Have the guy turn green and it’s David Banner in The Incredible Hulk.
Make the guy a dog and you have the littlest hobo.
I think that is a weird way of putting it. The 30 second montage obviously represents months and months of arduous work, with the seasons changing etc.
Also, from “any incompetent untrained” to “world-class expert” is not what I’m seeing. Rocky, Daniel etc. weren’t and didn’t.
Concussions, especially for professional athletes, didn’t used to be seen as a big deal. “He got dinged”, “got his bell rung”, “punch-drunk”.
Yeah it’s a really good example of the OP IMO. As it’s something where attitudes are actually in the process of changing in the public as a whole (they’ve already changed in sports, and of course medical opinion has been overwhelming for many years). It’s pretty glaringly inappropriate when I see a stereotypical “character gets knocked out, sees tweety birds, then carries on like nothing has happened” scene in one of my kids cartoons that’s been made in the last decade. It’s like seeing a character smoking inside. But at time it was made (again we are talking about 2010s) it was just funny trope.
This is the premise of the current show Poker Face. But that probably doesn’t count as its being deliberately retro, so the fact just including the trope gives the show a retro feel shows how long dead the trope is.
Reminiscent of Joe Versus the Volcano and Tom Hanks’ “brain cloud.”
But spit-takes are alive and well on SNL.
Are you only counting times when it’s done in movies or television? Lots of people still do it in public to someone they don’t like. This list has recent cases of pieing in public to moderately famous people::
Yes, I was just thinking of movies and television, like Three Stooges shorts and such.
I think that trope is a product of an economically prosperous era. It’s more fun to contemplate hitch hiking across the country when you could decide anytime to find a good job and settle down.
The MAD magazine satire of Then Came Bronson did a hilarious sendup of the opening credits sequence. The guy in the station wagon describes the prosperous middle-class life he’s “tied down to”, and envies Bronson’s “rusty bike, moldy sleeping bag, and the clothes on (his) back”.
A character is so nearsighted that he/she can barely see anything clearly…even while wearing eyeglasses. (Was this an artifact of a time when eyeglasses were less effective?)
There are plenty of people with eyesight degeneration who wear lenses for what benefit they can get who are nonetheless substantially visually impaired.
I know someone who has 20/40 vision with glasses or contacts. And that was after years of therapy. She has an unconditional drivers license. She can see well enough for everyday activities.
Frighteningly, when crossing the street she will peer out for cars.
Had one in junior high. The thing I most remember was it suggested engineering. Interesting to me because my mother and grandfather were both engineers.
But me? I’m a writer. I’m fascinated by how engineering brains work, but I definitely don’t have one.
Me: “Look, that cloud is a bunny!”
Mom: “That cloud is a cloud. What on earth are you talking about?”
The story of my childhood. 
don’t forget the elephant scared of mouse
Poker Face again! She actually smokes inside! It’s as if she’s trying to kill the “no smoking” trope by actually . . . smoking. Inside someone else’s house or business. It’s distracting the first time she does it, and every time after that too. We forget how common that used to be.
So it’s kinda a trope in its own right, whereby you instantly denote that a scene took place at a certain point in time by showing people smoking. It’s like showing people in powderer wigs or plate armor, except we remember the days of smoking inside (or some of us do) so it adds a nostalgia factor.
The bad guy sends an anonymous message, by using individual letters cut with scissors from newspaper headlines and pasted on a page .
Usually a ransom note or threat.
The letters were a mish-mosh of different sizes and fonts.
I think it was common on Mannix.
Except that Poker Face is set in the modern day, and the main character smokes because she’s a hot mess. Although she’s been trying to move to vapes in Season 2.
Of course, the real reason the character smokes is, how would Natasha Lyonne’s voice sound that way if she didn’t?