The initial reviews for The Big Bang Theory were negative. The nerd falls for pretty girl meme has been done to death, and the critics did not think the show would last.
They were wrong.
Looks like it’s still doing really well overall on Rotten Tomatoes:
Tragically.
Punk was primarily reactionary. I mean, I’ll quote one of the earliest auteurs:
The Ramones were the Rockettes without any of that obnoxious “technical chops” crap. They made old-fashioned pop songs… pop songs on speed and without anything like social graces, but there’s definitely more in common between “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Rock Around The Clock” than there is between it and most of what King Crimson made, or Pink Floyd’s later period. They were a bunch of angry weirdos (Joey especially) pushing back against jazz and classical music infecting their dance music, and turning it into dirges in the dark, as the poet once said. Even the Brits understood that well enough for the Clash to rip off Elvis for the cover of London Calling.
Anyway. Punk was rock’n’roll merged with anarchism, the idea that anyone could have a hit record… which merges right neatly to whatever Asexual Weirdo said that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. It ties into a mythology, the Great American Garage Band, a bunch of (straight, White, male) teens getting together and making the Next Big Thing without needing anything but their middle-class allowance and enough Third Space to practice without being shot. The equivalent to that now is… uh… Soundcloud Rappers, who can become the Next Big Thing with a laptop and an Internet connection.
Punk, disco, and rap all came out of the same cultural ferment. Punk got held up as the legitimate child of New York City 1977, but it was, ultimately, reactionary and backwards-looking. Disco, the gay music, was violently Demolished in a public orgy. Rap was ghettoized. How the worms all turn around on their little turntables, eh?
Regarding ABBA: I have also heard that they started to be taken seriously when artists who thought they had at least moderate musical proficiency tried to cover their songs as a joke, and found out they couldn’t play them. Oh, they could play the simplified versions, but that wasn’t what they wanted to do.
ABBA were one of SNL’s earliest musical guests; how dreadfully uncool could they have been in their glory days?
Well, the season also included Lily Tomlin performing “I Got You Babe” with Scred and the Muppets.
That SNL appearance treated ABBA as a complete joke, splashing water on them while they lip-synched (according to that SNL oral history book, writer Michael O’Donoghue hated them and this was his idea).
As far as I can tell, despite their commercial popularity in the 1970s, that was their only SNL appearance. How cool could they have been if they were never invited for a “real” appearance?
What about Vertigo? IIRC when it was released it was considered a pretty good Hitchcock film at best. Since then its reputation has soared to IMO baffling levels, where it is considered a towering pinnacle of world cinema.