Retraux

Sometimes media are produced in an intentionally old-fashioned style, designed with the intentional appearance of being decades older than is actually the case.

Whereas Steampunk involves a setting that is faux-retro, this trope is entirely one of how the fourth wall is painted—entirely stylistic, in other words. Sound is intentionally scratchy, marks of damaged reel, and faded appearance are common in Film or television. Some films go out of their ways to open with studio vanity plates pulled directly from the era that they depict (See Logo Joke for that).

Retraux may involve Deliberately Monochrome, Antiquated Linguistics, or Silence Is Golden. If it's a supposedly past speculation about The Future or Twenty Minutes Into the Future (i.e., the present), will inevitably invoke Zeerust or Raygun Gothic. If it's a Show Within a Show, it may include Stylistic Suck.

In video games, retraux frequently arises (incidentally or deliberately) in freeware games and other small-scale productions for practical reasons—pixelated sprites and backgrounds and Chiptune music tend not to be as prohibitively time-consuming and difficult to make as quality 3D assets and orchestral performances on quality acoustic instruments. Indie Gaming and Retro Gaming go hand in hand. Low-resolution sprites are also common starting from mid 2000s even in flash games due to low memory consumption and being easier to make accurate hitboxes.

Compare George Lucas Throwback, where a production is made evoking old-style works but with modern production values (in contrast, something that's Retraux can be mistaken for an actual old-style production). When the work is produced in a format suitable for the era, it becomes Old Format, New Work. Can overlap with Newer Than They Think when done especially well. See also Retraux Flashback

Examples of Retraux include:

Anime

  • Gekiganger 3. (More so in the actual show than in the OVA.)
    • Interestingly enough, according to Word of God, despite its 1970s-esque appearance, it was actually made in the 2090s, which means it's an example of this even in-story.
  • GaoGaiGar has an art style rather reminiscent of giant robot anime from the 1970s.
  • Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei, especially the opening. Lampshaded in the episode about Detuning (doing less than your best): Among the examples for detuning is "Deliberately adding imperfections to give the impression of an old film." followed by a cue card saying "This show does it too".
  • The ADV Films trailer for Chrono Crusade has narration mimicking the style of voice-over used on old-fashioned newsreels. (However, the anime itself doesn't use many Retraux effects outside of a few scenes in the opening and the grainy episode title cards and eyecatches.)
  • Airmaster - The anime version ran from 2003-2004 but wouldn't look out of place in early 90s. It's probably an Affectionate Parody.
  • Cowboy Bebop intentionally uses a drawing style and character design reminiscent of anime from the 1970s, despite being made in 1998. The original DVD release for the show also has the DVDs looking like LPs.
  • Mostly averted in Baccano!!, but in a scene where a character explains his world view that the world exists for his amusement, the show briefly looks like a scratchy film with low-quality sound to mimic movies from the era. And like the Chrono Crusade example above, the American trailer intentionally invokes film from this era by being Deliberately Monochrome, using a "news reel" style narration and backed up by a tinny piano score similar to what a silent film would have.
  • Kaiba looks like a sixties' children anime.
  • In Lucky Star, Meito Anisawa and the other Animate store employees are drawn in a style reminiscent of anime (especially Super Robot anime) that's some decades older than Lucky Star. There's even a visual effect that makes their shaded areas be of non-uniform color tone and change their color tone slightly over time, simulating the look of cel animation.
  • Many of the Gundam works set in the Universal Century deliberately try to maintain a consistent art style reminiscent of the 1980s, right down to the Eighties Hair. If you look closely, you'd notice that the characters of Gundam Unicorn wouldn't look out of place in Zeta Gundam.
  • When Yuya's classmate finally gets A Day in the Limelight in Risky☆Safety, the director chose to make the episode as a Silent Movie complete with inter-titles instead of hiring a voice actress for the character.

Comic Books

  • It's not unknown for a flashback or 'never before told' story to be drawn in the style of a certain time period. An excellent example is The Age of the Sentry miniseries, whose titular hero was supposedly Marvel's Superman Expy in the 1960s, but was forgotten by all of humanity until his "return" in 2000. The flashback scenes are drawn to resemble 1960s Jack Kirby and 1980s Frank Miller. The front cover even has a fake "Approved by the Cosmic Code Authority" logo.
  • Iron Man and Doctor Doom once travelled back in time to a New York City circa the Silver Age (thirty years earlier in real time, perhaps ten or twelve in terms of Earth-616 chronology). The art was drawn and colored to resemble the comic book art of that period.
  • Alan Moore's 1963 looks and reads like a classic Marvel comic (complete with Moore spouting fake Stan Lee style hyperbole and including fake '60s-style ads).
  • The 25th anniversary (1983) Legion of Super-Heroes story had multiple segments that took place in pastiches of different parts of the Legion's history, using the original logos, original artists, and plot elements based on stories of the time. A weaker version of this was done for the 30th anniversary in 1988.
  • The humorous one-shot Superman/Batman: World's Funnest featured the two magical imps Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite accidentally destroying countless alternate universes, most of them drawn in the style of a certain artist—Curt Swan, Sheldon Mayer, C. C. Beck, Jack Kirby, Alex Ross, Bruce Timm and so on.
  • The Orson Randall one shot issues of Immortal Iron Fist are often drawn in the style of pulp era artists.
  • The Transformers April Fool's comic Shattered Expectations was done in the style of the Generation 2 comics - drawn similar to Derek Yaniger and full of Furmanisms.
  • A mild example in Ultimate Spider-Man: Requiem where in a flashback, the art goes back to Bagley's style, rather than the current penciller for the series, Immonen.
  • A Stormwatch issue concentrating on the history of century-old Jenny Sparks depicts her in each decade as she would have appeared in the comics of the time, with the 80s flashback in particular being a clear homage to Watchmen.
  • Another one from Alan Moore, Supreme has flashbacks with an art style that corresponds with the time those flashbacks happened. This is justified in-story; from Supreme's perspective, his recollections of (for example) Golden Age events have such a simple, rough style to them because it was such a long time ago and everything seemed so simple back then.
  • Another flashback example, Two Thousand AD Prog 2010 features a Judge Dredd story that starts on Christmas Eve 2098 (the first published Judge Dredd story takes place in 2099), which is presented in the style of an early 2000AD strip complete with black and white art and yellowing pages. The second half of the story takes place in the "present day" of Christmas Eve 2131, and switches over to a modern style colour strip.
  • Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Files is about a boy who is a fan of the Comic Within A Comic Space Age Adventures featuring Captain Crater And The Cosmic Kid. Four different issues of the comic (spanning the 1930s to 1970s) are presented in the book, each printed on newsprint (as opposed to the thick glossy paper of the rest of the book) and drawn to resemble comics from the appropriate era including imitation poor colour registration and printing blemishes.
  • Alias by Brian Michael Bendis features a flashback to Jessica Jones attending the same school as Spider-Man, drawn in a style reminiscent of Steve Ditko era Spider-Man.
  • Also by Brian M. Bendis, the Golden Age Daredevil features 3 periods of time : the 40s, the 60s and modern day, each drawn in styles reminiscent of what was found in comic books of respective eras. The Retraux is especially noticeable in the colours.
  • As Deadpool features a lot of both meta-commentary and time travel, this tends to come up in his book. The best example is when he gets set into the past to Amazing Spiderman #47, and infiltrates himself into the story, Forrest Gump style.[1] All the panels and dialogue are drawn in John Romita's style, and all the characters (except Deadpool and friends) talk like Stan Lee wrote them (indeed, enough panels are lifted from the original work that Romita and Lee are credited as co-authors.) Seeing the modern Meta Guy Deadpool interact with the comics-code Spiderman story is a Crowning Moment of Funny.
    • In case you're wondering why specifically Spider-Man, it's because Deadpool's costume bears no small resemblance to that of the ol' Webhead, meaning it was a snap to redraw Spidey as 'Pool.
    • The Flashbacks issues are all about this, as they all involve Deadpool in various eras of Marvel history and drawn in the styles of the authors being parodied, be it emulating the styles of Jack Kirby or Rob Liefeld. The only constant amidst the varying Art Shifts being Deadpool's modern-day speech bubbles.
  • John Byrne's untitled story from Batman Black And White: Volume Two is drawn in the style of a Golden Age Batman comic and is written accordingly as well, with Batman and Robin smiling throughout the entire story, delivering wisecracks, and besting the villains via a clever scheme.
    • Batman Black & White: Volume Three has the story "Urban Renewal"; it features some nostalgic flashbacks by characters to the "old days", and the flashbacks are drawn in the Golden Age style as opposed to the more realistic present-day scenes.
  • One sequence in The Incredible Hercules features Herc hallucinating that he's reliving previous adventures due to being poisoned. When action is presented from his view, the comic suddenly appears to shift to a seventies artstyle and coloring. They even pan from Black Widow's modern look to her look from when she was on the Defenders with Hercules to emphasize it.

Film - Animated

  • The newsreel at the beginning of The Incredibles.
    • Also, one of the DVD bonus features is an "authorized adaptation" of a Mr. Incredible adventure, in the form of a cheaply-animated and simple-minded old kiddie cartoon with considerable "aged recording" noise. (The cartoon can also be viewed with Mr. Incredible and Frozone chiming in their comments, MST3K-style.)
  • The clips of Woody's Roundup in Toy Story 2.
  • The 1930s style song "The Spirit of Adventure" over Up's closing credits is in lo-fi monophonic sound.
  • The ending credits of The Tigger Movie run against sepia still images of scenes from the film redrawn in the style of E.H. Shepherd's line drawings from the books. Tigger in particular looks completely different from the Disney version.


Film - Live Action

  • 2011 French romantic comedy The Artist is 1) shot in the old 1.33:1 Aspect Ratio, 2) Deliberately Monochrome, and 3) a silent film.
  • Hobo with a Shotgun is made to look like it was made in the early '80s, complete with Technicolor, music, and film grain.
  • Most films by Quentin Tarantino are full of this, being George Lucas Throwbacks.
  • Grindhouse, a '70s B-Movie pastiche which was presented in its theatrical cut as a double feature with scratched-up film, missing reels, trailers for ficitional films and an ad for a Tex-Mex restaurant adjoining the theatre.
    • It gets really weird when you notice that while it goes as far as to have fake ads and trailers that look like something right out of the seventies, the actual settings of the films are modern.
      • And note the tendency of the film to warp during particularly action-packed scenes. It's as if it's too intense for the celluloid to handle. More realistically, this might be because those specific scenes have been watched the most, out of context. In the '70s, it was not uncommon for the projectionist to simply cut out a particularly hot sex scene and take it home, which explains why half of Planet Terror‍'‍s is gone and why the lapdance scene was cut from Death Proof‍'‍s theatrical release.
  • The 2005 The Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) movie. (Even the trailer!)
    • The makers of it are currently doing Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness in style of a 1930s movie.
  • The director and cinematographers of the film Ed Wood went out of their way to exaggerate the dark, grainy, ill-lit look of low-budget 1940s-1950s films.
  • Woody Allen's Zelig is a Mockumentary about a "chameleon man" of the 1920s and '30s. The supposedly archived footage of the era was actually filmed using cameras and such of the period. This, in addition to Forrest Gump style editing (though this movie predated that one by over ten years), created a nearly impenetrable illusion.
  • Far From Heaven, set in The Fifties, imitates the look of movies produced back then, specifically Douglas Sirk's movies - the plot is almost lifted from All That Heaven Allows. The score is by Elmer Bernstein, who composed music for several famous films in the '50s.
  • The French musical Eight Women. The look of the film evokes the look of films made in the 1950s, and the songs are all performed in a 1950s style, despite some of them being from as late as the '80s.
  • Orson Welles used this trope in Citizen Kane with the newsreel in the beginning, going so far as to use sandpaper on the original print to make it look old and worn.
  • Mirage is a 1965 movie filmed in black and white and in the style of classic noir.
  • Good Night and Good Luck: Filmed in black and white, with only Archive Footage of Joe McCarthy used to portray the senator, and every scene in the movie shows a character with a cigarette in his or her hand (as was the case in the 1950s)
    • Many viewers complained about the unrealistic over-the-top-ness of the 'actor portraying McCarthy'.
  • This trope is a specialty of Larry Blamire:
  • The Westlake Film Company has one silent movie comedy in their arsenal. To: Steve, From: The Devil was even shot with that kind of camera used long ago, along with the same good old improvised piano music, which makes Painting the Fourth Wall successful in this case.
  • The Turkish movie GORA has a brief flashback scene to the early 1900s, shot in the scratchy, silent, black-and-white footage of the first 'moving pictures'.
  • The Mexican (2001) had the flashbacks filmed in a hand-cranked camera to evoke this trope.
  • Down With Love is an Affectionate Parody of a certain subgenre of early-1960s romantic comedies, filmed with more than a few Retraux touches. It's particularly noticeable in the set design and background music.
  • The Mel Brooks film Silent Movie is filmed in color and includes a music track that's part of the film (rather than separate—but this was common in the last years of the silent era). Nonetheless, it was done in the style of...a silent movie, with actors "speaking" their lines, followed by a dialogue card: something that's partially parodied throughout the movie.
  • The Mel Brooks remake of To Be or Not to Be features a montage of World War II footage of Poland being attacked, in the style of the newsreels of the time. The montage ends with main characters appearing in the same gritty black and white style.
  • For Back to the Future: The Ride, the short "Doc on the March" was done in the style of an old newsreel, with Doc inserted into various footage Forrest Gump style. See him get an autograph from Thomas Edison! Watch him get a photo of The Beatles! Witness him resisting the urge to bump off Richard Nixon!
  • The Bayeux Tapestry-esque opening of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, complete with the film's Nazi invasion depicted in Medieval tapestry style
  • Kung Pow used old footage from an actual Hong Kong martial arts flick that was worn, so most of the new parts edited into the movie were artificially worn to match the rest of the film.
  • Just about anything directed by Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, his American Express commercial) is full of it. Actually, Wes Anderson himself is pretty Retraux. (Have you seen how he dresses?)
  • The "Maroon Cartoon" opening of Who Framed Roger Rabbit is made to look like an animated theatrical short from the 1940s, when the movie is set.
  • Serenity, see Firefly below.
  • Several parts in CSA: Confederate States of America are made to look like older films, including an old, silent movie.
  • The Mel Gibson crime movie Payback is very stylized film-noir; colors are washed out, characters wear vintage clothing, even the cellular car phones are rotary dial.
  • The House of the Devil is an homage to 1970s horror films, from the setting to the credits to the music.
    • It's even being released on VHS.
  • Nearly all of Guy Maddin's films are made to replicate the look of films from the 30s and the silent era, with considerable success.
  • Iron Man 2 features the song "Make Way For Tomorrow Today" over the end credits, performed by the Stark Expo Singers. The theme song for Stark Expo '74, it sounds a lot like various songs from Disney movies and theme parks, most notably "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," the theme to the Carousel of Progress attraction. This is no accident. The Stark Expo theme was written by Richard Sherman, who wrote that any many other memorable songs as a Disney employee.
  • Catch Me If You Can a movie set mostly in the 1960s has a Saul Bass style animated opening credit sequence.
  • The Moulin Rouge commentary track mentions how much trouble they went through to put imperfections in the film in order to evoke this.
  • The 1977 war film The Ascent is made up to look like a film from the 1940s, with its World War II setting, uses of Academy ratio (an aspect ratio long disused by then) and black and white cinematography.
  • The 1984 film "Nothing Lasts Forever" is filmed in the style of ancient black-and-white SF films. It looks so convincing that first that it takes the unmistakeable appearance of Dan Ackroyd to alert the audience to its true age.
  • Apollo 18, in keeping with its Blair Witch-esque premise, is entirely portrayed as found footage from a 1970s space mission, with all the accompanying film grain and video artifacts.
  • Black Dynamite is a 2000s Blaxploitation Parody done entirely in the style of 1970s Blaxploitation films, right down the soundtrack, flimsy camerawork and aged look. So much so that even Roger Ebert mistook it for a 70s film.
  • Kung Fury is a 2015 action comedy that manages to both be an homage to The Eighties and pass off as a film from The Eighties.
  • While the 2019 version of Little Women is not itself Retraux, the publicity photos of the All-Star Cast definitely are; they were taken by a period-style camera with an actual period lens, on tin type instead of on film. See them here.

Literature


Live Action TV

  • Cold Case flashbacks are filmed to evoke the period they are from (e.g. black and white for times that predate colour film).
    • In addition, the flashback sequences often feature popular music that likely would have been featured in a TV show episode from whatever year the flashback would have taken place in.
  • Garth Marenghi's Darkplace genuinely looks like some low-budget sci-fi/horror show from the 1980s, despite having actually been made in 2004.
    • The same goes for a song featured in one episode One Track Lover link which certainly sounds like a cheesy pop song from The Eighties.
  • Same for Look Around You, which mimics 1980s educational TV despite being made in 2002 (for the first series) and 2005 (for the second).
  • And in turn, The Peter Serafinowicz Show, from the creator of Look Around You, has featured faux 1970s public information films (complete of course with authentic faded colour, grain and scratches).
  • One episode of Ashes to Ashes does this for the Show Within a Show, being shot on 1980s style video with very limited lighting and makeup, scratchy sound and cheesy backing music. (link - could arguably be a minor spoiler).
    • Speaking of which, its parent show Life On Mars revelled in this trope for advertising, even going as far as having a recreation of the BBC One ident of the 70s precede broadcasting of the second series. The American version did the same with the ABC logo.
  • The TV version of In the Heat of the Night used a brilliant pastiche of a 1960s title sequence.
  • Harry Enfield did this a lot in his sketch shows, especially with the Cholmondley-Warner & Grayson sketches on Harry Enfield and Chums. His later series Harry & Paul featured Retraux versions of modern films, such as a 1930s melodramatic version of The Bourne Identity and a silent version of Brokeback Mountain starring Laurel and Hardy.
  • Smallville has a Film Noir episode framed as Jimmy Olsen's dream sequence.
  • Star Trek loves to use the holodeck for this kind of thing. Jean-Luc Picard's noir adventures as detective Dixon Hill were a fan favourite (and won the show an Emmy for costume design), as were Tom Paris's Buck Rogers-style Captain Proton stories, which were actually filmed in black and white; and Deep Space Nine's forays into fictional nightclub crooner Vic Fontaine's club.
    • Special mention must be given to the Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", which features time travel back to the era of TOS. In addition to inserting Deep Space Nine actors into existing footage, new scenes aboard the old Enterprise and the space station were filmed using 1960s-style lighting - they even used 1960s film stock because the colour saturation properties were different.
  • Jimmy McDonald's Canada was a parody of current events shows from The Sixties, filmed in black and white, and occasionally stopping to advertise cigarettes. Richard Waugh, who played Jimmy, somehow managed to convey "The Sixties" in his very speaking voice.
  • Mad Men on AMC is supposed to be set in the early 60s, and is filmed with a dark, slightly fuzzy/grainy look to it. This is in keeping with the show's obssessive focus on setting—the furniture is all vintage, along with the clothing. Even to the point of making the actors wear authentic undergarments that are never seen.
  • Firefly was deliberately filmed with old camera lenses to give it that authentic 70s Western feel.
  • The DVD menus of The IT Crowd. The first series is a pastiche of vintage computers, complete with tape loader and extremely elaborate (for a DVD menu) parodies of Head Over Heels and Jet Set Willy. And the second series does to 16-bit games what the first did to 8-bit.
  • Yo Gabba Gabba! has an 8-bit sounding opening, prominently features chiptunes during scene changes, and occasionally features episode filler scenes that pays homage to 80s video games, complete with blocky graphics.
  • Fringe, for an episode set entirely in The Eighties, used an 80s-style opening Special Edition Title. Hilariously, they replace the normal flashes of futuristic fringe sciences (teleportation, dark matter, etc) with things that were futuristic at the time (cold fusion, in vitro fertilization, personal computing) but have either become commonplace or totally debunked. Compare to the usual opening
  • Chuck: "Chuck vs. the Role Models" has a Cold Open of a '70s/'80s style Special Edition Title (mostly a parody of Hart to Hart's credit sequence.)
  • The Larry Sanders Show does this a little:
    • We occasionally see clips of Larry's shows from the five years prior to the start of the series. Not a terribly long time compared to most examples of this trope, but the producers take care to make these clips look different from Larry's "current" shows.
    • Larry's talk show is, itself, rather Retraux. Like Johnny Carson, Larry does a lot of big, broad sketches where Larry and Hank wear elaborate and silly costumes. This style of comedy sketch became more or less extinct in late night after Carson's retirement, however. Characters occasionally remark In-Universe that none of the other talk shows do this sort of thing anymore.
  • For the entirety of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon's Video Game Week in June 2011, the opening credits were turned into an animated sequence with the look of 8-bit Nintendo games of The Eighties (including direct visual references to Mega Man 2 and Ninja Gaiden), with digitized music to match.
  • Top Gear did a 1970s style intro for a fake detective series, The Interceptors, complete with era-appropriate Porn Staches.
  • Danger 5 deliberately looks like a low-budget 60s action flick. An action comedy about a team, Danger 5, fighting Stupid Jetpack Hitler in a 60s Alternate History, it also includes Retraux Toku action, in which Hitler gains command of mechanically enhanced Japanese supersoldiers.
  • Glee's Show Within a Show during the third season's Christmas Episode was deliberately filmed in black and white, and invoked the feel of holiday variety shows from the 50s to the 70s, albeit with a little tongue-in-cheek humor about the whole thing.
  • A Spitting Image sketch claimed to be celebrating the show's 100th aniversary, and showed a clip from the supposed first show in the 1880s. This was a black and white scene of two Punch and Judy style puppets, and silent movie captions reading "I say, Mr Gladstone! You're not very good!"
  • Hustle. An exposition scene explaining how an old-style con worked was done in the form of a black & white silent movie.


Magazines

  • Time magazine published a special Bicentennial "July 8, 1776" edition in 1976. The entire issue is written as if Time had actually existed in 1776, with all its usual sections (with a few obvious exceptions like Film and Television.) It apparently sold well, and was followed by a "1789" edition covering the first inauguration of George Washington.

Music

  • Pop Revival
  • The Foo Fighters' 2011 album "Wasting Light" was recorded entirely on analog tape in Dave Grohl's garage.
  • The whole "electroclash" genre of music, which mimics 1980s Synth Pop.
    • Likewise "sleaze metal", which evokes 1980s Hair Metal.
      • Hundreds of Thrash Metal revival bands have sprung up ever since metal started making a comeback in the early 2000s.
      • As well as the Garage Rock revival (60s Nuggets-era garage), Power Pop (70s rock/pop), certain Alt Country bands... basically if you like old musical genres there's a niche for you.
  • Most of Brian Setzer's career, starting with the Stray Cats, has been in the vein of early-fifties Jazz and Rockabilly sounds.
  • German cover band The Baseballs has this as their schtick, playing modern songs as Rockabilly and even dressing up for the part.
  • Whether or not this was a conscious effort on their part, The Hives had that sort of image (and sound) that you might date to the Sixties heyday of garage bands, circa Tyrannosaurus Hives.
  • The Mike Flowers Pops' cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall".
  • Heck, anything featured in these two April Fool's episodes of the "Coverville" podcast.
  • One contraction: Lo-fi
  • For his first few albums, Lenny Kravitz prided himself on using pre-1970s recording equipment exclusively.
    • The Apples (In Stereo) have almost never used non-vintage recording equipment - about 99% of their recorded output has been mastered on eight-track reel-to-reel.
    • Same thing with The White Stripes, who sent promo copies of one of their album out on vinyl and said "If you can't play this you don't deserve to listen to it" (or something to that effect)
  • This is the selling point of Toerag Studios in London, which uses only old analogue recording equipment.
  • Blue Country Heart, a collection of '30s country and blues covers by former Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, features songs recorded in a single take on period instruments.
  • Monster Magnet's early material (the two EPs, Spine of God and Superjudge) is this kind of throwback to 1970s acid rock.
  • They Might Be Giants have them all beat—they recorded their song "I Can Hear You" on a wax cylinder, without using any electricity for the instruments or recording device. Appropriately, the lyrics are about places where poor sound quality is encountered.
    • They also recorded a version of their song "The Edison Museum," fittingly, as they recorded it at the Edison Labratories.
  • Australian artist C.W. Stoneking sounds and acts like a 1930s blues singer.
  • The entire psychobilly genre is based on combining 1950s Retraux Rockabilly music with lyrics about zombies and things.
  • A lot of the stuff Tom Waits records. "Buzz Fledderjohn" was recorded outside.
  • The XTC side project Dukes Of Stratosphear was meant to sound like 60s psychedelia; in fact they tried to pass off the first release as rare recordings by an obscure British band of the 60s. Aside from mimicking the style, they also recorded to 4-track and replicated mid-60s production techniques, including a good deal of Gratuitous Panning .
  • The Beau Hunks.
  • The Trip Hop movement in the 90s glorified everything analogue (possibly as a backlash against the sterile "digitalness" of 80s synthpop), resulting in many electronic musicians trying to emulate the beloved nostalgic atmosphere by using old equipment, sampling old records and even intentionally degrading the sound quality.
    • Boards of Canada base their entire aesthetic on the sound and feel of old educational films (their name is taken from the National Film Board of Canada). Wobbly vintage synth sounds and obscure voice samples are their trademark.
  • Daptone Records and the label's house band The Dap-Kings get their distinctive soul/R&B sound from their use of only analog recording equipment.
    • Sharon Jones' video for her song "100 Days, 100 Nights," recorded with the Dap-Kings, extended this all-analog ethic a step further. The cameras used to shoot the video were black-and-white, vacuum tube-powered machines built in the 1960s, imparting an authentic-feeling softness and haze to the picture.
  • The videos of the Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake songs Dick in a box, Motherlover, and 3-Way are all shot exactly as if they are from the early 80s, including the costumes, the music, and are even shot in Brooklyn, which you've seen a million times in 80s TV shows.
  • There's this musical movement called the "8-bit remix" in which music (eiher a popular song, a selection from a soundtrack, or even video game music from the 16-bit era onwards) is recreated (or remixed) using "chiptunes", which is computerized/electronic music similar in style to what you would hear on an NES, a Master System, or some other 8-bit system. One can find many different examples on sites such as YouTube.
  • The Squirrel Nut Zippers and their various spun-off and overlapping groups are famous for songwriting that meticulously recreates early- to mid-twentieth-century pop and jazz styles, but special mention goes to SNZ alumnus Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, recording live-in-studio with a single microphone.
  • YMCK is all about this.
  • One track on the Space Channel 5 Part 2 soundtrack, "Mellow Medley", is a medley of Space Channel 5 songs done in the style of 16-bit game music.
  • Max Raabe & Palast Orchester are a faux 20s jazz orchestra from Berlin, they cover modern popsongs in this style as well.
  • As any Authentic Mississippi Delta Blues Aficionado ™ will testify, Robert Leroy Johnson is well-known as the great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Authentic Mississippi Delta Blues Music ™. Johnson was well-known for his mastery on guitar, small back-catalogue of hard-to-find blues recordings, wild lifestyle, his untimely death at the age of 27, and for the mystique of having sold his soul to 'Ol Scratch down by the Crossroads in exchange for going from a marginal talent playing an out-of-tune guitar to inventor of the modern blues style in such a short period of time. Well, being a poor Southern black bluesman in 1938 meant you did your Authentic Blues Playing on a cheap old acoustic guitar. Fast-forward to the modern age, and you can purchase a Signature Edition Robert Johnson L-1 for $2,793 retail, probably way more money than Robert Johnson ever saw in his entire short life.
  • Lupe Fiasco's "1985" which was done in the style of rappers of that year.
  • Franz Ferdinand has an addiction to old equipment, especially if German or Soviet. Particularly notable is the ancient Soviet synthesizer they used for their third album (Tonight: Franz Ferdinand) which had been designed by Soviet engineers as an imitation of Western models without actually ever having seen the innards of a Western synthesizer.
    • They also had a thing for Soviet Constructivism (and El Lissiztky in particular) on the album art during the period of their first two albums.
  • The Spirit of Adventure is an affectionate parody of 1930s styles. It was a reward for stragglers through the credits for Up. Plus for the plot references since it's a narraration of Charles Muntz's life.
  • The Swedish band Änglagård, who recorded two albums in the mid-1990s, offered a surprisingly authentic take on the 1970s Progressive Rock sound, complete with actual vintage instruments (Hammond organ, Mellotron) and production techniques. Many fans credit them for the resurgence of interest in the progressive rock genre in the 90s.
  • R. Kelly's song "When A Woman Loves." Aside from the obvious synthesizer use in the instruments, his singing is pretty much old-school 1950s Motown crooning.
  • The band F.L.Y. does retro New Wave ska punk and synthpop. With Auto-Tune.
  • Them Crooked Vultures wouldn't be out of place on classic rock radio. Upon hearing it, it's easy to think their debut album came out in 1975 instead of 2009. It helps that the bassist for the band is John Paul Jones. One review remarked that the song "Scumbag Blues" almost sounded like it belonged on Led Zeppelin II.
  • Some works in the Futurepop subgenre of Industrial invoke this, such as VNV Nation's latest album.
  • The artists of the France-based Valerie Collective do 80s-style italo-disco/synth/electropop.
  • Adele's Rollin' in the Deep is a straight throwback to the disco era, complete with the black diva voice.
  • Most bands from the Elephant Six Collective, recreating psych rock or chamber pop from the 60s/70s.
  • An Innocent Man by Billy Joel is an homage to the music of his youth, full of songs that sound like they could have been performed by James Brown or Motown bands.
  • Phil Collins released an album of 1960s covers called Going Back, which used computer plug-ins, analog equipment, vintage instruments and playing styles, and performances by surviving members of Motown's "Funk Brothers" to produce note-for-note, and sonically similar copies of songs Phil was influenced by. The album cover shows a 1960s-era picture of Phil, mop-topped and suited, sitting behind a drum kit. *
    • His 1982 cover of The Supremes' You Can't Hurry Love also counts.
  • The 2006 Special Edition of Klaus Schulze's Timewind had vinyl textured CD's, and the original liner notes for "Wahnfried 1883" were printed on the back cover.
  • Alison Moyet's cover of Billie Holiday's That Ole Devil Called Love was recorded in 1985, but still feels like the 1944 original.
  • TNT's 10th studio album, The New Territory, is intentionally mixed and mastered to sound like a 1970s rock record, seeing as the entire album is a tribute to them.
  • "Technicolor Dreams" by The Bee Gees. Sounds like the 1930s, released in 2001.


Music Videos

  • Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' "100 Days, 100 Nights" was literally filmed using equipment that's straight from the 1960s. (The director bought two vintage TV cameras on eBay in working condition—for about $100 total.)
    • The packaging for the album from which the song comes (same title) is also deliberately retro. If you have the vinyl pressing, you might well pass it off to your friends as a soul album from 1967 or so.
  • Snoop Dogg did a music video ("Sensual Seduction") with camera filters and effects right out of a late-1970s/early-1980s MTV track, back when record companies and video directors still shot a lot of music videos on video instead of film.
  • In fact, almost any use of video (as opposed to film) footage in a modern music video falls into this:
  • The Smashing Pumpkins modeled the video for "Tonight, Tonight" after the classic early film A Trip to the Moon.
  • "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails.
  • silverchair's video for "Across The Night" was done entirely in the manner of early 20th-century black and white surrealistic film.
  • The Mindless Self Indulgence song 'Shut Me Up' has the framing device of a 50s Public Awareness Announcement, complete with grainy black-and-white clips taken from the movie Reefer Madness, a vaguely science-looking guy, and ending with an ominous warning that it (succumbing to Punk-Rock) could happen to YOU.
  • Rob Zombie's video for "Living Dead Girl" combines this with a massive Homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
  • Sum41's video for We're All To Blame takes place on the 1980s TV series Solid Gold, complete with glitter and spandex-clad dancers has 70s/80s era effects and even plugs their hair metal alter-ego band. More jarring is the fact the band is wearing 2000-era clothes, singing a very serious song.
  • The video for Q-Tip's "Move" appears to be shot on VHS... right down to VCR blue-screen and on-screen displays at the beginning.
  • Muse's "Knights of Cydonia" (which actually has its own trope page), includes a fake copyright notice of 1981 at the end of the video. The song itself is also heavily based on the old 1960s instrumental piece "Telstar", of which Muse frontman's Matt Bellamy's father was part of The Tornados, the band that recorded it.
  • Aqua's video to "Back To The 1980s" have them dancing in 1980s rocker fashions, which fits this tropes with capital R.
  • The Ghost of Stephen Foster mimics the look of old cartoons so well that people often ask if they used footage from those cartoons.
  • Move Your Feet by Junior Senior. The video was actually animated in Deluxe Paint on an Amiga.
  • Beyonce's "Why Don't You Love Me?" is very dedicated to the retro look.
  • Kasabian's video for "Vlad the Impaler" mimicks Italian exploitation flicks of the seventies and other such fare. Complete with the title character wearing an awesome red and black cape.
  • Mark Ronson's "Bang Bang Bang"
  • Yolanda Be Cool feat D-Cup: "We no speak Americano". The Song itself is retraux to some extend, as it starts like a Song from the 50s and then turns into Electro. The song they covered it from however, is from that time period: Renato Carosone - "Tu Vuò Fa' L'Americano"
  • The music videos for Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" and "This Fire" feature lots of retraux in their art style. In fact, the band seems to love this trope, as their album arts (especially You Could Have It So Much Better) are built around this as well.
  • In addition to her musical style, many of Lights's videos have a future-retro theme.
  • Los Amigos Invisibles' video for El Disco Anal is made in the style and quality of a '80s Menudo's videoclip. And since the song sounds already really like something from that era (down to the "miniteca" announcer)...
  • "Tell Her About It" by Billy Joel features Joel singing in a Fake Band ("B. J. and the Affordables") in the style of The Beatles and other sixties groups on The Ed Sullivan Show.
  • The video to Enuff Z'Nuff's "Fly High Michelle", released in 1989, has the feel of the 1960's psychedelia, complete with rainbows, balloons, and doves.


Professional Wrestling

  • The short-lived Wrestling Society X was home to Matt Classic, a wrestler who had been in a coma since the '50s, and wrestled in the same style that won him the World Heavyweight Championship in 1952—including such devastating moves as the head vice, the abdominal stretch, and the airplane spin. Matt Classic was portrayed by Colt Cabana, who was in his mid-20s at the time.
  • WWE decided to do an "old school" night on Raw in November 2011. They threw up a classic looking WWF set and ramp, swapped out the barriers with old-fashioned rails, and even used a retro-styled WWE logo (though this has actually appeared on a few John Cena promotional items in the past). They even had Michael Cole dress up as an od-school Vince McMahon, since Vince was on commentary duty during the era the show was representing.


Sports

  • The National Hockey League created Retraux alternate jerseys, especially among teams too new to have large amounts of history to tap into. As of the 2011-2012 season, a third of the league have jerseys in this style. The Pittsburgh Penguins are the worst offender as they have worn actual vintage jerseys from the 70s in previous years but chose to switch to a made up Retraux design for the 2011-12 season, albeit based off their original 1967 design.
  • The Australian Football League's "heritage round" has teams wear old-style versions of their guernseys. Hawthorn fans seemed to particularly like their heritage strip, and there is a push for the team to change back to it permanently.
  • The throwback jerseys worn by the NBA's Golden State Warriors and Philadelphia 76ers were such a hit with fans that the two teams changed their logos permanently.
  • NFL teams are allowed to wear throwbacks twice a year. Of note were the Green Bay Packers late 1930s throwbacks with brown helmets to stand in for leather.


Tabletop Games

  • "Mazes and Minotaurs" is a What If on Dungeons & Dragons if Gygax and Arneson used Greek mythology instead of medieval fantasy and it's also a playable as well.
  • "Labyrinth Lord" is a Retraux as well—this time much closer to the original version of Dungeons & Dragons
    • As well as "Swords and Wizardry," which draws on Sword and Sorcery as opposed to Labyrinth Lord's High Fantasy and which also takes out the Thief, leaving us with the Fighting Man, the Magic User and the Cleric of original D&D.
    • There are a fair number of other retroclones out there, including OSRIC and Basic Fantasy for 1e. In addition, the makers of "Labyrinth Lord" also made "Mutant Future," which is a close-as-you-can-get-it remake of Gamma World using the Labyrinth Lord rules.
  • Also, Encounter Critical, deliberately designed to look like a mid-70s D&D-knockoff made by a pair of sci-fi fans.
  • Magic the Gathering's Coldsnap set was designed in the style of the Ice Age and Alliances sets from a decade earlier, most blatantly the use of "slowtrips," the clunky, slow version of cantrips that hadn't been used since less than a year after Alliances.
    • And cumulative upkeep. Don't forget that.
    • The joke set Unhinged, the nostalgia set Time Spiral, and the online-only reprint sets all bring back retired frame designs to evoke this trope.
  • Cartoon Action Hour kisses up to the action cartoon of 1980s.
  • Goodman Games used the slogan "Third Edition Rules, First Edition Feel" for their Dungeons & Dragons 3E products. They intentionally copied the style of D&D 1E to appeal to fans of that game who never converted to 2E or 3E.
  • There's Forgotten Futures, shareware "Scientific Romance Role Playing Game" by Marcus L. Rowland—as the name says, it's designed for this sort of adventures.


Theater

  • Christopher Fry's 1948 play The Lady's Not for Burning is written in the style of a Shakespearean comedy.


Video Games

  • The poster boy for this trope, Mega Man 9 is done entirely as an NES-style game. That's right, a NES game on high-definition consoles (and Wii Ware, where it makes a bit more sense). Up until the game's release, this was busily producing a Broken Base—fortunately, it turned out to be so good, it consolidated Mega Man fandom in enjoyment instead. Capcom produced some fake NES carts for the game and commissioned the ridiculous "box art" picture shown at the top of the article (an homage to the famously So Bad It's Good North American cover of 1 through 3, which had mostly nothing to do with the character). The game even has an option that lets you relive the glory days of NES sprite limitations by enabling sprites flickering when too many are on the screen at one time.
    • And it continues on with 10, also in faux 8-bit sprites. Its faux box art has more-or-less the same style of Mega Man as 9's, with now-unlocked-from-the-start Proto Man joining the badly-drawn fun, and boasting "Dual FX Twin Engines" and a "Parallel Hyper-Bit Interface" much like how Mega Man 9 promised an "Ultrasound Graphics Synthesis" and an "8-Bit Fidelity Engine". The "lost" commercial for 10 comes complete with all the attitude of video game ads in the 80s and poor VCR tracking. (The commercial music, though, is an anachronism of sorts for what is supposedly the 80s.)
  • Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril is a Metroidvania released in 2010 and it's completely with 8-bit graphics and music. Which makes sense, considering that it's a real NES game, cartridge and all.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a game from 2002, mimics the loading screen of a Commodore 64 upon booting up, a reference to the game's 1986 setting.
    • Similarly, there is a GTA Vice City "fanpage" devoted to the Degenatron, a primitive parody of second generation video game consoles, complete with working "emulations" of its three "8-bit" games and a supposedly old scan of a Degenatron magazine ad. Done again in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which promotes an eXsorbeo "fansite" containing another "emulator" for one game from "1991" with monochrome and pixelated graphics not dissimilar to those of classic Game Boy games.
    • Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories features similar aesthetics in some of its fake websites, appearing like those circa 1998. Of note is this one, which particularly pokes fun at your average poorly designed Geocities-like website common before the abundance of competent web designers.
    • Grand Theft Auto Advance is a retraux of the first two GTA installments with its top-down perspective.
  • Viewtiful Joe, when you run out of VFX.
  • Much like Mega Man 9, Sega Racing Classic, an Updated Rerelease to the classic racing title Daytona USA, uses graphics that look like they came out of 1994, the year the original game was released to international audiences. The only changes were to the draw distance and resolution. See it in all of its glory here. [dead link]
    • This is largely due to practicality more than anything else. Arcade operators (they still exist!) continued to place orders to Sega for Daytona USA machines and replacement parts. Unfortunately, Sega no longer produces the hardware and no longer had the Daytona license. The solution was Sega Racing Classic, which solves all three problems.
  • Stubbs the Zombie. Retro-future setting and they intentionally put a grainy "filter" of sorts to complete the ensemble.
  • Mass Effect has a similar film grain screen filter, in order to better emulate the 70s-80s science fiction movies that inspired it.
  • 1942: Joint Strike is designed to look like a World War II movie, complete with film grain, sepia tones, and the projector winding up and down at the start and end of each reel level.
  • The Timeless River in Kingdom Hearts II, which is Disney Castle in the past (reached through time travel), based on 1920s Disney shorts. The audio for the world is even in mono and the two songs for it are deliberately left in low quality on the game's OST.
    • As well as everyone switching to their earlier/original designs, including Sora, who switches to a simple version of his original outfit.
      • It actually gets even more meta: he looks like a character straight out of an Astro Boy manga-era Osamu Tezuka work.
  • Mr. Game & Watch, a living, walking LCD character in the Super Smash Bros. series who just came out of a LCD game what with being essentially a 2D stickman, his very limited animation and the only sounds effects he produces consisting of beeps and boops.
  • The Rhythm Game Donkey Konga 3 includes a version of the theme from the original Donkey Konga done in NES-syle.
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare uses this in two places.
    • The first, and more perplexing occurrence, is in the Flash Back Cutscene to the two Lt. Price sniper missions. These are shown in sepia tones and simulated film graininess... despite being set roughly a decade after the Chernobyl accident (1986).
    • The second is a cheat setting, unlocked through collecting items in-game, that changes the in-game rendering to mimic early Ragtime films, complete with all the sound being replaced with a piano tune.
  • Abobos Big Adventure. When the developers describe it as "Every NES game ever made put into a blender", you know you have a winner.
  • Test Drive: Eve of Destruction has a similar cheat, the description of which claims that it is "newly discovered racing footage from 1912".
  • I Wanna Be the Guy focuses almost exclusively on the difficulty of older games with an occasionally matching graphical and audio style.
  • God Hand has two minigame segments that play 8-bit styled music, as well as referencing Space Invaders in one of them with a randomly appearing UFO worth loads of points.
  • No More Heroes features a number of throwbacks to 8-bit games, including 8-bit music at some points, a pixellated tiger that serves as a timer for your special moves, a high score board that appears after each ranked battle, and even a top-down scrolling shooter minigame. The sequel turned the menial task side missions into 8-bit-style minigames as well.
  • House of the Dead: Overkill takes a page from Grindhouse and manages to turn the franchise into even more of a terrible B-movie game than it already is.
  • La.MuLANA is a 2005 indie PC game with a striking resemblence to MSX games, complete with limited boss animations, SSCC channel music, and flipbook-style scrolling, the latter of which many MSX platformers, such as Knightmare II: Maze of Galious and Vampire Killer, utilized due to the MSX's poor scrolling capabilities.
    • Similarly, GR3, developed by the same people who worked on La.MuLANA, is designed to mimic the MSX Gradius games, complete with the graphics, HUD, two-option limit, and jerky scrolling.
  • Baldurs Gate II Throne Of Baal had a quest in the Tower where the player had to let go of the main character, and play a Dialogue Tree driven pen and paper RPG in order to obtain a MacGuffin.
  • Gradius ReBirth is a throwback to older titles in the series, with sound effects from the MSX Gradius arc, remixes of music from lesser-known titles (Gradius II for Famicom, Salamander 2, etc.) using instrument samples from the arcade version of Gradius III, and graphics that look like something out of Gradius II, III, and Nemesis '90 Kai.
    • Konami made an entire series out of ReBirth titles, with the other games being Contra ReBirth and Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth.
  • Almost everything in the Fallout games is designed to basically be what The Fifties thought the future would be like. Fallout 2 strayed from it somewhat, but Fallout 3 brought it back and stuck to it like glue.
  • The 1st part of the opening sequence for Power Stone is made to look and sound like a faded film reel from the early 20th century is being run. This is appropriate since the game scenery and characters are throwbacks to that era.
  • Sega's Fantasy Zone Complete Collection in their Sega Ages line includes a reinterpetation of Fantasy Zone II if it had been developed by Sega's AM team on Sega's System 16 arcade board like the first game, instead of the vastly inferrior Sega Master System hardware and System E arcade board. For extra authenticity points, they developed this remake on the actual System 16 hardware. Fans of the series called it Fantasy Zone II DX to destinguish it from the original Fantasy Zone II.
    • In Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, Opa-Opa's "voice" samples consists of sound effects ripped directly from Super Fantasy Zone. This is in contrast to fellow retro racers Alex Kidd (who's Suddenly Voiced) and the Bonanza Bros. (who have their "he-he", the only speech they ever had in the original game, resampled in multiple variants)
  • Pole's Big Adventure uses this trope to its fullest as it is a Parody of the 8-bit Platformer
  • The Independant Gaming Source's Bootleg Demakes Competition. Name says it all.
  • Team Fortress 2's art style (including some fake ads on the official website and introductory tutorials shown on grainy projector film) has a 1950s-60s aesthetic. The jazzy spy music helps too.
  • In Red Dead Redemption, the player can watch old-time cartoons (complete with dialogue cards and period music) in projection rooms.
  • Cave Story's graphics were made in a very low resolution with no anti-aliasing to mimic early 16-bit era games. The music, similarly, uses a custom-written sound driver whose sound is not unlike that of the TurboGrafx 16.
  • Iji's graphics are done in low resolution to mimic games from the late eighties, and lots of solid colors as though there were a pallete. The animations however, are much more fluid than those of that era.
  • Retro Game Challenge (also known as Game Centre CX) is a collection of faux 8-bit games, presented in-story as having been sent back in time by the host of the Japanese television show it's based on. At one point you actually have to blow on a cartridge to make it work.
  • The FB Games Directory held a programming competition in 2008, where the task was to create a Retraux game using the FreeBASIC programming language.
  • Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts has a mini-game called "Hero Klungo Sssavesss teh World!" [sic], a parody of 8-bit games, right down to the strange (but awesome) promotional art that has nothing to do with the actual game.
  • Eversion is a very 8-bit-like game released in 2008. The cute, low-res graphics, however, are a facade for the game's much more sinister side.
  • Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is full of Retraux, like the 9-Volt retro stages and the Ashley's Theme title cards to the character intros.
  • The flashbacks in the Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (including a playable one in Porom's chapter) are deliberately done in the same style as the the original SNES version of Final Fantasy IV. The rest of the game looks more like Final Fantasy VI, which at first makes it appear as an example, but the game was originally made for cell phones incapable of the graphics of later Final Fantasy games.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's Prologue uses the HUD from its predecessor, Rondo of Blood, which makes sense as it's a pseudo-flashback to Rondo and the game is a direct sequel to it. Richter and Maria modes also make use of this HUD.
  • The sixth level of Parappa the Rapper 2 is done with graphics and music resembling old 8-bit video games, and gets progressively less detailed as your performance dips into the "bad" and "awful" levels.
  • Cortex Command is an in-development retraux game which is a 2D side-scroller with a look of the early 90s, though it wasn't even started until the year 2000.
  • The entire Roguelike genre qualifies. Roguelikes, such as Nethack, ADOM and Angband (among others), use primarily ASCII graphics. This style, along with the gameplay, is a deliberate attempt to evoke the feel of the classic game Rogue.
  • The "Void Quest" dungeon in Persona 4 mimics 8-bit graphics and even, during the boss fight, old-style RPG menus - with a twist (you're the monsters being attacked, and the boss is the hero).
  • One of the many Tetris variants on Tetris Friends is Tetris 1989, designed to mimic the Game Boy version as close as possible. In terms of sound, only the the Tetris theme is accurate, but who's complaining?
  • The Dark Spire is a close imitation of 1980s Wizardry games, and even has a mode which produces wireframe graphcs like in the early 1980s, along with 8 bit style music.
  • The Bitlands in Super Paper Mario are a throwback to 8-bit games. The doors in Fort Francis even make retro sound effects when opened.
    • The Thousand Year Door has this too - in addition to the traditional ability to turn Mario into an 8-bit sprite (as seen in the other Paper Mario games and Super Mario RPG), you can do the same for Mario's various partners - they'll take on edited forms of the sprites of the basic enemy type they are generally, though some like Flurry and Ms. Mowz get totally new sprites due to not having one to draw one.
  • The Wii Ware game Bit Boy features six levels each based on a different generation of consoles and with graphics to match.
  • Steampunk game Steel Empire has the levels start with an old sepia-tone video.
  • The flashback sequence, within a flashback sequence, in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials & Tribulations is presented in flickering sepia-tone with flickering black lines, suggesting the earliest days of silent film. Despite the fact that, according to the timeline of The Verse, it took place in 2003.
    • Apollo Justice does it as well for one sequence. When you play as Phoenix Wright in his final trial, all the graphics and music used are from the Phoenix Wright games instead of the new style used by Apollo Justice. Only Klavier, Trucy, Zak, Valant, and Drew Misham appear in a more modern look in graphics during this sequence.
  • Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army deliberately has no voice acting and uses a 30s style silent film appearance for its dialog windows in order to mimic silents films of the era the game takes place in. Its sequel, Raidou Kuzunoha VS King Abaddon, maintains this technique.
  • Left 4 Dead has a film grain, though you can disable it if you want. Additionally, the campaign title screens are made to look like movie posters and credits are played at the end of each, essentially making it a 90s Zombie Apocalypse movie in video game form.
  • Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver, already Video Game Remakes themselves, feature the "GB Player", which allows you to replace the game's music with the chiptune music from the original Game Boy Color games. The towns and areas that received new songs have had all new 8-Bit remixes made.
  • Freeware flash game Malstrum's Mansion is an Adventure Game in the style of Shadowgate or Uninvited, made in the style of an old black-and-white Apple Macintosh game. You start it up from an old-style desktop, and it even has copy protection!
  • Contra 4 is essentially a retraux sequel to the earlier Contra games, particularly Contra III: The Alien Wars, with several Shout Outs to the first three console games in the series. Even the game's manual is written in the same tongue-in-cheek tone as Konami's old localized manuals during the NES era (and unlike the NES games, this carried over to the game itself).
  • "Soundless Mountain 2" is a 2-D fan remake of Silent Hill 2.
  • Whenever Babe Ruth appears in Backyard Baseball, he is drawn in a crude style, unlike everyone else.
  • 3D Dot Game Heroes takes this up another level by turning pixels into voxels.
  • Half Minute Hero features blocky sprite graphics reminiscent of the old Dragon Quest games, despite being on the PSP.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, you have access to a ring later in the game that makes you look like 8-bit Link from the original 1986 game.
  • Released for Nintendo DSiWare is Dark Void Zero, which is basically Dark Void reworked as an 8-bit action side-scrolling platformer. It was even marketed with a fictional development history, saying that it was originally developed for the PlayChoice-10, taking advantage of the technology available. It also supposedly featured "System Zero", a chipset that increased the limitations of the NES. Capcom found the promotional materials for the game and began tracking down a surviving copy of it, and found that a promotional prototype copy of a home version was given away to a young Jimmy Fallon. It was this version of the game that the DSiWare version was supposedly based on. More details are here. Part 2 describes the attempts to get the supposed ROM working.
  • Independent PC game 8-bit Killer, is a First-Person Shooter with NES-style graphics, sound effects and music.
  • In Super Robot Wars Z, the older super robots such as Baldios, God Sigma and Getter Robo G get some very awesome retro-looking animations in their finisher attacks, COMPLETE WITH CHOPPY ANIMATION AND TRIPPY RETRO "LASER BACKGROUNDS" AND PASTEL-FRAME EXPLOSIONS! This is a first for the franchise and was the key to exciting many people who weren't very excited about the game initially and also demonstrates the degree of love the designers have for the older shows, preserving them in all their glory. Needless to say, many mech-anime fan tears of joy were shed.
  • Nostalgia provides Exactly What It Says on the Tin as an unabashed love letter to old Eastern RPGs.
  • Darwinia provides a pseudo-retro style graphics with very little textures and many of the characters are 2D sprites. In addition, game intros provide homage to the older times. One is ZX Spectrum loading screen. Another is a deliberate recreation of Cracktros which tells how it's been cracked by DMA Crew. The Steam release got delayed by an hour because it was thought to be authentic.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 4 for Xbox Live and PSN is a return to the gameplay from the first three Sonic games, though the graphics are not retraux 16-bit but rather 2D sprites built out of pre-rendered 3D models (ala Donkey Kong Country). The Broken Base is still as bad as ever, though.
    • Game Land Zone from Sonic Colors. The layout of the levels are basic replicas of the levels from the classic Sonic games, and the music played in the levels are a 8-bit chiptune-styled remix of the music from the main game.
  • In Okami: The song during the narrator's closing words. If you actually sit and wait after the music pauses, an 8-bit remix of the song "Ida Race" starts to play.
    • There were also official renditions of some of the game's areas as NES RPG style maps.
  • Evil Genius has a very 60s style to it, meant to evoke the campy spy movies it's based on.
  • Any games by Spiderweb Software are about ten years behind normal games in both their style and their engines, although they advance at the same rate as the rest of the industry. There is a very good reason for this: they have a development team of three people, and if they tried to make modern-style games they wouldn't be able to finish them at a reasonable pace.
  • VVVVVV feels like some lost computer game from the 1980s, with monochromatic sprites, screen-by-screen gameplay à la Jet Set Willy and Monty On The Run, and even an authentic Commodore 64 font for in-game text.
  • Team Meat, the developers behind Super Meat Boy, released an iOS tie-in game designed to invoke LCD gaming like Game and Watch and Tiger Handheld.
  • Retro City Rampage plays like an 8-bit Grand Theft Auto and is chock full of Shout Outs to stuff from The Eighties.
  • Halo 2600. Out now in your favorite web browser.
  • During Act 4 of Metal Gear Solid 4, Old Snake starts dreaming on the way to Shadow Moses Island (the setting to Metal Gear Solid). The game scales back to PS 1 standards. Original music, graphics, Guard stupidity, and even the Game Over screen is retraux. As Snake wakes up, his head is still PS 1-style for a split second. This also unlocks facial camoflage that allows you to keep the PS 1-Snake head (which makes him look like the eraser sitting on the top of a pencil in comparison to the rest of his body).
    • Also, in the boss fight against Liquid Ocelot, the appropriate music and health gauges regress back through the series for each stage of the fight, including changing the combatant's names and replacing Psyche with Hunger/Stamina or O2 (for chokeholds).
  • Eggy, a game made using Game Maker, in which you take control of a sixteen-by-sixteen-pixel egg trying to defeat an apparently French chef. It's Better Than It Sounds.
  • The opening credits of Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s features an Atari-era Activision logo, and a retro Harmonix logo.
  • A Chinese developer known as Waixing, who's being known for its' notorious RPG conversions, actually remade the original Resident Evil for famiclones.
  • Eggman's Sonic Simulator in the Wii version of Sonic Colors uses 8-bit-style "demixes" of the normal stage themes.
  • Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten allows you to use either detailed high definition sprites or the standard definition sprites utilized by the past three games.
  • The logos for Aperture Laboratories in "The Fall" in Portal 2. In the earliest section built in the 1950s, it's called "Aperture Science Innovators" with a symbol for an atom. For the 1970s, it's a very typical 70s yellow logo. The items in each test are also designed to look like older versions of the main testing rooms and equipment from Portal and the first part of Portal 2.
  • The Nintendo 3DS's Virtual Console allows you to play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, and added a few Retraux touches to enhance the experience: for example, on original Game Boy games it's possible to swap between a grayscale screen and a green screen that emulates the look of the original Game Boy, even including a motion blur similar to that in the old system. It's also possible to view the games in their original resolution, with a border representing the original system surrounding the screen- the 3DS's 3D effect is used to give the appearance of the screen being set back from the border, and they even emulated the battery light dimming as the 3DS's battery runs low.
  • In Zettai Hero Project, the main character had just taken over the mantle of the Unlosing Ranger; since no one believes in him, he has no sponsors. So for the first few times he goes up against Dark Death Evil Man, it's set to an 8-bit RPG system akin to Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. It progressively improves to 16-bit before settling on visuals more akin to Valkyrie Profile.
  • The My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fangame Story of the Blanks.
  • The whole Etrian Odyssey series more or less came about because a certain game designer really wanted there to be Dungeon Master for the DS. Every aspect is lovingly oldschool, even down to the music, which was actually entirely composed on a PC-88.
  • Every game in the Super Smash Bros. series has at least one stage made in the fashion of Nintendo games of the old: the original had Mushroom Kingdom (complete with the 8-bit Mario theme); Melee had Kingdom and Kingdom II (the latter, inspired by Super Mario Bros. 2, and with the music from this game); Brawl had Mario Bros. (from the eponymous arcade where Luigi debuted) and 75m (from Donkey Kong) - and yeah, there is original 8-bit music available for these stages. Oh, and let's not forget the Flat Zones in Melee and Brawl, which are essentially set in Game & Watches running composite games as you fight (though both have original music).
  • Marvel Ultimate Alliance allowed you to play Pitfall with your active hero after the boss fight with Phoenix. While the hero still appears in 3D, the rest of the stage (save for the end point) is entirely made like in the Atari 2600.
  • Dwarf Fortress is a very detailed civilization building and exploration simulator set in a High Fantasy world... that happens to be illustrated entirely in ASCII.
    • Donators can ask for "ASCII Art" that depicts part of a story in Dwarf Fortress style Ascii. Donators who continue to donate get to continue this story.
  • The Flash game Tower of Heaven has graphics in shades of green that would look at home on the original Game Boy.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. the World looks, sounds, and feels like a beat-em-up game from the 1990s—quite fittingly for a game based on a graphic novel that was heavily inspired by video games of the '90s. Indeed, Ubisoft specifically hired rock band Anamanaguchi and graphic artist Paul Robertson for the game because of their previous Retraux work!
  • Soulcaster and Soulcaster II have 8-bit-style graphics.
  • The Nintendo 3DS game Mutant Mudds is done using NES-style graphics and sound. Taken even further, there are hidden levels that mimic the monochrome color schemes of the Game Boy ("G-Land") and Virtual Boy ("V-Land").
  • The Indie Game Wretcher is an attempt to mimic old horror adventure games, and uses a 16-bit style reminiscent of the Clock Tower games.
  • Free Civ, a free indie remake of the Civilization games is done in the image of the early entries of Sid Meier's series.
  • Bioshock has a number of touches like tutorial videos and commercials meant to emulate the style of 1940s-50s advertising.
  • Bioshock Infinite's Columbia meanwhile is filled with posters and paraphernalia that wouldn't look out of place at the turn of the 20th Century, complete with old-school kinetoscopes. While the Truth from Legend and Fact from Myth viral ads are entirely done in the style of Conspiracy Theory documentaries straight out of The Eighties.
  • Much of the lore and backstory in Team Fortress 2, befitting its Pixar-inspired aesthetic is done in the style of magazines and comics from the 1950s-60s.
  • In addition to the multiple homages to The Eighties, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has cutscenes that wouldn't look out of place in a 16-bit or 32-bit game.

Web Animation

  • The "Old Timey" cartoons in Homestar Runner.
    • Pretty much any of the Videlectrix games on Homestar Runner (with the exception of Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People): Peasant's Quest is at least as good, if not actually better, as many of its "contemporaries" which it mimics, such as Leisure Suit Larry.
      • To add to the retrauxness, the employees of Videlectrix are the Brothers Chaps dressed up in polo shirts and fake mustaches. And their games are programmed on an Apple IIe.
    • Furthermore, they occasionally make toons in their own older style, like "The Homestar Runner Gets Something Stuck In His Craw".
    • Let's not forget "Coach Z's 110%", which is made in the style of an old Infomercial.
  • In episode 35 of Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series, a Clip Show, Yami asks Kaiba if he remembers the time the two of them first met, which is shown as 'a time when the video quality wasn't very good, and the audio was all muffled and scratchy'. Clips from the first episode are used in black and white, with a fake moustache and monicle painted onto Kaiba, and a 'silent movie' motif with old-style dialogue printed on the screen and an upbeat piano theme.

Kaiba: "Your brash nature offends me, Mr. Moto! I shall soon put an end to your impertinence!"
Yami: "You have assembled several creatures! Surely this is a violation?"
Kaiba: "My affluence makes a nonsense of the regulations!"

Web Comics

  • Narbonic did one of these, The Astonishing Excursions of Helen Narbon & Co., interspersed with the main comic.
    • Narbonic also had the Dave in Slumberland strips once a year, which were drawn in the style of Little Nemo, and provided immense foreshadowing.
  • Issue 1 of The Adventures of Dr. McNinja appears as if it had been printed during The Golden Age of Comic Books.
    • Flashbacks in Dr. McNinja use the shading style of the time when they take place (e.g. when the story was told about how Gordito got his guns, the comic dropped shading.)
  • Wondermark is made to look like it was made in the early 1900s, and was: the author takes old-style printings and adds dialog.
    • Married to The Sea, from the people who do Toothpaste For Dinner and Natalie Dee, follows the same formula as Wondermark, except in single-panel format.
  • The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats is a webcomic based on LOLcats made to look like it's from the early 1900s.
  • The back cover of the first The Order of the Stick prequel book describes the deliberate choice of greyscale as "Past-O-Vision". The use of crayons to illustrate the "dawn of time" backstories also invokes this trope.
  • In commemoration to Geocities shutting down... Behold! Xkcd redesigned as a classic 90s Geocities site! Complete with broken html, pointless marquees, and flashing background graphics.
  • The Jet Dream comics (and sister titles It's Cookie! and My Jet Dream Romance) are presented as if they were actual comic books published in the late '60s and early '70s by an obscure publisher obsessed with male-to-female sex changes.
    • Evidence in Jet Dream letter columns and other material suggests that the publisher believed in mass-scale wholesome crossdressing by boys to prepare for humanity's future as a One-Gender Race. The wholesome, hoped-to-be Code approved Jet Dream comics were only one of his business ventures aimed at cashing in on a "Fem Is In!" movement that... never quite developed.
  • Unicorn Jelly looks like something drawn in an 8-bit MS-DOS paint program, and with good reason: it was drawn in an 8-bit MS-DOS paint program.
  • I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space!!! has been run through Photoshop filters because the auther/artist wants it to feel like "your parents’ old collection that they forget they left up there, all faded and stained."
  • According to Word of God, Minus is done in the style of a Newspaper Comic from the early 20th century. It shows.
  • The Blonde Marvel 11-page story "The Thing That Came" was presented as if it had been published in 1955.
    • The artist did it again in early 2012, with a "Municipal City" series, centered on Commander Marvel, that is supposedly fragments of a long-lost 1950s newspaper comic.
  • The Platypus Comix story "Vess MacMeal Starring in: The More You Know!" has drawings resembling 1950s kitschy artwork.


Web Original

  • This parody infomercial about "mastering the Internet". Yes, it's a modern-day spoof. It sure doesn't look that way, though. According to the director, it was dubbed between video recorders four times for that extra-special effect.
  • The New Adventures of Captain S, a series made by PBC Productions about a gamer who can phisically enter Sega games, is supposed to look like it was made in the early 1990s. It takes inspiration from Captain N: The Game Master, Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad and Saved by the Bell. The credits use the same font that was used in Full House and the DVD cover is made to resemble the DVD cover of Breakfast Club.
  • The Totally Rad Show: 5/12/86 - where the whole show is done in the style of a 1980s public access show.
  • This Transformers Affectionate Parody gives an account of Transformers appearing in The Gay Nineties.
  • "Ask That Guy VIOLATES Ma-Ti is done in the style of a silent film, complete with the text screens after the dialogue and black-and-white footage. The illusion is broken at the end after Ma-Ti takes down Ask That Guy and reprimands the viewer for being sick enough to want to watch the titular act depicted.
  • This fake trailer depicts what The Legend of Zelda would have been like as a John Hughes-esque Eighties teen movie. Bonus points for including period music, an Orion Pictures logo and VHS artifacts; if you ignore the obvious parody bits, you could easily mistake it for an actual '80s trailer from an old videocassette.
  • One of the more unnerving "photos" of Slender Man is designed to look like it was taken in the early Nineties. Details of note include a date watermark and added graininess, the latter of which is more pronounced due to the camera distortions that always pop up when Slendy is around.
  • The Onion published a book called "Our Dumb Century" featuring fake front pages of the paper throughout the 20th century starting in 1900.
  • For April Fools' Day 2011, YouTube added a button that would turn the video you're watching into sepia tones, add jittering and scan lines, and replace the audio with jazz music. Its featured video that day was of a few of its most famous videos redone in this style.
    • Even more brilliantly: if you were watching a video that used YouTube's subtitle functionality, the text would appear as intertitles as in a silent film.
  • Red vs. Blue does this when Church is sent back in time. They use an earlier Bungie game, Marathon, instead of the more modern Halo engine for all the footage in that time period. As the show always upgrades to the latest Halo engine when they become available, it might be that they used Marathon due to it being the oldest game in the "series."
    • Also, the dramatic lens flare that show up in CGI episodes in Season 9.
  • The internet once claimed that Orson Welles had made a movie adaptation of Batman; although it was revealed to be an April Fool's joke perpetrated by Ain't It Cool News and Comics Should Be Good, but that didn't stop someone from making a rather believable two part trailer of the non-existent movie.
  • This viral campaign ad from the Watchmen film
    • If there were an early 1990s Watchmen cartoon, this would be it.
      • And in the Watchmen universe itself, that cartoon is something that Veidt Enterprises would conceivably have produced to market its toy action figures...
  • Ivan Guerrero's "premakes" are trailers of modern films as they would have been if they'd been produced in the B-Movie days circa 1950.
  • This fake VHS trailer from ChiefBrodyRules for Captain America: Winter Soldier posits what the movie would have been like had it been made in The Eighties, complete with appropriate effects and editing. Keep in mind, this was made in 2014.
  • The "Monobook" skin in MediaWiki used to be the default skin until Vector arrived in 2009. Since then, a lot of work has gone into making Monobook retraux, with a responsive design version )with icons that were made in the New 10s but match the rest of Monobook's 2000s look) and the nullification of 2010s-era flat design present in the other skins. There are even scripts on English Wikipedia that make the cleanup templates look like they did before "template standardization" in 2007, to complete the faux-2006 feel.

Western Animation

  • The Venture Brothers. The creators admit a genuine love of fake-aging footage and such, and went through great lengths to get the Season 2 DVD to appear to be (but not actually be) worn and decades old, as if it had been in the trunk of somebody's car for 30 years. And the menu screens are done in the style of an old, old slide-show presentation of what people in The Sixties thought the future would be like. The third season was all shot in high definition in order to make the footage quirkier and grainier, not sharper or more vector-ey.
    • And the third-season DVD is presented in the style of an Atari 2600 game, down to the packaging and Pitfall-style menu screens.
  • In fitting with the Animaniacs' backstory as characters locked away since the early days of animation, occasionally a "lost Warner Brothers short" was aired that was done deliberately in the style of WB's original Bosko and Honey cartoons.
    • Additionally, one episode featured clips of the Warners guest-starring on such old cartoons as Calhoon Capybara, Oohooroo, Where Are You, and Obese Orson. For the clips, the producers carefully made sure the animators replicated the low-budget feel of the cartoons parodized.
  • The short-lived Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? was deliberately drawn to resemble a late 1970s/early 1980s vintage cartoon.
  • How to Hook Up Your Home Theater basically takes 1940s Goofy and puts him in a contemporary setting. You can read about this here.
  • There were a couple of Scooby Doo made-for-video movies in 2002-2003, Scooby-Doo and the Legend of the Vampire and Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico, that were deliberately done in a retro 1970s-esque style to resemble the old Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? cartoon series (something that What's New, Scooby-Doo? and the other made-for-video movies generally avoided), even going as far as bringing back the original voice actresses for Daphne and Velma (as Frank Welker was already Fred and Scooby-Doo's main voice actor, and Casey Kasem was still available to voice Shaggy any time he was needed), using synth/keyboard remakes of the classic Scooby-Doo background music, featuring many of the old Hanna-Barbera sound effects and even putting the gang in their classic 1970s outfits and designing them in the same manner.
    • In Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase, the gang is sucked into a video game about their adventures. In the final level they meet themselves (or rather, their video game doubles), who are drawn in the older style.
  • A short on one of the Veggie Tales videos is silent and done in black and white... even though it still uses computer animation.
  • The Tinpo shorts on CBS' Kewlopolis block (which can also be seen online) use 8-bit style music (although one can also hear actual modern electric guitars on the soundtracks as well).
    • The music, incidentally, is by a band named Anamanaguchi, whose members actually write music using an NES music tracker and play the resulting code on an actual NES, with electric guitars to accompany it. It's awesome stuff.
  • An episode of The Fairly OddParents had Timmy and his grandfather entering an old black-and-white cartoon, drawn to look as such.
  • In an episode of Futurama, the crew watches a Harold Zoid silent hologram in black-and-white.
    • Futurama packaging and merchandise also often evokes Zeerust aesthetics (like some things in the show - Bender himself is an example).
    • The episode "Reincarnation" has three different segments each done in a different retro style: an early 1930s black and white cartoon, a 1980s 8-bit video game, and a 1970s anime.
  • In The Legend of Korra, the "Previously On..." segments are done in the style of old movies, complete with a grainy sepia effect and an over-excited announcer.
  • Scooby Doo Mystery Inc has the clothing style and style similar to the first series.
    • In the episode "The Mystery Solvers Club State Finals", the Dream Sequence uses the original Hanna-Barbera designs, a sharp contrast to the new series' modern drawing style.
  • The Peanuts movie Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown is hand-drawn, has the same style as the classic series, and has voices to a similar effect of the originals.
  • Regular Show has a very washed-out color scheme, the soundtrack is sourced from a lot of '80s bands, and the characters always play retro-styled video games on a Sega Master System.
  • The 2011 Winnie the Pooh film follows the style of the original shorts fairly closely, right down to details like photocopy lines and the backgrounds.
  • The short-lived Code Monkeys was an animated series done completely in the style of an 8-bit video game, with the cast resembling characters from mid-80s Taito games such as Renegade and Mat Mania.


Real Life

  • Many attractions at various Disney Theme Parks are painstakingly worked on to appear genuinely ancient or old, such as the Tower of Terror.
  • Consumer-level video editing programs such as iMovie and Windows Movie Maker have their share of effects that make things look brown ("Sepia"), old (old reel marks), or even very old (choppy action and faded borders). Of course, these are abused by amateur video makers.
    • Effects like those are even built into some camcorders; Sony's Digital-8 decks are a good example, as are some flash and DVD-based cameras. Needless to say, people who do serious video work tend to recommend not using them under any circumstances and doing all that sort of thing in postproduction.
  • "Vintage" T-shirts for sale at retail stores. Brand new shirts deliberately faded and cracked to look like they're 30 years old. Pre-ripped jeans also count.
  • Certain slot machines (mainly those manufactured by IGT) are still being made with mechanical reels and levers to pull, even though they're all run by computers now and these are no longer required. Many people prefer these for a more authentic experience. Even in Minnesota, where mechanical reels are not allowed, the video versions of these same games are still built with levers. Sadly, machines that dispense payout in coins/tokens (instead of tickets) are much rarer, if not extinct.
  • Computers and laptops built with false-wooden frames, buttons and similar accessories are fairly popular among various groups, particularly steampunk.
  • Various architectural styles like Neoclassicism or Gothic Revival. Amusingly, the latter was a reaction to the former: Neoclassicism was seen as "Enlightenment" and "liberal" (in the old sense), so Romantics and (old-sense) conservatives invented their own revival to counter it, drawing Romanticism Versus Enlightenment into the field of architecture in the ugliest (except for the buildings, pretty much all of which were beautiful) possible way. The debate didn't end until the Bauhaus-educated German Modernists, driven from Nazi Germany for being "degenerate" (or worse, Jewish) came out of nowhere to destroy them both. (The Soviet Vkhutemas was doing much the same thing, but since they were Dirty Communists they were ignored in the West).
  • Many alleys of Budapest's Inner City were redesigned to look 19th century, complete with lamp posts that look like gas lanterns.
    • The goal of the Margaret Bridge's recent reconstruction was explicitly to restore the bridge to its 1936 design.
  • Reliced[2] musical instruments. Fender is particularly guilty of releasing guitars and basses that are purposely beaten and aged in the factory that look like they have 50 years worth of abuse on them. This is also the entire business model of Nash guitars, which are really beat up Fender copies for about twice the price of new Fenders. Needless to say there is quite a bit of contention amongst guitarists as to whether this is an affordable alternative to vintage instruments that can run up to $70,000 a piece or if they are bought by posers who want their guitars to look worn without actually putting the work into having a guitar get that beat up through touring and playing constantly.
    • There's also another aspect to this. From the 50s to the 70s all instruments used nitrocellulose lacquer, but as it was rather hazardous, polyurethane is the standard finish today. Nitro is very "fragile" and easily comes off and ages very nicely (fading, yellowing and so on). This is why real vintage guitars have a special sort of relic to them. Polyester on the other hand is very hard and thick, has no real aging and hardly ever comes off, which makes getting a played in feeling with many modern guitars is close to impossible. It's thick and goopy and dampens the sound, but protects the instrument and offers a wider selection of colors. Polyurethane is somewhere between nitro and polyester—only a little bit thicker than nitro so it doesn't kill your harmonics, but with durability and color choices comparable to polyester. It still doesn't age quite the same, and opinions vary whether that's good or bad. Still, it's generally considered an acceptable compromise.
  • Some people have cell phone ringtones that sound exactly like old-fashioned bell telephones.
  • Doritos re-released a chip flavour that they discontinued in the mid 1970s and put it in bags made to look like the bag design from that era as well. As of 2020, ketchup-flavour Doritos are still available in the retro bags in Canada.
  • The car industry has many examples of faux-retro models.
    • Chevrolet Camaro
    • Dodge Challenger
    • Fiat New 500
    • Ford Mustang
    • New Mini
    • Nissan 350Z/370Z
    • Nissan Figaro
    • Plymouth Prowler
    • VW New Beetle
  • Though more subtle than most, there has traditionally been a lot of demand for "film look" coming from digital video cameras, to the point of making things like 24p frame rates standard even on relatively low-end camcorders. The adoption of DSLR cameras like the Canon 5DmkII specifically aimed to duplicate the depth-of-field effects film cameras traditionally give by using standard interchangeable lenses and large image sensors; the jury is still out as to whether "film look" has been truly achieved for The Rest of Us, or if its proponents have created a new, unique DSLR look.
  • Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback use cane sugar instead of the high-fructose corn syrup found in modern soft drinks. They also feature vintage brand logos on the packaging.
  • The Seattle Space Needle celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2012. As part of the celebration, the whole thing was painted the "only in the 60's" shade of "Galaxy Gold" paint that it was during the 1962 World's Fair.
  • In the 1990s, McDonald's built several drive-thru-only locations in the style of the earliest restaurants.
  1. ↑ Deadpool #11
  2. ↑ "Relic", not "Re-lice"
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