I’d only heard of them b/c of my Grandfather, but the The Ink Spots had 54 chart topping hits, 20 in the top ten, with another dozen in the US R&B charts at the same time.
Or, how about the Billy Jack movies?
Older rock music other than Classic Rock and Metal.
Guitar Hero and Rock Band seem to have changed our memory of what Rock was in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s. It seems that even 3rd tier metal bands like Poison and Whitesnake have new fans, but 1st tier bands that don’t translate well to the music game genre are fading from memory. For example, prog bands like Yes, Genesis, Electric Light Orchestra, Supertramp and King Crimson have almost vanished from the pop music memory.
Likewise, a lot of 80’s new wave that wasn’t guitar oriented seems to be fading.
Here’s hoping that the addition of keyboards in Rock Band starts bringing some attention back to these great bands.
Ma & Pa Kettle
The Little Rascals
Shirley Temple
Robert Blake until he killed his wife
Mickey Rooney
Patsy Cline
Rosemary Clooney
Peggy Lee
Tom Jones
Julio Iglesias
David Soul
Independence Day was a huge hit, grossed hundreds of millions, most talked about movie of the summer and yadda yadda. Fourteen years later (damn- has it been that long?) there’s no nostalgia or cult following and there’s never been a sequel.
The Crying Game was the most talked about movie of 1992, won several awards, caused a major stink when Gene Siskel gave away the twist on his show, and was used as a joke in lots of other movies and TV shows. Today- nada.
Popular novelists Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth and Winston Churchill (not the British Prime minister, who used the byline Winston S. Churchill to avoid confusion) are completely forgotten today, but they were the best selling writers of their time.
The Band was one of the top five rock groups of the early 70s, but other than “The Weight,” no one knows their music.
(The “Classic Rock” format short changes a lot of acts, reducing their catalogs to one or two songs.)
Don’t mean to be that guy, but I imagine “Up On Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” are still pretty well known.
Well Patsy Cline died in 1963 so that limited her career. She only had 3 albums out when she died. (3 more came out after she died) From what I can tell she’s still popular with country fans. Unlike some dead artists they did not release a whole bunch of her stuff beyond those 3 extra albums.
A lot of alternative and post grunge bands from the 90s - The Gin Blossoms, Candlebox, Goo Goo Dolls, Collective Soul, Hootie and the Blowfish.
That’s really interesting. I’d like to think of some other “popular but forgotten” authors.
As for singers - how about Johnny Mathis or Jim Reeves?
Bestselling novelists (all of them MAJOR bestsellers in their day- at least millions and in some cases of tens of millions of copies) who are pretty much forgotten:
Frank Yerby (The Foxes of Harrow, Fair Oakes, The Saracen Blade, others)
Irving Wallace (Seven Minutes, The Word, The Prize, others)
Francis Parkinson Keyes
Thomas B. Costain (The Silver Chalice, The Black Rose, Son of a Hundred Kings, others)
Doing only slightly better in the ‘Gone and forgotten’ department are Jacqueline Susann (in her heyday she outsold most other bestselling authors combined, but for many years she was completely out of print), Grace Metalious (Peyton Place sent her from housewife in danger of eviction to multimillionaire overnight) and Edna Ferber (Showboat, Cimarron, Giant). With these I think they’re far more remembered- usually due to adaptations of their works (movies, TV for Metalious [plus “Peyton Place” being slang for small town hypocrisy and scandal even to those like me who never saw the series) and in Ferber’s case the musical Showboat)- than they are read.
Mathis is still pretty big. He’s the focus of the opening essay in John Waters’ new book (Role Models) in which it’s mentioned that while he hasn’t had a hit in many years he has a very loyal fan base and his annual Christmas tour sells out major venues.
Little Richard is in the same book; he’s still known to the middle aged and over but I doubt many people under 30 know who he is.
Technology had a lot to do with it but in the early years of “Monday Night Football” one of the biggest attractions was was a 90 second clip of several games played 30 hours earlier. Narrator Howard Cosell (who had nothing to do with what games were selected) would get death threats from fans upset that their team was not selected. It forced other networks, who had previously shown the high school bands playing “Up with People” at the stadium (always billed as “a great halftime show”) to start in studio halftime shows with footage from other games.
The CB craze of the 1970s. C.W. McCall is sorry his career ended after one song, we are disappointed it lasted that long.
When ABC lost the NBA contract to CBS in 1974, they responded with a made for TV competition called “Superstars” various athletes trying events outside their field. It outrated the NBA for several years and spawned “Super Teams” and “Celebrity Superstars”.
Re: Johnny Mathis- Waters said the most astonishing thing about him is he’s such a nice guy that you can’t bring yourself to ask “how in the hell can a nice intelligent openly gay black man be a conservative Republican!?” when you’re with him.
Personally I have trouble listening to him without getting freaked out ever since his music was used in Home, the single creepiest episode of X-Files (if not of any TV show) ever filmed. For those who haven’t seen it the episode involves deformed hillbillies, infanticide, incest, mass murder… and Johnny Mathis music.
Correction: she was Felicia Hemans, not Florence.
Funny trivia - the music of CW McCall came from Chip Davis who is now the leader of Manheim Steamroller.
BTW, McCall had 7 top 40 hits on the country chart, so he was only a 1 hit wonder in terms of the pop/rock chart.
The recently deceased Mitch Miller.
Orchestra leader Percy Faith.
Calypso music.
(I’m just mentally going through some of the vinyl my dad used to have in the basement.)
Norma Desmond.
George M. Cohan, a man who may not be “completely forgotten”, but in a thread that mentions ET, Patsy Cline, and “Baker Street”, I think his name fits better than many. 
From the above link…
Eh, I hear kids of the 90s waxing nostalgic about it frequently, and I hear a joke every couple months about killing an alien space ship with a Mac virus. Usually the same people wax nostalgic about Will Smith’s good ol’ days with Fresh Prince and MIB.
The Cosby Show was huge, but now it just survives in a few badly-aged jokes about ugly sweaters.