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After the first few commercials, the idea was dropped, and for several years just featured generic commercials, but still featured Magic just as a dog and Carrie Donovan just as old lady with glasses. Early commercials for Capital One represented credit card debt as rampaging hordes of barbarians, which only a Capital One card could drive away. Now their commercials are about barbarians getting along in the modern world using Capital One cards. It helps that the barbarians have been remade into fun-loving guys after a good time. Capital One's original selling point was that they charged a lower APR than the competition.
When they raised their rates during the late-Oughties credit crunch, they had no choice but to re-tool the characters. Parodied in this Onion article, where it turns out that "no one at Capital One can remember why it put Vikings in its ads". A few years ago, Charmin toilet paper ran an animated spot about bears taking the product with them into the woods. The bears have since become the center of their own campaign, but because they also live in houses, there is no connection to the original joke.
Woken from a hypersleep, you find yourself alone on a drifting star cruiser, light years from home. The crew has disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a few scattered records and a strange artifact that seems to hold the key to an alien civilisation. Played out in stunning 3D. A collaboration between legendary game designer Richard Garfield and Valve, Artifact offers the deepest gameplay and the highest-fidelity experience ever seen in a trading card game. A collaboration between legendary card game designer Richard Garfield and Valve, Artifact is a.
Duke the talking dog from the Bush's Baked Beans commercials. Originally, the joke was that company spokesman Jay Bush had told the secret family bean recipe to his dog Duke, naturally expecting the animal to keep quiet—but it turned out the dog could actually talk, and wanted to sell the recipe!
Nowadays, the commercials for the most part inexplicably feature Jay Bush hanging out with this dog that just happens to talk. They seem to be going back with the original gimmick in a more recent commercial, though. The latter is now Carfax's mascot. He's also vaguely Australian or perhaps lower-class British now, despite being voiced by Kelsey Grammer a native of the U. Virgin Islands in the original.
They introduced a talking pig character with a commercial that asked, "Can switching to Geico save you fifteen or more on car insurance? Did the little piggy go wee wee wee all the home? Now they've got the pig in normal situations, using the Geico phone app. The same happened with the Geico cavemen. The original few ads were about fully culturally assimilated modern cavemen being rightly offended by the Geico slogan "so easy a caveman can do it" and making a public stink over it, but they pretty quickly morphed into random skits with the caveman characters.
Clearnet, a former Canadian telecom, had an innovative marketing campaign which featured music, animals, images of equipment, some printed words, and nothing else. Telus kept that approach, and has done quite well with it since. Most people have forgotten Clearnet. However thanks to inflation and dozens of pricier variations the Six-Dollar Burger since now costs over six dollars for the base burger and up to seven or eight dollars for the more complicated variations so the name now can be considered completely unironic.
During the 90s, Coca-Cola put in a major advertising campaign for Sprite to try and brand it as a cool, hip, and urban drink. The commercials featured lots of tough looking black guys playing street basketball and then drinking Sprite to cool off. As part of the campaign they added a textured grip to Sprite bottles, so that the bottles would be easier to hang onto while you were playing street b-ball.
However, even though the advertising campaign has long since ended, the bottles still have the textured grip on them. Ronald McDonald has been largely retired from the restaurant chain's advertising in the US, mainly due to pressure from nutrition advocates concerned about peddling unhealthy fast food to children. However, his name is still present in the company's network of childrens' charities Ronald McDonald House , and his image can still be seen in the kids' playset areas in some restaurants although these are being phased out as well.
Mac Tonight's whole gimmick when he was first introduced was that he was a lounge crooner sitting at a flying piano singing McDonald's-themed lyrics to the tune of "Mack the Knife", specifically modeled after Bobby Darin the artist most associated with the song. Then Darin's son Dodd Mitchell Darin filed a lawsuit against McDonald's telling them to stop using the tune in their commercials, claiming it infringed copyright. As a result, Mac was relegated to being just kinda Little Caesar's slogan "Pizza, pizza!
Despite having dropped this offer in the '90s in favor of other things like focusing on their Hot 'N Ready Pizza a large pepperoni that's ready to be carried out within five minutes of ordering , the slogan remains. It's simply never mentioned anymore that her cute little pigtails are there to hide the antennae she inherited from Mom. Dick Tracy's signature two-way wrist radio, which would have been a technological marvel in its day, would now get nothing more than a shrug in the modern day era of cell phones.
It still exists due to being such an integral iconic item to the character. But then, this applies to just about all its non-work characters, including Phil who only makes an appearance once in a blue moon anyway , Ratbert, and even Dogbert. Dogbert still appears frequently, having made the transition to office humor quite well because he is the personification of how Scott Adams would like to act if he could get away with it. However, the fact that he is a dog and Dilbert's pet is almost entirely inconsequential. Adams has been filling the void partially with one-off gag characters for some time now, however.
Also, some new regular characters were created after the switch to office humor, including Asok, Carol, and Tina. Bob had a place in the office during the runup to Y2K: Shermy, Patty and Violet. Schulz intended for them all to have been foils for Charlie Brown in different ways, but as other characters developed and Lucy became his primary foil they became increasingly unnecessary. Shermy, who spoke the first line in the strip, was the first to suffer.
His original role was to be better than Charlie Brown at everything Charlie Brown loved to do; as early as the late s his appearances become rare and he has only one line in A Charlie Brown Christmas which was kind of Lampshade Hanging ; he laments that in every Christmas play, he's always cast as a boring shepherd. He last appeared in and was last mentioned in Schulz didn't mind getting rid of him as he said he was basically down to using Shermy when he needed a character with almost no personality. And he didn't like Shermy's haircut, either. Patty not to be confused with Peppermint Patty , originally the mother hen and Alpha Bitch , diminished as Lucy took over most of her role.
She last appeared in a speaking part in , with occasional cameos thereafter. When You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown was revived on Broadway in late s, her role was rewritten to be Sally instead, as most modern audiences would not have been familiar with the character. Violet managed to remain a semi-used character until around By that time not only had Lucy become the strip's dominant female character, Peppermint Patty and Marcie had also arrived and established themselves.
Still, her and Patty managed to remain background characters until the almost the end, with their final appearances being together in a strip about two years before it ended. As a genre, newspaper comics themselves are almost an Artifact. In previous decades, popular strips like Garfield , Calvin and Hobbes , Peanuts , Cathy , For Better or for Worse , The Far Side and The Family Circus appeared in thousands of newspapers and reached millions of readers, with newspapers publishing full-color pullouts for Sunday comics.
Now, however, almost all of the popular strips have ended, newspapers are increasingly cash-strapped and looking for ways to cut costs, and Webcomics have become a popular alternative. Newspapers have drastically cut back on the number of comic strips they run, and many have dropped the Sunday comics altogether, to the point where they seem to run comics more out of tradition than anything else.
This was Lampshaded by Bill Watterson as early as , when he wrote about how the lack of newspaper competition meant that the surviving newspapers would only purchase the most popular strips. As a result, the big strips would get huge, while the smaller newspapers, in Watterson's words, "play musical chairs and vanish. The strip's fifth artist, Peter Kuper, has kept it since taking over in Foxtrot usually is very good at keeping its pop culture references current; although one that stands out is the family's iFruit computer , based on the original iteration of the iMac. The family kept this version long after that style had become archaic by home computing standards.
The family's hairstyles are all ridiculously out of fashion, staying the same since they were created. Dagwood's strange hairdo reflects the early 30s male trend when it was fashionable to have the hair as flattened as possible against the head with brilliantine or pomade. The unruly streaks of hair were meant to show how when Dagwood was stressed, some locks of hair around his temples would become loose but still kept stiff. When his son Alex was born, he just "inherited" his father's hair. Blondie herself is still using her old flapper hair style, although it's not as confusing for people who didn't read the strip from the very beginning.
Dagwood's single button appears to actually have been a shirt stud, worn in the early 20th century by upper class men at dinner occasions. This reflected Dagwood's former social status. Beetle Bailey has often updated with the times, starting in the '70s by slowly adding diversity to the cast that was previously all white and male, adding a tech character in, and even calling out General Halftrack's lecherous ways following the Tailhook Scandal and Clarence Thomas hearings.
However, the uniforms are woefully out of date still sporting solid olive drab that went away in the early '70s in favor of camo patterns as well as old-style open Jeeps, '50s era rifles, and tanks more resembling those from the '50s than modern ones. Similarly to the above, the parents are still portrayed as Baby Boomers. It's becoming increasingly unlikely people of their age would have biological teenage sons, if not impossible. Jeremy still rocks grunge-era clothes from his introduction in the '90s.
An attempted aversion exists in The Family Circus. Jeff Keane took over after his father's death, and seems to recycle a lot of the older strips from the 80s, removing outdated stuff via apparently photoshop. However, it leads to some oddness, such as the kids watching a modern flat screen TV sitting on the floor or Ma Keane having odd blank spots around her head where her 50s era hair curls are whited out. Barney Google and Snuffy Smith: The strip's focus evenmtually shifted to Snuffy and his family and neighbors in Hootin' Holler.
Google was absent from the strip from to , and started re-appearing more frequently in The classic Swedish comic Having started in , all soldier characters originally wore the traditional blue uniform with gold buttons. As uniform standards changed over the decades, several characters were changed The rest of the cast wears 40's era gray uniforms, possibly because they're easier to draw. Real-life swedish soldiers wear green camo. Bloom County was originally about the travails of Major Bloom, his grandson Milo, and the other residences of the Bloom Boarding House.
The aspect of the Blooms owning the house was dropped after a while, standout ensemble characters like Binkley and Opus started to take prominence, and the elder Blooms and earlier boarding house residents were dropped after a year or two. By the end of the original strip in , Milo was the only character that remained from the beginning of the strip, and we never did get a good idea of who owned the house.
Calvin mentions that he ended up being rather awkwardly shoehorned into some of the stories. It's common for fanon to evolve over time and be displaced by newer fanon. In these cases, often elements of older fanon will still exist in some form. For example the background pony in My Little Pony: Eventually fan portrayals changed to her being The Ditz instead of having a speech disorder. She still usually uses "Muffin" as an Affectionate Nickname for Dinky.
Willow in My Immortal. She's originally introduced as Ebony's best friend. Kevin was the second lead of the film American Pie after Jim, but thanks to the breakout characters of Finch and, particularly, Stifler, by the time the third film American Wedding rolled around there was really nothing for him to do, especially since his love interest Tara Reid wasn't even in the movie. But because he was Jim's best friend it would've been strange for him not to be in the wedding party so he was basically just around to stand there and hardly say anything.
The writers of Back to the Future Part II were stuck with the fact they had put Marty's girlfriend in the car with Doc at the end of the first movie, thus forcing them to write her into the sequel. They said that, if they had actually planned on a sequel, they never would have put her in there. They did, however, find a way to write her back out again until the very end of Part III.
There is no real need for Andromeda to appear in the remake of Clash of the Titans given she has lost her role as love interest to Perseus and her city has already done more than enough to anger the gods even without her mother's hubris in proclaiming her beauty. She only seems to have been retained at all because Perseus rescuing Andromeda is such a big part of the original myth.
Andromeda is shown handing out food to the poor people in the city, so at least she is useful in-universe. It's also worth noting that she was Perseus's love interest in the original cut of the film with Io and Perseus simply being Like Brother and Sister and had much more screentime that ended up being cut as a result of Executive Meddling.
See this alternate ending. The sequel pairs them romantically at last. The Lord of the Rings: Arwen wasn't super-prominent in the books , barely more than a One-Scene Wonder two-scenes to be exact , but Liv Tyler was high-profile enough that filmmakers felt it would be pragmatic to expand her role. She got third billing too. However, as the films went on, they rightly felt they would do well to stick to Tolkien and focus on the main plot, and the films were pretty much successful enough to not bother with pleasing focus research.
As a result, Arwen's appearances in Return of the King are essentially cameos. In the books, she appears in two scenes: She is mentioned on the sly a few times later, but her story is almost exclusively part of Aragorn's backstory, found in the appendices. The same principle happened to Cate Blanchett's Galadriel, but to a lesser degree because she is already way more prominent than Arwen. The appendices give more information about her, including an Offscreen Moment of Awesome where she and her husband led an elven army to destroy one of Sauron's main fortresses in the North while the main characters were fighting their own battles to the East.
For the films, Blanchett was given more lines and scenes throughout the trilogy. Their journeys were reduced to being just side-characters that follow behind Aragorn wherever he went as his loyal companions, and as a result, they were the only characters of the Fellowship that didn't get any time to truly shine in the spotlight throughout the trilogy.
Legolas and Gimli became so irrelevant to the overall story that they were only handed a couple of scenes by the time of the 3rd film. Because Legolas and Gimli were founding members of the Fellowship, they got to continue sticking around. Although the film of Runaway Jury involves gun politics, the original novel was about a tobacco company on trial. Nevertheless, the movie still contains a number of references to the pros and cons of smoking e.
The Protagonist telling a neighbor that he should quit , which are a leftover from the source material. Jar Jar Binks in episodes 2 and 3 of the prequel trilogy left over from episode 1. He was originally going to survive his encounter with Darth Vader on the Death Star, but with crippling injuries, and spend the rest of the film as an invalid, giving advice from the sidelines. Lucas realised that this would just slow the action down and get in the way, and rewrote the script, not that long before the fight sequence was due to be shot.
This may be where the "force ghost" concept came from — as an alternative method of dispensing said advice. So does Lando to a lesser extent. This is also a Development Gag ; an early concept that never quite made it to the screen is that the movies are the story as told by R2-D2 himself. However, Leonardo's katanas are so iconic to him that he can't have any other weapon.
For that reason, he uses his swords only for Flynning and actually hits his opponents with his hands and feet. Vesper Lynd's name in Casino Royale Her name is a play on "West Berlin" , as her loyalties were split down the middle like how Berlin was split by the Soviet-built wall in much of the Cold War.
Also the recipe given for the "Vesper Martini" in the film is the one from the book. However, several of the ingredients have been reformulated in the decades since. Using that recipe would result in a different taste today. Alternate recipes exist to recapture the original flavor. Star Trek has an interesting meta-example with Chekhov's portrayal. In the original series , Walter Koenig 's hilariously bad Russian accent "Keptin!
In the version, Chekhov is played by the Russian-born Anton Yelchin , who actually speaks fluent Russian, and is fully capable of speaking in a convincing Russian accent. He doesn't , of course, since everybody knows that Chekhov just wouldn't be Chekhov without that cheesy accent.
Joyce in the film adaptation of Arrowsmith. In the book she's his second wife, and her high-society lifestyle distracts Martin Arrowsmith from his research. The film did not include that storyline, so in the movie, Joyce is just kind of there in the last third of the film, not doing anything to affect the plot. Godzilla gives a key example on how this trope can backfire when fans think it's half-assed. One of the original Japanese character's most iconic traits is his nuclear breath attack, which has gone through iterations of being a vaporous spray to a plasma beam.
Nevertheless however, it was always present. Unfortunately Tristar wanted to make a movie about a giant radioactive reptile more "realistic" and scrubbed the iconic attack. In its place we get to see the monster roar at some cars that explode and briefly make it look like it's breathing fire. This being just one of multiple iconic traits thrown out in the movie resulted in fans deeming the monster not even recognizable and hating the film.
Dark of the Moon is a weird example. Megan Fox played Mikaela Banes, the female human deuteragonist of the first two movies. She's skilled with cars and mechanics, and this would be her defining part of her personality. Despite being a completely different character, aspects of Mikaela were integrated into her role. Namely, she works at a car dealership, and holds a very high position despite the fact that there is nothing indicating that she's good with cars. This is because Mikaela was originally supposed to return, with her removal and Carly's addition being a very late re-write to the script, the writers had no choice but to keep her job the same as Mikaela's.
If Mikaela had the job, it would've made perfect sense. With Carly, the only justification is that her boss likes her.
Archived from the original on August 1, When the four-inch scale returned in , it was in the form of the fairly uncommon Scouts, even in name reinforcing the Deluxe's dominance. Legolas and Gimli became so irrelevant to the overall story that they were only handed a couple of scenes by the time of the 3rd film. Little Caesar's slogan "Pizza, pizza! The Slender Man and his facelessness.
First Class came out in , it made perfect sense to make it a period piece set in the s , since the movie was explicitly meant as a prequel to the original X-Men. Ditto for its sequel X-Men: Days of Future Past , which was a s period piece. However, considering Days of Future Past ended with Wolverine changing the past to prevent the Sentinels' rise and undoing the events of the first three movies , it can seem a bit odd that X-Men: Apocalypse was a s period piece, considering it was effectively a prequel to a movie that never happened.
By that point, it seems that the filmmakers just kept up the retro setting because the previous two films had it, rather than because it made narrative sense, even it featured teenage characters who would have originally been infants or young children at that time. Maleficent keeps the Christening scene from the original Sleeping Beauty intact - where Maleficent interrupts before the third fairy grants her wish. In the original it was a plot point - as the third fairy was able to soften Maleficent's curse so that the princess will only sleep instead of dying. But in Maleficent , the curse is for sleep from the start and never gets softened.
Pirates of the Caribbean 's Will Turner. He was the proper protagonist for Curse of the Black Pearl as originally written, but then Johnny Depp appropriately hijacked the show and turned it into a rollicking pirate yarn full of plenty of zany antics and double-crossing. The problem is that this left the clean-cut protagonist without any particular role in the film except as a Living MacGuffin and as the guy who gets the girl.
In the followup movies, he's given a personal connection with Davy Jones through his father, and He doesn't even make for a good Foil to Jack Sparrow, because his classically-heroic characterization keeps him from fully participating in the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder that permeates the rest of the cast. On Stranger Tides gets rid of him and is a stronger movie for it.
In Mark of the Vampire , Count Mora the vampire is observed to have a ghastly wound on his right temple. This is never explained. The explanation is that in the back story he shot himself, which is how he became a vampire. That bit was in the 20 minutes cut from the film before the theatrical release, so in the movie Bela Lugosi goes around with a huge bloodstain on the side of his head for no reason. There's some strong evidence that the movie was originally going to be a vampire movie due to all the traditional vampire-killing methods being applied to werewolves, their leader being a woman who stays alive by sucking the youth out of people, it taking place in Transylvania and so on.
Watchmen changes the graphic novel's Twist Ending so that the Big Bad 's plot involves destroying the world's major cities with a series of explosions instead of creating a genetically engineered monster to wreak havoc in New York. But the movie keeps Ozymandias' Cool Pet Bubastis, a bizarre-looking feline creature who clearly wasn't born through natural means.
The book explains that Bubastis is a genetically engineered hybrid species of lynx tailor-made by Ozymandias himself, and she serves as Foreshadowing for The Reveal that Veidt has cracked the secrets of genetic engineering, and can create his own artificial hybrid creatures. But since this plot point doesn't come up in the movie, Bubastis has no real reason to exist, and she seems oddly incongruous amidst the movie's mostly grounded realism. The film is supposedly designed as an homage to s sci-fi, with elements like aliens and the Red Scare , in the same way that the old films were homages to s pulp adventure.
But Indy is still around, despite still being very much the Adventurer Archaeologist typical of the 30s, as opposed to being retooled into a typical 50s protagonist for instance, a Science Hero , and all the ancient civilizations and deathtraps stuck around as well for him to explore and explain, despite being totally unrelated to sci-fi.
The tonal clash is pretty obvious, but without those elements, it would be unrecognizable as an Indiana Jones film. In Spider-Man , Peter Parker's web-shooting abilities are reimagined as an inherent part of his superpowers, unlike in the comics. But whenever he fires his webs, he still has to press his middle and ring finger to his palm to activate them.
In the comics, he did that because the triggers for his wrist-mounted "web-shooters" were concealed in the palms of his gloves. Some people might wonder why he still does it in the movies, since his webbing is a bodily function that should come as naturally as breathing or blinking. Presumably, the filmmakers figured that it just wouldn't be a Spider-Man film without the iconic "Spider-Man" hand gesture. There are still some statutes in Finnish law from as back as and that have been completely obsolete for hundreds of years, but have still not been removed.
These laws mandate, among other things, what types of plants each household must cultivate every year, and set fines in Thalers a monetary unit that hasn't been in use in Finland since about Since the Constitution of the United States cannot be changed, only amended, the 18th amendment still establishes the prohibition of alcohol repealed by the 21st amendment. There are several other such artifacts, such as original system of selecting the Presidential runner-up as Vice President replaced by the 12th Amendment.
One of the compromises between the free and slave states had a built-in deadline that turned it into an artifact importation of slaves was protected until ; it was banned by law as soon as this clause expired. Many printings of the Constitution will cross out, gray out, or otherwise indicate sections that have been superseded by later amendments.
There's nothing in the Constitution requiring this to be so, but when the first few amendments were adopted it was consciously decided that they would stand on their own rather than changing the original text piecemeal. Pretty much anything associated with judicial dress in the English-speaking world. Black robes were originally worn as a gesture of mourning for Queen Anne, wigs as a sign of 17th century aristocratic fashion or, in the colonies, English political domination.
The British aristocratic titles Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Lord of Parliament all originate from a feudal system where they were clearly distinct political offices with clear responsibilities and powers: Dukes were high-ranking nobles with vast holdings generally expected to lead the King's armies and advise the monarch; earls were the regional lords of counties; marquesses were more-important earls whose counties were on the borders and therefore had more responsibilities, since they were expected to defend the realm from foreign attack; viscounts were generally related to earls second sons and so forth and held smaller holdings; barons were your typical local lords; Lords of Parliament were Scottish nobles without other titles but entitled to sit in the Scots Parliament.
As the centuries went on, this diminished to all the ranks of peerage having the same effective function - granting their holder a seat in the House of Lords. As of , they don't even do that any more, but the titles still legally exist. Similarly, members of the House of Lords cannot vote in elections for the House of Commons.
As most Lords are affiliated to a particular party, this rule obviously isn't because of neutrality, so why's it there? Because the Lords and Commons originally represented different strata of society. All aristocrats were automatically in the House of Lords anyway, so why did they need to be represented in the Commons? There's a lot of such laws. George III finally discontinued the title in Multiple kings continued to style themselves rules of territories they didn't rule for a reason or the other. Even though Algeria has been independent since , for quite some time afterwards, the French President was still allowed to declare the state of emergency on the Algerian territory.
Some laws dealt with redacting the death certificate of an executed convict or placed capital decrees among the rulings' priority for Supreme Court's review, even though the death penalty was abolished in Some outdated dispositions about hard labor , abolished in , had also remained on the books until about fifty years afterwards. Some condominiums' bylaws, adopted under the Vichy Regime, still prohibit selling to Jews; this could be considered a double example of this trope since the statutes which these bylaws cite for defining a Jew have been abrogated and the bylaws themselves are nullified by later anti-discrimination statutes.
Officially, Parisian women were not permitted to wear trousers until The law had long since ceased to be enforced before that, of course.
Some unconstitutional statutes in state Codes of the USA have still not been repealed. Alabama has still the constitutional duty to organize a segregated school system among other outdated clauses. Massachusetts capital statutes are still on the books even though the Supreme Judicial Court found them unconstitutional in The possibility of appealing a ruling of the High Court of Australia to the Privy Council has been effectively nullified by the refusal of the High Court to give the leave needed.
The constitution of the German state of Hesse still includes the death penalty as a possible means of punishment. However, since the death penalty in Germany was abolished on federal level, and federal law trumps state law, this has effectively no meaning. Almost all laws passed in West Germany before have a sentence usually near the beginning or end about its implementation in West Berlin being subject to approval of the West Berlin assembly. West Berlin was de jure not subject to federal German law although it was de facto treated very similarly to any other part of Germany, however the Allies would not allow laws to enter into force in West Berlin without being passed by West Berlin authorities.
Similarly West Berlin did not have any federal MPs instead sending non-voting delegates chosen by the city parliament to Bonn. Of course upon reunification those statues became pointless and were left out of new laws, but they were usually not removed from laws already in force. The entirety of the Portuguese Commercial Code! It was first published in and had a major revision in , making it the last of the Portuguese legal codes still binding all the others were approved during the second half of the 20th Century, substituting the older ones. Although many articles have been revised or outright repealed, it still stands in all its antiquated glory - and it shows!
Mentions to the "Kingdom [of Portugal] and its domains" Portugal has been a Republic since , and lost its "dominions" in , except for one in and another in and to its King Charles I "by the Grace of God" Portugal has officially been secular since , 19th-Century language weird to any modern Portuguese speaker, and no mention of air transportation as a commercial activity it has to be considered so by analogy from land and sea transport.
The Weimar Constitution of the constitution fo the Weimar Republic while effectively dead with the Nazi takeover in has never been formally put out of effect and in fact, the Grundgesetz explicitly lists a number of articles of the Weimar Constitution that are still in force.
However, wherever newer federal law or the Grundgesetz contradicts the Weimar Constitution, Weimar Constitution rules are inapplicable. Harry Potter In Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone , the House Cup championship was such Serious Business that Harry, Hermione and Neville became the most unpopular kids in school after losing Gryffindor a hundred and fifty points and the awarding of the Cup was important enough to almost be a second climax.
Later in the series, no one seems to care much about the House Cup anymore when the emphasis on School Tropes is dropped in favour of the high-stakes war against Voldemort , and yet Snape stubbornly continues to punish our heroes by taking points from Gryffindor. Quidditch also stopped being important after the third book. The next three books kept creating reasons for Harry to no longer play having matches cancelled for the Triwizard Tournament in Book 4 , having Umbridge temporarily ban Harry from the team in Book 5 , and having Harry on the sidelines due to injuries in Book 6 since it could not be outright ignored.
Over the years, the H. Series has gotten much darker , but Block and Tackle continue to appear. When there is a genuine need for some generic mooks, it's always those two, but otherwise they tend to have simple cameos in every volume. He makes a fairly small appearance in Life, the Universe and Everything and was then completely absent, with only one or two mentions, until And Another Thing The radio version of Mostly Harmless made after Douglas Adams ' death felt compelled to bring him back anyway. The joke is not only lost entirely on American audiences, but modern British audiences as well, as the Ford Prefect car that was once so popular in Britain had been out of production for some time even before the radio show debuted and is now long-forgotten by anyone except classic car affectionados.
The joke was that Ford, when coming to Earth, had mistaken cars for Earth's dominant life form due to insufficient research. The German version fixes this by calling the character "Ford Escort", while all other versions keep his name the same. The US film got around the problem by showing Ford and Arthur's first meeting Ford steps into the street to greet an oncoming car — which is indeed a Ford Prefect—and Arthur tackling him just in time and having Ford tell Arthur what he was doing and why, specifically pointing out his unusual name.
Roran in Inheritance Cycle. Once they properly joined the rebellion, however, Roran was left with his character arc almost finished and virtually nothing to do for the final two books. Apart from occasional relationship development, Roran's face-time in the back half of the series consisted solely of assorted rebellion missions and skirmishes which certainly didn't hurt his reputation as a stone-cold badass but are completely irrelevant Filler. The album One Hot Minute was written during bad times in the band members' lives, but oddly, the one track they still occasionally play from it is the most negative song of the whole album, Flea's solo song "Pea".
They were artifacts because they were album tracks from the albums that were being promoted at the time Californication and By the Way. The funk-oriented bassist Flea and the hard rock drummer Chad Smith seem out of place in the band's alternative rock period which has mostly been written by Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante since replaced by Josh Klinghoffer. The band have reintroduced a lot of older tracks in their setlist since, so that might be changing. Until Genesis had enough hits to throw away a lot of their earlier epics , progressive pieces such as " Supper's Ready ", "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight", "Squonk", "Dance On A Volcano" and "The Cinema Show", which were still played even as late as , often clashed considerably with the new sound, style and line-up changes of the band in The '80s , to the point where they could be seen as artifacts in the setlist.
Despite several centuries of independence from Spain, the Dutch national anthem still contains a statement of loyalty to the Spanish king. Russia's current national anthem has the same tune as the Soviet Union's but with different lyrics. The horns seemed to be used very sparingly, and in the background of their hits, when used at all.
A similar situation would be narrowly averted with Electric Light Orchestra. Even after the departure of Roy Wood from the band after their debut album, and the group's eventual Genre Shift into pop and at one point, disco! By the group's album, the New Wave -inspired, synth-heavy Time , the group had jettisoned strings almost entirely in favor of a synth-pop sound, using only a few string players or studio string parts through The '80s ; Time , however, acknowledged this by shortening the group name to its Fan Nickname , ELO , officially.
Black Sabbath intended to title their second album War Pigs , but it got changed to Paranoid instead due to the popularity of the song with the same title. The rest of the artwork remained unchanged, though, and the war pig on the album cover makes very little sense. It includes the line "It's '97, why aren't things wild? It's explained by the fact that work on the album began in , and Gregg Alexander was such a perfectionist that it was delayed until he was fully happy with it.
Linkin Park They have this with the rap aspect of their sound. In the first two nu metal-influenced albums Hybrid Theory and Meteora , it made perfect sense. After they moved on, they downplayed its presence, removing it from most songs, but not entirely. Minutes to Midnight , in the midst of all the Arena Rock , had several rap songs that felt out of place, while A Thousand Suns was progressive space rock with the occasional industrial hip-hop song.
It's hard to imagine any other band putting in random rap if they had just started out with either of those albums. Their later material afterwards was more rap-oriented however, which may mean this may no longer be the case. Speaking of their nu metal material, despite trying to distance themselves from the genre and even disowning it, they still have to play the material from their first two albums at every live show completely intact. No matter how at odds their old songs are with what they're trying to do, they remain. The latter is an especially interesting case, because Chester actually said it was his least favorite song , yet it remains a concert staple.
However, "Crawling" has in fact been slowly phased out in the '10s especially after they learned of its memetic reputation for mocking wangst. Before the concept of 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields came into place, Stephin Merritt just knew he wanted to write a long album of songs about love, and at one point had the idea that it would be a double album with 26 songs, one for every letter of the alphabet. Billy Joel 's "We Didn't Start the Fire" tends to stick out like a sore thumb whenever he includes it in a concert not that he plays it often - very few of his songs are as drenched in '80s synth, and most of the other songs are heavily piano-based or have synth parts that are less distracting "Pressure" or so iconic that you can't really leave them out "The Entertainer".
This is evident because the track features trombone, a instrument only used on "Shiny Beast" whilst Bruce Fowler was in the band. Word of God is that the game was originally designed with a card game theme, which was changed to movie-making midway through production. Welcome to Night Vale: Conservators in the pennartifactlab removed a modern gloss as they prepared the object for display. From the way the coating was applied over the break edges, it was clear that it had been put on after the stela was excavated.
The power of social media, which brings together so many people with diverse interests and knowledge, has helped in a conservation treatment! In a previous post , the restringing of a faience Egyptian broad collar was discussed. A couple of eagle-eyed readers pointed out that the falcon head terminals should face outwards, whereas our terminals are looking at each other.
The falcons have been facing inwards for as long as we have had the piece, so what was going on? Almost immediately, Egyptian Section curator Jen Wegner got to work, digging in the Archives and looking at other collars, including beaded and gold collars as well as painted ones. In all of them, the falcons faced out, not in. Our terminals were on backwards!
When the collar was excavated, the falcon head terminals were separate from, but in the same context as, the hundreds of barrel beads. The terminals and beads were drawn separately in the notes but were reconstructed by the time they were photographed. Since , the collar has been on display, gone out on loan, and published. No one had noticed or had gone so far to comment on the incorrect placement of the falcon head terminals.
Because the collar was restrung for purely conservation reasons, the placement of each of the beads had been retained. Now that it has been pointed out, it was decided to switch the terminals to face outwards. Fortunately, I was able to switch the terminals without fully restringing the collar.
First, the knots were unpicked from each side. Then, the thread was unstrung so that the top and bottom rows could be removed, which mostly released the terminals. Finally, two of the strings had to be cut. Once the terminals were removed, they could be swapped, and the collar restrung. The collar has a few more knots than before, but for the first time the falcon-headed terminals are facing the right way.
Thanks again to our attentive audience! A very special shout-out to our Egyptological colleagues, Tom Hardwick and Peter Lacovara, who pointed this out in the first place. Who knows, maybe someone reading this right now will contribute to a future mystery! The answer is in this case at least , when those coins are reused in other objects.
This necklace comes from Coban, Guatemala. It is made from black glass roundelle beads, interspersed with coins from Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain. It was collected in the early 20th century, but the coins all date to before There are also a number of other beads and charms, including two crosses, two round silver beads, and a black faceted stone charm in a silver bezel. The necklace is in good condition, and the only treatment it needs is a nice overall cleaning. This necklace is being prepared for display in our new Mexico and Central America gallery, along with this necklace, also made from coins:.
On top of the 1 Sol are two small deer, and suspended below are 2 quetzal birds, and a cross. Coins are important in Guatemalan culture. These necklaces would have been symbols of wealth, and be passed down from mother to daughter within a family.
Even today, when a couple decides to get married, the groom will often give the bride a gift of 13 coins in a small box, called an arras. Sometimes beading objects can be quite complex! A cool Egyptian broad collar came into the lab and needed to be restrung. The collar has six alternating rows of blue and black faience beads and a final row of teardrop beads with falcon-headed terminals. Although the beads are in excellent condition, they are on modern cotton thread which was starting to degrade.
In several areas, the string had broken and been reknotted or tied to other close by strings. To make sure the collar was stable enough for display, it was decided to restring the broad collar. Four strands of white braided Dacron polyester fiber , each about 6 meters long, were used. To keep track of the strings, the ends were color coded using markers and each strand used a different dental needle.
Half of each strand was wound onto color coded spindles made from bamboo skewers so that restringing began in the middle of each strand. The spindles were stuck into the side of the foam tray to keep them out of the way. The collar was restrung from top to bottom, moving across each row. Two strings moving in opposite directions were passed through each of the beads in the row to create a ladder-like system to hold them vertically. I cut and removed the old cotton string as I worked across each row in order to keep the beads in place. The top two rows and the left side of the third has been restrung on the white braided Dacron string; the lower beads are still strung on the old beige cotton string.
After all the rows were restrung across the collar, additional string was passed through to connect the columns of beads. The flexible dental needles we use for restringing were key here — they can bend at odd angles to pass the string through a column even when the beads were not lined up exactly. The larger teardrop beads at the bottom were also attached by running the string up to the top of the collar and back.
Finally, the strings were knotted at the terminals. Recently, while working in the Artifact Lab, I was reminded how often conservation borrows terminology from other fields, often in unexpected ways. Both are medical terms, and kind of unusual ones. I recently used both methods on this ceramic lion relief B from the site of Nippur. Instead, poultices are usually used to draw foreign substances out, for example drawing out stains, soiling, or salts. These poultices can be moistened with all types of different solvents, depending on the treatment goal.
In the case of the lion relief, I used cotton poultices to draw out ingrained sooty soiling to clean the surface. Tourniquets are often used in conservation as a controlled way to apply pressure and hold something in place. In the case of the lion relief, I used tourniquets made of cling film tightened around paint brush handles to hold the joins of the relief together and aligned while the joins set. The adhesive I used took a few weeks to cure, and until cured the adhesive did not have the tack or strength to hold the joins together without the support of a tourniquet.
One of the things I love about working in the Artifact Lab are the questions I get asked. I was recently working on the lion relief in the lab and realized that I had to explain the poultices and the tourniquets I used in this treatment. I use these terms so often, I had forgotten that for most people they mean something quite different. Not only can it be worked with ease through a variety of processes to make beautiful artwork and jewelry, but it also never tarnishes or corrodes…not in 50 years or years — NEVER!
You can learn more about Queen Puabi and her amazing treatment history here , and in the new Middle East Galleries. In situ image of the headdress of Queen Puabi, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the s. In the past few weeks, the Conservation Lab has been shimmering with gold. As a material, gold has virtually no inherent vices: Gold frog ornament, SA, with a mend on its back proper right foot. For most gold objects, the only treatment necessary is a brief campaign of degreasing with ethanol on cotton swabs. For others with thin and pliable areas, such as the back right foot of the golden frog ornament pictured above, external forces exerted on the material may cause stress cracks, potentially culminating in a break.
Where cracks are seen, mends with toned Japanese tissue may be applied, creating inconspicuous band-aid-like fixes. After these quick treatments, the objects can often be returned to storage by the end of the day. However, not all that glitters is entirely gold. There are several processes used to achieve this look. A number of the gold objects in the upcoming Mexico and Central America Gallery, including the golden frog ornament above, were manufactured using the technique of depletion gilding.
The inclusion of other metals in a gold alloy alters the properties of the gold, and may increase the hardness of the final material. However, the presence of non-gold metals in an alloy will predispose the material to tarnishing and discoloration. To learn more about gold in Central America, check out this piece from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
B before treatment, with a broken strand and hasty repair tying off the ends.