Isn’t this little guy just adorable? 2 billion screaming tweens apparently think so. Shit, Justin Bieber actually can sing. Hunh.
It seemed a good idea at the time.
No lie: I have actually seen kudzu grow, by which I mean it grows fast enough it is visible to the naked eye.
Don’t kangaroos emerge as lima bean sized joeys before they transfer to the pouch?
- Martin Goodman, seeing the success of NPC’s Justice League , asks Stan Lee to do a “superhero team” comic book.
Hewlett Packard started in a garage.
It’s so funny you should mention this because in 1999 my father spent a few months working on “some shitty movie of the week” (his words) He’s a set builder and spent time making a Dominion Supermarket look like a Greek restaurant. He finished the movie and then…nothing…So we forgot about it. Then a year later it came out. We thought it would just end up another small movie. It was pretty exciting to see something that we never expected to go anywhere to suddenly be everywhere!
Given that the total USA GDP is around $15 trillion, I can honestly say that 25 years ago I wouldn’t have guessed that bottled water would account for 113% of the USA economy. 
This is what I was going to mention. It was epic fail at first-release, then became a huge cult classic. I’ve even introduced my two older daughters (aged 23 and 19) to it.
Oprah Winfredy. You’re going to give an overweight black girl a talk show that is going to put Phil Donohue out of business? Yeah, right.
Peanuts. A simple comic strip becomes as huge a commodity as The Simpsons later would.
Doonesbury–started out as a strip in the Yale newspaper. A political cartoon strip that became an indusry.
CATS–You take a 40 year book of poems about CATS with no real plot. You have a cast and production crew with little to no track record. The show is financed by over 1,000 individual investors putting up a quarter, the composer mortgaging his estate for a quart, and the theatre delaying the other half. The show features one junkyard set and really cheesy costumes. It opens to tepid reviews…
…and ends up playing in every US state and almost every country, trasnslated into over twenty languages, winning a butt load of awards, and making the production crew world famous.
(Rocky Horror)
There are a handful of things that I enjoy that I would never directly introduce to my (hypothetical) children. This is one of them 
“Oh, and here is your mother the semester she was tranny mom.”
I just couldn’t do it to them.
Damn you for beating me. It’s plainly the best answer
This is the kind of thing I find fascinating; when a side product or afterthought becomes bigger than the rest of the enterprise and eventually no one even remembers the main product. I like to call such things the “tail that wags the dog” although that’s perhaps not the correct use of the phrase.
Another example is Flickr, which originally was developed as a tool for a MMOG.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Started out as an independent, black-and-white comic book with a self-financed print run of 3,000 copies. It grew into a massively popular comic book franchise, with network cartoon shows, feature films (including a recent revival after the franchise’s heyday in the early 90’s) and the whole nine yards of merchandising.
Avenue Q wins the title of “most bizarre thing that started out really, really small and became huge”. It was a workshop that later went off-Broadway. I saw one of the first previews and remember thinking “This is either going to flop miserably or be huge.”
One of the best Tony show moments was, after Wicked had taken a bunch of awards and was rhe hands-on favorite to win the top Tony, the announced said “And the winner for best musical is…Avenue Q.” There was a good 15 seconds of stunned slience, the Wicked team going 
and the Avenue Q team :eek:
The show has translated well, despite questions of whether it would play well outside of New York.
What we need is this thread: “Things that started out very, very HUGE and stayed very, very HUGE.”
Not saying you should. But to be perfectly fair, my kids were pretty much adults when I introduced them to RHPS. My 10YO, however, doesn’t know anything about it. Sometimes when she’s around, Jango will start playing a RHPS song, and I’ll just forward through it. I don’t need her asking questions about “Mom, what’s a ‘transvestite’?” 
your mother.
Precursor, not successor, and at the time, that’s just how computer games were sold.
He was also supposed to be played by Michael Keaton.
Tell that to the CW!
I’ll throw out the word “OK.” It started as a joke - an 1830’s version of l33t-speak - in a few papers in the northeast US. Now it transcends English - it’s one of the most understood words on the planet.
Saturfay Night Live. A little show on late night TV at a time when Variety shows where not popular became a vehicle for some hugely successful careers.
Buffalo wings.
You Tube.
Before he became ruler of the Soviet Union, Stalin spent many years not existing.