List of Major Commercial Flops

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List of major flops
Helping orphans the way you would do it
A flop or product failure is a product that doesn't reach expectations of success, failing to come even
close. A major flop goes one step further and is recognized for its almost complete lack of success.
However, most of the items listed below are ones that had high expectations, large amounts of money
or widespread publicity, but fell far short of success. Obviously, due to the subjective nature of
"success" and "meeting expectations", there can be disagreement about what constitutes a "major flop".
Two examples: David McReynolds ran for President of the United States in 1980 and 2000 on the
socialist ticket, but came nowhere near winning. However, he would never characterize his campaign as
a flop because he ran for president in order to get his causes recognized, without any hope of being
elected. But the creation of New Coke is generally regarded indisputably a "major flop".
Table of contents [hide] [hide]
1 Entertainment
1.1 Musical comebacks gone awry
1.2 Flops in sports
1.3 Flops in television
1.3.1 Flops in soap operas
1.3.2 Other flops in television
1.4 Turkeys (Flops in theatre)
1.5 Flops in film
2 Commercial flops
2.6 Commercial failures in aviation
2.7 Automotive flops
2.8 Computing flops
2.9 Video game system flops
2.10 Other commercial flops
3 Flops in science and engineering
3.11 Technical failures in aerospace
3.12 Weapons
3.13 Scientific projects
3.14 Civil engineering projects
4 Political flops
4.15 USA Presidential campaigns
4.16 French elections
4.17 Canadian elections
4.18 UK elections
5 See also
Entertainment
Musical comebacks gone awry
Search
MC Hammer's failed restyling as a gangsta rapper.
New Kids on the Block didn't make the comeback cut as "NKOTB".
Diana Ross had to cancel her "Diana Ross and the Supremes" tour for lack of interest, mainly
because she had refused to include other original members of the Supremes in the tour, cutting off
23 scheduled appearances.
Vanilla Ice
Flops in sports
The European Hockey League
The United States Football League
The XFL
Flops in television
Flops in soap operas
The BBC soap operas Triangles and Eldorado
The relaunched ITV1 soap Crossroads
The ABC soap opera The City
The NBC soap opera Generations
90-minute installments of the soap opera Another World. After sixteen months and a 50% ratings
decline, the show moved to back to an hour and never recovered.
Other flops in television
The disastrous 1980 season of Saturday Night Live
Supertrain
Pink Lady & J eff
Bette
The Chevy Chase Show
The Pat Sajak Show
Thicke of the Night - Talk show with Alan Thicke
The U.S. version of Coupling
The Mike Bullard Show
Turkeys (Flops in theatre)
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) Lyrics by Alan J . Lerner, of "My Fair Lady" and "Brigadoon"
fame; music by Leonard Bernstein, with important Broadway successes such as "On the Town,"
"Candide," and, most notably "West Side Story" to his credit. Closed after only seven
performances. There was no cast recording made. An attempt was made to revive it in London in
1997. A reviewer commented "As exhumations go, this one had its bright moments."
Carrie a 1988 Broadway musical adaptation of Stephen King's novel of the same title, starring Betty
Buckley, closed after only five performances and 16 previews. One of the many problems plaguing
the show was a bucket of pig blood which was replaced by people dabbing red paint on the
actress' face, as actually pouring stage blood on the actress would have interfered with her body
microphone. The show was such a notorious turkey it provided the title to Ken Mandelbaum's
survey of theatrical disasters, Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops.
Flops in film
A movie is most likely a flop if it doesn't perform as expected. A major movie flop might barely (or not
even) make back the money it took to finance it. In extreme cases it might put the studio out of
business.
A separate discussion of movie flops and box office bombs provides examples and rationales.
Commercial flops
Commercial failures in aviation
These are aircraft which were technically sound, but failed in the marketplace. For aircraft which failed
to work at all see '#Flops in science and engineering'.
The Bristol Brabazon - this giant airliner was simply too expensive, too large for the time, and
carried too few passengers in great luxury rather than many passengers in less space.
The Convair CV-880 and CV-990 - these aircraft were commercial disasters as they only offered
five-abreast seating, and were easily outcompeted on price by the Boeing 720 which was based on
an existing aircraft type.
Supersonic transports: Boeing 2707, Tupolev Tu-144, arguably Concorde
The Dassault Aviation Mercure - this aircraft had extremely limited range and as a result only ten
were built for the French domestic airline Air Inter
The Northrop F-20 Tigershark - this fighter aircraft was designed as a private venture for export,
but failed utterly as foreign air forces wanted the more prestigious F-16 Fighting Falcon used by
the USAF, despite the F-20 having superior performance and lower cost.
The Boeing 737-600 and 757-300 failed to recieve the orders that Boeing originally expected. The
737-600 is still for sale, however, and as the development cost was shared with other 737 models,
it might not be considered a flop in the traditional sense. The Boeing 767-400ER, while receiving
only a few orders, wasn't a flop because it was intended to be a niche aircraft for Delta Air Lines
and Continental Airlines to replace their L-1011 and DC-10 fleets.
The McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) MD-87 and MD-90 failed to recieve orders as
compared with the Boeing 737 family and Airbus A320 family.
Sales of the Airbus A318 and A340-200 are lesser than what Airbus expected.
Automotive flops
Ford Motor Company's Edsel
De Lorean automobile
Electric cars - Ford Motor Company and General Motors, who only had lukewarm interest in the
technology, have dropped production of their electric car models.
Sinclair C5 - a battery powered car designed by Sir Clive Sinclair
The Bricklin SV-1
The General Motors V-8-6-4 variable cylinder engine.
Computing flops
The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first attempt at building a supercomputer. Its
actual performance was less than one third of its original specification. This resulted in IBM
drastically dropping the price and losing money on every machine sold.
The ILLIAC IV array processor supercomputer.
Microsoft Windows 1.0 and Microsoft Windows 2.0 were huge flops because their sales were low,
they were very slow, needed a lot of memory for the time, and practically no software were ever
written for them.
Microsoft Bob.
Apple has had flops, notably the Apple III, Apple Lisa, and arguably the Apple Newton.
IBM had the IBM PS/2 and the IBM PCjr.
IBM's 4" diameter floppy disk drive, introduced at about the same time as Seagate's 3" floppy,
Hitachi's 3.25" floppy, and Sony's 3.5" floppy. (All but Sony's flopped).
The Commodore Amiga was a flop in the United States (but was successful in Europe).
Amiga CDTV - This early multimedia computer was overpriced and suffered from using the
obsolete AmigaOS 1.3, when version 2.0 was already available.
Data Play CD replacement disk technology. Cited by J im Louderback as one of the "eight biggest
tech flops ever".
Go (pen computing corporation), cited by J im Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops
ever".
Intel expected the Itanium processor (referred to by detractors as "the Itanic") to revolutionize the
microprocessor industry, but after 7 years of development and billions of dollars spent the first
Itanium chip proved an utter technical and commercial failure. However the project still goes on,
and Itanium 2 is an improvement. (Furthermore, the Itanium had the valuable side effect of killing
competition; its development caused several competing chips, such as the Alpha and advanced
version of the Sparc, to be abandoned by timid management).
Iomega Clik! drive. Cited by J im Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
Magic Cap, an early PDA OS which failed to take off, and was eventually made irrelevant by the
success of the Palm Pilot. Cited by J im Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
In the 1980s, Commodore International became the first company to sell a million home
computers. Hoping to repeat the success of its multimillion-selling VIC-20 and C-64 computers, it
released the Commodore Plus/4 in 1984. It flopped. Commodore tried--and mostly failed--for 10
years to duplicate the C-64's success and went bankrupt in 1994.
The INMOS Transputer, a brave attempt at a different way of computing - but now largely
forgotten.
WebTV (now MSN TV). Internet delivery via television set and set-top box. Cited by J im
Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
The Sinclair QL an unsuccessful attempt by Sinclair Research to make a 16 bit computer in the mid
1980s
Video game system flops
Sega has had numerous flops in North America, for example the Saturn, the Nomad, the Master
System II and III, and the 32X (the Master System was successful in Europe and Brazil, and the
Saturn was successful in J apan). The Megadrive was not well received in J apan. After Sega's last
console the Dreamcast was discontinued, Sega abandoned hardware production altogether.
Nintendo's most notable flop is the much-maligned Nintendo Virtual Boy. It also has a history of
introducing novel controllers that are utilized by only a handful of games, such as the Power Glove,
Power Pad, Robotic Operating Buddy, SNES mouse, and the SNES light gun.
The Game.com handheld
The Atari J aguar console and the Atari Lynx handheld.
Daikatana, the hyped and massively delayed video game from J ohn Romero.
The Atari 2600 version of E.T
The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man
The Amiga CD-32
The Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I) player, a "multimedia machine" jointly developed by Philips
and Sony. It was considered overpriced and underpowered.
The 3DO Multiplayer, a "multimedia machine" (it was marketed as a family entertainment device
and not just a video game console) designed by R.J . Mical and the team behind the Amiga and
marketed by Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts. It was introduced at $699, twice the price of
most game consoles.
The Apple Pippin, a games console based on MacOS and the PowerPC - was abandoned before
production, clearly was unlikely to have succeeded.
The Nokia N-Gage - many video gamers simply mocked the system because of its clumsy design
and this led to poor sales.
Other commercial flops
The 1976 Summer Olympics, which left the host city of Montreal in debts that it spent years paying
off
The Betamax VCR system - after some initial success it was soundly beaten in the marketplace by
VHS. Betamax failed in part because it was not an open standard.
The Digital Compact Cassette - a format introduced by Philips, which lost out to Minidisc and CD-R
DIVX, a take-off on DVD that required users to pay per viewing. Retail electronics giant and DIVX
backer Circuit City lost about $200m over the fiasco.
eBook devices. Between 1999 and 2002, a number of companies, notably Gemstar, jockeyed for
control of this supposedly vast, lucrative market, believing that consumers would pay hardcover
prices for a severely limited number of book titles in DRM-encrypted formats that tied each
electronic copy to a unique serialized hardware device. In 2002 the "eBooks are dead" meme
became widespread. In 2003, Gemstar pulled the plug on its servers and Barnes and Noble ceased
offering eBook content of any kind.
The Elcaset audio format - an attempt at a higher-quality replacement for the compact cassette by
Sony.
Lymeswold cheese (UK)
The Millennium Dome - a commercial and public relations disaster, it now lies empty in Greenwich,
England.
New Coke, introduced April 23rd 1985. The Coca-Cola company changed the formula and taste of
its flagship product, a universally successful drink whose name was almost synonymous with soft
drinks. It was a marketing and public relations debacle, and the company had to backtrack and
return to the older formula. However, when they went back to the original formula, demand for
the classic taste grew to a greater extent than before New Coke, propelling Coca-Cola to a market
lead over rival Pepsi - making the situation an unintentional success for Coca-Cola.
The Tanganyika groundnut scheme, a plan by Clement Attlee's British government, financed by
British tax-payers, to cultivate tracts of what is now Tanzania with peanuts.
Crystal Pepsi was Pepsi's answer to New Coke
Dasani, Coca-Cola's brand of bottled water, was a flop in the UK after it emerged it was essentially
just Sidcup tap water, treated to make it more pure but in fact containing high levels of bromate.
Pepsi Blue
Flops in science and engineering
A scientific flop may be something that took years of man-hours and a lot of money to complete (or
perhaps never completed) and ended in failure.
Technical failures in aerospace
The Brewster F2A Buffalo - this World War II fighter aircraft was outclassed by most Axis fighters
early in the war but held its own on some occasions
The Europa rocket failed five times, without a single successful launch
The Messerschmitt Me 163 was so dangerous that it killed more Luftwaffe pilots than Allied
airmen.
Most reusable space vehicles: Shuttle Buran, HOTOL, various NASA space planes, arguably the
Space Shuttle.
The Spruce Goose flying boat, Howard Hughes' white elephant.
Project Vanguard (1958), the first attempt by the United States to put a satellite into orbit. The
project managers insisted on using a new, civilian-designed, purpose-built rocket. There were
repeated embarrassing crashes. After Sputnik, it was quickly decided to use proven military missile
designs as the base for future space attempts.
Weapons
The Chauchat light machine gun - the French weapon of WWI was notorious for its unreliability,
prone to jamming and lack of precision manufacturing.
The German Maus tank was so heavy (188 tons) that it was unusable
The British SA80 rifle was notoriously unreliable.
Scientific projects
Cold fusion - after much hype, claims of success proved false. (Research into cold fusion
continues.)
Project Mohole was a 1950s proposal to drill through Earth's crust and sample the material below,
but it was never implemented because in the mid-1960s the planners realized it was impossible.
MIT Media Lab founded in the 1980s to address issues of media convergence. Failed to produce
more than a handful of commercially viable ideas. Media convergence occurred without the lab's
help. In the early 2000s major financial mismanagement and extravagant spending by faculty
forced the lab to cancel a proposed expansion. Lab continues to fight for relevance despite having
no clear mission.
Civil engineering projects
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed due to resonance in a gale force wind.
The J ohn Hancock Tower in Boston is, as the article notes, "known more for its early engineering
flaws than for its architectural achievement." Wind-induced torsional and lateral oscillation was so
large as to induce motion sickness in upper-floor residents. Ten thousand of the floor-to-ceiling
plate-glass windowpanes fell out of the building to the ground (with, amazingly, no injuries to
passersby or building residents). During engineering analysis of these problems, it was discovered
that under certain wind conditions the building could actually have undergone a Tacoma-Narrows-
like collapse. The entire 58th floor is now devoted to a damping system containing two 300-ton
weights.
Political flops
USA Presidential campaigns
In the 1912 Election, Republican incumbent William H. Taft received only 8 electoral votes to 88
for Bull Moose Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt and 435 for Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic
nominee, the worst ever showing for an incumbent president. Splitting the Republican base with
Roosevelt, he garnered only 23% of the popular vote, the least support ever for a major party
candidate. He was also the only major party candidate in American history to lose either the
electoral or popular vote to a third party candidate.
In the 1932 Election, Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover earned 59 electoral votes and 40% of
the popular vote to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's 472 and 58%, respectively. Having earned
444 electoral votes and 58% of the popular vote in 1928, Hoover's fall was the worst repudiation
of a president in modern American history.
In the 1964 Election, Republican Barry Goldwater got 52 electoral votes to 486 for incumbent
Lyndon J ohnson and lost by 22 points in the popular vote, the worst popular defeat ever for a
Republican presidential nominee in the 20th Century.
In the 1972 Election, Democrat George McGovern received only 17 electoral votes to 520 for
incumbent Richard Nixon and lost by 23 points in the popular vote, the worst popular defeat for a
Democratic presidential nominee in the 20th Century.
In the 1980 Republican Primaries, J ohn Connally spent millions of dollars hoping to win the
nomination and instead ended up with only a single delegate to the convention.
In the 1984 Election, Democrat Walter Mondale got 13 electoral votes to 525 for incumbent Ronald
Reagan, the worst ever electoral defeat for a Democratic presidential nominee in the 20th Century,
and lost by 18 points in the popular vote.
In the 1992 Election, independent candidate H. Ross Perot spent millions of dollars in a national
advertising campaign, and garnered vast popular support, leading Democratic nominee William J .
Clinton considerably and barely trailing incumbent Republican George H. W. Bush in the early
spring. However, after a disastrously planned campaign, which included his withdrawal from the
race and late reentry, Perot received only 20% of the popular vote and no electoral votes.
In 2004, Howard Dean ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004 and gaining lots of support and
front-page articles in major news magazines prior to the primary elections, but ended up third in
the 2004 Iowa Democratic caucuses. After suffering a string of unbroken defeats, Dean won only
his home state of Vermont, after he had dropped out of the race.
French elections
The unnecessary dissolution of a favourable parliament (Assemble nationale) in 1997 by
President J acques Chirac should have presaged an easy win for his partisans. They lost, yielding
power to the opposition.
In the 2002 presidential campaign, extreme right J ean-Marie Le Pen went in second position, just
before Lionel J ospin, who said immediately he retired from politics.
Canadian elections
Kim Campbell led the governing Conservatives in the 1993 election campaign and succeeded in
winning only two seats in the House of Commons.
Stockwell Day became leader of the Canadian Alliance in the 2000 election campaign -- despite
predictions that his charismatic presence could lead the party to an electoral breakthrough, the
party gained just six additional seats in that year's election, and Day proved so spectacularly
ineffective as leader that thirteen caucus members quit the party a year later.
UK elections
Sir J ames Goldsmith's anti-EU Referendum Party failed to win a single seat in the 1997 general
election, despite heavy publicity and a significant number of votes.
The Labour Party's performance at the 1983 general election, led by Michael Foot. The manifesto
was described as 'the longest suicide note in political history'.
The Conservative Party's performance at the 1997 general election, and also at 2001 general
election. In both General Elections the Conservatives were routed disasterously. Their showing was
both times far worse than that of Michael Foot.
See also
product management
management
new product development
product

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Article about "List of major flops" in the English Wikipedia on 24-J ul-2004

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