One of the interesting things about the Star Trek:TOS episode “By Any Other Name” (The one where Warren Stevens, as the extra=galactic alien hijacks the Enterprise to go back to his own galaxy) is that, when the superfluous members of the crew get turned into polyhedral paperweights, Stevens takes up two in his hands – one that hand been a blonde woman, the other a black man, but now identical geometric forms – and drushes one, effectively killing the crewmember. The other he restores – and it’s the black man, not the blonde woman. Nifty little trope subversion there.
Actually, I think she was a brunette. But that shocked me too when I first saw it—not because it was a black guy who survived, but because it was a woman who was killed.
Yes, that was a delight.
Happy Days did that with Ralph and Potsie as roommates.
The death of Thompson in By Any Other Name always bugged me about how random it was. Sure, you join Starfleet, you expect it to be dangerous, but you expect to be killed by battling with Klingons, or being jettisoned in an ion pod, not crushed to powder to prove a point, without even a say in it, or a chance to defend yourself.
I think it’s more common for a mentor figure (of any type or color) to get killed off than for a “magical negro” to be.
There is also the related: asthma (and specifically asthma medication) as a sign of nerdiness and butt of jokes, that can be discarded at will to show the nerd in question has gained enough self-confidence to not need a crutch like… er… life saving respiratory medication 
The asthma medicine bit was used as recently as The Big Bang Theory (Leonard used an inhaler)
Another family sitcom trope that was all over the place in the 80s and 90s.
There’s a “School Aptitude Test” that will apparently determine your future career. Almost every character will be given a career that is 100% contrary to their personality (in the Simpsons episode Brat Bart becomes a cop and brainy Lisa becomes a housewife) or interests but then be forced to spend the remainder of the episode trying to practice for their job because they’re resigned to their fate. Then at the end of the episode they either learn that fate isn’t immobile and that they can choose a different career if they really want, or that there was an “error” in the process and the test results got mixed up and the students are given results that actually match them.
Nobody ever actually questions how a multiple choice test with less than 100 questions will actually determine what your occupation is when there’s more than 100 career paths in the world, or that the idea of a career test in general is stupid.
I mean, mathematically speaking, if the test is calculated as a whole (and not each question referring to a specific career path), there are more possible results than there are hydrogen atoms in the Sun, so…
Predator 2. “Who’s next?”
Tapping on the phone cradle when someone hangs up on you. “Hello? (tap tap tap) hello?”
Heads of households (e.g., Ward Cleaver, Ozzie Nelson, Rob Petrie) wearing dress shirts, neckties, and sports jackets while home, even on the weekends. Did anyone ever do this IRL?
H.P. Lovecraft did.
And of course, the counterpart-- June Cleaver doing housework in pearls and a dress.
Every once in awhile, when Rob was really loafing around the house, he might wear a cardigan instead!
But always with a tie!
According to Jerry “The Beav” Mathers, she wore those pearls to cover up what looked like a tracheotomy. (Barbara Billingsley was extremely thin.)
Wanted to respond to this when I first saw it, but I forgot to come back around.
Not sure about Pizza Hut locations in the U.S., but Domino’s locations in the U.S. are franchised. That could account for varying availability of anchovies – sometimes available in one location but then not in another one.
I worked at Domino’s in college (early 1990s) at two locations in SE Louisiana. Both offered anchovies as a topping. It was rarely ordered.
Has there ever been an instance of a big tough guy using a respirator?