I think you’d have to go back to vaudeville, when a rubber stage prop stood in for an actual plucked chicken. Why a plucked chicken was funny I don’t know.
Fear not! The plane will take off just fine.
When I was in the Boy Scouts we had a talent show and someone had a book of short skits we could perform; this was one of them.
Why a duck?
I watch a lot of 60-70s tv shows and this thread describes half the episodes!
The ones I am glad are gone is “I won’t hit a woman!”. I just saw Sulu (in “That Which Survives)” say that, and I’m like, “Dude, she’s trying to KILL YOU! Do whatever it takes!” Modern shows, such as FBI etc, have bad guys with no inhibitions about hitting women, and the women officers are capable of taking a hit as well as dishing it out quite effectively. And we’re better for it!
I’m also glad we got past "lady-[whatever] (doctor, cop, pilot, firefighter etc) like it needed to be emphasized. But now it may be the pendulum is swinging back.
Cuz there ain’t no Sanity Clause.
Brief, cursory martial arts training enables a small, unathletic, mild-mannered man (or woman, or child) to deck (or ‘flip’) a much larger adversary.
I’ve got a dead trope. The police detective (or equivalent) sticking his bare finger in a pool of blood to see how congealed it is to judge how long it’s been there.
Yeah there is yet another head injury related trope that I think has now died. It’s that you can safely and reliably knock someone out with a blow to the head, and they will rendered unconscious long enough to be transported to whatever location the plot demands whereupon they’ll wake up healthy and with no repercussions for being beaten into unconsciousness
Not exactly handcuffs, but just last night on the reboot of Night Court, Abby and Dan got their hands caught in one of Harry’s magic boxes and spent the entire episode locked together.
I still see that one pretty regularly. I think that trope will survive as long as there are hacky screenwriters who need a convenient way to take somebody out of the story temporarily.
Here’s a once common drama / thriller trope: bad guy sees the error of their ways and decides to renounce their evil ways. It’s usually a ‘second in command’ bad guy, because the plot still needs a ‘big boss baddie’ for the good guys to defeat. But the reformed bad guy cannot have a happy ending since they’ve committed too many unredeemable bad things. So the only redemption arc available to them is to die heroically while helping out the good guys. Darth Vader is a good example of this trope.
It’s not as common since the notion of the ‘anti-hero’ enables just about anybody to have a ‘happy ending’ redemption arc, no matter what terrible things they did previously. But you still see it occasionally, for example Walter White in Breaking Bad.
That reminds me of the detective at the crime scene who puts a little bit of the white powder on his tongue in order to “taste it” to determine if it is coke or heroin or whatever. He then looks up and and says, “Yep!”
Or Hannibal Lecter in the movie version of Hannibal.
I say, I say, I say… would you hit a woman with a baby?
No. I’d hit her with a brick.
I don’t wish to know that. Kindly leave the stage.
I think this is a subset of the larger “training montage” trope. Whereby any incompetent out of shape untrained character can achieve world-class expert status in any skill by means of 30-second training montage.
That trope is alive and well definitely
True, but Hannibal had maybe 1/2 a redemption arc. He went from indiscriminately murdering to only killing and eating what he called ‘free range rude’. So if you were cool, and chill, you had nothing to fear from him. He was practically a murdery cannibal version of a folk hero.
The book version of Hannibal took it to even more of an extreme-- toward the end of it he had actually hooked up with Clarisse, and they were living happily ever after under aliases in Europe. I heard that the author, Thomas Harris, did not like the movie adaptions of his books, so he wrote ‘Hannibal’ as a big FU to the movie studio-- “let them try to make a movie out of this!”.
I think this is true. Having watched years of MMA, I can assure you that being knock out from a blow will not render you unconscious for more than a couple of minutes. Unless of course there is serious brain damage. In which case you don’t wake up with no ill effects.
Along with that same line of thinking, it used to be that as long as you could ‘karate chop’ the back of the neck - no matter how softly - the victim would be instantly out cold.
Maybe it’s better writing, or maybe it’s more awareness of how bad head injuries actually are. This one may not be dead, but I have seen more characters showing realistic effects, such as nausea, vomiting, head aches, etc, after a bimp on the noggin than before.
Of course, by the next episode, they are perfectly fine.
Only once, in the classic TV days, did this trope get subverted. Hogan’s Heroes: Hogan gets knocked out. When he comes to, Newkirk gives him the prognosis: “Just a mild concussion. You’ll be right as rain in a year or two.” 
Pedantic nitpick here. The term antihero does not mean a protagonist like Walter White who actively does bad things instead of good things. An antihero is a hero who is trying to do good, but rather than being the perfect handsome broad-shouldered upstanding citizen with a square jaw who helps old ladies across the street and always does the right thing, is flawed, human, and imperfect (e.g. Rick from Casablanca)
That reminds me of a character badmouthing someone and saying “He is standing right behind me, isn’t he?”