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

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

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

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

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

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

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This often heralds the beginning of a Dork Age. Can very often result in an Unintentional Period Piece since "current events" are usually short-lived.

See also Popularity Polynomial, Mascot with Attitude, Discredited Meme, Follow the Leader, Two Decades Behind, Long-Runner Tech Marches On, Society Marches On, Jumping the Shark, Network Decay, Magazine Decay, Pretty Fly for a White Guy, and more than a few Scrappies and cases of Misaimed Marketing. Contrast Growing with the Audience.

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

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Examples

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Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Confectionary

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

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

Fanfiction

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

Films — Animation

Jetsons: The Movie executive producers re-cast Janet Waldo with Tiffany as Judy Jetson just because she was popular at the time, a move that did not sit right with cast and crew especially when they had already used Janet for the movie and just re-recorded all her lines with Tiffany, to say nothing of the fact that by the time the movie came out Tiffany was declining in popularity. Not only that but the movie is littered with early '90s pop songs.

Ice Age 4: Continental Drift cast Nicki Minaj and Drake as characters just because the studio perceived them as being hip with the kids. It even has the characters dance along to a generic auto-tuned pop song in the end credits. Considering this is the fourth movie of a franchise that began in 2002, these elements can't help but feel like the filmmakers are falling into this.

Aside from a cringeworthy joke about emojis in one trailer and Flo Rida and Meghan Trainor's contributions to the soundtrack, The Peanuts Movie largely defies this trope completely. Charles Schulz's estate and family had a large hand in the production and wanted to keep the same timeless feel of the source material, so they made it a point to exclude any pop-culture references or bits of technology that didn't appear in the original comic strip.

Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie was made 13 years after the original series ended. The show already felt somewhat dated in 2004 due to Helga Pataki's father being a wealthy beeper salesmen during a time when beepers were becoming obsolete and being replaced by cellphones. The Jungle Movie tried to take advantage of Technology Marches On by having Rhonda Lloyd use a smartphone and showing that Big Bob Pataki's beeper business was on its last legs. While it seems reasonable at first glance, it comes across as this trope because The Jungle Movie takes place only about a year and a half after the final episode of Hey Arnold!, so technology would not have advanced that much in such a short amount of time.

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Live Action TV

Magazines

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

Music

Newspaper Comics

Professional Wrestling

Puppet Shows

Radio

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

Theatre

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

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

Toys

Video Games

Web Original

Western Animation

Real Life