opponent to concede once the election was called for Trump, she did not give the traditional election night public concession until late the following morning.
  4. ↑ and that it had terrible performance in cold environments, which was significant when your greatest threat was expected to be Russia, but most people focus on the "real" reason
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