Lostalgia

Lostalgia
Whatever happened to
The life that we once knew?
Can we really live without each other?
—"Free as a Bird", by The Beatles, 15 years after John Lennon's death.

"I love the nostalgic, myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past."
—Walt Disney

So you find out about an amazing TV show. You watch a couple of episodes, and you're hooked. You buy the DVD box sets, you watch everything else the guy(s) made... and then realise that they won't make anything new. Ever. The crushing realization that this is all there'll ever be, is Lostalgia. Nostalgia, but for a lost cause. This is especially heartbreaking when the new series that you're into abruptly ended, leaving you with No Ending and no hope for a canonical resolution.

This is common when it comes to online work. Professional writers have people nudging them from behind, and monetary incentive; there's nothing to stop an online artist or author from spawning yet another perpetually half-finished fanfiction or comic that'll never extend to more than a few beautiful, heartbreaking pages.

Also applies to bands that have broken up (or artists that have, um, become ex-artists) by the time you get into them. Frequently associated with the Archive Binge, when the webcomic is about to or has already ended.

May or may not be related to Dis Continuity, since Your Mileage May Vary on which point in a given work's lifetime it stopped being good. What Could Have Been and Too Good to Last are related. One Book Author is also related, though in that case the person has only ever made one thing. See also Awesomeness Withdrawal.

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     Anime

    * FLCL is one the most bizarre and hilarious things ever animated, and ends after only six episodes.
    * Sailor Moon - Toei all but refuses to acknowledge it exists and its creator seems to have stopped fighting for it (although she is married to Yoshihiro Togashi [Hunter X Hunter, Yu Yu Hakusho], whose health problems are well known at this point).
          o But now Toei seems to have realized that the 20th anniversary of the series is approaching, and is re-releasing the entire series on DVD as well as allowing certain countries to relicense the show. On the other hand as far as musicals are concerned, the fans will just have to Keep Circulating the Tapes.
    * Record of Lodoss War and Patlabor are pretty much done as screen franchises, alas.
    * Martian Successor Nadesico. The TV series ended rather abruptly, the movie had a Bittersweet Ending Sequel Hook, and the sequels were canceled in favor of video games that never made it out of Japan. The makers then had a falling-out which prevented any sequels from surfacing; they've since made up but can't do it because it's been too long since the series to be profitable.
          o Considering that a Bluray release of the series recently faired well in the sales rankings, along with at least one new figure from a new company (only one has been releasing anything in the past few years, mostly garage kits), we may see it sooner than one might expect. This is, of course, speculation.
    * The Street Fighter II V series did have an ending... for Ken and Ryu alone - the audience never found out what happened to the rest of the supporting cast after they defeat and kill Bison. Considering the series wrapped up its 29-episode run in 1995, obviously it will never receive a sequel despite a resurgence of interest in the franchise after SFIV was released.
    * As hard as it is to accept, we may never see Shinichiro Watanabe take the reins and create another series that could even appeal to the mainstream.
    * GaoGaiGar and Betterman. Set in the same universe with occasional references to each other and with a crossover series planned to tie up loose ends from each of the shows. Unfortunately we will most likely never get that series.
    * Soon after you discover Dragon's Heaven, you're going to feel this, if you ever discover it at all. An old, highly obscure manga followed by one single OVA, but with some of the coolest mechs ever and a Crowning Music of Awesome soundtrack, it's a crying shame that nothing more ever came of it.
    * A lot of anime, especially those based on Visual Novels, Dating Sim games or short manga only last for 12 or 13 episodes. Even if the plot is tied up nicely and the ending is satisfying, it can still leave you wanting more.
    * The Littl Bits. There are precious few sources for obtaining it on DVD or VHS, but it's not likely to ever be seen on TV again.
    * Cyber City Oedo 808 was intended as a demo to impress potential investors; had the investors been impressed, they would have expanded out the three one-hour episodes into a full length series... in 1993. Needless to say, the investors were not impressed.
    * Ask Dr Rin! fansubs were going slowly before (like, 1 ep per six months), but since two or three years ago, the subbers appear to have fallen off the edge of the earth. In the meantime, it's near impossible to find raws, never mind translations of the episodes.
    * The Iczer series, spanning a three episode story, a six episode sequel, a two episode spinoff, and several unfinished manga. They were all released between the 1980s to early 1990s, and whilst popular during their time, have been all but forgotten by the general fandom.
    * Satoshi Kon. Four complete films and one TV series are far too little from such a skilled and imaginative storyteller, struck down by cancer far before his time.
    * Eden of the East. Somehow 11 episodes and two movies does not seem enough for such an excellent series with a brilliant plot and such amazing characters.
    * Double Arts, an engrossing and fun shounen manga that thumbed its nose at loads of the problematic stereotypes of its genre in wonderful ways and was obviously gearing up for an Ancient Conspiracy plot...and was cut down in its infancy by low ratings, with barely enough time for the artist to sketch out an ending with a little closure.
    * The Kämpfer manga's scanlations have seemed to stop for no obvious reason, either due to scanlators dropping it or something in the country of origin. This has happened on some mainstream manga sharing sites, but it is unclear if the scanlations are available anywhere else.
          o Just as the pace and dramatic tension were picking up in the anime and recapturing audience interest, it abruptly exited on it's own indulgently lostalgic note. The brief omake that followed mingled Lostalgia with open bitterness.
    * Both versions of Birdy The Mighty qualify, the OVA series and Decode. It seems we'll never see Birdy battling Revi. . . .
    * The chemistry between Vash and Wolfwood — production of a new series will never be able to restore that.
    * Trinity Blood is in permanent limbo. Sunao Yoshida, The author of the Light Novels that originated the franchise died unexpectedly in his thirties. Kentaro Yasui took over writing duties, but the anime ended with a first-season cliffhanger and the manga is stalled without any substantial resolution. It doesn't help that, with Tokyo Pop closing in mid-2011, fans of the translated novels, four of which have yet to be published, are out of luck another distributor picks them up.
    * Whenever the Gundam series change it's timeline, this will happen. Character or mech that you have grown to like will probably never appear again. Even if the new timeline is just as good or even better than the previous one, it will never feel the same.

     Comics

    * Scholastic Publishing distributes "book order" forms in elementary schools, and holds "book fairs", in order to help grade-school kids get into reading. To this day, Calvin and Hobbes collections remain some of the most popular items among kids, despite the fact that it ended its newspaper run before some of these kids were born. How are they going to feel when they realize that, once they've read It's A Magical World, there's nothing left?
          o Just as unhappy as the fans of the Bizarro Universe Calvin and Hobbes, Barnaby.
    * The Far Side.
    * Don Rosa has retired, although out of necessity: He is nearly blind.
    * While he definitely had good reason to leave, one only wonders what DC Comics would be like if Alan Moore was still working for them.
    * Power Pack good comic really interesting stories for Marvel world. Shame they have no plans for them anymore and it got canceled.
    * Rion 2990 was an independent manga-esque comic released in the 1980's and published under the Mirage imprint. Unlike other manga-esque titles, Rion looked absolutely authentic in regards to it's visuals that it could be mistaken as an actual Japanese manga. In addition to that, it had a high stakes, cold war era plot about a struggle between war and peace with likable characters. It was proposed to be a 4-issue miniseries, but it got cut short and only two of the four issues were released due to Mirage ballooning and crashing. There will never be another manga esque comic drawn as authentically as Rion 2990.
    * Owing to primarily Author Existence Failure, it's sad that there's no more Tintin comic books since the author died in the midst of writing the last one...

     Fan Fic

    * Hamlet: The Manga. An absolutely hilarious Slayers fanfic. Hasn't been updated for six years and likely never will be, so no Acts 4 or 5...
          o The author (Amethyst) apologizes. A lost job and a challenging stab at self-employment brought on a case of Creator Breakdown. (She tried her hand at an original webcomic but orphaned that when she lost her Wacom tablet...)
    * The Shoebox Project. Though not officially over, it hasn't been updated in over two years and the community was then HACKED and all of the entries on Livejournal erased in November 2008. One of the authors has pretty much stated that, while they haven't given up on it entirely, it's pretty much an ended era of Harry Potter fanfic. A real shame too, because it truly was one of the best written prequels out there, rivaling even the source material.
    * Jaquemart, the uncrowned queen of the Revolutionary Girl Utena sequel fanfics is left forever hanging because of the author's Real Life responsibilities combined with his unhappiness with the results of attempting to express himself in the fic; apparently it was even better in his mind, and is just not good enough to continue.
    * Happosai, the fanfic author, not the perverted little toad, vanished without a trace sometime in late 99, after beginning his second revision of the Tenchi Muyo fanfics. (he stopped halfway through to rewrite older chapters and fix typos, contexts, grammatical errors and the like, then poof, gone.) Although quite a bit heavier in the romantic side than the comedic side, it quite literally catches the characterizations of the entire cast perfectly, in fact such perfection hasn't been seen since the original OAV. Warning: Total size equivalent to one book of Lot R. But so, so worth it.
    * As batshit insane as it was, it's rather depressing to have no idea what insanity the rest of My Inner Life held. Unfortunately, the author has all but vanished from the internet and probably wouldn't cough up information on it even if she was still around. Apparently she considers the fic an Old Shame.
          o Eventually the same will occur to My Immortal, whose insanity ended rather abruptly and there's no way to confirm which of the continuations availiable in the internet is the genuine one.
    * Similarly, one can't help but wonder how the Rose Potter series would have gone, had the author not written himself into so many plot holes.
    * Big Buttocks was a hilarious Inu Yasha fanfiction, parodying the show Big Brother. The site the series was hosted on has not been updated since 2004, so it was more or less abandoned in the third week. And now the link to the site is broken and it is impossible to find the series at all. *sigh*
    * The Open Door by Academy Nut was abrupty declared dead despite its large fanbase on Stardestroyer and FF.net, mostly due to the author losing interest his own own story.
    * But That Was In Another Country, an amazing Kingdom Hearts / Final Fantasy VII AU fanfiction, seems to have fallen by the wayside in the wake of its highly-talented author's disappearance from the internet. All the more heartbreaking because it was "only" one of the best works, so far, of a generally prolific and wryly funny writer.
          o Even the beautiful website for another of her stories has vanished, possibly for lack of maintenance, taking with it an archive of gorgeous fanart.
    * Guardians Of Pokemon, a long-running Pokémon fanfic that gradually suffered more and more Schedule Slip until finally dying a quiet death with a Christmas 2007 special.
    * Not only have Racewing and the Lemonrangers disappeared from the internet, they seem to have taken all their fic with them.
    * Home is one of the most popular stories in the Star Trek section of FF.Net, with well over 5000 reviews and new readers still regularly adding to those reviews. It's also a Dead Fic, with its last update being back in 2009. It's especially sad to see newcomers still begging the author to continue after all this time...

     Film

    * Why did "Manos" The Hands of Fate never get a sequel? Because it was awful and nobody liked it or spent money on it. But cheer up: thanks to MST3K giving it an audience, a fan sequel is now in the works.
    * Any film that was complete, and will therefore never, ever get a sequel:
          o The David Lynch Dune movie.
          o Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
          o Speed Racer.
          o Gladiator.
    * "All it takes is a little...push." That is pretty much the last we'll ever see and hear of Heath Ledger, apart from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
          o What's also terrible is just imagining how awesome his Joker could have been in sequels.
    * The title takes on an extra meaning for fans of early (especially silent) cinema, as 80% of the films from before the 1930's or so have deteriorated or been destroyed. Even some notable directors — such as F.W. Murnau, who made Nosferatu — have had few films survive, leading to a double-whammy of suck for the fanbase, since the creator is long dead AND little of what they made can still be seen. Luckily, the universe sometimes throws 'em a bone through miraculous rediscoveries, like the recent findings of Murnau's Phantom and the complete cut of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
          o Especially films like London After Midnight that don't exist at all anymore, save for production stills.
    * Monty Python Live At The Hollywood Bowl: There won't be any more TV shows and movies either, but there's something sadder about knowing that there will never be an all singing, all dancing, all solo wrestling Python live show again.
    * Watching Poltergeist can make the viewer wonder what would've become of Heather O'Rourke and Dominque Dunne in the last twenty years.
    * Metropolis.
          o And before anyone comes on and says, "No, they've found a complete version!": no, they haven't. They've found a version that's missing only eight very crucial minutes or so, but it's not complete and probably never will be.
                + Strictly speaking, it was a complete version — a badly damaged complete version with those eight minutes being the parts that were too damaged to restore.
    * Name a Chris Farley movie... any of them.
          o Also John Candy... both men were wonderful human beings, lit up the screen like a firecracker and are gone forever.
    * There won't be any sequel to Addams Family Values without Raul Julia.
          o Technically there was, with Tim Curry or someone playing Gomez, but it was a straight-to-video affair that nobody's heard of and those few who have seen consider uninspiring.
    * The Master And Commander movie.
    * Waitress. Writer/director/supporting actress Adrienne Shelley was murdered not long after it was completed.
    * Many people discovered The Film Crew (a Spiritual Successor to MST3K helmed by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy) via Agony Booth. And were swiftly disappointed that the four episodes available on Amazon are the only four there are and are likely to ever be, given that this is what Nelson and crew did before Riff Trax.
    * Steve Gordon made a smash hit feature film writing and directing debut with Arthur, a marvelous romantic comedy with some of the best work Dudley Moore and John Gielgud ever did. And then he suddenly died soon afterward, leaving us to wonder what else he might have done.
    * Diane Thomas was killed in a car crash shortly after agreeing to write a sequel to her first screenplay Romancing the Stone. The studio went ahead with the sequel and created The Jewel of the Nile, a film so bad that my college screenwriting professor made a final exam out of pointing out all the flaws in it.
    * Wonder what delightful films Thelma Todd would have gone on to make if she hadn't died at the age of 30 in 1935? Also Jean Harlow, who was even younger.
    * Watching The Crow is always bittersweet because we'll never see what Brandon Lee could've done.
    * Anyone else wonder what sort of over-the-top Xanatos Robbery scam we missed out on for Ocean's Fourteen?
    * James Dean; look at the powerful performances he turned in for his three starring roles, and wonder what could have been had he lived as long as contemporary Marlon Brando.
    * An in-universe example occurs in Toy Story 2, when Woody learns of the cancellation of Woody's Roundup.
    * Caligula, believe it or not. What was meant to be a vicious eff you to consumerism by means of comparison to Roman debauchery, and a whole lotta other good dramatic stuff, was utterly bastardized through Executive Meddling at Bob Guccione's hands.
    * "Game of Death" (as it was originally intended) and anything else that Bruce Lee might have done.
    * Judy Garland may be one of the most tragic cases of this: She was a wonderfully talented actress and a beyond-brilliant singer, with some of Hollywood's most famous numbers ("Over the Rainbow", natch, but also "The Trolley Song" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "The Man That Got Away", and "I Could Go On Singing") to her name. Unfortunately, years of abuse heaped on her at MGM for her ugly-duckling appearance gave way to lifelong self-esteem, drug, and alcohol issues, and just as she was seeing a second rise in popularity, she died. There's very little chance of the film industry ever seeing someone like her again.
    * For that matter, lavish Hollywood musicals in general may be Lostalgia; there's just no market for them anymore.
          o Before Pirates of the Caribbean, how far back do you have to go for the last pirate movie? Fifty years? They were popular at one point.
                + 16 years. Cutthroat Island
    * Speaking of genres without a market anymore, The Western, full stop. Deconstructions still get made (and sometimes strike it big in newer media) but only very, very infrequently. Applies even more so with classic, non-Deconstructed Westerns, which don't get made at all.
          o A good one recently was made, True Grit. The door is open...
    * H.B Haliki, the man that gave us the original Gone in Sixty Seconds. No, it wasn't just that 2000 remake Nicolas Cage. The original was an independent film made in 1974 on a shoestring budget, and it's one of the best 70s car flicks ever. He also made The Junkman and Deadline Auto Theft, but in 1983, while filming the now unfinished Gone in Sixty Seconds 2, a stunt sequence malfunctioned and he was crushed by a water tower.
    * Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith, a popular actress in 70s exploitation films such as Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural, Revenge of the Cheerleaders and Massacre at Central High. Her career lasted for only about five years, before a heroin addiction took over her life. There's a definite What Could Have Been aspect, as she was talented and was able to land some more mainstream roles, and with a proper starring role could have established a solid career. As with Candice Rialson, some of her choices in roles (Laserblast and the X-rated musical version of Cinderella) probably damaged her ability to land parts in later films. As it is, she only has 30 or so film appearances, many of them only bit parts (the back of her head in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid), and several of them decidedly on the trashy side of film.
          o We can add Judith Barsi of The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven fame, murdered by her father in 1988.
    * Shock Treatment, the sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show generated more Lostalgia than it cured. Most fans returned to the original without a second glance.

     Literature

    * John Keats was already one of the greatest poets in the English language by the time he was 24. He was dead by the time he was 25. Most writers produce their best work late in life, and he was already in work on several pieces with the potential to be classics. His fans like to speculate that he could have eventually surpassed Shakespeare himself, but, y'know, the dead thing was a big impediment to that.
    * Piers Anthony had a book called Mute which created an entire well-defined and intriguing universe, with complex characters and hinted-at half-revealed Xanatos Gambits, ended it on an unresolved plot Cliff Hanger... and then dropped it. Word Of God is that he's not going to pick it up again, ever.
    * The death of Philip José Farmer means there will be no more Riverworld, World of Tiers, or the Dungeon stories.
    * Hiero's Journey and The Unforsaken Hiero. Even though it was quite clear that Sterling Lanier was never going to finish the story (He quit writing in 1983 — The Unforsaken Hiero was one of his last novels) there was a faint hope that he'd either change his mind or pass it on to someone else until he died in 2007.
    * The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series ran many laps around the track but Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency ran to just two and a half books before Douglas Adams died, taking his modern day Sherlock Holmes, his grouchy secretary, Way Forward Technologies, The Alleged Car and Mr. 'Odwin' with him. It's really sad to read the fragments of an unfinished/barely started book in The Salmon of Doubt anthology, to recognise the classic Adams' style and little moments of genius, and have the story stop just as it's getting interesting.
    * Robert Asprin due to writer's block, an extended legal battle with the IRS and now death. Though coauthor Jody Lynn Nye continues his works, they just aren't the same...
    * After an amazing twenty book series, the Aubreyad ended with author Patrick O'Brian's death. The unfinished 21st book has since been published, but the long countdown to the end of the series and then being left without a proper ending is excruciating.
    * Balzac's La Comédie humaine, A massive series of novels about day to day life in post-Napoleon France, all interlocking. Sure, he completed 95 volumes of it, but a whopping 48(!!!) remain unfinished, a few of them are only titles. It's like a whole fictional second life, and one can only wonder what could have been.
    * Humor columnist and non-fiction humor writer Lewis Grizzard. He died a year and a half into Bill Clinton's first term, and it was WAY too soon. Who knows what he would have written about the Lewinsky scandal, the War on Terror, Lady Gaga, etc. And the most tragic thing is that he never got around to writing a pure fiction novel, which was one thing he said was on his bucket list.
    * Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry, AKA Katherine Mansfield, with most of her work published posthumously.
    * Once upon a time there was a guy named Phil Farrand. He wrote five Nitpicker's Guide books about Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and The X-Files. Too bad the publishers got scared that they'd get in trouble (even though commentary can't be called copyright infringement, and they never got sued even once) that they pulled the plug on the Star Wars book and all further Guides. Five books, that's all there is. At least we still have the forums at nitcentral.com.
    * Stieg Larsson and his Millennium Trilogy, due to Author Existence Failure before they were published.
    * J. R. R. Tolkien, several of whose works were completed/published posthumously.
    * Same goes for his sc-fi counterpart Frank Herbert. Sure we got sequels/prequels on his Dune novels "based on found notes". But one can only wonder what Frank himself had really planned for the ending of his saga.
    * Did you enjoy reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath? Good, because it's the first and only novel you will ever get to read by her. She committed suicide in her apartment in 1963.
    * A Confederacy Of Dunces is a hilarious and tremendously compelling book, with a highly colorful look at New Orleans in the 1960s and an astounding creativity at all kinds of different subplots bouncing off each other in a more and more complex manner, until the whole book becomes one big clockwork joke. It even won the Pulitzer Prize, something very rare for a comedy. Alas, its author John Kennedy Toole had long since taken his own life by the time it was even published.
    * A Song of Ice and Fire can tow the line on this for fans new to the series (old hands who've followed the books since the beginning have a different name for it). They buy one book, become enraptured, buy the remaining three, devour them utterly, then cast about for the popular and totally available next installment...only to find that that the most recent book was released six years ago. No book stores have an expected release date, and your friends and internet news sources only have rumors and hearsay for you. Probably the most reliable source would be the author's own website, but even that has a Zeno's Paradox of completion status (90% done, 95% done, 98%, 99%, 99.5%, etc.), leading the casual fan to believe that he treats his books the same way you treat that one biology essay you won't want to work on, meaning that even though the periodic status updates on the website technically mean that the series isn't dead, but to you, it might as well be.
          o Finally brought to a halt by a final release date of July 2011, for certain this time. However, once that's come and gone, the situation comes right back for the remaining two books. We have no way of knowing whether the time will be shortened or yet another six years waiting.
    * The Bronte sisters as a whole. Charlotte and Emily were just getting started, and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are two of the great novels of British literature.
    * It's possible - possible - that Geoffrey Chaucer never meant to ever finish The Canterbury Tales. But the fact that what we have was supposed to be one-fourth of the completed tales - it makes English scholars turn down their glasses in remembrance.
    * When one considers that homo sapiens have been a recognizable species for about 200,000 years, a recognizable society began to develop about 50,000 years ago, and civilization as we know it started about 10,000 years ago, the 5,000 year old Epic of Gilgamesh is highly unlikely to be the first epic tale of its kind. It makes one wonder how many incredible stories, some possibly better than Gilgamesh, have been lost completely.
    * The Sumerian creation myth - the oldest recorded work we have, dating around the 1600s BC - has a missing piece, and it's pretty much impossible that we will ever know what it said.
    * Bridge Of Birds was supposed to be the first of a series of seven Master Li and Number Ten Ox novels. We've got The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen, but the rest of the series is never going to happen now.

     Live Action TV

    * Firefly. The first season was brilliant and left a lot of story threads hanging. The comics are doing a pretty decent job of filling in the gaps and loose threads, but there hasn't been anything post-movie yet, just stuff in the gap between the show and film (except the excellent one-off written by Patton Oswalt, taking place at Wash's wake).
    * Chappelle's Show.
    * This Is Wonderland, a brilliant Canadian legal dramedy, ran for three seasons, and ended on three concurrent cliffhangers. What a drag.
    * Anyone who finds out about The Young Ones now and decides to watch a few episodes and become hooked will be horrified to learn they only made twelve episodes before killing off the entire cast.
          o Which didn't stop them coming "back from the dead" to record the 1986 Comic Relief cover of "Living Doll" with Cliff Richard and its accompanying comedy sketch B-side.
    * Freaks and Geeks has a Spiritual Successor to the "Freaks" side, or several (every movie Judd Apatow has done in the past five years...) but the "Geeks" side hasn't really been touched since.
    * Carnivàle.
    * Popular, complete with unresolvable cliffhanger ending.
    * Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. How can there be just 13 episodes?
          o This can be said for any Doctor, which is why it pains me to watch The Caves of Androzani and wonder what another season with Five would've been like.
          o Or how glorious UTTERLY TERRIFYING the Tennant/Moffat season would've been.
          o Think how sad it is for those of us who liked the Eighth Doctor, but only have the So Bad It's Good TV movie! Sure, there are the non-canonical audiobooks and Expanded Universe novels, but there will never be any more Paul McGann Doctor being awesome onscreen.
          o All those lost episodes starring William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton...
          o A fourth season of Sylvester McCoy after the brilliance of "The Curse of Fenric" "Ghost Light" and the previous season's "Remembrance of the Daleks"!
          o Colin Baker is a damn fine actor, but he rarely got a chance to show it during his run. Perhaps that unfilmed second season (which was trashed in favor of the "Trial of a Time Lord" arc) would've fixed that.
          o Shada! (I don't care that it was done as an audio with Paul McGann, I want a finished Tom Baker version, dammit!)
          o Obviously occurred in the 16 years between the cancellation and the revival.
                + David Tennant himself got a case of this on his final appearance.
    * The Sarah Jane Adventures, for tragic reasons. Perhaps they could spinoff the spinoff, but no one can replace Lis Sladen.
    * Wonderfalls.
    * Oh God, The X-Files. You watch the excellent early seasons, but you know that the entire Mytharc is going to unravel, showing you firsthand where the term The Chris Carter Effect came from. That's worse than early cancellation.
          o Or finding you really liked The Lone Gunmen, and realizing what a hideously bad episode was used to write them out with so many questions either unanswered or answered in the dumbest way possible.
    * Dark Angel ended after only 2 seasons with a Cliff Hanger.
    * Star Trek.
          o All the props and costumes from all the series have now been sold off, making it highly unlikely that any Star Trek series will ever air weekly again, at least set in the original continuity. * hic*
          o Oh, man. Especially the original Star Trek: you see the original Star Trek, and wonder what might have been if the effects had been up to their storytelling abilities, and then you see the movies, in which they are. The first movie doesn't even count, and so you get five, only five. The ride needed to continue much longer. Who cares if the cast was getting older, there's this thing called "hair dye!"
                + Of course, Star Trek: The Next Generation only had one truly awesome movie, First Contact, but... we only got to see the sweet new Enterprise-E three times. We probably won't see it again.
    * We can officially add the Stargate Verse to this list now... Due to the failure of Stargate Universe to find a large enough audience (Which we can largely attribute to Syfy's decision to air beginning in the fall, up against the big networks, and push SGU to the back burner in favor of Wrestling) and MGM's financial woes, it's extremely unlikely that a new series will be created, and the Direct-to-DVD movies planned for Atlantis and SG-1 are now shelved. Brad Wright has even admitted that their attempts to get a wrap-up movie for Stargate Universe have already fallen through. The sets still exist for the moment, but unless MGM gets back on its feet soon, they may be destroyed or sold off before anyone can revive the franchise.
    * Johnny Carson and Tom Snyder.
    * Lars von Trier's "Riget". After the deaths of two of the actors, the planned third part of the series never got to see the light of day. It's sad because the show ends on a huge cliffhanger and we never got any resolution to the major plot points at all.
    * Anyone getting into The Wire now will feel this, as evidenced by the friends I've lent the series to. On the plus side, the ending is satisfying in the way it wraps up the series, and creator David Simon has outright stated that a sixth season would have sucked.
    * Now And Again, cliffhanger ending after one season.
    * Several episodes of Police, Camera, Action!, which never or rarely get aired - mainly Helicops (1995, not the 2007 one which is unrelated!), Don't Look Back In Anger (very much like Top Gear in a way, only more Retraux), Learning the Hard Way, Danger Ahead, and The Fords / Ford (of which is rarely ever aired). ITV tend to air episodes of this show Out Of Order.
    * Odyssey 5. It will never, ever be okay that the show ended where it did.
    * Twin Peaks, especially with the unresolved cliffhanger, sudden cancellation, and general mindscrewyness of the season's latter half (and a good deal before).
    * Dracula: The Series.
    * Pushing Daisies.
    * American Gothic.
    * Profit could be the poster child for this. Due to its very brief run, it didn't even really have a cult following when it ran in 1996. By the time most people became aware of the series, during its release on DVD, it was so long after its production that a revival was impossible. Add to that the fact that David Greenwalt said that the very last episode (arguably the best) was the episode where they finally figured out the show's tone.
    * Moonlight. A witty, sleek, fun take on the Vampire Detective Series, with great characters and occasionally excellent writing. Canceled in its first season, just as it was really getting steam creatively (it didn't need help ratings-wise, which makes its cancellation a real head-scratcher) and just as Twilight, and vampires of all shapes, became huge. CBS must be kicking themselves. At least they managed to provide some closure for the Official Couple in the last episode, if not for anything else.
    * Both hour-long live-action drama series produced for Cartoon Network, Unnatural History and Tower Prep (Officially, History is cancelled and Toweris only in Development Hell, but I wouldn't hold my breath.) Both were incredibly well received, both hinted that their incredible first seasons were only a small amount of what they were planning to do, and both were hamstrung after 13 episodes.
    * Quantum Leap. I watched it a bit during its original run (although I was five or six at the time), but I really got into it in 1999, when Sci Fi Channel showed it in reruns every weekday afternoon. The last fifteen seconds of the finale crushed me, though, when it was revealed that Sam never returned home. (And supposedly they were gonna fix it with a Sci Fi Channel movie in 2002, but sadly that never happened; and Bakula and Stockwell have since moved on to other things anyway.)
          o There was rumour about a revival series with either Bakula and Stockwell or a new cast (no, no, no) a year or so later but I don't think there was any substance to that.
    * American Dreams. Bloody cliffhanger endings.
    * The cool '60s retro Crime Story second season ended on a cliffhanger, like it did the first season - but never came back. If the head bad guy and his flunky survived a nuclear explosion, they should've survived a plane crash at sea.
    * Black Adder. Lousy British Brevity.
    * In the same vein, Fawlty Towers had only thirteen episodes, still worth watching and repeating since 1975. On the bright side, at least it doesn't suffer Seasonal Rot.
    * No more The West Wing. Ever. Why, cruel world?? Whyyyyyyyy?????
    * The Sarah Connor Chronicles ended on a an awesome cliffhanger, never to be resolved.
    * The 4400 had such potential to continue onwards, the cliffhanger was almost sinister.
    * Veronica Mars.
    * Arrested Development. There is a movie that keeps swinging back and forth from "it's really happening!" to "back in Development Hell."
    * Journeyman. One half-season, and not even any kind of cult following. It's a shame.
    * Whenever creators talk about filming vast amounts of material for a show and then having to cut it all down to just a few or even one hour of television, and then only release fifteen or twenty minutes of extra footage on the DVD, one can't help but wonder how many great moments almost but didn't quite make the cut.
    * Reaper
    * The Inspector Lynley Mysteries was canceled abruptly after only 23 episodes with absolutely no resolution. This sucks. Granted, there were six seasons, but still! Goodbye, Barbara Havers... *sniff*
    * For all its faults, the BBC Robin Hood was pretty damn awesome, but Marian, Jaq, and Alan leaving spelled the beginning of the end, and mid-way through season 3 it's cancelled and an obvious hackjob ending is slapped together for 'closure' on the Robin Hood tale. Blagh. At least we got to see some of the finest hamming since BRIAN BLESSED. Keith Allen and Brian Blessed must now be protagonist/antagonist of a long-running series, oh yes.
    * Kyle XY ended season 3 with the realization that Kyle has a Long Lost Sibling, and he kills a bunch of his clones. Did I mention there is no fourth season?
    * The Black Donnellys. It was doomed from early in its only season after one episode was too violent to even be aired on TV (it was only released on NBC's website) and shortly afterward pulled from its primetime slot and aired as a web series for the rest of its all too brief run. It ends on a major cliffhanger with many dangling plot threads and the central question (exactly what the cops want to know from Joey "Ice Cream" completely unanswered, or in this case, as it's a question, unasked)! It aired on NBC. If it were on HBO or something, it would probably still be around. There's also no way it can be brought back from the dead since the lead actress is best known for her current role as "Thirteen" on House...
    * Skins's model of replacing the cast with a new generation every two years can easily result in this. After Gen1 it was "No more Sid or Cassie!"; after Gen2 "No more Naomily!"
    * Brimstone: John Glover as the Devil. Teri Polo was pretty hot, too. At least the last episode sorta kinda not really wrapped up *one* plotline ... a little.
    * Once upon a time there was a show called Space Cases starring the original Black Ranger and a very young Kaylee (long before Firefly). It was a kids show but it had a plot somewhere between Star Trek: Voyager and Farscape, it had two seasons and that was it...
    * Flash Forward - with only one season, it was never really given a chance to prove itself, so now the screwed-over viewers are left to wonder what may have been, what D. Gibbons' wall of crazy said, and why 2016 meant "The End".
    * Life on Mars (UK version): Two seasons, and that's your lot. Still, it was always excellent and wrapped up well.
    * The Dutch TV Series Pension Hommeles and Ja Zuster Nee Zuster from the late 50s launched (or reinforced) the career of many Dutch singer/actors. The songs were written by Annie M.G. Schmidt and several amongst them are considered to be classics. Unfortunately most of the original tapes of the series were lost in the intervening decades, and the first episodes of Pension Hommeles were broadcast live so there were never tapes of it in the first place.
    * Missing went "missing" after only three seasons.
    * The version of Zorro filmed in the early 90s ended on a major cliffhanger.
    * Outcasts. Ended on such a tantalizing cliffhanger - and was then cancelled by the BBC due to poor ratings. Unless some other sci-fi channel renews it, it's unlikely we'll see another season.
    * Any series such as Super Sentai, Power Rangers or Kamen Rider that yearly replaces its cast - you get your one year of a show, a couple of movies (for Rider and Sentai) and then that's it gone. While there's always another series next year, it won't feature any of the same characters and will have its own different plot.
    * Rock And Chips, the prequel to Only Fools And Horses, would presumably have continued up to the death of central character Joanie Trotter, had it not been for John Sullivan's sudden Author Existence Failure.
    * Keen Eddie only got thirteen episodes, and only a handful were aired before it was canceled. Watching the rest of the episodes, especially the last, shows they were building up to something, and while there thankfully wasn't a cliffhanger, none of the character-arcs were even kinda resolved.

     Music

    * Nirvana. For all their success and influence, they released only three albums before Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994. To this day, people wonder how rock music would have progressed in the '90s had Kurt been around for it.
          o Perhaps Lostalgia is behind the excitement about the 'Them Crooked Vultures' supergroup of Dave Grohl, plus Josh Homme and John Paul Jones. It seems to be the answer to a lot of fans secret wishes: Nirvana fans have Grohl back behind the drums behind a worthy guitarist (excepting the brief touring stint with QOTSA). Or as the NME says; "He hasn't had anyone good enough to rub against since the bastard shot himself". All that Homme-Lostalgia for the days of Kyuss and QOTSA before he fired bassist Nick Oliveri is being partly relieved. And of course everyone gets to see a quarter of Led Zeppelin back in action.
    * The Smiths remain one of the greatest bands, if not the greatest band, of The Eighties. In an era when a lot of the music back then was cheesy at best, Morrissey, Marr, Joyce, and Rourke defied and deconstructed many of the stereotypes that befell their contemporaries. They sang songs about loneliness and despair, either seriously or with a sense of humor, that remain timeless to this day. It's bad enough that the band only existed for five years and broke up after releasing four albums. It's even worse when a court battle over money did nothing but ensure that there will NEVER be a Smiths reunion.
          o Hell man, 80's college rock in general. I'll never see Wall of Voodoo live, much less Minutemen.
          o The fandom seems to be pretty much split between this and "they released an album that was actually good and then broke up."
          o Minutemen being an excellent example: A band from the early '80's who don't look dated at all, who play hyperactive punk/jazz fusion, predate The Pixies and Nirvana but have a similar sense of humour, who remained cool enough to provide the theme tune to an MTV series about idiots trying to kill themselves nearly two decades later. Now that sounds like an awesome band. Shame their front man died in a van crash in 1985.
          o Two albums, and Jeff Mangum goes into seclusion after the most genius one. Its pretty sad.
    * Tupac Shakur. One of the greatest and most influential rappers of the '90s, gunned down in his prime on the Vegas Strip after releasing five albums. The worst part is the enormous black cloud hanging over his murder and the subsequent investigation. Although his death was most certainly connected to the East Coast vs. West Coast gangsta rap rivalry, nobody has figured out who killed him (although fingers have been pointed in every direction).
          o The exact same thing can be said of The Notorious B.I.G. Hailed as one of the greatest rappers of all time, he was killed as a result of the aforementioned East/West rivalry two weeks before his second album (titled Life After Death) was set to be released. (Two more albums of unreleased material were put out in the following years.) Once again, nobody knows who did it.
    * Guns N' Roses. No, not that Guns N' Roses. Seeing Axl's opinions on a reunion makes it even worse.
    * Back to Black, perhaps one of the best albums of the decade, was the last we'll hear of Amy Winehouse. She was working on her third album when she died in 2011.
    * Oingo Boingo. Possibly one of the coolest (and strangest!) rock groups to ever exist, and they don't exist anymore outside of an utter abortion of a cover of Only a Lad in Guitar Hero Rocks The 80s and the occasional appearance of their songs on other games.
          o At least band frontman Danny Elfman has a career in the film industry. ''Boys and girls of every age...''
                + Sadly, that has pretty much killed any hopes of a reunion tour— Elfman has noted in interviews that his hearing is somewhat damaged from the touring days and he's concerned that a new tour might damage his ears enough to hamper his composing career.
    * There is nothing... nothing... more painful than getting into Pixies a few months after their reunion tour ended.
    * Robert Johnson. Only recorded 29 songs in his lifetime before dying at 27. Even with this small catalog he's proven skilled enough to inspire a large number of musicians.
          o Also other blues musicians like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Boy Fuller.
    * In a similar note, Washington Phillips recorded 16 (surviving) songs during the late 20s, pioneering modern gospel music, and then went back to being a preacher during the Depression, never to record again.
    * Michael Jackson's musical career was already beginning to seem like it might be a case of this in the 21st century, but unless some posthumous recordings are released, it's quite official now.
          o And now we're going to be getting some posthumous material—an album, Michael, full of previously unreleased material, is coming out in December 2010. And a few other works honoring Michael's legacy.
    * The Sex Pistols, who popularized punk rock, and who only managed to record a single album (on which the band's best-known member didn't even play a single note) before collapsing under their own self-loathing. Sure, they've toured on and off since 1996, but they've never gotten around to recording any new material in all that time.
    * For creators of Punk Rock itself, The Ramones. Even more with most of the band dying (only the drummers and the substitute bassist are alive).
    * And completing the trifecta, The Clash.
    * Just as Queen were beginning to get a footing again in America with creative albums like The Miracle and Innuendo, Freddie Mercury passes away from AIDS. Queen, as we knew them, can never be again.
    * Same holds true for Pink Floyd, with the deaths of Richard Wright and Syd Barrett, and the often rocky relationship of David Gilmour and Roger Waters, though at least they seemed to make it up at least long enough to do a show at Live 8.
          o And said show was so phenomenal that it just made the Lostalgia even worse.
    * Kirsty Maccoll. It was my birthday...
    * The Normal are best known for the creepy, ahead-of-it's-time, oft-covered and anthologized proto-synth pop song "Warm Leatherette". Unfortunately, if you really like that song, there's only one other Normal song, "TVOD", which was originally its A-side. There's also The Silicon Teens, who, like The Normal, are also an alias for Daniel Miller: They put out one album consisting of intentionally synthesizeritis infected oldies covers with a few originals mixed in. Beyond that, Miller has primarily stuck with producing, remixing, and occasionally being credited for synthesizer or programming on other people's albums.
    * Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, members of the Wailers. Bob died of cancer a year after releasing one of the best albums of his career, and Peter was shot just a few weeks his first album in four years. Bunny Wailer, the sole surviving member of The Wailers, also warrants lostalgia due to an obvious Creator Breakdown leading to him producing unlistenable homophobic dancehall for the past decade.
    * Joy Division only produced two albums before lead singer Ian Curtis killed himself.
    * Woodstock in general. Watch the movie and listen to the LP eight million times and wish you could be there...
          o Made worse by both Woodstock '94, which teased us by restoring the spirit of the original to some degree, and then the disaster that was Woodstock '99, which crushed any hope of restoring that spirit...
    * People still ask about when the next DC Talk CD is coming out, even though Toby Mac is flying high with his new band, Michael Tait had a respectable solo career before becoming the lead singer of the Newsboys, and Kevin Max released three full-length albums, two E Ps, and several other side projects, with a new full length album due out in May of 2010.
    * "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" Napoleon XIV made an entire album with this type of song. Nap now runs an entertainment business, and, while it has been said that he still writes songs, any chance of him releasing another album is gone into the ether. He had tried to get another album published; another of those questionably tasteful yet, by god, effectual songs. Apparently, no one wanted him to.
    * Sublime. Just... Sublime. First major studio release, and then the lead singer dies of a heroin overdose.
          o This has lead to a lot of fighting between the band and Bradley Nowell's family: The family don't want them to tour under their own name, while the band wants to finally be able to play for the fans they got from their hits. They've compromised, touring as "Sublime and Rome," named after their new singer.
    * Randy Rhoads. Two full length albums of great guitar work, a live album thats even better and.... nothing more, aside from whatever Quiet Riot stuff they can scrounge up, but even then Randy was still rising when he died in 1982. Hell, there's hardly any decent live footage, with only one really pro shot video of four songs... and is focused on the bassist during the guitar solos.
    * The original Black Sabbath. Ozzy can barely breathe and Bill Ward's too old to hammer the skins like he used to. Even Tony and Geezer have moved on to reunite Dio and Vinny Appice, a reunion which may actually have reversed this trope for people who never thought Dio-Sabbath would play again, let alone with new songs and setlists devoted entirely to Dio-fronted material.
          o Worse, Dio's dead now.
    * Aaliyah. Prior to her untimely death she was looking poised to become an even bigger star than she was, and had a few choice movie roles lined up.
    * All too common among fans of emo, in the original definition of the term, not the bastardization that gave rise to Emo Teens. The early and mid-'90s were full of bands in the scene that only lasted a year or two and often didn't even release a full album, just a series of singles, splits and compilation tracks. So you might discover a band that had ten absolutely amazing songs, but those are also the only ten songs they ever made. And they broke up years ago and you will never see them. Bit of a downer.
          o Perhaps the best example of this is the band September. They released a ten-inch record (now long out of print) often considered one of the best records of the style after they broke up. They also had a song on an also out of print compilation. A grand total of five songs, all amazing. They also played a whopping two shows during their existence. That's it.
    * Nick Drake. Released three albums of beautiful immaculately arranged sensitive song-writing before dying of an overdose of amitriptyline.
    * The Stone Roses, who made a great album, a good compilation and a good album (yes, I know some people hate Second Coming - I don't), then broke up. My Bloody Valentine, who recorded 1 album and 2 EPs that were good (Isn't Anything, Feed Me With Your Kiss and You Made Me Realise), 1 album and 2 EPs that were liquid awesome (Loveless, Glider, Tremolo) and then went on a long hiatus, would have counted between 1991-2009, but thankfully enough they reformed.
    * Do you love The Who? Were you born after 1978 or a few years before? Then you know the pain of having watched videos of Keith Moon in all his awesomeness and knowing you'll never see him live. The same goes for John Entwistle if you got into them in the past few years.
          o And now Roger Daltrey says Pete's hearing is so blasted from decades of high-volume performances that he had to nearly sit on an amp during the recording of Endless Wire to hear anything, making another album or tour highly unlikely.
    * The Velvet Underground. Wouldn't it have been awesome if they had done at least one more album while John Cale was still with them? Or if the friction between Cale and Lou Reed hadn't resurfaced just before taking their 1993 reunion tour to North America? Or if Sterling Morrison were still alive so that more VU projects could have come up in some form over the past fifteen years?
    * The Kovenant, who have kept their fans waiting for a new album for seven years now, and they aren't even broken up.
          o Likewise for the similarly named Covenant, who has been silent since Skyshaper(2006).
                + They have an upcoming album, Modern Ruin, although it's been delayed by label issues.
    * Many Five Iron Frenzy fans became fans near the end of their career and have been begging for a reunion ever since.
    * Even extremely modern bands can fall into this. The Receiving End of Sirens formed in 2003, released two acclaimed but nearly-unknown albums, and broke up a few years later.
    * The Runaways. After the death of drummer Sandy West, there is very little chance of the girls rocking again.
    * The Beatles. Two of them are dead, it's safe to say the studio vaults have been exhausted, and it's obvious that Paul or Ringo don't have any more Abbey Roads up their sleeves. One could argue that they had no more worlds left to conquer, but who's to say for sure?
          o Well, there are two elusive songs: "Carnival of Light", which Paul does have a copy of, and "Now and Then", a John Lennon song The Threetles overdubbed for Anthology 3 but was scrapped. Other than that, The Beatles are pretty much gone.
    * Brian Jones. If he had lived and mended fences with the other Rolling Stones, they would have probably gone in a more creative direction than the by-the-numbers blues-rock they make today.
    * So many jazz artists who died too soon—where do you stop? You can start with Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Billie Holliday.
    * The Seattle punk-revival band The Exploding Hearts only released one album before most of the band died in a rollover accident.
    * Whatever happened to The Fitness? (Seattle-based neo-New Wave band, unheard from since 2003)
    * Another "whatever happened to": Josefine Garline, a nearly-forgotten Scandanavian Europop One Album Artist. Produced only one album, Young Generation, and one single of the same name. And it's expensive and difficult to find nowadays.
    * Frank Zappa. 'Nuff said The man's take on music was just... awe-inspiring. And yet he died in '94 from testicular cancer.
    * Jellyfish, a highly influential power-pop/Beatlesque band of theNineties, puts out two moderate selling, Sgt. Pepper-like Cult Classic masterpiece albums, and a selection of soundtrack songs, live cover versions and demos, most to all of which were released on the boxed set Fan Club, before breaking up after four years. Their sunny, singalong pop could not compete with the grunge or angst-rock made popular at the time. The lead singer/drummer Andy Sturmer largely faded from the spotlight, which he was never really comfy with, while other ex-members make solo albums and group projects largely available as expensive imports in Japan.
    * Genesis, after more than a decade in hiatus and speculation, finally goes on a farewell/reunion/whatever tour following a botched reunion with Steve Hackett and Peter Gabriel, and Phil Collins suffers nerve damage from sitting in a dangerous position while playing the drums, leaving him currently unable to play drums or piano for the time being (in not forever). With Collins' injuries, Gabriel's busy schedule (and/or disinterest) and the poor reception afforded Ray Wilson, it is somewhat unlikely Genesis will ever return in any shape or form, not for a while, anyway.
    * Sufficient Lostalgia is felt over the deaths of notable 18th, 19th, and 20th century composers (such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Gustav Mahler) that scholars have actually written "performing versions" or "realisations" of the sketches they left incomplete at their deaths: each one has remnants of a 10th Symphony that was picked up in the twentieth century and "completed", for instance. And then there are the planned works of which not even sketches were left — for example, Beethoven's last string quartet, written the year before his death, might have been conceived as the first in a series of three. What would the other two have been like? We have no idea. He died. Lostalgia tends to hit musicologists hard.
    * Yet another lost One Hit Wonder: Ashley Jade, whose only major hit was a cover of Baby D's "Let Me Be Your Fantasy", only produced one album, Dreaming, before falling off the face of the earth.
    * Type O Negative, due to the recent loss of Peter Steele.
    * The Adventures Of Duane And Brand O. They released one album together, LP of Devastation. Then they went their separate ways. They both are working solo now, but Brando's lyrics aren't as strong as Duane's, while Duane is not as effective without Brando's awesome musicianship, not to mention working without someone to trade lyrics with (compare Mega Man II to the stage themes from Mega Man 6). Together, they were much more than the sum of their parts.
    * Jeff Buckley - He's released one awesome album, was just becoming great, then suddenly drowned. At least the posthumous album was a double, but you have to wonder what else would have come from him.
    * New Radicals - A huge hit in 1999 with You Get What You Give, a modestly successful follow up single Someday We'll Know and a bestselling album in Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too was all the public heard from this band. Although singer Gregg Alexander went on to write for other artists, he has no interest in reforming his band because he hated touring and doing promotion. The band's popularity is still very high despite this one album - to the point where over a decade after the band's break up the official forum for the band still gets regular posts (though these mainly concern what the other band members are doing now).
    * Mother Love Bone - Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose just as they were about to make the big time. On the bright side, we did get Pearl Jam instead, but MLB had a completely different sound.
    * Country Music singer Cyndi Thomson is a double-subversion. She walked away from her recording contract after only one album (and one big hit, "What I Really Meant to Say") because she didn't think she could handle the stress of a second album. Several years later, she returned to the label, but never released any new material and was quickly dropped again.
    * Hank Williams and Patsy Cline are also two big examples of this in country music. They died at 29 and 30, respectively.
    * Laserdance, along with most other space-synthpop. They briefly returned in 2000, releasing the Strikes Back album, but retired permanently afterwards. Former co-producer Michiel van der Kuy produced two albums with Rob van Elijk under the alias Area 51 before disappearing once again. According to this, however, he's working on a new album under his Rygar alias.
    * Ulver, a Norwegian experimental band, has their "Black Metal Trilogy", considered some of the best black metal ever. Too bad they have said that "Ulver is obviously not a black metal band and does not wish to be stigmatized as such...We are proud of our former instincts, but wish to liken our association with said genre to that of the snake with Eve."
    * Jimi Hendrix.
    * Duane Allman and Berry Oakley from The Allman Brothers Band.
    * Independent trance artist/DJ Dejin, from Snohomish County, Washington, released but one album, As You Dream (available exclusively from http://www.nrgmusic.com/ ) in 2001, and then disappeared back into the shadows where he came from.
          o Ditto for Alex Arestegui and his sole album, Proem. He released one single after, Discover, but was never heard from again.
    * Selena. The "Queen of Tejano music" was ready to crossover from Spanish to English and had a budding acting career by the time she performed to 66,746 fans in the Astrodome. That all ended when when she was gunned down by her ex-fan club president two weeks shy of her 24 birthday.
    * Industrial band Xorcist mysteriously dropped off the radar after 2000's Insects and Angels. Worse, their previous albums are all out of print and can be difficult to obtain(the site with the free mp3s of their songs shut down).
    * Trance brothers Transa, after many singles such as "Prophase", "Supernova", "Nightstalker", etc., released a two-disc album in 2002, but called it quits afterwards, probably because Dave Webster had a son to take care of.
    * Binary Finary, famous for "1998", was on hiatus for a long time due to disagreements between members. They released the download-only compilation The Lost Tracks in 2006, then disappeared for good.
    * Nightwish without Tarja. Anette's voice is fine, but still.
    * David Bowie fans — especially newbies — feel this as he hasn't released a new album or toured since 2004, only making a few (mostly One-Scene Wonder) appearances here and there. His last live performance and his last message to fans (via his website) were in 2006. He hasn't formally announced his retirement and from all indications appears to be healthy since the '04 heart attack that ended his Reality Tour. But between each passing rumor of a new album or tour failing to pan out and him not getting any younger (he's in his mid-60s) the hopes that he will return grow slimmer and slimmer, and having granted no interviews in years, he's officially become a Reclusive Artist.
    * Sparklehorse. Mark Linkous is dead, meaning he will no longer be writing any more mostly incomprehensible yet oddly poetic song lyrics, and we will never hear odd, but beautifully relaxing songs like Sunshine again.
    * Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. Three pioneers of rock and roll, and all lost at the same time. The Day the Music Died indeed.
    * Nailbomb. One studio album, one live album then they deliberately made the decision to quit while they were ahead. The live album was even called "Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide"
    * When Trent Reznor announced that Nine Inch Nails would stop touring indefinitely, many fans got hit with this, as most of NI Ns fame was due to their extremely energetic and complex live shows.
    * Kandystand, an up-and-coming retraux-Eurodance duo, unfortunately disbanded due to some sort of tiff/dispute between the two members.
    * Haji's Kitchen was one of the most unique and interesting bands of the early 90s - a crazy fusion of grunge and groove metal, replete with Alice in Chains-esque vocals and the added bottom end of 7 string guitars. Their lead guitarist could shred like crazy. Due to problems with their label, only 3,000 copies of their CD were made - and sold out quickly. Copies of the CD go for over $100 when they can even be found. While their songs are available online and they have recently played some reunion shows, a full resurrection of the band seems unlikely.
    * Trance master Vincent de Moor's last original release, Mystique Colors, was in 2006; the only stuff he's put out since then are remixes of older material.
    * Deee-Lite, who released their debut LP "World Clique", had one stratospherically popular hit in "Groove Is In The Heart", released a worthy follow-up album called "Infinity Within" that got next to no promotion because their label, Elektra, saw them as a "club act", and were then sent reeling, though still managing to release another great album, "Dewdrops In The Garden", before breaking up under the pressure. There'll probably never be a reunion because by their own admission they only formed the group to have fun and broke up once it stopped being fun, and they still get enough money from DJ sets and "Groove Is In The Heart" royalties to live comfortably.
    * EBM pioneers Front 242's last new material, Pulse, was in 2003 (after a ten year gap), although they're still touring.

     Professional Wrestling

    * ECW. The Professional Wrestling promotion that revolutionized the entire industry has long been dead, buried, dug up, and then pissed all over by Vince McMahon. An especially bitter pill to swallow after the first two One Night Stand pay-per-views got hopes for a revival done right way, way up.
          o It's arguably been treated better than WCW, which had been effectively destroyed by the end of the Invasion storyline. Save for some DVD documentaries, there was never any reunion pay-per-view or attempt at revival, save for one poorly-received match at the beginning of the Invasion.
    * This happens whenever a wrestler gets fired, is forced into early retirement, or dies.
    * Bret Hart's post-concussion syndrome, and subsequent stroke, have ensured that we will never, EVER see that one last, great blowoff match with Shawn Michaels that was over a decade in the making. The truly sad part is that when he could have done it, he was too angry and bitter to even consider it, and now that he's mellowed out and mended fences with both Shawn and Vince McMahon, he's simply no longer physically capable of wrestling like the Hitman we all know and love.

     Radio

    * The second The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series (which was a continuation of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) ended with a several unresolved subplots, because Douglas Adams was expecting to make a third series. Unfortunately, he was never asked to make a third series, and changed continuity completely when he wrote the follow-up books.
          o A number of followups to the series (3 seasons worth) were created by BBC Radio 4 during the 2000s. They followed the plots of the later novels and featured most of the original cast. What an actual third season would have been like, we'll never know still!
    * Old-time radio show collectors like myself are disheartened by the fact that many radio shows from the '20s and early-to-mid-'30s were destroyed or lost, or in some cases probably not even recorded. Thousands of hours of fascinating radio history will never be heard again.
    * The Goon Show. Granted, there are 158 extant episodes, which is plenty, and the show had to end when it did for many reasons, but still there are just as many reasons why I wish there were more episodes. Not to mention the fact that a whopping 93 episodes, including the entire first series, were wiped and have not been heard for almost sixty years and probably never will be.
    * Only 15 episodes of The Stan Freberg Show were made, due to never attracting a sponsor (despite critical acclaim). Freberg took favorite sketch requests a week before the final episode to say thanks for the fans enthusiasm for the show. Thank goodness all the episodes survive.
    * Music on AM radio instead of right-wing propaganda.

     Stand Up Comedy

    * Bill Hicks. It's sad to think that he was only around to talk about the first President Bush, the first Gulf War, and Rick Astley years before the Rickroll.
          o It's not hard to guess what he'd say about those first two "sequels." Not hard at all.
    * Lenny Bruce is considered the granddaddy of modern stand-up, but not many people under 50 have actually heard his routines (unless they've seen the Dustin Hoffman film Lenny) because he died in 1966.
    * Mitch Hedberg was very young when he died, which deprived the world of a truly brilliant comedian.
    * Sam Kinison would have had a lot to say about the Clinton years.
    * Andy Kaufman died in 1984. Thus no one knows what he might have done with the rise of the WWF making professional wrestling and Kayfabe more mainstream, what he would have accomplished if the producers of Saturday Night Live were able to get him back on the show (as they had intended) after the 1982 viewer poll banned him, or what further antics he might have performed on David Letterman's shows.
    * We'll never hear any more raunchy-but-honest insights from Richard Pryor or blue collar kvetching from George Carlin during his best years. As someone who wanted to see both live and never did...

     Tabletop Games

    * The closing of WizKids: their constructable strategy games are simply too much fun, and of course, as their IP is getting bought by other companies, there is only mention of Hero Clix... At least there's still plenty of product/support available online, something which can't be said for everything on this list.

     Theater

    * Rent is often said to have changed musical theater forever, at the height of its popularity it won everything from the Tony to the Pulitzer, and it ran on Broadway for 12 years. It launched the career of previously unknown composer/lyricist Jonathan Larson. Too bad he died unexpectedly the night before the show first opened.
    * The original Starlight Express from the 1980s, the incarnation that most fans consider superior, will never be seen again. All we have now is the Bochum, Germany production, which is still considerably distorted. Moreover, in one of the most infuriating cases of Executive Meddling ever, all but one copy of each costume from the London productions was destroyed to prevent the show from being revived in the West End. The poor reception of the 2003-2007 U.S./U.K. tour also likely precludes Starlight Express from going through another American production.
    * Gilbert And Sullivan's first show Thespis was not revived as often as their later works, and there was little demand for the score. The only copies of the full orchestral and vocal scores were destroyed in the Blitz. Fragments have been found, and attempts have been made to re-create Sullivan's style with varying degrees of success, but unless somebody finds a score in their grandmother's attic, the true Thespis can never be heard.

     Video Games

    * As any longtime Monolith Productions fan will tell you, at least three of their franchises are long overdue for a sequel. Namely Blood, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and No One Lives Forever.
    * Meanwhile at Raven "Dark Forces Saga" Software, Heretic and Hexen.
          o And Soldier Of Fortune, which Activision Ruined FOREVER by outsourcing the third installment to a budget-title developer.
    * Like Phantasy Star? Like Phantasy Star II: The End Of The Lost Age, Generations of Doom, and The End of the Millennium? Unfortunately, the closest you'll ever get to a sequel to those games will be the Online-styled portable games. What's more, remakes of the first two games in the series were made, and Sega made plans to import them, but they never came to fruition. At least there are plenty of compilations in the U.S....
          o Then again, very few sequels ever wrapped up a series as well as End of the Millennium did. A lot of series tend to get put in the fridge with the last game in the series ending with a huge cliffhanger. The fact that the remakes never went international and the PSIV-remake was canceled still sucks though.
                + The series still does have one very nasty plot thread left hanging, though — albeit one from a game that was never officially released in the US. Phantasy Star Gaiden ends with Alis(a) from the original game returning to Algol to defend it from some unknown threat. This was originally a lead-in to Phantasy Star IV, but when they decided to go with an unrelated plot for that game, this left us with no idea what happened to Alisa, or what threat she was supposed to face.
    * Super Robot Wars, the Original Generation games on the Gameboy Advance... which sold horribly in America, preventing fans from playing any of the games in English aside from the odd fan translation. (That, and non-OG games are licensing nightmares.)
          o Keep in mind that the GBA, Nintendo DS and the PSP are all region free. So if you're willing to put up with the Japanese, you can import Advance, Reversal, Destiny, Judgment, W K L, MX Portable, Advance Portable, Z2, and OG Saga: The Lord of Elemental with little fuss. If you have an older model Dreamcast you can burn a boot disc which you can use to play Alpha Dreamcast as well.
          o Altus also had the balls to bring out Endless Frontier complete with a preorder bonus. Too bad there was a sequel...
    * This editor played the Quest for Glory series of games as a child, and still feels the loss that comes with the realization that there are NO OTHER GAMES like that series. The adventure game genre as it was known then doesn't exist anymore, and even during the golden age of adventure games, the Quest for Glory series was the only adventure game/RPG hybrid ever made, one of its kind.
          o The abrupt end of the Space Quest series created similar feelings in this editor.
          o Well, technically, it's only one-of-a-kind if you include graphical adventures — Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor did something similar with text adventures.
    * Psychonauts. Sniff...
          o Buck up, little Whispering Rock camper.
    * Jade Empire... (okay, admittedly not many would admit to liking the first two, but Jade Empire was okay!)
          o Wait, what first two? Jade Empire was a stand-alone original intellectual property by BioWare.
    * When is LucasArts going to hurry up and realize that Knights of the Old Republic 3 ain't gonna make itself? You do not end one of the greatest series ever on a cliffhanger! (Note: An MMO set in the same time period does not count!)
          o Speaking of LucasArts, many Adventure Game fans were rather displeased to hear of the company's decision to cancel the production of sequels to Sam & Max and Full Throttle, effectively abandoning the genre. In a bit of a subversion, though, we did end up with a new Sam & Max, anyway. Now, if only Ron Gilbert could get the rights to Monkey Island...
                + And now, this trope has again been subverted, thanks to Telltale's new Tales of Monkey Island series. I guess we should start praying for Full Throttle, now.
          o Hey, LucasArts, wanna give us the last two games in the Loom trilogy and finish that cliffhanger?
                + For that matter, wanna give us something besides a bloody Star Wars game for once? There have been a few, but only a few, and of those even fewer were worth playing.
          o I'm sick of playing these wussy rebels! Tie Fighter: The Rise of Thrawn, anybody?
          o The Star Wars: Republic Commandos game. While the game itself is easy to acquire, there was a supposed sequel to the game (some said it would be Imperial Commando, some said Republic Commandos II, etc.) planned, but it never released; however, there is no indication that production ever started.
    * FreeSpace 2. Most who have played it consider it to be one of, if not the, greatest space sims ever produced. But a split between the publisher and the developer (and the former declaring bankruptcy), and the fact that nobody seems to play space sims anymore, means that the story is incomplete and the myriad of questions are left unanswered. The fandom considers itself luckier than most, though, considering the very active mod community.
    * After some gameplay footage of Duke Nukem Forever has been leaked shortly after 3D Realms closed down, some people actually felt sorry for the poor ol' Duke.
          o Actually, the game was so awesome that it created a singularity in space and caused itself to be erased. You know it makes sense.
                + So awesome that it brought itself back into reality too?
    * Tetris: The Grand Master took the classic block-stacking game and refined it into a high-speed challenge that takes months, if not years, to master. While its developers, as well as designer Ichiro Mihara, are all alive and well, the Tetris Guideline's strict requirements for new Tetris has made it very clear that we will never, ever see a new TGM game (at least without removing or heavily altering many features that gave TGM its appeal in the first place, as in the tragic case of Tetris: The Grand Master ACE), whether it's on arcade or console, in Japan or North America.
    * Capcom all but abandoned Viewtiful Joe, Maximo, Mega Man Legends, and 3 different Resident Evil titles after promising in some cases to make them. Anyone picking up these old games and enjoying them will hit a brick wall really fast.
          o They have at least stated a wish to go back and revisit Legends sooner or later. One hopes they get it together before author existence failure hits. (Battle Network and its cousins have sort of become Capcom's Pokémon of sorts, and so they focus on that to fund other projects down the line.)
                + Mega Man Legends 3 is a go! Unfortunately, Keiji Inafune, the father of the series, has resigned from his post at Capcom. Seeing as he established Legends as his favorite Mega Man subseries and designated Legends 3 as the one game he wanted to create the most, this announcement is made somewhat bittersweet.
          o And then Legends 3 got cancelled. Internet Counterattack towards Capcom doesn't begin to describe it.
    * Commander Keen 7. The game was supposed to feature the final battle between Keen and his Evil Counterpart that would decide the fate of the whole universe, only it never got produced.
          o Spoilers: The cyberdemon won. What?
    * Ecco The Dolphin: One of the most haunting and difficult series of Sega's heyday. Had the rights snatched from the creator after an abrupt ending that even promised an Old Save Bonus, and the Dreamcast title itself also had a sequel in the beginning stages of development before its home console went up in smoke; all Ecco has to look forward to these days are endless rereleases. What few newbies the fandom gets tend to run facefirst into the fanbase's bizarrely sordid history.
    * Advent Rising: The game was a bit glitchy since it was forced onto the market, but those who could get past this found that they couldn't decide which was more awesome — Orson Scott Card's story of an Everyman simultaneously becoming both the Last of His Kind and a Physical God, or Tommy Tallarico's Crowning Music of Awesome. The glitches were fixed with the PC release, but it was too late to keep the game from bombing — and driving the company into bankruptcy in the process. The game's Cliff Hanger ending is thus among the most tragic in video game history.
          o Divinity suffered similarly ('closed' but with much room to grow and make a trilogy) as gameplay-wise it faced the same launch issues that killed the public's taste.
    * Grabbing's where you must begin! Shaking treasure from within! Throwing hard is how to win! Ultra-Intergalactic-Cybot-G, MARINA! There's no time for snacks!! (A sequel is pretty much impossible at this point, since Enix has the rights to the characters and the original creators are no longer with the company...)
          o Refreshingly in the sequel-heavy industry of video games, Treasure don't tend to do (direct*
            Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun have a Spiritual Successor relationship. The many Bangai O games are perhaps more aptly described as variations on a theme rather than sequels.
            ) sequels anyway. The Wii Sin And Punishment sequel is the exception rather than the rule. Mischief Makers 2 was never likely to be on the cards, if that's any consolation.
          o A sequel? How about a Virtual Console release?
    * Like the Mother series? Then sucks to be you, since Shigesato Itoi repeated many times, on many separate occasions, that he's not going to make any more parts. It's pretty sad to see the fans desperately obsessing over anything which even remotely resembles a possible Mother 4... And let's not even get into the No Export for You issues. Or the lack of a Virtual Console release.
    * X-Com. People keep trying to make a truly worthy sequel, but the odds don't look good.
          o Especially since the company that now owns the rights to the series is releasing a game called "XCOM", which, while being hyped as an FPS re-imagining of X-Com, bears little to no resemblance to the games the fans loved and tends to remind most people of BioShock, instead — to the point where some are referring to it as "Xenoshock".
    * Klonoa. None of the games sold well but did very well critically, and then Namco stopped exporting them. And then in 2009, they released a Wiimake of the first game... which proceeded to sell horribly despite once again being well-received critically. Even more painful as the executive director of the series stated that he was going to do a remake of Lunatea's Veil and make a Klonoa 3 if the game did well... it's just not fair!
    * The Legacy of Kain series. The last game does give a glorious send off (of a sort) to one of its two main protagonists and does end on a hopeful note but the Big Bad is still at large and there's plenty of dangling story strings to be resolved. A final game to wrap the series up will almost certainly not be made due to the main writer departing and the death of one of the voice actors.
    * Star Control 2 deserved a real sequel (most fans and the original creators denounce the third game as non-canon). There is a petition for creators Toys For Bob to make one.
          o Don't be surprised if some of it makes it in. There was some decent writing there, and a couple interesting races. Were it not for the Star Control legacy name and bad puppetry, it'd likely have done better.
    * The Def Jam series were amazing fighters, perfectly blending 3D fighting and wrestling into a single glorious package. Fight for NY had a tighter-than-an-iron-grip engine that could easily handle multiple fighting styles, it actually had a fucking story (something that was mostly limited to the Guilty Gear games at the time), and the character creation system was top notch. Then Icon came along and trashed it all to pieces. Now the license is gone, and we may never get another entry.
    * And on that note, with the success of BlazBlue, it looks like Guilty Gear might not get another game either.
    * Eternal Darkness was incredibly good, had a few limits, but it was good, I think a sequel could have fixed a lot of stuff... Until Silicon Knights' other project was made, and pretty much stopped another game from possibly being made, weep.
          o Although as of 2008, the game's designer stated "There is a chance; we love all the games we work on. We don't want to be pigeon-holed, we want to be known for strong content... There's a strong chance we'll return to it, but there's no announcements yet.". And after worrying fans by letting the trademark (briefly) lapse, Nintendo did go to the trouble of re-registering the trademark in February 2010.
    * The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker...well, sort of. After this game, the Wind Waker timeline has now been put exclusively on the DS, with no chances to be put on a console ever again, and it's all because the fans complained about the graphical style! These complaints ended up creating the Twilight Princess timeline, but there's just so much more that could have been done with the Wind Waker games on the console- instead, fans demanded that they a get Ocarina of Time on steroids.
          o This could go the other way. Those who preferred Twilight Princess never got a sequel. It seems incredibly unlikely, now that they've announced Skyward Sword, that we ever will. WW fans got not one, but two continuations of the timeline, albeit on the DS. We never saw that for TP. We'll never know if Link ever left Ordon again, or if an unseen Twili who was loyal to Zant found some other way to invade Hyrule. Granted, it didn't end on an explicit Sequel Hook the way WW did, but come on, after an adventure like that, why would the Goddesses let Link go to waste?
          o Majora's Mask featured several one-time characteristics that have yet to return in a new game. It was also the last title starring the iconic Hero of Time.
    * There will probably never be another Mana game that uses the old 2D-overhead-view-Power Trio-party Action RPG style...
    * Skies of Arcadia. Legends, the director's cut, is just not enough. Especially when the various video games news sites decide to rub salt in the wound by reporting rumors of a sequel that never came to fruition.
    * Power Stone. Full stop.
          o The clone games with the same control schemes as well, especially Barbarian.
    * Darkstalkers. Though Morrigan/Felicia/Anakaris show up in cameo roles now and then, what about the other 95% of the cast?
          o On the subject of fighting games, Fatal Fury. Or hell, any SNK franchise that's not The King of Fighters. SNK's early-2000's bankruptcy forced them to cling to KOF and Metal Slug for the last 10-or-so years. To tell you how bad this is, some people want KOF to succeed just so SNK gets a shot at continuing their other franchises. I don't blame them.
    * Conker's Bad Fur Day. Thanks to Microsoft we may never get a proper sequel.
          o To be fair it was doomed from the start. Unless they created Twelve Tales as the sequel (or really prequel) there would be no chance of a potential series. Berri's dead and Word Of God is Conker would be too at the end.
                + While not necessarily from the start, it certainly doomed chances of a sequel to BFD when the creator had a constantly revolving opinion on liking or hating Conker and their overwhelming like to expand the war between the Squirrels and the Tediz than the rest of the BFD game. Most of Live & Reloaded's earlier incarnation as Live & Uncut revolved around the war more than anything else, and even in Reloaded the war is far more heavily emphasized. Word Of God also confirmed that if not for the scrapped ending of BFD where Conker commits suicide by shooting himself in the head in the pub, Conker would have been killed in the restarted warfare.
    * The Sega Dreamcast... such a tragic fate that befell that system.
    * Sakura Taisen has long been called a holy grail of localization, being a text-heavy Visual Novel with enough SRPG elements to appeal to the Western market. In 2010, NIS America was kind enough to go through the trouble of translating the fifth game for the English market. Despite their efforts, it sold poorly, and so we'll just have to imagine what we're missing out on with the prior four games.
    * Speaking of Sakura Taisen, from the same creators (aka Red Entertainment), Mitsumete Knight. Two games, four Drama CDs, about ten music CD, a few goods... And then the franchise was abandoned, as, while it did meet success, it didn't meet one as big as the Tokimeki Memorial series'. Especially sad since Mitsumete Knight's general producer, Ouji Hiroi, told in the booklet of the 1st Drama CD he was dreaming of a TV series of the game being made. And seeing the game's rich storyline, there would have been a lot of potential. Now, nearly 15 years after, with the obvious possible rights problems between Konami (the other creator of Mitsumete Knight) and Red Entertainment, and three of the original seiyuus out of commission (Daisuke Gouri, who voiced the Final Boss, and Shiho Niiyama, who voiced one of the main girls, being both dead, and Hiroko Konishi, voice of the heroine no less, now long retired from the seiyuu world to pursue an actress career)... Let's just say it would need a miracle as big as the Sakura Taisen V being released in the Western world one, to see this franchise revived.
    * The Ultima series. Started out quirky and weird yet interesting in the first games before finding itself with the Age of Enlightenment by ignoring the standard cliches and focusing on ethics, philosophy and having a genuinely virtuous protagonist. An intriguing setting with elements that returned in later games and unforgettable characters. Not to mention Ultima Online was the first successful MMORPG, without which we might not have the genre at all. But thanks to EA taking the license and putting it away, we'll probably never see a continuation.
    * Nintendo's StarTropics series. A third game would be pure love... hell, how about making Mike Jones playable in the next Smash Bros. game? (Even as a clone of Ness?) Or an assist character? Or even just give him a trophy...?
    * F-Zero. Hell, the last release (Climax, which was back in 2004, mind you) didn't even make it out of Japan and the anime's Sequel Hook never resulted in a Sequel Series. F-Zero GX is heralded as one of the greatest racers of its decade, but Nintendo has no current plans for the series and has gone to great lengths to all but disown the anime-based games. Sure, Captain Falcon may be showing his moves in Super Smash Bros.., but the overall lack of love and recognition from Nintendo is jarring. It's a damn shame seeing such groundbreaking innovation go to waste.
    * Descent. Rumors have been going around, since Interplay's revival, of a fourth game, but no material has surfaced so far. At least there's the upcoming Wiiware rerelease.
    * Sony seems to have permanently abandoned the Jet Moto franchise. The last entry was 10 years ago.
          o They seem to be letting the Syphon Filter series slide too; doesn't help that Logan's Shadow ended on a cliffhanger.
    * Almost anything by the now-defunct Compile, especially The Guardian Legend. An exception is Puyo Puyo, which Sega picked up after Compile went under.
          o Golvellius: Valley of Doom ends on a perfectly legitimate Sequel Hook which never got addressed. Instead, the original game, itself, was remade several times for various computer systems.
    * Sierra ended at least three franchises on massive cliffhangers; after (thankfully) aborted attempts to introduce third-person co-op gameplay to the last two series, which would have been about as intuitive as hubcaps on a coffee table, they were abandoned with little fanfare. Leisure Suit Larry was later revived in a blatantly cynical attempt to make money off of what parent company Vivendi Universal perceived as the prurient interests of gamers, with no involvement whatsoever from the series creators, and both games predictably bombed; but other than that, both series appear to be dead with no revival in sight other than the odd fan game.
    * Any game by Cing, including Little King's Story and the Hotel Dusk: Room 215 series. Their games sold terribly while being well-received, and they went bankrupt as a result.
    * Sky Gunner.
    * Any and all monster raising games from the PlayStation era not including Monster Rancher. Each and every one had their own gimmick, their own grandiose storyline, their own little bits of awesome. But since they weren't portable, they lost traction. Jade Cocoon, Azure Dreams, Dragon Seeds, to name a couple of the best.
    * Space Station Silicon Valley, and a number of other quirky awesome games on N64. On a related note, since Grand Theft Auto has been so successful, doubt we'll ever see another Body Harvest.
    * Jagged Alliance. Technically it still exists as a Russian company has the rights and is still making it, but like some EA examples above, the game has lost its heart and soul. It most resembles the transition of Xcom minus the FPS elements. The game has had the Deadly Serious tone pushed to 11. 9/11, that is. The humour has been expunged, and without Sir Tech, the great voice acting and memorably differing mercenaries as well. It's full-on pure tactical realistic wargame. Clearly, the Russian devs need a bit more vodka to loosen up and stop being the Stop Having Fun Guys type of Russian. It's a great game on it's own, but it's no Jagged Alliance, that's for sure.
    * Omikron: The Nomad Soul, nuff said.
    * Elite Beat Agents. Less than 20 songs are playable in this fun rhythm game for the DS. If you don't mind playing it with unfamiliar songs, Ouendan 1 & 2 can get your fix. But there will probably never be another one.
    * Hey, there were those of us who adored Xenogears. Maybe not necessarily for all of its game engine elements or its obviously budget-cut second disc, but for its captivating story, and the promise that it was part 5 of 6 parts. Sure, it was rebooted as succeeded by Xenosaga, but that was Screwed by the Network before it could get anywhere near a semblance of the world of Xenogears and had to end early. Now there's Xenoblade—yet another reboot succession—which looks like it's going to be a No Export for You for North Americans.
    * The LUNAR series. The original two games had plenty of hints at a broader, overreaching storyline involving the rebirth of the other dragons and so on, but despite several remakes it seems increasingly unlikely the fandom will ever see Lunar 3. It's enough to break hearts, really.
    * We'll never get a long and challenging Tomb Raider game again, as Eidos force Core Design/Crystal Dynamics to rush their games into release, meaning that every single game released in the last decade has had the same problem; being short, obviously unfinished and glitchy. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson. This wasn't a problem for the first four installments, due to the Invisible Grid engine allowing the designers to make the games quickly enough to satisfy Eidos.
    * Dino Crisis. Capcom left the second game hanging on a cliffhanger, then proceeded to destroy the franchise with the third installment, which disregarded the prior story arc and was Recycled In SPACE.
          o On that note, you can pretty much include any Capcom Cult Classic (more or less) that comes out, as you can tell by the numerous entries above. You don't see a Strider 3, God Hand 2, Final Fight 4, Captain Commando 2, Onimusha 5 etc. coming out any time soon, do you? Fans were legitimately surprised to hear that Ōkami, perhaps the greatest game that no one played, is getting a sequel. This is all compounded by the fact that all (you read that right, EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.) of these series have had lots of fanfare to get into some incarnation of the Capcom vs. Whatever franchise, and in particular, the Marvel vs. Capcom games cemented the popularity of characters such as Morrigan, Felicia, Strider Hiryu, Captain Commando, and Jin Saotome. Hell, MvC1 is the reason that we got Strider 2 in the first place!
    * The fact that both System Shock games didn't sell well and are owned by a different company than the one that created them means that there will be no System Shock 3. We'll have to make do with BioShock.
    * In an official interview, it was confirmed that they "still aren't making" Homeworld 3. Why, oh why, Relic...
          o Dawn of War. That's why.
    * Star Wars Battlefront sadly looks as if it's been abandoned - many years have passed since Battlefront 2, Pandemic's gone and the game's future was stated to be "up in the air" by Lucasarts. Though there are rumours, lately...
    * Brütal Legend, with the announcement of the sequel's cancellation. I only just got to know Eddie, Ophelia, and the rest, and now I'll never get to see them again...
    * Valis, since the creators went bankrupt and sold the rights to an H Game producer, will never be seen again.
    * Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness was canceled after two episodes. Not indefinitely postponed. Canceled.
    * Play the Max Payne games. Now despair as not only has the original developer Remedy bowed out of further development, but 3 is being developed by Rockstar North: set in Sao Palo starring a fat, aging, and balding Max.
    * The entire shmup genre before the prevalence of Bullet Hell. Not that there's anything wrong with the existence of danmaku, but if you want a new shooter in the style of many 80's and 90's shmups (like those developed by Toaplan, which went bankrupt in 1993)—in other words, one that doesn't rely on a large bullet count to pose a challenge—you can forget it, as the vast majority of shmups developed these days are Bullet Hell.
    * Lostalgia for Black Isle has gamers hanging their hopes on Obsidian Entertainment. Though their contribution back into the Fallout franchise has been received as an improvement over Bethesda Softworks, it remains to be seen if we're witnessing a revival.
    * Appeal's Outcast. A sequel (sadly PS2 exclusive) was in the works. But alas, Infogrames/Atari pulled the plug, the developer went under... Some screenshots still linger on the web, and fans are still working on a project to revamp the original. The world of Adelpha will be sorely missed by fans everywhere.
    * The Chrono series looks like it's met with this fate, which is either the saddest or most merciful decision Square could ever have made, depending on your opinion of their more recent works.
    * SimCity is a prime example. One of the many franchises that EA screwed up (see Ultima, above), SimCity 4 was released in 2003, and another one has not been made since, except a Contested Sequel that neither sold well or got particularly good reviews. There are a number of Game Mods for SC 4, many of which are good, but the game is getting old, and mods can only go so far...
    * Danielle (nee Dan) Bunten, considered by many to be a mesmerizing developer, innovating things like multiplayer games and releasing the first game capable of play-over-modem (Modem Wars) and designing titles like M.U.L.E. and Cutthroat$ and Cartel$s, died suddenly in 1998 of lung cancer, taking with her an early design for M.U.L.E. Online and other numerous ideas.
    * Older hardware in general is becoming this as time goes on: materials from the 1970s and early 1980s will not last forever, and as first-, second-, and even third-generation consoles begin to decay, things like Fairchild Channel Fs, Odysseys, and Vectrexes become increasingly rarer as units fail simply from age. In a few more years, emulation will be the only way to experience these games.

     Web Comics

    * The webcomic Elf Only Inn started as a cut-n-paste comic about a RP chatroom, but the art gradually got better and the plots more interesting. After a long hiatus, the whole thing was continued as part of an online game, culminating in a complex and brilliant story about breaking the game/summoning eldritch horrors. Sadly, updates just stopped shortly after the group transferred again to a nautical themed server.
    * The webcomic RPG World stopped being updated right before the final battle, and has been abandoned ever since.
    * The webcomic Acid Reflux ended when the artist left for other things, in the middle of a story. It still has an online archive so new readers can find it, and then be sad when they get to the last completed strip.
    * Jailhouse Blues, one of Bob and George's subcomics. Hilarious, insane... and unfinished. How can you not like it when Mega Man gets a weapon called "More Ammunition Than God"?
          o Plus Metroid: Third Derivative, Randomness...
          o Really, the vast, vast majority of fan comics, both those hosted on the site, and those by members of the forums. Counting Bob and George, there are maybe 10 sprite comics associated with the site that have reached any sort of satisfactory conclusion, and a few of those are a stretch. Before a recent purging of the forums (of anything not updated before January 2008), the comics section was filled to bursting with comics, some good, some bad, some ugly, that would never be updated again.
    * Men In Hats, though luckily we have the guy in the black hat from XKCD to keep up Aram's legacy.
    * Lightbringer by Lewis "Linkara" Lovhaug, was a good webcomic, although most of it had fairly bad artwork (he tried, goddamnit, he tried!), but after reading through it, I was struck with a terrible sadness and a mad rush to find out if it ever continued. It did not. Lightbringer was a DAMN. GOOD. COMIC.
          o But it is still ongoing, what are you talking about?
    * Angel Moxie may have reached an ending, doesn't mean it won't be missed...
    * The Life of Riley reached a climax showdown between a Big Bad and the major protagonist reincarnated as a Messiah, and a server crash knocks it offline for months. It comes back triumphantly... to a couple of Big bad flashback comic, before Real Life and a couple of mouthy assholes discourage the Clan BOB team from bothering to continue.

     Web Original

    * Something Awful's Goon City project, a virtual joke city that features pixel-art tributes to every film, video game, and Memetic Mutation conceivable, is a cease-and-desist order waiting to happen. I will rue the day when the lawyers learn about the website and destroy as much sections of the website as possible.
          o They would be advised to cease before they input anything licensed by Warner. If you haven't heard, the recent debacle (2010 summerish) is that they've been removing FUNERAL SERVICES uploaded on youtube for playing copyrighted music. The rage is, obviously, absofuckingnuclear. Here's one that wasn't deleted outright, but did still have the audio removed.
    * Jim Wright's Delta Blues reviews of Star Trek: Voyager. His life got insanely busy in Season Seven, and he never really finished it. Odds are he never will.
    * Improfanfic was a fanfic site where each chapter of a story was written by a different author. In its heyday (the late 90's to around '02, as far as I can remember), it was a thriving, bustling site that produced some of the most creative fanfiction around. The authors worked with each other, shared ideas, and actually enjoyed what they were doing. Somewhere along the line, Status Quo Is God reared its ugly head (nothing bad ever happens to Jack Lysias!), criticism got increasingly virulent and out of control, and the administrator (who's a fine writer in his own right) became more and more of an obstructionist jerk. The final blow was probably the abuse heaped on a rookie contributor; granted it was a terrible chapter and deserved to get nixed (which it was), but the flaming got SO heated, SO nasty, SO over the top, it scared off what few new authors were willing to sign up. The flagship story, Magical Crossover Fighting Tournament Ultra, ground to a halt halfway through the climactic final arc, and everything else has been dead for years.
    * Before Dave "Fargo" Kosak made Flintlocke'sGuideToAzeroth, he made The Daily Victim, a series chronicling the crazy exploits of nerds, some of which involved the video games of the day. Each day of the week, he would write one for a different character, and the most popular one at the end of the week would get a follow-up story at the end of the week. Soon callbacks to previous stories got so frequent that it practically inhabited its own fictional universe. The series had two artists, Gabe of Penny Arcade fame, and Lemuel "Hotsoup" Pew, who currently draws for Blank It. Then, after an epic story arc involving an operation to overload an MMORPG's server and force a reset in order for a character to regain a rare item he lost, Fargo began to look for a third artist, and then the series died. This happened no later than 2004. To make matters worse, the stories have vanished from Gamespy's website; the main page still exists, but nothing else does. What few fans remain of the Daily Victim only have their memories to rely on, and no new fans will ever join them.

     Western Animation

    * Invader Zim and to Jhonen Vasquez in general. After ZIM he hasn't done anything except a few small projects (and even these are mostly connected to the punk band Mindless Self Indulgence). He says he's working on a movie but we'll see how that goes.
    * Gargoyles. But on the bright side, we have the comics now...
          o Hate to break the news, but, not anymore, we don't...
    * Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea is practically made of Lostalgia. A great 80s cartoon that will likely never again see the light of syndication on American TV. The only hope for fans of the show is to learn its native French, or perhaps Spanish.
    * Nelvana's The Get Along Gang pilot. It manged to turn the dull, lifeless greeting card art into a cast of expressive cartoon characters, featured multiple epic moments for the cast, including Portia Porcupine accidentally beating three supercars in a race while driving an old jalopy. Problem is, DiC was the company that picked up the series, and they followed the dull look of the cards and had more typical plotting.
    * After discovering Rocko's Modern Life, make sure to watch it slowly, because those fifty-two quasi-legally obtained episodes are all there is.
    * Batman Beyond, Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Justice League, JLU'', and the other DCAU related stuff.
          o Batman: TAS stands as the single best "serious" Western cartoon ever. It's hard to even try to list the things that made this show so special — the music, the tragedy, the art, the brilliant voice acting, the fact that it expertly followed "show, don't tell" where most cartoons never even try. It's also never going to see another episode, and with modern superhero cartoons all going Lighter and Softer it's questionable whether it will ever have a rival.
          o The Bat Embargo ruined so many things for JLU. Like, say, pretty much forcing Mark Hamill to retire as The Joker. Thankfully he was able to do it again for Batman: Arkham Asylum after five years.
          o Though it's fair to say that the DCAU was finished in a rather gratifying way. Okay, so Darkseid and Lex Luthor vanished to who-knows-where, Grodd had been Thrown Out The Airlock and everyone who sided with him became Human Popsicles. But there still are some villains running around. What to do about it? Cue And The Adventure Continues. 'Cause if you think about it, it would be pretty hard to build any more story arcs based around these guys who remained (well, Sinestro maybe, considering the DCAU's adherence to the comics mythos, but then again it'd be a job for the Green Lantern Corps, not the entire League).
    * Undergrads, a short-lived MTV cartoon that ended with an unresolved Love Triangle and the promise of a second season that never came.
    * Sit Down Shut Up. It got Screwed by the Network so badly. From randomly jumping timeslots, to an abrupt cancelation, and Comedy Central only airing 4 or 5 episodes, it was hardly given a chance. It was really unappreciated too.
    * Megas XLR. An awesome Humongous Mecha series set in New Jersey by the same guys who did Downtown, another underappreciated gem, canned after two seasons with so much backstory left unexplored.
    * Sonic the Hedgehog, anybody? Two seasons, one great story arc, a Sequel Hook... and a prompt cancellation.
          o The series sort of lives on in the comic book. Becoming the most successful and longest running comic based on a video game ever.
    * Clone High. Realizing that not even the small internet campaign to save it wouldn't work was depressing.
    * Home Movies. It's nice that there are a few seasons to watch.
    * The Pirates of Dark Water, a promising show that unfortunately ended after only 21 episodes.
    * Korgoth of Barbaria. Is it possible to have Lostalgia for a show that never even really got started?
    * What further insane hilarity could have ensued if John Kricfalusi's attitude and poor work ethic hadn't caused Nickelodeon to kick him off The Ren & Stimpy Show? God only knows.
          o Knowing what happened with the "Adult Party Cartoon" episodes on Spike TV...
    * X-Men Evolution. Yes, Marvel, it was very kind of you to put all four seasons up on YouTube. Since it kept getting shifted to different networks over here in the UK, and the DVDs were cancelled, I hadn't seen them in the right order and it was bugging me. However, it isn't the same as having new episodes. Especially when they foreshadowed the freakin' Phoenix in the ending.
          o Oh, look! They made a new series with X-Men. Gasp! And it's got Emma Frost! And she's a main character! Wait...ONLY ONE SEASON?! DAMMIT, MARVEL!
                + And down the drain goes the appearance of Deadpool in the main series... (even though Hulk vs. Wolverine is considered to be in the same universe as WatXM)
    * Fievel's American Tails would have been a great idea if it had been done right and if it had lasted more than 13 episodes. The first An American Tail movie was practically begging for a sequel at the end, Your Mileage May Vary if it ever ended up getting a truly worthy one.
    * King of the Hill. Since there are currently no plans to release the later seasons on DVD, this is the second time the show has been screwed by FOX. And Brittany Murphy's death has put the kibosh on any plans for a revival.
    * KaBlam!. This show failed commercially, and never had any VHS or DVD releases (or iTunes, for the record). Even some of my friends don't know what the show is anymore. Watch all the episodes you can on YouTube, before Viacom takes them off (when they should be getting a DVD set together). At least it went into the 21st century a bit, for 3 episodes.
          o Made worse by the fact that most of the (very few) episodes floating around were apparently recorded from the reruns on the Nicktoons Network... which cut out about half of the episodes.
    * Danny Phantom. Butch Hartman said he wanted to keep the show going, but Nick screwed the show over so badly, most have given up. The only bright spot is that it got a Grand Finale.
    * There is still an active fan-fiction scene almost a decade after Daria ended — and much of it is filled with series continuing the narrative where the canon left off.
    * The Oblongs. Despite its cynicism, you can tell the titular family do actually care about one another. Only one season, sadly, and the series creator hates it. Le sigh.
          o Skip to about 6:07 and begin cheering.
    * The Spectacular Spider-Man ended with a series of both very depressing and suspense-building cliffhangers. Now they will never be resolved and the awesomeness that was the show as a whole is gone. CURSE YOU DISNEY!
    * Despite a seeming unkillable zombie of "Fight For [season] Five" fan-action, Kim Possible lives on only in a (still very active) fanfiction/fanart scene. Though she got a good Grand Finale to make a capstone to the series - something most series don't manage - it's still a shame there won't be more.
    * Anything out of Robert Mandell: Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders, Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, and Thunderbirds 2086. "Obscure yet awesome" and Keep Circulating the Tapes seem to be his perpetual curses.
    * Adult Swim was good enough to run the one season of Mission Hill after the WB network canceled it two episodes in. There were scripts for a second season seen online, but no real chance of a comeback there.
    * W.I.T.C.H. started out as a somewhat cheesy but still above average female-oriented fantasy action series. Then Greg Weisman took over and turned the second season into an engrossing epic tale full of killer plot twists and a villain to rival David Xanatos. And then cancellation; many of the show's plot threads were wrapped up by the end, but the last episode still features some tantalizing hints for where season three would have gone.
    * The cancellation of Sym-Bionic Titan, reasons rooted to the show not being a Cash Cow Franchise and the High Production Costs, a large movement formed to get the show back on air. Unfortunate chances of success for the movement is slim to none since the show's creator, Genndy Tartakovsky, no longer works for the network it aired on.
    * Freakazoid!. A kooky, off-the-wall product of the 90s. Rife with superhero spoofs, it's a show that was tragically ahead of its time and definitely has a spark that is missing from the cartoons of the present.
    * Clerks: The Animated Series only saw six episodes before ABC wanted no part of it (of which only four made it to air). It was headed in a good direction and had a very "aware" sense of humor but...nevermore.

     Other

    * The Confederate States of America was a subject of Lostalgia in the South for over a century after The American Civil War, and it still persists in some regions to this day. Hell, the term "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" came to describe the effort to legitimize the Confederacy's efforts and give them an Historical Hero Upgrade.
    * It's hard not to feel lostalgia for the mid-1980s in motorsport: Formula One cars put out over 1000hp. Group B rally cars had 600hp, and were nearly as quick off-road as F1 cars were on-road. NASCAR hadn't discovered restrictor plates yet. Le Mans still had it's Mulsanne straight and legions of Porsche 956s doing battle. Then there's the Indianapolis 500. How many racing fans wish they could turn back the clock to before the devastating 'split' in 1996 between CART and the IRL and watch Unser, Foyt, Mears, Fittipaldi, in front of a sell out crowd, in the most watched sporting event in the world, driving real Indy cars, not the neutered, misshapen lumps they all peddle around now.
          o Not to mention the cars have devolved from gorgeous◊ to butt-fugly◊.
          o Or have devolved from 1000 horsepower, 250 mph Mercedes powered missiles◊ to 650 hp spec Dallaras◊ that everybody hates.
    * Neopets is a weird case. Basically, it used to be that all the pets had different (static) artwork for each color/species combination. Then they decided to make it so the pets (which act more like small children to begin with) could wear clothes, backgrounds, and accessories, but to do that they had to change all the artwork. A handful of pet colors (those with the most unusual poses, like royal and faerie) were given the option to keep the old artwork instead - these are now referred to as "Unconverted". So if you feel nostalgic for the old artwork and want, say, an unconverted faerie cybunny... you'd better have 15 million neopoints to cough up for a draik so you can trade, and it better be a damn well-named draik and a fairly badly-named cybunny. Otherwise all you can do is stare at the pretty pictures, get all depressed about what the site was like when you were a kid, then eat ten pounds of chocolate ice cream before you feel better.
    * Monarchy. We'll never have it again, no matter how much we try. And I mean true monarchy, not the figurehead ones today.
          o We still do, actually. It's just now we call them hereditary dictatorships and they're a lot less stable.
    * Food/Candy.
          o How about PB Maxx? Cookie on the bottom, peanut butter, cookie bits, all wrapped in chocolate. Gone since the mid-90s. Bring it back!
          o The Choco-Dile!
                + They still make 'em, but they're only available in certain very small regions or online at a fairly high markup.
          o And while we're on food, spicy chicken from Taco Bell. Specifically the spicy chicken burrito & crunch wrap. Damn you, Taco Bell! You got me addicted and now you're holding out on me! Everything you have now is a poor substitute for what once was! You bastards! * weep*
          o Anyone remember the Polar Pizza? It was an ice cream cake sold at Baskin Robbins stores made of a giant round brownie representing the "crust", a layer of vanilla ice cream as the "cheese", and sprinkles, M&Ms, and Oreo bits as toppings. Think of all the children's birthday parties it won't be part of now.
          o Jell-O pops. We got the pudding pop back (Thank you, PopSicle!), but my God, is it hard having to describe Jell-O pops to the young whippersnappers these days.
          o Hershey's Bites. M&Ms Crispy are these to anyone not living in the Europe, Australia or southeast Asia...though according to The Other Wiki there's a rumor they're coming back in 2011. And speaking of M&Ms, a lot of people miss the tan ones.
                + As for the M&ms: I'm afraid we were given a horrible substitute in 'pretzel M&Ms' this year, not the triumphant return of the best M&Ms ever...
          o KFC's Triple Crunch Melt sandwich. It can be recreated easily (frozen or ready-made chicken strips, kaiser roll, provolone and BBQ sauce are super easy to get), but it's just not the same.
          o Some of the happiest moments of some tropers' childhood involved watching cartoons after school while eating a Planters' cookie-esque snack called PB Crisps. Vaguely like Nutter Butters, but even better.
          o Ecto Cooler.
          o Josta, a proto-energy drink using guarana in a cola.
          o Pepsi Blue.
          o Flavor-blasted Jalapeño Goldfish
          o In Austria and quite likely Germany and the Swiss, there was an ice cream brand called Cheesy; vanilla ice popsicle looking like cheese with holes. It tasted glorious. Disappeared in the mid-nineties.
          o Red Fusion Dr Pepper was a cherry-flavored variant which existed for a short time and then promptly vanished off the face of the planet, even though it was the most delicious beverage ever created.
          o Crystal Pepsi.
          o Novelty and "test" sodas are often this, like Pepsi Holiday Blend, Pepsi Jazz (a line of uniquely flavoured diet colas), Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, or A&W's short-lived Chocolate Creme Soda.
          o Ben & Jerry's No Sugar flavours. We diabetics mourn the day the line disappeared.
    * Amiga; without Commodore's horrifying mismanagement, it would be occupying the trendy, high-end, media-oriented space filled by Apple today.
          o Technically, the Amiga OS survives today, but it's nothing like it was...
    * Some people in The New Russia have this for the pre-Soviet Russia - what could have happened if Russia never entered World War One, or if the October Revolution never happened, or if the White Guards had won. Others have that for the USSR — what could have happened if Gorbachev never started his reforms, or if the August Putsch never interrupted the reforms and a new Union Treaty got signed.
          o Putin said of this "Those who do not miss the Old Days have no heart; those who want them back have no brain."
    * We went to the moon. That was awesome. Ever again doing something like it or better? Signs point to "fat chance". Everyone who grew up on sci-fi is asking "What happened?". I Want My Jetpack.
    * VHS tapes, Laserdiscs, cassette tapes and any form of "obsolete" media.
          o Even more so when you consider all the material released on them that never got converted to the current media, especially movies.
    * Childhood. Or youth in general.
    * Basketball fans never got to see Len Bias play in the NBA.
          o Or, for that matter, Wayne Estes or Hank Gathers.
    * Hardcore baseball fans feel this way about pre-racial integration baseball but not in the way you might think. Some of the most legendary figures of baseball history were active in the 1920s and 30s but were separated into the mainstream whites-only league (which nonetheless had a few light-skinned minority players) and the Negro and other minority leagues. Baseball wasn't integrated until much later and the fact that these great and storied players never met means that baseball fans potentially lost even more legendary games and championships over something that's now more or less considered absurd.
    * Horse racing is loaded with Lostalgia. Every two or three years, a horse who is either a champion or seems to be on the way to becoming one suffers a career-ending—or even life-ending—injury, leaving fans to wonder what might have been. Ruffian and Barbaro are two of the best-known examples.
    * In general, any genre / sub-genre / way of producing a work that gets Deconstructed so heavily that people no longer produce new works like it on account of no longer being able to take it seriously anymore.
    * This Cracked article has "The Contents of Ernest Hemingway's Suitcase," "The Rest of the Canterbury Tales" and "All Music Made Throughout Most of Human History". The last one in particular is like having a corkscrew driven into your temples during a migraine, considering that the writer tells us that the loss rate of music before the nineteenth century stands at almost 100 percent.
    * Department stores. Macy's in particular expanded by gobbling up a very large string of chains, some of which had been around since the 19th century, in a long chain of acquisitions between 1984 and 2006. Gone were historical regional chains like Marshall Field's (itself having already swallowed Dayton's and Hudson's), Jordan Marsh (around since 1841), Filene's, Strawbridge's and Robinsons-May.
          o To other extents, Montgomery Ward has gone out entirely, declaring bankruptcy in 2000.
          o And too many local chains to count. Some were bought by larger chains; some just went under entirely.
    * Theme parks are a prime source of Lostalgia. Astroworld in Houston was closed in 2005.
    * A large amount of italian renaissance art. Even applying the "90% of everything is crap" rule, there are a lot of paintings and statues on record that have long since disappeared and that would be amazing to have. Mantegna's St. James fresco Cycle, the cartoons for the Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo, Leonardo's Leda and The Swan, his Medusa, Giotto's Navicella (considered at the time his best work to boot),Simon Martini's portrait of Laura, the list goes on and on. Actually make that "a large amount of art, period".

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

These are archived troper tales about "Lostalgia."
* Subverted by This Troper: She got into ''{{Primeval}}'' after it had been cancelled ''and'' [[UnCancelled revived]].
* I had this happen when I discovered ''CaseyAndAndy'' thanks to, you guessed it, this wiki. Though it really wasn't so bad, since the archives are still there and I didn't have to bear with the year-long hiatuses that apparently popped up during its run.
* [[Tropers/TromboneChild This troper]] discovered ''{{Firefly}}'' online in August 2008, about six years after it had been cancelled. She watched everything, fascinated by all the potential plotlines...and then she had to remind herself that she'd never get anymore. She felt like crying.
** Oh lord, don't get me started on ''{{Firefly}}''. Despite being a pretty big Whedonite, I only got into it last year (2009), when a friend was espousing how good it was and his own lostalgia over it. There's just so much potential for awesomeness that couldn't possibly be summarized by one movie...
* This troper had never seen an episode of ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' until 2005, when she was inspired by this wiki to watch it all. Over a period of about four months she got two episodes every weekday. And then it was over! Sad.
* [[{{Tropers/Lurkerbunny}} This troper]], infamously a RobinWilliams fan, only just got into ''MorkAndMindy'' in 2007. It depresses her to know that Robin could never reprise the role, even if he wanted to (which he doesn't) because he's aged so much. It just wouldn't work.
* ''StargateAtlantis'' is great, ''StargateUniverse'' looks promising and the new direct-to-DVD movies are fun, but this troper would gladly trade all of that to bring back ''StargateSG1''.
** This troper feels the same way, particularly since there might not be any more direct-to-DVD movies. ''Stargate'' is great but it's best days could very well be behind it.
* ''{{Wonderfalls}}''. [[OtherJoey This troper]] never saw the show in its original run (despite liking ''DeadLikeMe'' and ''{{Firefly}}'' a whole lot), and but discovered it via syndication on [=LOGO=]. For a while he consoled himself with ''PushingDaisies'', but now...
* [[Tropers/HopelessRomance This troper]] got into CloneHigh about 2 years ago and watched the entire series in 2 or 3 days. My heart crumbled when I realised there was nothing else for the show. I couldn't get a copy of the DVD, and I can't seem to find it on iTunes. WHY?!
* [[Tropers/AcrossTheStars This troper]]'s {{Lostalgia}} button is ''[[TheXFiles The X-Files]]''. She's only midway through Season 3, but she knows that it'll run out soon enough, and then... no more adorable Mulder! No more foxy Scully! [[BigNo WAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!]] However, there is hope for another movie in four years...
* DAVID BOWIE. This troper, despite being an 80's child, wasn't properly introduced until just THREE YEARS AGO, just a few agonizing years after Bowie essentially throwing in the towel with being an active figure in pop culture. [He is still active today, but behind the scenes active.] The majority of my life, he was right there in pop culture, and this troper utterly missed it. Must have been under a rock. Never ceases to make me very, very sad.
* [[{{Tropers/Metz77}} This troper]] felt this way after he got into TheBeatles' solo careers, and realized that John was reaching a peak as a songwriter when he was killed.
** [[{{Tropers/xyzzy}} This troper]] found out her favorite Beatle was George after he died. And discovered her favorite author, DouglasAdams, under similar circumstances.
* This troper misses the old-school TheSmashingPumpkins and wonders what James Iha and D'Arcy are up to. At least Iha seems to be working on a second solo album and D'Arcy is still alive, suing Virgin Records over SP ringtones. Now, the half-Pumpkins is bland, with stories of terrible shows and Billy's bad faux-British accent.
* This troper feels this way about Panic! At The Disco.They released a wonderful (in my opinion) first album, and followed it up with a second album that was completely different. And then they broke up.
** A hearty agreement from this troper, who wishes that the band could've come up with more like the first album.
* [[Tropers/DannyLilithborne This troper]] mourns ''SailorMoon'' - it's a series that singlehandedly pulled me out of a major depression, and Toei all but refuses to acknowledge it exists and its creator seems to have stopped fighting for it (although I sympathize somewhat since she's married to Yoshihiro Togashi (''HunterXHunter'', ''YuYuHakusho''), whose health problems are well known at this point).
* This troper discovered jazz singer Etta James when fooling around on a Usenet {{MP3}} group. The discovery that the stuff he downloaded was all there (save bootlegs and collaborations) was a major bummer.
* [[Tropers/NekoIncardine This Troper]] first encountered the musical act Oingo Boingo about five years after the band had broken up. Possibly one of the coolest (and strangest!) rock groups to ever exist, and they don't exist anymore outside of [[ComplainingAboutThingsYouDontLike an utter abortion of a cover]] of ''Only a Lad'' in GuitarHero [[MissionPackSequel Rocks]] [[DisContinuity The 80s]] and the occasional appearance of their songs on other games.
* FrankZappa. [[{{Tropers/Nausicaa}} This troper]] discovered his music as a fourteen-year-old and only realised after a Wikipedia binge and a few albums that he died in 1990, the year she was born.
* This troper had nothing but complete affection for "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" after hearing five seconds of it in a short film. She found the song somewhere on the internet, and listened to it again and again and again. She found out Napoleon XIV made an entire album with this type of songs; she found it on Amazon and ordered it straight away. She waited. She got it. She listened to her heart's content. She realized that good ol' Nap now runs an entertainment business, and, while it has been said that he still writes songs, any chance of him releasing another album is gone into the ether. The moment when her heart shattered came when she heard that he ''had'' tried to get another album published; another of those questionably tasteful yet, by god, effectful songs. Apparently, no one wanted him to. She still knows the lyrics to every one of his songs...
* On that note, this troper loves Ska music, but was too little to be able to appreciate it in its heyday, like when it was actually played on the radio and in movie soundtracks. Sure, some bands are still around, but it still blows to have missed the height of its popularity.
* This troper has become completely obsessed with ''SuperRobotWars'' upon playing the ''OriginalGeneration'' games on the Gameboy Advance... Which sold horribly in America, preventing him from playing any of the games in English aside from the odd fan translation. (That, and non-OG games are licensing nightmares.)
* [[Tropers/FreezairForALimitedTime This troper's]] own potential {{Lostalgia}} was ''subverted by the frickin' universe.'' Or at least the brains at Ubisoft. "Wow, it's a [=GameCube=] copy of ''BeyondGoodAndEvil''! I've wanted to play this game for a while. I think I'll buy it. ...Hey, this game is AWESOME! I'm obsessed! ACK! Cliffhanger ending?! What do you MEAN the game sold terribly and there will NEVER EVER BE A SEQUEL? Nooooo!" Then, approximately [[UnCancelled three weeks later...]]
* This troper is currently rediscovering the [[BattleTech BattleTech]], or more specifically, the [[MechWarrior Mech Warrior]] franchise. To be even more specific, the [[MechAssault MechAssault]] games, a pair of Xbox-live enabled games released for the original Xbox around 2003, and 2004-ish. So far, I'm dying to see these games brought back with a new installment, ESPECIALLY considering the fact that the games themselves fell so damn hard into obscurity sometime after their release that noone ever talks about them anymore! I mean, there's not even a trope page for the two games for crying out loud! There was a new Mech Warrior installment in the works, but I recently heard that it was suspended indefinetely due to a dumbass lawsuit from Harmony Gold. It seems unlikely that Day One studios or anyone else would ever return to the franchise to make another game, and this is very saddening, as this franchise is one of the very rare Western takes of the [[HumongousMecha Humongous Mecha]] genre. BOTH MechAssault 1 & 2 should be friggin [[RatedMForManly RATED M FOR MANLY!]] as the gameplay is about hopping into mechs and [[StuffBlowingUp blowing shit up]] while some [[AutobotsRockOut hard rock plays in the background]]. These games are [[TestosteronePoisoning MEN'S]] Mech games, and while Xbox Live for the original Xbox is now dead, and reverse compatibility regarding these games is questionable, anyone who is still able to give these games a spin should try them out!
* ''{{Shenmue}}''. This troper has actually postponed playing it for concerns over this very trope: he's heard nothing but good things about the first two games, could easily find and play them, and would probably enjoy them- but he's never played a minute of it because the idea that the game's elaborate, detailed plot will almost assuredly ''never'' be resolved would be too much of a dark cloud over it.
* This troper watched ''The Amazing Screw-On Head'' pilot on the internet, then [[SmiteMeOhMightySmiter cursed the gods]] that a perfectly-cast, well-written, and beautifully animated show only has twenty minutes of canon. Dammit.
* Look, [[Tropers/GwenStacyWannabe I]] know there's gonna be a live-action [[AvatarTheLastAirbender Avatar]] movie in a couple years, and they're talking about another series with different characters, but it just won't be the same without the animated Gaang...
* This troper's Lostalgia towards ''{{Animaniacs}}'' is almost bordering on depression. Just a freaking shame it never even made it into the 21st century and the fact that it predates SO MANY things worth parodying.
** Yeah, a lot of the '90's WB stuff can do that. ''{{Freakazoid}}'', for example, or ''{{Histeria}}''...hell, even ''{{Detention}}'', probably the most forgotten member of the bunch.
*** This troper gets angry because of this; even supposed fans of old 90's cartoons and kids shows appear to have no idea what ''{{Freakazoid}}'' is when she mentions it. Her family ''loved'' Freakazoid, and everyone got sad when all the episodes were watched.
**** Oh, I did watch it and I was around during most of the nineties! Only that were I lived it was dubbed and was called "Fenomenoide", and I...could only catch the ending part every time I turned the TV on...but I know the theme song! In latin spanish...
* I miss you, ''TransformersAnimated''. I'm still hoping we get the third season on DVD some day... * Clutches [[MerchandiseDriven tiny plastic Prowl]] and weeps softly.*
* Riot grrl. That is all. Damn me and my not being born a decade earlier!
* This troper discovered {{Music/Aqua}} three years after they broke up... [[IGotBetter but now they're back together]]. Does that count as a [[SubvertedTrope subversion]]?
* [[Tropers/BoldAsLove This Troper]] will never hear a Runaways song for the first time ever again.
* [[Tropers/{{Freiberg}} This Troper]] just finished the last SectorGeneral novel... and realized that, being an obscure book series with a dead author, there is very likely never going to be another book, by anyone, about it ever again.
* It happens to me from time to time; Thank God, I've discovered series that had a very long or at least decent run ({{Frasier}}) but in most cases, they are [[TooGoodToLast too good for their own good]] ([[FatherTed Father Ted]], [[FredsHead Fred's Head]]), and then, we have [[DonBluth Don Bluth]]...I'm convinced that [[RockADoodle after]] [[ATrollInCentralPark several]] [[ThePebbleAndThePenguin awful movies]], he was heading to some recovery ({{Anastasia}} and [[TitanAE Titan AE]] may not be as good as his 80's films, but boy, they were a HUGE improvement) but he hasn't made a new movie in years...
* [[Tropers/LimeTH This Troper]] is a subversion, as he couldn't have gotten into AzumangaDaioh at a better time. When he finished the series, he got lostalgia, but about a year later, the 10th anniversary chapters were released, and he didn't have to wait seven years for them like everyone else ''because'' he got in so late.
* When I was an [[OldShame awful writer]] (nowadays, I'm just a mediocre writer), I used to read a lot of fics. One day, I found this piece of art in the YuYuHakusho section that got my heart entirely, but then I found out the last actualization had been made almost a year before. Needless to say, I got pissed and started sending daily reviews to make [[MostFanficWritersAreGirls her]] keep writing. Take a wild guess about what happened.
* Say ME if you had this with TheBeatles! ME!
** MEEE!!!
*** [[RuleOfThree ME!]]
* Because of a serendipitous moment at a local library, I am a newly converted ''StarlightExpress'' devotee. Nothing twists my heart more than knowing that I'll never be able to see "No Comeback" or "Belle the Sleeping Car" performed on stage, even when I eventually travel to Germany. Of everything that causes me to wish I had been a child in the 1980s and a teenager in the 1990s instead of a child in the 1990s and a teenager at the turn of the century, ''StarlightExpress'' is at the top.
* This Troper's twin discovered 70's and 80's glam rock and old-school punk when everyone else was heavily into grunge. Worse is that we lived a ferry ride from Seattle - grunge rock's home base. Her justification: "I live in an overgrown Navy base. I do not need to be reminded that life sucks!"
* This Troper discovered BlakesSeven...in the mid-nineties. Damn it.
* This Troper discovered ''Mother 3'' a few years ago. She is now on a frantic hunt for a copy of ''Earthbound'' that costs less than $80. And is cursing Nintendo for not making any kind of Virtual Console release. Not to mention how she just finished the 5th ''SakuraTaisen'' and loved it...
* This troper discovered WesleyWillis...one year after he died.
* I (Sapphire Redux) have noticed a lot of music sites/journalists worrying, as of 2011, if DavidBowie will ever record a new album (his last, ''Reality'', was in '03) and/or perform live again (last tour was in 2004). And I know at least one fellow fan who got into his work too late to enjoy the thrill of new material arriving.
* This troper was saddened to learn that the Jurassic Five had broken up with little chance of reunion nearly a year before he really got into them.
* [[{{Tropers/Thanos6}} This Troper]] was born just as disco was dying, and will probably not see a new disco song released after his discovery of it. Yes, disco. Feel free to mock.
* 2D platformers, especially with 2D sprites. Aside from Nintendo, hardly anyone seems to make them anymore, in favor of 3D and polygons.
* Feel free to laugh, but... many [[MemeticMutation memes]] when they are considered "old/dead". Hey, at least I appreciate them as more than a fad!
* Ephraim Kishon died two days after I read got hooked up
* This troper didn't discover TypeONegative until around the time Peter Steele passed away.
* Two words: MichaelJackson. His reputation was already DeaderThanDisco by the time I got into his music, then he himself kicked the bucket.
* ''ThreeTwoOneContact'', among other educational PBS programs. It was already nearing its end by the time I discovered it in 1987 at age 5.
* All too many of my favorite bands/artists produced [[OneBookAuthor just one album]] (or sometimes single), then dropped off the radar never to be heard again.
* Kandystand, a Eurodance revival group, has been silent since 2009, with no word of a breakup or future productions.
** Addendum: They have broken up, apparently due to a relationship dispute. [[DarthWiki/WallBanger Dang it!]]
* A long time ago, back before it was bought out by {{Viacom}}, Shockwave.com had online versions of classic [[MidwayGames Midway]] arcade games, indie [[AdobeFlash Flash]] games like DJ Fu, and even a system to download and play them while offline. And now those days are gone forever.
* Every single time I play ''{{Psychonauts}}''...
* [[{{Tropers/Webby}} This tropette]] noticed the comic strip "Spot the Frog" and quickly fell in love with the protagonist. I was unaware that the strip had ended, and read it's entire 4-year run in a day. On a brighter note, this trope was subverted wonderfully with DarkwingDuck. I'm preparing to buy ''The Duck Knight Returns''.
* I recently got into Bill Hick's material but I can't bring myself to watch everything he did, as knowing that such a caustic sense of humour isn't around to mock some of the direly stupid things at present hurts a lot more than I expected it to.
* I'm probably the only one which suffers this for KDE 3. If I had the programming skills I would gladly fork it.
* I discovered ''TheATeam'' (the original series) last year on my local retro network, and then online when that channel turned into a bunch of religious infomercials (in the middle of Season 3). I haven't finished the series because I don't ever want to run out of the show's silly, wacky fun.
* This a weird version in my case: While shearching though my On Demand service a few years ago, I stumbled across one of the [=MTV2=] episodes of CelebrityDeathmatch (after it got cancelled around 2001-2002, it was UnCancelled on that channel). After that, I got a little interested, so much so that after watching the other few episodes, I went to look up the series online. THAT was when I stumbled across [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6HEsRR7B2Q this fight]], which caused me to get REALLY into the older episodes. Since then, I've grown to not like the revived seasons... which is sad since, unless it gets revived again (and done RIGHT), ''that'' is how that show ends. ...and it hurts, a little.
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Go back to {{Lostalgia}}, even though there won't be any more of it, ever. * sob*

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The Cuza sez: Hot & Spicy Miracle Whip was some tasty-ass shit, but sadly it's gone. But don't worry, I found a replacement! That Zesty Ranch sauce from Old El Paso! Now that's gone too.

Now there's Cheez Whiz Tex Mex but it's not as good as the other two were.

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Longing for something from the past that will never see renewal in the present.

    So when TV Tropes finally dies, will you remember the unabridged version fondly?

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This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Socran: I take it not too many examples will qualify to be listed in the main article, huh? Man, this entire trope feels like it was written specifically for me and Super Robot Taisen, as far as American releases go. If only I had known to spread the word back when it actually mattered how many copies they sold...

Pro-Mole: Include Shaman King in the list and see if the number qualifies. When I realized the series just wouldn't have a real ending, I flipped on the inside...

Isn't this just Too Good To Last?

Doug S. Machina: It's not the troper missing Firefly, but their mother. Thank you, you've made a happy man feel old. I'll add Father Ted to this list.

Idle Dandy: Can't this be expanded to include any feeling of loss when a series ends? Like how certain tropers may have cried at the end of Revenge of the Sith because it was over?

Airof Mystery: The trilogy wasn't really over...well, kind of...but more "now the circle is complete".

Revolos55: I saw this referred to in a metaquote on Live Journal, where someone, having just watched the pilot of Firefly, said that they had just fallen in love with a dead show, and they were therefore a "necrofilmiac".

Elanorea: Does the Sailor Moon example really fit? I mean, as sad as it might be that it's not being aired anymore, it's by no means an unfinished or short-lived series. It lasted far longer than the author originally intended, and came to a definite conclusion after 200 episodes.

173.11.36.169
09:38:51 AM Mar 29th 2010
There's a related trope, but I don't think it's quite the same thing.. when all the really good anime you love came out back before videogame adaptations even had a chance of being any good.. now the hardware could support it, but it's just way too old for there to be any chance, and/or the actors are dead. DBZ is the only one that escapes this.

BigT
08:34:34 PM Jun 17th 2010
And only sometimes, as a lot of the DBZ games were not good.

nuclearneo577
04:20:15 PM Jul 27th 2011
edited by nuclearneo577
Dude, there are only 7 votes on the crowner.