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Creator Killer

327 statements
60 feature instances
32 referencing feature instances

Creator Killer	type	FeatureClass
Creator Killer	label	Creator Killer
Creator Killer	page	CreatorKiller
Creator Killer	comment	A Creator Killer is a rather unpredictable phenomenon when one or more works flop badly enough to take down or badly damage the publishers and/or the reputation of creative talents behind it. Though there are usually many factors needed to cause the death of a publisher or a creator, some high-profile flops are linked (rightfully or not) to the death of the organization working on it. Compare Trend Killer, Genre-Killer, Franchise Killer. Not to be confused with Died During Production (where the creator dies before their work is completed), Rage Against the Author (where the creator can literally be killed by his/her work) or The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You (same). See Star-Derailing Role when it happens to the performers. See Creator Backlash for when a creator turns against their work and Bury Your Art if they refuse to let it see the light of day, regardless if the work itself destroys their credibility. See Tough Act to Follow when one's career was not killed by a flop but the inability to follow-up a massive success. A Role-Ending Misdemeanor is when this trope is caused by personal scandal rather than a failed work. Contrast Breakthrough Hit (when the work makes the creator a big name), Career Resurrection (when the work makes the creator a big name again after a Creator Killer) and Win Back the Crowd (same). For understandable reasons, many of these overlap with Troubled Production. If it literally, and directly, kills them, then it's probably an example of Fatal Method Acting. When this happens to filmmakers, it's sometimes referred to as being thrown in "director jail". Note: While a good number of these entries have either been Vindicated by History or are a Cult Classic, they still count as Creator Killers because of the damage they did at the time of their release. Not to be confused (but can be overlapped) with Fallen Creator, where a once-respected creator is permanently disgraced due to a string of flops or personal misbehaviors. A creator/business that went defunct after one or two serious flops/mistakes could still leave a lasting legacy and be fondly remembered in hindsight. Do not confuse with A.I. Is a Crapshoot or for when an author wants to kill their own work. Has nothing to do with killing God/the gods, nor does it have anything to do with the creator dying for a different reason; for the latter you may want Died During Production, if they died without finishing the work. Also has nothing to do with the God Killer awakening from Puzzle & Dragons. (As TV Tropes does not know time, please wait either 10 years after the work's release or, in the case of studios and production companies, for official confirmation before adding an example.)
Creator Killer	fetched	2024-03-22T21:32:28Z
Creator Killer	parsed	2024-03-22T21:32:28Z
Creator Killer	processingComment	Dropped link to FingerPokeOfDoom: Not an Item - FEATURE
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Creator Killer	processingUnknown	How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life
Creator Killer	isPartOf	DBTropes
Creator Killer / int_110d4471	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_110d4471	comment	After Kevin Kulek — the leader of the boutique pinball manufacturer Skit- B Pinball — confessed that he really had no license from Fox to produce a series of highly-anticipated Predator games, backlash erupted, and he quickly became a persona non grata among pinball fans, companies and unfortunate pre-orderers of the game. Since then, customers have been fighting to sue Kulek en masse, and the company itself has adopted such names like "Shit-B".
Creator Killer / int_110d4471	featureApplicability	1.0
Creator Killer / int_110d4471	featureConfidence	1.0
Predator	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_110d4471
Creator Killer / int_1858fe06	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_1858fe06	comment	Karl Bollers is most famous for his run on Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics). Unfortunately, it wasn't well-received and is the biggest reason why he hasn't done much else.
Creator Killer / int_1858fe06	featureApplicability	1.0
Creator Killer / int_1858fe06	featureConfidence	1.0
Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) (Comic Book)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_1858fe06
Creator Killer / int_19ac064b	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_19ac064b	comment	Mario Gully was a promising comics creator who wrote and drew the superhero title Ant for Image Comics, but his career momentum was derailed with Issue #8, which contained nudity and profanity despite not being rated as a mature title (meaning it quickly fell into the hands of kids and outraged their parents). Despite Gully publicly apologizing for his mistake, Image discontinued Ant just three issues later and cut him loose, while the fallout affected sales for a Treasure Island adaptation he was making for Marvel and ended his relationship with that publisher as well. Gully briefly took Ant to Big City Comics and worked sporadically on a few Marvel titles, but in the years since has been more known for being convicted of robbery than any new creative output. Gully has since sold the rights for Ant to Erik Larsen.
Creator Killer / int_19ac064b	featureApplicability	1.0
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Ant (Comic Book)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_19ac064b
Creator Killer / int_1bd094cc	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_1bd094cc	comment	Relatedly, the one-two-three punch of Adult Party Cartoon, Gary the Rat, and Stripperella resulted in Spike TV giving up on any semblance of an animation block less than a year into its existence. (Stripperella was brought down mainly due to a lawsuit filed against a stripper who claimed that Stan Lee stole the show's idea from her; unlike the other two shows, it was fairly well-received by critics and fans and became enough of a Cult Classic to warrant a DVD release.)
Creator Killer / int_1bd094cc	featureApplicability	1.0
Creator Killer / int_1bd094cc	featureConfidence	1.0
Ren & Stimpy	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_1bd094cc
Creator Killer / int_1fc2cbe	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_1fc2cbe	comment	Andrew Dobson, author of So... You're a Cartoonist? and also known as Tom Preston, has always been a highly controversial artist for a large number of reasons, but for the most part of his career, had a significant fanbase along with a significant hatedom. Many times, he dealt with this by mocking his critics within his work. However, this did not work out for the better when he released the comic strip named BINGO◊, where he went into further detail about things that his haters loved to bring up. The reason this backfired horribly at him was that he brought up things that the vast majority of his fanbase was never aware of, leading to them going outside of DeviantArt for answers or to have the many critics, trolls and detractors provide the info for them. This eventually kickstarted a series of events that made Dobson lose a massive chunk of his fanbase, have dozens of parodies made against him to this day, and lose a great amount of respect amongst his peers. As a result, he departed from his DeviantArt site, got his Twitter account suspended due to multiple factors (involving hate speech) and disappeared from social media in 2020. Even his comics have been getting harder to track.
Creator Killer / int_1fc2cbe	featureApplicability	1.0
Creator Killer / int_1fc2cbe	featureConfidence	1.0
So... You're a Cartoonist? (Webcomic)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_1fc2cbe
Creator Killer / int_22df0dd	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_22df0dd	comment	Deathmate — the infamous 1993 Intercontinuity Crossover between Valiant Comics and Image Comics — is widely cited as the book that killed Valiant, and to some degree, the western comic industry in general for a while. While a crossover between the companies seemed like a good idea at the time, they ended up clashing horribly as not only did neither company have a proper grasp on how to write each other's characters, resulting in a disjointed story, Image was prone to chronic lateness, where by the time Valiant published their share of the work, Image's half didn't come out until at least a year later, and by that point, consumer interest had completely died while shop owners were now stuck with mountains of late pre-order shipments that were now worthless. The massive market boom tanked the reputation and sales of both companies in the following years, but while Image survived thanks to its low overhead, Valiant ended up being bought out by video game developer Acclaim, whose ill-advised choices with the company (including a massive culling of continuity and preexisting IPs while shifting towards making characters suited for video game development) led to Valiant dying a slow death by 1999, with Acclaim itself going under a few years later.
Creator Killer / int_22df0dd	featureApplicability	1.0
Creator Killer / int_22df0dd	featureConfidence	1.0
Deathmate (Comic Book)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_22df0dd
Creator Killer / int_234035fa	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_234035fa	comment	Tom Kirby, a former CEO of the company during the 5th-late 7th edition era of 40k and the last two editions of Warhammer Fantasy and the onset of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, was right up there with Ward and Cruddace in terms of hatred. He infamously declared that he did not care about competitive balance and that Warhammer was supposed to be a casual game, which many took to meaning he simply did not care about rules-writing at all. It didn't help that this was the era where the rules balance took a nose dive (including the infamous "build your army as you like" unbound approach), actually following through with a bunch of legal lawsuits, price hikes, and near-draconian "laws" on the sales of their own miniatures (to this day GW is still the only manufacturer that actually bans third-party retailers from advertising their own products online). How bad did it get? The fallout from this managed to cause GW to suffer a 5% annual loss for several years in a row. It got so bad that he eventually had to step down as CEO, with Kevin Rountree replacing him. Coincidentally this change also marked a moment where very well received products (discount sets, the return of specialist games, and the re-introduction of a lot of fan favorites and the online community) came out, so it's unclear whether Rountree managed to undo much of Kirby's mistakes, or if Kirby had implemented them but was ousted before they came to light.
Creator Killer / int_234035fa	featureApplicability	1.0
Creator Killer / int_234035fa	featureConfidence	1.0
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Creator Killer / int_2a43de9b	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_2a43de9b	comment	Canadian animation studio CINAR went out of business in 2004 after a financial scandal and a plagiarism lawsuit (Robinson Sucroe). The company later resurfaced as Cookie Jar Entertainment. In 2013, Cookie Jar was absorbed into DHX Media. Arthur survived for a few more years after production moved to 9 Story Media Group and Oasis Animation.
Creator Killer / int_2a43de9b	featureApplicability	1.0
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Creator Killer / int_2a640f8c	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_2a640f8c	comment	The abysmal reception of Gunsmith Cats Burst torpedoed Keiichi Sonoda's career as a manga author. After Bullet the Wizard wrapped up with little fanfare, he hasn't made anything else since.
Creator Killer / int_2a640f8c	featureApplicability	1.0
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Gunsmith Cats (Manga)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_2a640f8c
Creator Killer / int_2d734fc7	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_2d734fc7	comment	The failure of Raise the Titanic! is often credited with bringing down the film career of Lew Grade, at the time one of the most respected television producers in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the world. Grade quipped that "It would have been cheaper to Lower The Atlantic." It also disgusted the original book's author, Clive Cussler, so much that he refused to sell film rights to his books for 25 years. The subsequent failure of The Legend of the Lone Ranger in 1981 (a failure perhaps ensured by the producers suing the original Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, and forcing him to relinquish his mask) might have been the last straw for ITC Entertainment, the company Grade founded. Grade lost control of ITC in 1982 (though he returned under PolyGram management and remained there until his death in 1998), and the only thing keeping the company profitable for the final years of its existence was its library of previous accomplishments. If that wasn't enough, Jim Henson cut ties with ITC after they attempted tampering with The Dark Crystal to the point where he bought the film's rights from them (Universal still handled theatrical distribution, though), and in 1984 he bought every Muppet project ITC co-produced note including The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie, and The Great Muppet Caper back from them.
Creator Killer / int_2d734fc7	featureApplicability	1.0
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Raise the Titanic!	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_2d734fc7
Creator Killer / int_2ef1eeb	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_2ef1eeb	comment	Wolf Tracer Studios only made two movies-Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa and Wolf Tracer's Dinosaur Island. However, despite coming first, Believe in Santa killed any chance of the studio producing another major project. When it was in production, the special was planned to have a sequel and a soundtrack with songs by Whitney Houston. It also attracted a high-profile voice cast, including Mark Hamill, Nancy Cartwright, Jodi Benson, and Paige O'Hara, and got the privilege on airing on The WB. However, after receiving dismal ratings and being criticized for its animation quality and story, the sequel was never produced and the soundtrack was never made. The special has never re-aired on television after 2002 and hasn't been released on home video; resulting in the special being impossible to find for the next 13 years. The next —and final— project did not have any major release, with a returning Mark Hamill being the only high profile actor the studio was able to obtain.
Creator Killer / int_2ef1eeb	featureApplicability	1.0
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Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_2ef1eeb
Creator Killer / int_3f633fb4	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_3f633fb4	comment	From Cracked: "6 Hit Songs That Destroyed the Bands They Made Famous."
Creator Killer / int_3f633fb4	featureApplicability	1.0
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Cracked (Website)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_3f633fb4
Creator Killer / int_41b10263	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_41b10263	comment	Chris Evans was a pretty popular radio DJ at The BBC. However, when time came for Evans to be the new lead host of Top Gear following the firing of Jeremy Clarkson in 2015 and the retirement of his co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May from the program, it marked the beginning of the show's Audience-Alienating Era. Evans' tenure on Top Gear was widely disliked, and led to the show's decline in ratings. Chris Evans quit the show after a single season, being replaced by Matt LeBlanc. Coupled with sexual harrasment allegations over the next few years, Evans' stint as a Top Gear host ended up killing his career.
Creator Killer / int_41b10263	featureApplicability	1.0
Creator Killer / int_41b10263	featureConfidence	1.0
Chris Evans (Radio)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_41b10263
Creator Killer / int_46108175	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_46108175	comment	Bruce W. Smith's Jambalaya Studio company hasn't produced another animated series since the failure of Da Boom Crew. After The Proud Family completed its run with a Big Damn Movie, the company seems to have gone defunct.
Creator Killer / int_46108175	featureApplicability	1.0
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Da Boom Crew	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_46108175
Creator Killer / int_47083f25	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_47083f25	comment	Allied Artists Video thought it would be a good idea to release The Babe Ruth Story early in their run. After all, they were releasing dozens of other titles simultaneously, so What Could Possibly Go Wrong? They even placed as the film's blurb a rare positive review for the film, claiming it to be "a sports-action winner featuring the king of swat". Imagine the consumers' shock, then, when what they got was a cheap B-movie cash-in on the Sultan of Swat rushed and released three weeks before his death in 1948. One bad apple, it turns out, does spoil the whole bunch, and this painted a big red target on the back of Allied Artists Video when new owner Lorimar decided to put unprofitable assets on the chopping block in 1980.
Creator Killer / int_47083f25	featureApplicability	1.0
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Creator Killer / int_4b97cdc0	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_4b97cdc0	comment	Fantasy author J. Robert King was once the most prolific author for the Magic: The Gathering book line, writing no fewer than ten books between 1997 and 2003 including series prequel The Thran, Time Streams, all three books of the climatic Invasion Cycle, and a smattering of anthology books. Then came the Onslaught Cycle, which started off decently with Onslaught but showed some cracks even early on (recurring Villain Decay, a succession of Original Characters) which continued through Legions. The real Creator Killer for King, however, was Scourge. Even if Scourge hadn't been plagued by a pair of Comedic Relief Characters liked by seemingly no one but King, he made the critical mistake of resurrecting penultimate series Big Bad Yawgmoth, a move that apparently wasn't vetted by everybody at Wizards of the Coast. King never wrote another novel for the universe again, and come the later Time Spiral Cycle Yawgmoth's resurrection was retconned into having been a hallucination.
Creator Killer / int_4b97cdc0	featureApplicability	1.0
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MagicTheGathering	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_4b97cdc0
Creator Killer / int_4bfca968	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_4bfca968	comment	Peepo Choo creator Ringo Plum became impoverished after the original manga bombed hard in Japan. Before he started serializing it, he was beloved as a children's author and very popular for his picture books. Peepo Choo was his attempt to break away from his usual output and an attempt to tackle more complex and absurd themes, but the off-brand Toilet Humor and craziness made the manga very unpopular, and it was canceled three years into its run. Tragically, the series would do far better in the United States and would even gain an underground fanbase in Japan, but he would never see any of it.
Creator Killer / int_4bfca968	featureApplicability	1.0
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Peepo Choo (Manga)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_4bfca968
Creator Killer / int_4fb39203	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_4fb39203	comment	The failure of Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain and, to a lesser extent, Histeria! and Road Rovers ended the Steven Spielberg presents series of cartoons and also caused many of the writers and producers (like Tom Ruegger, Sherri Stoner, and Paul Rugg) to not get any work for at least a few years, with Rugg later focusing exclusively on voice acting.
Creator Killer / int_4fb39203	featureApplicability	1.0
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Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_4fb39203
Creator Killer / int_524499fe	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_524499fe	comment	Jean FranÃ§ois Nebell's company Litteris Production was in trouble after Sett pÃ¥ maken, an attempt to make a Norwegian Spitting Image, was so harshly received that it became a One-Episode Wonder. Its next release Sommerfugl was also very poorly received, suffered from low ratings, and was caught up in a scandal due to the poor working conditions on set. Together these two flops caused the company to go bankrupt.
Creator Killer / int_524499fe	featureApplicability	1.0
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Spitting Image	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_524499fe
Creator Killer / int_5ae078da	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_5ae078da	comment	ECW's show on TNN was supposed to be the thing that would take the company out of "cult following" status and into mainstream success. Instead, the financial and logistical pressures of producing the weekly program, as well as the network's forcing the promotion to tone down the blood-and-guts style that made them famous, and then failing to promote or back them in any way (even going so far as to negotiate to bring the WWF to the network while ECW was still airing), ended up killing the promotion. By the end, ECW was in open Writer Revolt, trying desperately to get their show canceled so they could shop it around to other networks before the money ran out. It didn't work, and like WCW their assets were sold off to rival WWE (who had just changed their name from WWF following a trademark lawsuit from the World Wide Fund for Nature) two years after they declared bankruptcy. WWE briefly revived the ECW name for a show on Syfy in 2006, then permanently retired the name in 2010.
Creator Killer / int_5ae078da	featureApplicability	1.0
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ECW (Wrestling)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_5ae078da
Creator Killer / int_5ae0bec6	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_5ae0bec6	comment	Simitar Entertainment, a media company that specialized in special interest VHS tapes covering a wide range of genres and compilation albums (as well as the first independent company to release DVDs), met an untimely demise in 1999 when Titan Sports, owner of the WWF, filed a lawsuit against them for infringing copyright from WWF: The Music, Volume Three (which was, as the title suggests, a music album). Simitar lost the case and wound up bankrupt by the end of the year. Afterward, they were forced to sell their assets to Brentwood Communications, which was later bought by Navarre Corporation.
Creator Killer / int_5ae0bec6	featureApplicability	1.0
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Creator Killer / int_6956d9bf	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_6956d9bf	comment	Rich's next studio, Rich Animation Studios, got hit with this twice. After their first feature film The Swan Princess flopped (though it spawned a small Direct to Video franchise), the animation studio disappeared from cinema for a few years and then tried their hand at feature film again with The King and I animated adaptation in 1999. The critical and commercial failure of that film (which came complete with a "no animated versions of our works" mandate from The King And I copyright holder Rodgers and Hammerstein Estates) caused the company to be acquired by Crest Animation Studios. The newly-formed RichCrest Animation Studios then released their animated adaptation of The Trumpet of the Swan, which failed to secure a wide release and was also a critical and commercial disappointment. Not until 2010 did the company (as Crest Animation Studios) return to cinemas with Alpha and Omega, which despite negative reviews was a commercial success and today is a Cult Classic among young animation fans, and also ended up spawning a line of DTV sequels.
Creator Killer / int_6956d9bf	featureApplicability	1.0
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The Swan Princess	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_6956d9bf
Creator Killer / int_6b689220	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_6b689220	comment	Film producer Dino De Laurentiis' career never fully recovered after opening his own studio in the early/mid-1980s, which he then proceeded to run into the ground within less than five years. The films De Laurentiis produced at his studio were not box office hits (Nor generally well-received, with films like Raw Deal (1986), King Kong Lives, Maximum Overdrive and The Transformers: The Movie being utterly ravaged upon release. Even Blue Velvet and the first Hannibal Lecter movie, Manhunter, ended up as Acclaimed Flops). Ironically, it didn't end up living long enough to see one of its projects, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, become a hit. His second company had a mixed track record, with films like Army of Darkness doing well enough to make back their budget, but not much after that. Although De Laurentiis kept producing until his death in 2010, he never had any success outside of the Hannibal movies (he apparently regretted selling the film rights to The Silence of the Lambs)—and adding insult to injury, the last theatrically-released film he produced, the 2007 film adaptation of the book Hannibal Rising, was a critical and financial flop that ended that franchise (not helped by the fact that the only reason both the book and the film existed was because De Laurentiis wanted to make a prequel Hannibal film). To show how desperate his studio was for a hit, in 1987 De Laurentiis teamed up with Glad to release the gimmicky comedy Million Dollar Mystery. Since the movie centered on trying to recover $4 million, they had a contest where if one of the audience members could accurately guess the whereabouts of a hidden million dollars based on clues sprinkled in and on specially marked Glad-Lock bags, he or she would get that amount of money!note In case you were wondering, the winner of said contest turned out to be a 14-year-old girl who managed to figure out that the million bucks were in the Statue of Liberty's nostrils! The film was a million dollar misery at the box-office, thus it not only poured salt on De Laurentiis' studio's wound, but it also put an end to veteran director Richard Fleischer's career. His late wife and the company bearing his name tried to revive the Hannibal Lecter franchise with the cult 2013 TV series, which despite critical acclaim, running for three seasons, a rapid cult fanbase, and catapulting Mads Mikkelsen to stardom, received low ratings and was cancelled, thus ensuring an ignominious end to the De Laurentiis legacy.note The TV show was not shown on Utah's NBC affiliate KSL-TV beyond the first four episodes; like most of the shows KSL-TV rejected, this one aired on Utah's local The CW affiliate KUCW for the rest of Hannibal's run. See the United States subpage of Banned in China for more information.
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Raw Deal (1986)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_6b689220
Creator Killer / int_7366d3a0	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_7366d3a0	comment	Fractale was conceived as a way for its director, Yutaka "Yamakan" Yamamoto, to make Kyoto Animation regret firing him, with all the resources put into it that you'd expect with a goal like that. He was so sure of its success that he said he'd step down if it did poorly. The end result was said to be good, if not great, by most people who watched it to the end, but not many people did. Yamakan probably would have had to step down even if he hadn't explicitly staked his career on it doing well. It also garnered some of the worst ratings for the noitaminA animation block. Although the 2011 Sendai Earthquake didn't help matters, the show's ratings prior to the earthquake were noticeably behind the average ratings for all other series in the block. The main problem was the competition; Fractale was billed as the "moe-killer" series by the director himself, and as if to prove this it was released at the same time as a cutesy-looking Magical Girl show. Unfortunately for Fractale, that show was Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which was not only the most popular anime of the Winter 2011 season, but also one of the most popular anime of the entire decade.
Creator Killer / int_7366d3a0	featureApplicability	1.0
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Fractale	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_7366d3a0
Creator Killer / int_7b1519c3	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_7b1519c3	comment	The critical and ratings failure of Sit Down, Shut Up and the cancellation of The Spectacular Spider-Man ended up being the final two blows to Sony Pictures Television's animation division, Adelaide Productions, as they wouldn't produce anything afterwards beyond the final two seasons of The Boondocks and became dormant after that. Further signifying its death was the announcement of Sony Pictures Animation's plans to enter the television market with their mature-oriented Alternative division. Notably, Hotel Transylvania: The Series only ended up with Sony as a distributor (at least in the US) with Nelvana producing the animation instead.
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Creator Killer / int_8509db53	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_8509db53	comment	Longtime producer Allan Carr was a major presence in the film industry during the '70s and '80s. His biggest success was the film adaptation of Grease. In 1988, Carr was given complete creative control of the 1989 Academy Awards telecast - which meant that he promised "the most beautiful Academy Awards of all time" and replicate his successes in Broadway musicals with a production number involving Snow White and Rob Lowe performing a duet of "Proud Mary". But the attempt didn't work as well and the resulting show was cringe-inducing to watch. note That's not to say it was all bad- he was the one responsible for changing the award winner announcement from "And the winner is..." to "And the Oscar goes to...", a changeover that still remains as of 2023. The Academy also used Snow White without Disney's permission and they were sued for copyright infringement. This opening show is in the book What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History. As for Carr, he continued to produce theater works before dying of liver cancer in 1999.
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Grease	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_8509db53
Creator Killer / int_8a08048e	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_8a08048e	comment	While no careers have to date been damaged by appearing on the show, the titular Taskmaster frequently jokes that his show is so terrible it's guaranteed to kill the careers of every comedian, actor, and other celebrity who appears on it, due to them trying and often failing to complete odd, unusual and eccentric tasks. At least they have a shot at getting the "overtly sensual" statue of his head.
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Creator Killer / int_8c1076c1	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_8c1076c1	comment	The 1967 Broadway musical How Now, Dow Jones, "based on an idea by Carolyn Leigh," ensured that no further musicals with Leigh as lyricist would ever reach Broadway, though her earlier lyrics for Peter Pan and Little Me were highly regarded. (How Now, Dow Jones did pick up a bunch of Tony nominations, but 1967 was an unusually bad year.)
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Creator Killer / int_8e82c366	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_8e82c366	comment	Despite The Real Ghostbusters' success, ABC felt the need to hire a child psychologists group called Q5 to help oversee the production of the second ABC season (the syndicated season did not have such requirements). It was during this time when the writers realized the group had absolutely no evidence to back their research as their changes for the show were either hypocritical, nonsensical, or seen as downright insulting by crew members. Needless to say, the ratings dropped afterward and Q5 was reportedly never hired again by any studio. See Phelous's review here for more information about the topic.
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Creator Killer / int_9864cd20	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_9864cd20	comment	The one-two punch of the cancellations of Gary and Mike and The PJs in 2001 (with the former having premiered earlier that year) sent Will Vinton Studios, once renowned for its various stop-motion and "Claymation" projects, into a tailspin. The company behind the California Raisins ended up collapsing and selling its assets, and its remains were eventually reformed as Laika LLC in 2005. Vinton tried his hand at another company, Will Vinton's Freewill Studios, around the same time, but despite having a number of projects in the can the company went nowhere, and Vinton retired to Portland, Oregon in 2008, where he lived until his death on October 4, 2018.
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Creator Killer / int_9bb5aad4	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_9bb5aad4	comment	While not a creator, distributor Upper Deck Entertainment got hit hard during the latter part of the GX era of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG due to their own Executive Meddling; a series of unpopular reshuffling of set cards (including the dismantling of two highly anticipated structure decks to release their new cards as difficult-to-get Secret Rares in the main sets), creation of poorly-received TCG-only cards, and ultimately the publishing of fake cards for third-party distribution ultimately forced Konami to pull their contract with UDE and wrangle the game away from them through a legal shitstorm. Even more damning, this incident has apparently caused Blizzard to pull their contract with UDE for the distribution of the World of Warcraft TCG, going so far as to make an entirely new branch specifically for distributing it themselves. No word yet on how this will impact UDE's baseball and hockey card sales, but it's likely that that's going to be the only thing that'll save them from bankruptcy. To make things even more troubling, there's a corporate family civil war brewing as a direct result of the aforementioned Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG scandal.
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Creator Killer / int_a057f61	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_a057f61	comment	Cutthroat Island, one of the biggest box office flops of all time, was the final straw for Carolco Pictures, which went bankrupt a month prior to the film's release due to its lavish overspending on other projects. It also destroyed Renny Harlin's respectability as a director, and the careers of everyone else involved (only the film's composer John Debney and distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came out relatively unscathed). It also killed off the pirate movie genre until Pirates of the Caribbean came along, and even now there are no successful pirate movies outside of that franchise.
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Creator Killer / int_a59870cc	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_a59870cc	comment	ABS-CBN Animation's first TV series, The Nutshack, proved to be their last as the show's failure with critics and audiences caused them to shift focus towards licensing anime titles for Myx TV. The same goes for the cast and crew, as none of them have done anything noteworthy following its cancellation, with the exception of co-creator Jesse Hernandez and theme composer NUMP. In fact, a few of them ended up quitting the TV industry to pursue other careers.
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Creator Killer / int_a7ef8e84	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_a7ef8e84	comment	While Pinky Dinky Doo was a success, it was cancelled in 2010 and Jumbo Pictures has gone dormant since. They made a block for PBS Kids Sprout called Musical Mornings with Coo in 2007, but that ended up failing due to low ratings. note The block started at 6 a.m. EST and ended at 9 a.m..
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Creator Killer / int_ab4deac4	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_ab4deac4	comment	Player Two Start: In an attempt to chase the coattails of the widely popular extreme sports series Thrillseekers, Fresh TV passes up on Total Drama in favor of Stōked. The resulting failure is cancelled after one season and drives them into bankruptcy.
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Creator Killer / int_ab67d84	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_ab67d84	comment	Blind Ferret Entertainment worked on the first season of Ctrl+Alt+Del, which proved to be a total bomb. Since then, the only thing they have made was a pilot for an Animated Adaptation of Least I Could Do.
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Creator Killer / int_b0fc9724	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_b0fc9724	comment	At the end of its fifth season, Saturday Night Live aired what was clearly intended as its final episode. NBC, however, refused to let their cash cow die, replacing the cast and writers entirely, and hiring the show's talent coordinator Jean Doumanian to replace Lorne Michaels as executive producer (snubbing Al Franken after network head Fred Silverman took personal offense to Franken's "Limo for the Lame-O" piece and Harry Shearer, who didn't like how Lorne was running SNL and wanted to add more experienced comic actorsnote most of whom, like Christopher Guest and Billy Crystal, wouldn't work with Shearer until season 10). While Doumanian did have a knack for getting good musical guests and treating the talent right, she was out of her depth for running a comedy show. Though Doumanian claims that she was sabotaged because the mostly male higher-ups at NBC did not feel comfortable having a woman run the show, the TV special Lost and Found: SNL in the 1980s places the blame of the show's horrid sixth season on Doumanian because of her incompetence and inexperience. She passed up a lot of potentially funny cast membersnote Jim Carrey, John Goodman, Paul Reubens, and Robert Townsend being just a few examples — and Eddie Murphy barely made it on. If not for writer Neil Levy intervening, he too would have been rejected., tried to make the sketches more dramatic, had no idea how to make the humor edgy (and when she did try, it ended up being dour, flat, and obvious in an intelligence-insulting way), brought on cast members who weren't seasoned in comedy at allnote save for Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, though Denny Dillon did have some experience in sketch comedy, as she was on a Lorne Michaels-produced Saturday morning kids' show in the late 1970s and Gilbert Gottfried did do stand-up before he was hired, but this was years before Gottfried would be known for his loud, obnoxious voice and politically incorrect humor, and did nothing to improve the show's quality when the reviews tore her season apart and began to praise ABC's Fridays as the new sharp, satirical sketch show (until ABC screwed the show over). After Charles Rocket's "F-word" debacle on the Charlene Tilton-hosted episode, Doumanian was fired (along with most of her cast, except for cast members Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Denny Dillon, Gail Matthius - though Dillon and Matthius would be fired later - and writer Brian Doyle-Murray). The season lives on as one of the lowest points in the show's peak-and-valley history (seasons 11note 1985-1986 and 20note 1994-1995 are the only other seasons that have spelled doom for SNLnote Other seasons, like seasons 18, 19, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, and 39 have been branded as bad, but it's mostly along the lines of being boring and uneven in quality, not "so bad that NBC wants the show canceled", but those seasons have been Vindicated by History, as most modern viewers will claim that the Weekend Update segments, done by Dennis Miller and Norm Macdonald respectively, are pretty funny). It earned an (dis)honorable mention in What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History and was one of the last straws for NBC regarding Silverman, who was fired for nearly killing the network shortly afterward. Doumanian resurfaced in The '90s as the producer of a number of critically acclaimed and moderately successful Woody Allen films. Two of them (Bullets over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite) even won Best Supporting Actress Oscars. Then her momentum ended in 2000 when she suddenly backed out of a movie, leaving Allen stranded, eventually resulting in both of them filing lawsuits against each other. The denouement of that season may have literally killed Charles Rocket. Before that season he was seen as an up-and-comer whose "Rocket Report" newscast segments made him seem like a natural successor to Chevy Chase note notably, he remains the only Weekend Update anchor to date to have actual experience in news broadcasting- at WPRI-TV in Providence, Rhode Island and at KOAA-TV in Pueblo, Colorado under his own name, and WTVF Nashville under the name Charles Kennedy. But after the series and his dismissal, he got only supporting roles in films like Dumb and Dumber and failed TV pilots. It was enough to pay the bills, but he never became the big star he could have been, and in 2005 he was found dead in a field near his home with his throat cut, apparently a suicide.
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Creator Killer / int_b36b839d	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_b36b839d	comment	Hook caused the downfall of Cinema Digital Sound during post-production. Steven Spielberg was initially enthusiastic about the system, but a series of failures on the test reels encoded for him caused him to change his mind, and hearing such a prominent voice in the industry disown CDS prompted everyone else to stay away in droves, ultimately dooming the first ever digital sound system before the second one, Dolby Stereo Digital, even made it to the big screen.
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Hook	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_b36b839d
Creator Killer / int_b4996199	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_b4996199	comment	Spider-Man: After the infamous Clone Saga, it was decided that all the Spider-Man titles were to be canceled and relaunched with new "number ones" alongside the Spider-Man: Chapter One miniseries written and drawn by John Byrne that would retell Spider-Man's origin. The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) was notable in that one writer - Howard Mackie - would be looking after both titles and was heavily promoted and garnered much anticipation among fans and critics, with Mackie claiming that they would "fix" the books and make things "fun" again. But things soured after the reboot where Mackie had Spider-Man face off against lackluster villains, engage in weird plots like facing off against vampires, supernatural villains, an alien-infested senator who was set up as the Big Bad of his arc, and - most notably - "killed" Mary Jane Watson. Fan and critical reaction was sour, and soon Mackie's plans were outright scuttled - he was replaced on one of the books by Paul Jenkins and was given just enough time to wrap up his run and bring back Mary Jane before he was pulled from the title and replaced by J. Michael Straczynski. Mackie's career never recovered from the debacle. In the decade since then, Mackie rarely worked in comics with his last work being a six-issue mini-series that was to serve as a "reinterpretation" of what was to actually have happened in the initial Clone Saga alongside Tom DeFalco.
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Creator Killer / int_b4e89049	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_b4e89049	comment	Before that, Rock-A-Doodle sank Bluth's original studio. It only survived thanks to financial backing from Hong Kong and Irish entertainment groups, who would then end all support for the studio following the consecutive failures of Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park (which barely got a theatrical release) and The Pebble and the Penguin (the latter of which did not have his name on it).
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Creator Killer / int_b8c61401	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_b8c61401	comment	Despite lasting for two seasons with positive reception, Skysurfer Strike Force wasn't the success that Ruby-Spears needed to keep themselves afloat from the financial problems stemming from their departure from Taft Broadcasting in 1991.note Taft had filed for bankruptcy that year and put up RS and Hanna-Barbera for sale, with Turner buying up HB entirely while only taking the pre-1991 RS library; leaving RS to fend for themselves. The Ruby-Spears animation studio would end up closing their doors in 1996 shortly after the show's cancelation, which was also aggravated by the new E/I rules having just gone into effect.
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Creator Killer / int_bcadd7cb	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_bcadd7cb	comment	Warhammer 40,000: Gav Thorpe is largely blamed for the weaknesses of the 4th-5th edition Chaos Space Marine codex for Warhammer 40,000 by taking the "less is more" approach a bit too far. His biggest offense was the removal of numerous unit options and items that were in previous Chaos Marine books, which largely homogenized what was once a diverse and varied army and prevented players from being able to run themed lists based off the available Chaos Legions at the time. Fan response to the Chaos Marine codex was so negative that Thorpe was removed as a codex writer and transferred to GW's novel writing division. Even then Thorpe has not released any GW-related content at all. The 5th Edition Grey Knights codex (which turned the faction into an overpowered force and had divisive lore decisions, to put it mildly) didn't quite kill Matt Ward's career, despite the hopes of large chunks of 4chan, but it led to Ward receiving vastly greater oversight while writing the Necron codex, and since the release of the sixth edition in 2012, his sole publishing credit has been for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Meaning it may not have stopped him writing, but despite the prevalence of rumors putting him in charge of any army whose author hasn't already been confirmed, he doesn't seem to be writing for 40K anymore. Warhammer Fantasy Battles fans remember Ward rather differently, as he was sent to 40k from WFB after writing the Chaos Demons codex for 7th edition... which was so incredibly broken that it forced the immediate development and release of an entirely new edition of the game in response. Robin Cruddace was widely praised for his handling of the 5th edition Imperial Guard book, which saw a once joke-level army being turned into one of the strongest forces on the tabletop until he got his hands on the Tyranids... and promptly got labeled as a treadhead. It's widely considered by the fandom that Cruddace excels at balancing vehicle-based armies, but when given the Tyranids, the only army in the entire game to not use vehicles in any way or form, his only reaction was to make them bland and passable while ensuring that any real threats to vehicles in the codex were eliminated (the sole exception being the Hive Guards) by raising their prices or reducing their effectiveness. Combined with Matt Ward's "accomplishments", this resulted in Games Workshop instead not naming any specific writer on any of their codexes since the 6th edition release of the Tyranids due to the internet backlash that ensues. Remember that Games Workshop is a firm that doesn't read internet feedback, which should give you an idea of how serious this is. Tom Kirby, a former CEO of the company during the 5th-late 7th edition era of 40k and the last two editions of Warhammer Fantasy and the onset of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, was right up there with Ward and Cruddace in terms of hatred. He infamously declared that he did not care about competitive balance and that Warhammer was supposed to be a casual game, which many took to meaning he simply did not care about rules-writing at all. It didn't help that this was the era where the rules balance took a nose dive (including the infamous "build your army as you like" unbound approach), actually following through with a bunch of legal lawsuits, price hikes, and near-draconian "laws" on the sales of their own miniatures (to this day GW is still the only manufacturer that actually bans third-party retailers from advertising their own products online). How bad did it get? The fallout from this managed to cause GW to suffer a 5% annual loss for several years in a row. It got so bad that he eventually had to step down as CEO, with Kevin Rountree replacing him. Coincidentally this change also marked a moment where very well received products (discount sets, the return of specialist games, and the re-introduction of a lot of fan favorites and the online community) came out, so it's unclear whether Rountree managed to undo much of Kirby's mistakes, or if Kirby had implemented them but was ousted before they came to light.
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Creator Killer / int_bfa193d4	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_bfa193d4	comment	Supertrain: The final destruction of NBC was barely averted with the flop of a series that had been Silverman's brainchild, and which the struggling network was resting its future upon. This hour-long comedy-drama series was essentially a clone of The Love Boat (trips, all-star guest casts, intertwining storylines with one a comedy, one more serious and a romantic story; etc.), except it was set aboard a high-tech bullet train. Fans tuned in the first week and found unfunny situations and a series that all-around paled in comparison to the vastly superior Love Boat, and a hasty attempt to rework the series failed. Supertrain often finds its way onto lists of the biggest TV flops of all time. Adding to the problem was the highly-expensive model train at one point jumped the tracks and crashed on the studio floor, requiring another equally expensive replacement to be built. This earned a spot on What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History, and got boss Fred Silverman, who was struggling right out of the gate, in real trouble.
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Creator Killer / int_bff01809	comment	The 5th Edition Grey Knights codex (which turned the faction into an overpowered force and had divisive lore decisions, to put it mildly) didn't quite kill Matt Ward's career, despite the hopes of large chunks of 4chan, but it led to Ward receiving vastly greater oversight while writing the Necron codex, and since the release of the sixth edition in 2012, his sole publishing credit has been for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Meaning it may not have stopped him writing, but despite the prevalence of rumors putting him in charge of any army whose author hasn't already been confirmed, he doesn't seem to be writing for 40K anymore. Warhammer Fantasy Battles fans remember Ward rather differently, as he was sent to 40k from WFB after writing the Chaos Demons codex for 7th edition... which was so incredibly broken that it forced the immediate development and release of an entirely new edition of the game in response.
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Creator Killer / int_c59ec4c1	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_c59ec4c1	comment	The studio's only other projects since Third Dimension's failure were two In Name Only credits for Voltron Force and Legendary Defender; as WEP licensed the franchise to Classic Media in 2010 before they were bought out and re-branded by DreamWorks Animation prior to the latter's debut. WEP's website, while still running as of this article's posting, hasn't been updated since 2012 due to DreamWorks shifting focus towards the Voltron website.
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In Name Only	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_c59ec4c1
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Creator Killer / int_c66f52d9	comment	A discussion of this trope in the music world can be seen in Todd in the Shadows' series Trainwreckords, which discusses albums that, for whatever reason (from poor quality to an unpopular change in sound to a Troubled Production to tensions within a band causing it to break up), destroyed the careers of the musicians who made them.
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Creator Killer / int_c75605f9	comment	The Great Gatsby, while now regarded as one of the great American novels, was a flop upon release, selling less than half of what F. Scott Fitzgerald's previous novels sold and leaving many copies on the shelves. Fitzgerald himself believed he only made $2000 off the book. The problem was believed by Fitzgerald to be a problem of audience: most novel readers at the time of release were women, and The Great Gatsby did not have an admirable female character. The book's failure likely contributed to Fitzgerald's drinking issues and poor finances during the 1930s. His fourth and final novel was also a flop, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing himself a failure as a writer - just two years before the United States military included the book for distribution to soldiers serving overseas, where its 1920s nostalgia caught on with the troops and ensured it massive postwar popularity.
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Creator Killer / int_c8fa15ad	comment	X-Men Forever destroyed Chris Claremont's once-legendary comic book career. While he still gets work every now and then, the only ongoing he worked on afterward was the 2014 Nightcrawler series which only lasted a year, the rest of his modern work being either one-shots or small stories as parts of larger anthology collections.
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Creator Killer / int_c911df7d	comment	The critical and commercial flop of Strange Magic was enough justification on Disney's part to give Touchstone Pictures the ax as the studio severed ties with DreamWorks SKG later that year; that studio went to mend fences with Universal Pictures (which they had dumped for Disney years earlier, after the studio was spun off from Paramount) and shift distribution of DW movies to them). The company bowed down with the release of The Light Between Oceans, which was also a Box Office Bomb that was released in September.note Any thought of Disney reviving Touchstone was put down for good when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019, rendering the label, which was founded to release Disney's more mature films, redundant Additionally, the failure also marked the end for George Lucas' mainstream ventures apart from a single scene in Solo, a possible Stock Scream that debuted in The Rise of Skywalker, and an executive producer credit for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (all of which besides Rise of Skywalker also flopped at the box office) and wound up becoming the only project from Lucasfilm Animation that's not a part of the Star Wars franchise.
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Creator Killer / int_ca677a95	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_ca677a95	comment	Cliffhangers: Another series that NBC truly and earnestly believed in, so much so that it nearly canceled several legitimate hits, most notably Little House on the Prairie, to put on a poorly written and produced program featuring three serial cliffhanger dramas. Each drama was twenty minutes long and ended with a cliffhanger, but only one of them reached its proper conclusion before NBC gave up.
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Creator Killer / int_d0164793	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_d0164793	comment	While Gloria Tesch's works were never well-received, her family self-published three Maradonia Saga books between 2008 and 2010, and they had planned to make more sequels — the last published book ended on a cliffhanger. Then they started focusing on The Film of the Book, which languished in Development Hell for a while and was finally released in 2016. It was so expensive to make that it got the Tesches evicted from their house, and they likely recouped extremely little of the money — if anything at all — as the film was only ever shown in one theater, which they had rented out. The film features a "Will Return" Caption, but it seemingly didn't even get a DVD release, let alone a sequel. Its failure seems to mark the end of the Maradonia series, which tainted her reputation to the point where she has evidently given up on itnote As of January 2020: There hasn't been a new Maradonia release since the film, the websites are down, the ebooks are no longer available for purchase, and the only physical copies on Amazon are used. and is trying to distance herself from it. She released her next book, The Secret of Moon Lake, under the name Sofia Nova and described it as her debut novel, effectively disowning Maradonia.
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Creator Killer / int_d62ee9dc	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_d62ee9dc	comment	The critical and commercial failure of Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil led to the quiet demise of Maurice Kanbar's production company, Kanbar Entertainment, as they have not attempted another project since. Kanbar himself has since stuck to his normal careers as an entrepreneur and inventor.
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Creator Killer / int_e54d6e9	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_e54d6e9	comment	Heaven's Gate destroyed the career of Michael Cimino (the director of The Deer Hunter), contributed to the collapse of the United Artists studio and its sale to MGM, and ended the "New Hollywood" post-studio-system era in which director/auteurs were given complete creative control over their projects. Thus, it not only destroyed the careers of the people who created it but ended an era that produced many of the best films in history. Cimino's directing career didn't immediately end after that, but all of his post-Heaven's Gate outings were commercial failures. He had a chance of recovery, however, as not long after Heaven's Gate Cimino was offered a chance to direct Footloose, under the condition that he won't exceed the budget and schedule by a single day or dollar. However, his Prima Donna behavior started again during pre-production, and when weeks before the shooting was scheduled to begin, he demanded to delay it until he rewrote the script and get $250,000 for it; Paramount quickly replaced him with Herbert Ross. Cimino's final film was 1996's Sunchaser; its failure to get a wide theatrical release due to poor test screenings made him stop working on any more projects, as he died twenty years later.
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Creator Killer / int_e5964cdb	comment	Max Deutsch was the self-proclaimed "extreme learner" behind the Month to Master project, which had him try to learn one skill a month. The final challenge was to beat then-World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a game of chess.note He was likely planning to play the AI Magnus in the app Play Magnus, but found himself with an offer to play the real Magnus. It went about as well as you'd expect, with the chess world considering it a farce at best and outright disrespectful at worst. After the backlash, Max stopped promoting Month to Master and has not done anything noteworthy since.
Creator Killer / int_e5964cdb	featureApplicability	1.0
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Chess (Tabletop Game)	hasFeature	Creator Killer / int_e5964cdb
Creator Killer / int_e74c8285	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_e74c8285	comment	At the end of Free Guy, the buggy launch of Free City 2, a cheap and exploitative cash grab that doesn't have Millie and Keys' AI code, is strongly implied to have killed the potential franchise that Antwan was hoping for and ruined Soonami Games financially. Millie recognized this when she happily took the deal that gave her what was left of the code for Free City to make her own game, the successful indie title Free Life, in exchange for dropping her lawsuit against Antwan for stealing her code, while Antwan arrogantly believed that the Free City brand was so golden that people would pay for any crap he released.
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Creator Killer / int_ef8bd4a5	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_ef8bd4a5	comment	Nearly all of Decipher's card games came to an end after the release of the final set of the Mega Man card game, which featured a deck so overpowered that it brought the company down with it. The company was already crippled by an ongoing decline in the CCG industry and, as was later revealed, a $1.5+ million embezzlement scheme by the company's finance VP.
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Creator Killer / int_effe6a11	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_effe6a11	comment	A rather sad example with the notoriously-awful The Eye of Argon, which was published when its author Jim Theis was seventeen. It is indeed as bad as its reputation claims, laden with spelling errors, Purple Prose, cliches, and Narm... which makes a lot more sense when you remember that the author was seventeen and had never really written anything before. It was originally published for a small 'zine, but then someone got a hold of it who found it to be So Bad, It's Good, which eventually led to it being published and circulated on a fairly large scale—without Theis' knowledge, and without paying him anything. The story became infamous in fantasy and literary circles, and making fun of it is still a popular pastime at conventions and the like, but Theis revealed in an interview a couple decades later that the whole debacle had really hurt him, as he mostly just wanted to forget the whole thing ever happened, and led to him deciding to swear off writing. He died in 2002, The Eye of Argon being his only published work.
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Creator Killer / int_f651fac4	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_f651fac4	comment	The failure of Titan A.E. brought down Don Bluth's career, shut down Fox Animation Studios, and helped end the post-Golden Age era known as The Renaissance Age of Animation where the animation medium re-surged in both popularity and quality thanks to increasing challenges by filmmakers and artists against the Animation Age Ghetto that had dominated the medium for decades. Thus, not only did it bring down the career of a celebrated animator, but also helped end an era that brought out some of the greatest animated media in history. A handful of other 2D animated film flops from Bluth's rivals at Disney and DreamWorks Animation piled on to Titan A.E. and ended cinematic 2D animation until the end of the 2000s with the releases of The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh (2011). Since then, the only 2D films released in theaters have been based on TV shows: The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water in 2015, My Little Pony: The Movie in 2017, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies in 2018, and The Bob's Burgers Movie in 2022. Before that, Rock-A-Doodle sank Bluth's original studio. It only survived thanks to financial backing from Hong Kong and Irish entertainment groups, who would then end all support for the studio following the consecutive failures of Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park (which barely got a theatrical release) and The Pebble and the Penguin (the latter of which did not have his name on it).
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Creator Killer / int_fb0c3aa4	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_fb0c3aa4	comment	WEP co-founder and Voltron creator Peter Keefe's only other noteworthy creative position after Third Dimension was for the TV special Nine Dog Christmas in 2003. He spent the rest of his life as an adviser and licensing consultant for numerous media companies like Toon Farm Animation and Zen Entertainment before his death from throat cancer in 2010; which occurred while he was attempting a comeback with a proposed animated series based on the ancient Oriental Zodiac called "Z-Force".
Creator Killer / int_fb0c3aa4	featureApplicability	1.0
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Creator Killer / int_fef0820d	type	Creator Killer
Creator Killer / int_fef0820d	comment	Animegataris reveals that the principal of the school the series takes place at once directed an anime by the name of Ultra Katharsis Kortisi—the very same anime that enamored Minoa to the world of Japanese animation. However, he admits that the anime completely tanked his career as an animator and director, since it was so Reference Overdosed that nobody could tell what the actual plot was, if there even was one. His disillusionment with anime eventually leads him to place some tough laws on the anime club.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Creator Killer	processingCategory2	Trivia
Penguin Memories / int_4b8fae12	type	Creator Killer
Shirobako / int_4b8fae12	type	Creator Killer
Be Cool / int_4b8fae12	type	Creator Killer
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Irreconcilable Differences / int_4b8fae12	type	Creator Killer
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New Hollywood	seeAlso	Creator Killer
PayItForward	seeAlso	Creator Killer
The Dark Age of Animation	seeAlso	Creator Killer
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Singin' in the Rain / int_4b8fae12	type	Creator Killer
creatorkiller	sameAs	Creator Killer

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