I’m putting this into Cafe Society because I igure most of the replies will be entertainment related.
Obviously, #1 is The Simpsons. From a bumper on the Tracey Ulman show, a new show on a new, fledglig network to a cultural phenomenon. It doesn’t start out smaller and get bigger than The Simpsons.
The Special Olympics. Eunice Kennedy Shiver started them in her back yard, amidst criticism that the retarded could not compete in games. Now global, and an extremely wonderful thing in terms of chnging people’s perceptions of the handicapped.
Chocoloate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. Originally just a flavor in Ben & Jerry’s first store, people would go to their other stores and when they were told it was only available at one store, drive miles to get it. Now everybody who makes ice cream has Cookie Dough.
Riverdance started as a once off 7 min performance during the interval of the Eurovision Song Contest that Ireland was hosting in 1994. I remember that night very well. It became quite big after that
Many recipes started out this way: one chef creating something that becomes popular. Examples include
Ranch Dressing – originally the house dressing for a dude ranch in California. Now impossible to avoid.
Potato Chips – invented by a piss-off chef named George Crum to get back at an overly demanding customer.
Caesar Salad – attributed to chef Caesar Cardini in a single restaurant.
Star Trek. Roddenberry was barely able to get his “wagon train to the stars” idea on TV in the first place because it was so different than anything else out there. It barely survived it’s second season, thanks to a letter-writing campaign from a core group of devoted fans, and was ultimately canceled after it’s third season.
Then it went into reruns in syndication, and picked up an enormous number of fans (like myself) who never had the opportunity to see it in it’s first run. A decade later, we had the first in a long string of Star Trek motion pictures, and the mid-80’s saw the first of several new Star Trek-based TV series. Now we have the movie franchise reboot. Like the Simpsons mentioned in the OP, it started off barely on the radar and just mushroomed into something unbelievably huge.
I don’t consider getting a series as staring out “very, very small.” That is quite an accomplishment in itsdelf. As I mentioned in my OP, the Simpsons wasn’t even a series.
The stories of entertainers who started small and have wound up HUGE would fill several threads, but I’d like to mention a TV shows that used to air late on Friday nights in this area (and I will assume was syndicated in other markets as well) called Soul Train with host Noble Blackwell. See this link for more details.Stevie Wonder was a harmonica player along with acts like Good Rockin’ Hoppy and Ironing Board Sam and was “Little Stevie” in those days of Fingertips. I can remember thinking as I watched him play and sing, “This little guy is going to be a star someday.”
Most stars struggle along the way. Very very few bit players end up the star.
On the other hand, a cantor named Dudu Fisher with no prior stage experience, captured the role of Jean Valjean in Israel’s Les Miz, and also did the role on the West End and Broadway.
Would those Geico cavemen count? They got bigger than they deserved to be.
I just happened to be re-reading Tom Wolfe’s novel the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which describes how a handful of west coast wing-nuts, led by an eccentric author, discovered the recreational uses of LSD. The 60s counterculture was originally small enough to fit into a school-bus!
South Park started out as a 5 minute student film, which led to a $2000 commissioned video Christmas card, which led to the series, which led to Everybody Draw Muhammed Day.
Pixar. The company started out selling computer monitors for medical equipment. They designed some in-house animations to showcase the quality of the monitors. They found that people were talking more about the animations than they were about the equipment so they decided to form a department that would make promotional animations. This department obviously grew into bigger things.
I’m thinking by this point when they hold their annual board meetings, somebody has to remember to ask if they’re still making medical monitors and if they sold any this year.
