That reminds me. Seinfeld. Boring.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. There have been many books written by Nigerians that are miles better than this depressing hatefest. There have been many more written by people all across Africa that are miles better. Yet this is always the one dragged out as The Example of African Literature. As a matter of fact, everything Achebe’s written is overrated.
I’ll hop on the Beatles/Rolling Stones meh-train as well. Will they still be as popular after all the Boomers die? My guess is a resounding no.
Add me onto the list for Lord of the Rings, novels.
Some comic book ones:
A lot of what Alan Moore wrote is twaddle which has gotten over-inflated because it was written by Alan Moore. He’s never written a goods Batman story - the only thing that makes The Killing Joke worthwhile is that the crippling of Barbara Gordon eventually gave us Oracle, who is a much better character than she ever was as Batgirl. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow is entertaining, but nowhere near as good as people seem to want to think, and by the time I hit Jimmy’s death, the overwhelming sadism of the story just got tiring.
Likewise, Frank Miller has never written a good Batman story, either. Dark Knight Returns was every bit the PoS that Dark Knight Strikes Back and All Star Batman are. No, Frank, putting a little tiny bit of armour under it doesn’t explain the yellow oval…it just makes the Batman who wore it look like a moron. The rest of it is only marginally less stupid than that.
Also unfunny.
I agree about Things Fall Apart, though, and I’m about to start a related thread.
It warms my heart to see OK Computer in this thread. I have never understood the (near) universal love for this album. It is a decent album, and I do give them credit trying to make interesting music, but best album of the last 20 years?! It wouldn’t crack my top 50.
I agree with every single syllable of this post. Except it’s 5 pages for me. Bravo.
Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. I don’t think everything they’ve done is overrated but that movie seems to be the one everyone quotes and is most familiar with. That movie puts me to sleep. Hell Monty Python in general is overrated. There I said it.
I’ll also put in that American Football is vastly overrated. I’m glad the season is short. Here’s a hint, fans: those men you see on the field - they aren’t you.
I just remembered the TV show (when I was a child) that would make me cringe. It has since been listed as the best show of all time. The Dick Van Dyke Show. I didn’t like him, I thought the comedy was weak, and I didn’t like any of the characters. After reading a SDMB thread lauding this crapfest, I watched one again on TVLand…it still sucks.
Steve Miller…he’s basically *Jimmy Buffet * without the parrot stapled to his shoulder. They’re both repetitive and dull. The booze helps the latter.
I used to think Dickens was dull and needlessly wordy. Then, I read Bleak House, and it recast Dickens in my mind. So, all Dickens but BH is overrated (but I’m coming around to the canon, so check back in a year).
-Cem
Not sure Deadwood is a classic, but I got bored with it pretty fast.
One other thing occurred to me: The collected works of William Shakespeare. Now, don’t get me wrong, he wrote some great stuff. But he’s highly overrated. Ask Harold Bloom, or any high school English department, and even some of the college ones, and you will get the impression that Shakespeare is the be-all and end-all of literature, period end of story forever and ever times a thousand.
He’s good, he’s great, at times fantastic, but he’s not all that ever needs to be said in the printed word.
Office Space.
It really isnt’ that funny and the fractions of a penny heist thing was done in Superman 3.
I find them boring as well, but the older I get, the more I get the sense that there really is something to their music. Their music definitely has a soulful swagger to it that just somehow seems to belong in smoky barrooms or pool halls.
And the Beatles can never be overrated.
For me, I get all with the praise of Jack Keroac’s On the Road. Even in my somewhat vagabond searching-for-myself days, that book was a boring piece of crap.
As for movies, Antonioni’s Blowup left me in stitches when I saw it first on TCM. I only found out later that this was supposed to be some sort of landmark 60s movie and was very highly regarded in critical circles. I’m not sure I’m quite ready to dismiss it as “overrated,” just that I completely missed whatever was supposedly great about it. The problem could very well be me.
Some of these answers seem more in the vein of “things I don’t like” rather than “things that are considered ‘classics’ but which you think are highly overrated”.
Is football really a classic? You could argue that the '75 Cowboys were the greatest team to walk the earth or that they were overrated but it seems kind of silly to say that football is overrated within the context of the discussion. Far be it from me to go against the flow though.
I still can’t believe someone called the Canterbury Tales overrated. By what standard are they overrated?
Marc
Oh, take the best of any artform, genre, or whatever, and there’s somebody who will call it “overrated.” Personally, I can’t believe a piece of literature over 600 years old can still make me laugh in this day and age.
Harold Bloom is full of shit. You could spread him on the Sahara and grow crops.
It’s a “classic” among sports in that I’ve been told time and time again it is THE sport to watch and if I watch that I may proceed to ignore others. That is THE American sport, and a bunch of other rubbish.
Casa Bonita voted ‘the tourist destination in Denver that shouldn’t be.’
I suspected as much when I was 7, looked back into the kitchen and saw the guy opening the BIG can of Old El Paso refritos. That was nearly 30 years ago.
The Stranger and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I thought both were horrible, and ended up on curriculums because people were afraid to say they thought it was crap for fear of looking stupid.
I’d have to go with everything Henry Miller ever wrote. I tried to read Tropic of Cancer and got about ten pages in before I gave up and went back to the library just to return it and get it out of my life. Oooooh, Henry used a bad word! Woooooowwww, Henry got bare naked with a girl! From the glances I’ve stolen from his other works, pretty much all of Henry’s books run this way. From the three minutes or so I spent on his Wikipedia bio, Henry’s whole life seemed to run this way. Not that it wouldn’t be cool to have 327,000 menage’-a-trois’s in your life, but damn, man, it’s a hell of a lot more exciting to be in a threesome than read an account written by someone who looks like my accountant.
I understand that it was revolutionary in its day, and Orwell gave it particularly eloquent praise in his essay Inside the Whale, but nowadays to me, it just seems like existentialism without the challenge. Or the philosophy. Or the brains.
Holy cow! My class from Colorado Springs took a fieldtrip to a waterpark and we ended up eating dinner at Casa Bonita way back in 1986. I had no idea this place was still in business and I admit that if I ever got back to Denver I would probably eat there again just because I can’t remember ever eating at the same place after a 20+ year gap. Then again that hasn’t exactly made me want to try Chuck E. Cheese.
I do have fond memories of wasting quarters playing Gauntlet at Casa Bonita’s arcade.
Marc