August 3, 2026 • 14 mins
What are one-hit wonders? Why do one-hit wonders happen? Is this a real thing? What about no-hit wonders? We'll get into some of the reasons and misconceptions around one-hit wonders and answer some of those questions in this mini. What's your favoriate one-hit wonder?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome
to Why we do what we do Mini. I'm your
host Abraham and I'm your host Shane. We are a
psychology podcast. We talk about the things that humans and
(00:25):
non human animals do, and we do it in a
mini form, which means it's short. We're gonna try and
get into our topic, get out of there in about
fifteen minutes or less. I'll let you get about your day.
And that's what we do. And sometimes in these minis
we talk about the popular things that humans celebrate about
each other in limited quantities. I guess is how I'm
gonna put that. Yes, And if you're joining us for
(00:48):
the first time, then welcome. I hope you enjoy what
you hear in this discussion, and if you're coming back,
then welcome back. And I'm glad that you continue to
find joy and the things that we make. And either way,
if you'd like to support us, so you can leave
us a rating and review, like subscribe, tell a friend,
or join us on Patreon, and I'll talk more about
those things that you can do to support us at
the end of this discussion. But you find yourselves here
and we appreciate that, and it's a mini which means
(01:10):
we should jump into it. Is there anything I'm missing
or you'd like to add before we begin today? Note
not today beautiful, So we begin. We are talking today
about music, specifically a type of music one called a
one hit wonder. This refers to an artist who has, Conceptually,
here we're talking about a single, huge mainstream success hit
(01:31):
in the form usually of a song. After this hit,
they fail to achieve similar success and often will kind
of disappear. So they some song of theirs gets very
very popular. It flares up very bright. They're very well
known for that song. That's the last anyone really hears
about them in the popular spaces they once occupied because
(01:53):
of that song.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, they quickly become someone you used to know. A snaps,
well done, STAPs snaps.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
There you go. So, how does this happen?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well, I was trying to research this, and it's a
huge complex system of taste makers and capitalism and all
those things, and artists integrity and all that, but it's
mostly general trends in what could be described as an
extremely competitive market. There are lots of metrics, including the
Billboard Hot one hundred. We did a whole episode on Billboard,
which I think is really valuable and important. But we
(02:25):
do need a little bit more history here to understand
the current music industry in order to understand how one
hit wonders actually develop.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Love history perfect. So, pre World War Two, just even
recording and putting out music was a lot more challenging
than it is today. By Miles and Miles, musicians would
often act as singles artists. Now why would they do this, Well,
it's a lot cheaper to record a single where you
only have one track or maybe two tracks because one
to two and release it that way than to record
(02:53):
an entire album. It takes less time in the studio,
it takes less space and a record. But in the
nineteen fifties, with the emergent of record charts such as
the Billboard, society began to quantify what a one hit
wonder actually was, began to create a context by which
it's like, well, there's something important in here about the
fact that we attached the value of something to the
(03:15):
artists who created it, and then therefore what they create,
that thing that's created is known as being important and
relevant to that artist, And so if they make more things,
then we can attribute those again to that artist, and
if they don't make things that achieve that level of
acclaim and fame, then we sort of write them off
as they got the one thing in the sauce and
then that was kind of their one trick.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, So the general consensus is that when somebody has
only one Billboard Top forty hit, and that's kind that's
the main criteria that I've seen a bunch of times.
Is it a Billboard Top forty hit god When they've
had only one and failed to have another, Even if
they have popular songs and it doesn't reach that level,
they get this status of one hit wonder. It's arbitrary,
and I think it's really important to stay it up front.
(03:58):
It's completely arbitrary. But that being said, the timeline for
when their next hit is not agreed upon. So technically
someone could have a hit on the charts forty years
later and negate that definition. They could have a huge
hit in you know, let's say the eighties, and then
they come all the way back into the twenty twenties
and they have a hit then, and technically they're not
a one hit wonder. But you know, at this point
(04:19):
in time, it's an arbitrary title.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, they would have spent so long as a one
hit wonder, they'd kind of been known that way, even
if they were no longer a one hit wonder.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
I think exactly exactly, Okay.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
The main culprit for trying to understand, like how this happens,
what's going on here, because presumably you want to invest
in someone who's going to turn out hit after hit
after hit, and therefore you can have like a reliable
money making machine in the form of someone who just
records these these hits that go out into the world
and people buy up that thing. But the main culprit
(04:50):
for making one hit wonders is simply that the recording
industry is highly competitive between current trends, artist personalities, record
label support, public behavior. An artists may become rapidly popular
and then just fizzle out soon afterward. And I do think,
as you mentioned the beginning, like there is a huge,
huge amount I think people don't recognize of Like if
(05:12):
you like music that plays on the radio, you like
stuff that's popular, there's like a really really good chance
that some producer was like I chose this, that people
are going to like this because I chose it. I
control this market. I control what you get to hear.
I control what you like. You like it because I
told you you like it, deal with it, and then
(05:34):
you give me money, and I keep doing this to you.
And so some of them they give up on that
artist and they are just no longer willing to push
them anymore, or sometimes they for whatever reason. You know
that artists just can't connect with another's version of the hit.
But that's essentially the I think. A thing to remember
and consider when we're talking about these is like, how
(05:55):
much of the time, if you're like popular music, someone's
pulling the strings for you to like that popular music.
They're controlling that for you. You're making no choices in
this arena.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Right, And it's it's even worse with like algorithms and
stuff too, Like now that's now that's turning into a
whole different thing. That's like making it so that certain
songs reach certain levels and other ones get suppressed and
all that stuff. But you know you're a real one hit.
Wonder if your song is used like thirty forty fifty
years later in a commercial or an ad.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
All Right, So we're talking about the.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Incredibly complex contingencies by which somebody becomes a one hit wonder.
It requires the artist to make a song, It requires
a record label to usually get on with the song.
It requires a pr team, It requires radio, it requires advertising,
It requires all these things. But there are other situations
where this does happen. So in some instances, a hit
may emerge following the death of an artist, like big boppers,
(06:51):
Chantilly Lace or Shantilly Lace, and other instances, the breakup
of a band quickly following some slight success can boost
a song into the stratosphere. And that's like if you've
ever heard You Get What You Give by New Radicals,
that is an example. They broke up before that song
became super popular and that is like their hit.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
So there's lots of other things that can boost up songs. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
One reason we saw on our research is that an
artist with a big hit may not have been the
original writer. And this is actually again fairly common that
artists will essentially buy music and then they perform it
and they get to claim it as their own because
they bought it, but it wasn't actually something that they wrote.
And who cares, because the point is that they get
to make money, And that's what this is. This is
the industry. It's about that the Hitcharden may have been
(07:34):
a cover song and may have been written credited to
another artist or a writer or a producer. They'll have
people kind of ghostwrite some of these. Sometimes they'll buy
them off writers, and subsequent songs written by the actual
artists might not have the same catchiness or novelty or
the things that made that first hit a success. They're
not bringing to the table because they got it from elsewhere.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Right exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
So they leverage something that is like the talent of
somebody else, and then they can't just they just can't
do the same thing. They can't replicate it. Artists have
also come to hate the original hit song that they've recorded,
like that's been their popular hit, like I don't know Canson,
and so they do everything they can to rewrite their
band and their preferred image.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
So Chumbawamba is a really great example of this.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
You might know the song tub Thumping because it was
all over the place in ninety nine seven. Do you
remember that, Like you just couldn't go anywhere without hearing that,
and like spice Girls, Oh my god. But what you
might not know is that the band wrote the song
as a joke. It was not meant to be a hit.
It was not meant to be anything other than a joke.
Because they were an anarcho punk band that started in
nineteen eighty two and were widely considered influential in the
(08:38):
anarcho punk band scene, like in that space, and they
were very loud animal rights activists. Just for a reference,
so you all know. Their last release was an EP
called Immemorium Margaret Thatcher that they'd recorded and set for
pre orders in two thousand and five. They recorded in
two thousand and five because they were like, when she dies,
we're gonna release this, and they didn't release it until
(08:59):
the day she died, and they quoted it as saying
it was a part of a quote segment of celebrations.
Wow Chumbawama, I get knocked down, but I get up again. Yeah,
is an anarcho punk band and tub Thumping was a
weird one hit wonder song that they just didn't really
they didn't really care about.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
They're like, we could I bet we could do this.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Eh, that is wild that's in wildness mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
A point of note here, artists generally do not like
being called one hit Wonders, right. Why Well, because this
would suggest that they were defined by a single piece
of work, not their entire body of work. As you said,
a lot of times, I actually have a lot of
successful tracks, I get very popular, they just don't quite
make it into that top forty slot. And so even
if all of their tracks have really successful singles off
(09:44):
of them, if they don't get quite to the same
point they're like, dude, we're like, we've been a touring
band for twenty years. We sell out shows, we sell merch,
we sell albums, like we're doing great. Calling is the
one that Wonders seems a little unfair, you know, uh huh, Yeah,
that definitely happens to a few of them. Actually, it's
been Doctors an EXAs this where they're pretty much known
for their one track, but they actually had a bunch
of songs that you actually probably recognized many of them, yeah,
(10:05):
because they actually were they were a group for a
long time doing their thing.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
I mean Third Eye Blind is an example too, Like,
I mean, I wouldn't say they were one hit wonder
because they've had a couple other hits, but like most
of their hits come from their first album, and they've
had multiple albums since then that are really good. Ever
Clear is another one too that had like a couple
really good hits, but they've got great albums beyond those records. Yeah,
so I think it's really important to I mean, maybe
that's just like relevant to us.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
But so also this term.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Is an exclusive to music. This happens with movies and
books too, and there are some notable examples, like the
director of Donni Darko, Richard Kelly hasn't really had a
successful movie since Donnie Darko. He has directed some things,
but that was big, his big thing, and that was
his debut movie.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Duncan Jones, director of moon Man. That movie was good. Yeah, Wow,
moon was so good.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Interesting. So apparently got that one out there and then
hasn't been able to land anything quite a successful since.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Hanks the actor is considered a directorial one hit wonder
because he really only directed that Thing You Do to success.
Everything else that he's done has not really reached that level.
And that Thing You Do is great.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Actually never seen that.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I need to Oh Space, it's so good, it's so good.
Paul W.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
S Anderson not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson.
Very different different, yes, very different act.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yes it is.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
He directed Event Horizon and the Resident Evil series, so yeah,
also falls in that.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, his only good movie being Event Horizon is the
point of that one, right, yeah? Yeah, Resident Evil fun
not good. This happens with books too. So Margaret Mitchell,
the author of Gone with the Wind really only put
out one book. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, really
isn't known for any of her other works, if they exist.
Emily Bronte is another one, for Wuthering Heights. She Again,
(11:50):
these are folks that have a body of work, but
they're pretty they're not as well known as like these
particular works.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Oscar Wilde, author author of Picture of Dorian Gray. Anthony Burgess,
author of a Clockwork Orange good book too. Yeah, them
leaving out the final chapter of that book from the
movie I think was not the best choice.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
And then finally Ken Kesey Kessey Casey, author of One
Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest also sort of again only
known for the one thing that they.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Did right, kind of wild I mean, But so I
think the point is is, like, there are lots of
contingencies that lead to this, but at the end of
the day, there's no true one like one true cause
it's just kind of like lightning in a bottle type
of situations. And it's unfortunate because these artists are doing
good work and really putting out incredible things beyond that
one particular piece, and many times they don't like it,
So be nice to them.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
One Hit Wonders, it's that nice.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
If you'd like to sell us your thoughts on One
Hit Wonders, you can email us directly info WWDWWD podcast
dot com and would you look forward to hearing from you. You
can also reach us on the social media platforms. If
you like to support us, give us all the stars,
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you can join us on Patreon. You get early episodes,
(13:06):
add free episodes, bonus content, and I'll read your name
in our list of supporters at the end of our
full length discussions. And it really helps us be a podcast.
So we do appreciate everyone over there. Thank you so
much to my team of people. Thank you for recording
with me today, Shane and your awesome job putting together
these notes.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Hey, thanks for having me and let me do it.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Thank you all for listening. Is there anything you would
like to add or that I forgot before we wrap up?
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Nothing for today? All right? Then, this is Abraham and
this is Shane.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Why We Do What We Do Mini is out.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Bye.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
You've been listening to Why We Do What We Do.
You can learn more about this and other episodes by
going to WWD wwdpodcast dot com. Thanks for listening and
we hope you have an awesome day.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Mo
You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome
to Why we do what we do Mini. I'm your
host Abraham and I'm your host Shane. We are a
psychology podcast. We talk about the things that humans and
(00:25):
non human animals do, and we do it in a
mini form, which means it's short. We're gonna try and
get into our topic, get out of there in about
fifteen minutes or less. I'll let you get about your day.
And that's what we do. And sometimes in these minis
we talk about the popular things that humans celebrate about
each other in limited quantities. I guess is how I'm
gonna put that. Yes, And if you're joining us for
(00:48):
the first time, then welcome. I hope you enjoy what
you hear in this discussion, and if you're coming back,
then welcome back. And I'm glad that you continue to
find joy and the things that we make. And either way,
if you'd like to support us, so you can leave
us a rating and review, like subscribe, tell a friend,
or join us on Patreon, and I'll talk more about
those things that you can do to support us at
the end of this discussion. But you find yourselves here
and we appreciate that, and it's a mini which means
(01:10):
we should jump into it. Is there anything I'm missing
or you'd like to add before we begin today? Note
not today beautiful, So we begin. We are talking today
about music, specifically a type of music one called a
one hit wonder. This refers to an artist who has, Conceptually,
here we're talking about a single, huge mainstream success hit
(01:31):
in the form usually of a song. After this hit,
they fail to achieve similar success and often will kind
of disappear. So they some song of theirs gets very
very popular. It flares up very bright. They're very well
known for that song. That's the last anyone really hears
about them in the popular spaces they once occupied because
(01:53):
of that song.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, they quickly become someone you used to know. A snaps,
well done, STAPs snaps.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
There you go. So, how does this happen?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well, I was trying to research this, and it's a
huge complex system of taste makers and capitalism and all
those things, and artists integrity and all that, but it's
mostly general trends in what could be described as an
extremely competitive market. There are lots of metrics, including the
Billboard Hot one hundred. We did a whole episode on Billboard,
which I think is really valuable and important. But we
(02:25):
do need a little bit more history here to understand
the current music industry in order to understand how one
hit wonders actually develop.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Love history perfect. So, pre World War Two, just even
recording and putting out music was a lot more challenging
than it is today. By Miles and Miles, musicians would
often act as singles artists. Now why would they do this, Well,
it's a lot cheaper to record a single where you
only have one track or maybe two tracks because one
to two and release it that way than to record
(02:53):
an entire album. It takes less time in the studio,
it takes less space and a record. But in the
nineteen fifties, with the emergent of record charts such as
the Billboard, society began to quantify what a one hit
wonder actually was, began to create a context by which
it's like, well, there's something important in here about the
fact that we attached the value of something to the
(03:15):
artists who created it, and then therefore what they create,
that thing that's created is known as being important and
relevant to that artist, And so if they make more things,
then we can attribute those again to that artist, and
if they don't make things that achieve that level of
acclaim and fame, then we sort of write them off
as they got the one thing in the sauce and
then that was kind of their one trick.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, So the general consensus is that when somebody has
only one Billboard Top forty hit, and that's kind that's
the main criteria that I've seen a bunch of times.
Is it a Billboard Top forty hit god When they've
had only one and failed to have another, Even if
they have popular songs and it doesn't reach that level,
they get this status of one hit wonder. It's arbitrary,
and I think it's really important to stay it up front.
(03:58):
It's completely arbitrary. But that being said, the timeline for
when their next hit is not agreed upon. So technically
someone could have a hit on the charts forty years
later and negate that definition. They could have a huge
hit in you know, let's say the eighties, and then
they come all the way back into the twenty twenties
and they have a hit then, and technically they're not
a one hit wonder. But you know, at this point
(04:19):
in time, it's an arbitrary title.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, they would have spent so long as a one
hit wonder, they'd kind of been known that way, even
if they were no longer a one hit wonder.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
I think exactly exactly, Okay.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
The main culprit for trying to understand, like how this happens,
what's going on here, because presumably you want to invest
in someone who's going to turn out hit after hit
after hit, and therefore you can have like a reliable
money making machine in the form of someone who just
records these these hits that go out into the world
and people buy up that thing. But the main culprit
(04:50):
for making one hit wonders is simply that the recording
industry is highly competitive between current trends, artist personalities, record
label support, public behavior. An artists may become rapidly popular
and then just fizzle out soon afterward. And I do think,
as you mentioned the beginning, like there is a huge,
huge amount I think people don't recognize of Like if
(05:12):
you like music that plays on the radio, you like
stuff that's popular, there's like a really really good chance
that some producer was like I chose this, that people
are going to like this because I chose it. I
control this market. I control what you get to hear.
I control what you like. You like it because I
told you you like it, deal with it, and then
(05:34):
you give me money, and I keep doing this to you.
And so some of them they give up on that
artist and they are just no longer willing to push
them anymore, or sometimes they for whatever reason. You know
that artists just can't connect with another's version of the hit.
But that's essentially the I think. A thing to remember
and consider when we're talking about these is like, how
(05:55):
much of the time, if you're like popular music, someone's
pulling the strings for you to like that popular music.
They're controlling that for you. You're making no choices in
this arena.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Right, And it's it's even worse with like algorithms and
stuff too, Like now that's now that's turning into a
whole different thing. That's like making it so that certain
songs reach certain levels and other ones get suppressed and
all that stuff. But you know you're a real one hit.
Wonder if your song is used like thirty forty fifty
years later in a commercial or an ad.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
All Right, So we're talking about the.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Incredibly complex contingencies by which somebody becomes a one hit wonder.
It requires the artist to make a song, It requires
a record label to usually get on with the song.
It requires a pr team, It requires radio, it requires advertising,
It requires all these things. But there are other situations
where this does happen. So in some instances, a hit
may emerge following the death of an artist, like big boppers,
(06:51):
Chantilly Lace or Shantilly Lace, and other instances, the breakup
of a band quickly following some slight success can boost
a song into the stratosphere. And that's like if you've
ever heard You Get What You Give by New Radicals,
that is an example. They broke up before that song
became super popular and that is like their hit.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
So there's lots of other things that can boost up songs. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
One reason we saw on our research is that an
artist with a big hit may not have been the
original writer. And this is actually again fairly common that
artists will essentially buy music and then they perform it
and they get to claim it as their own because
they bought it, but it wasn't actually something that they wrote.
And who cares, because the point is that they get
to make money, And that's what this is. This is
the industry. It's about that the Hitcharden may have been
(07:34):
a cover song and may have been written credited to
another artist or a writer or a producer. They'll have
people kind of ghostwrite some of these. Sometimes they'll buy
them off writers, and subsequent songs written by the actual
artists might not have the same catchiness or novelty or
the things that made that first hit a success. They're
not bringing to the table because they got it from elsewhere.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Right exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
So they leverage something that is like the talent of
somebody else, and then they can't just they just can't
do the same thing. They can't replicate it. Artists have
also come to hate the original hit song that they've recorded,
like that's been their popular hit, like I don't know Canson,
and so they do everything they can to rewrite their
band and their preferred image.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
So Chumbawamba is a really great example of this.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
You might know the song tub Thumping because it was
all over the place in ninety nine seven. Do you
remember that, Like you just couldn't go anywhere without hearing that,
and like spice Girls, Oh my god. But what you
might not know is that the band wrote the song
as a joke. It was not meant to be a hit.
It was not meant to be anything other than a joke.
Because they were an anarcho punk band that started in
nineteen eighty two and were widely considered influential in the
(08:38):
anarcho punk band scene, like in that space, and they
were very loud animal rights activists. Just for a reference,
so you all know. Their last release was an EP
called Immemorium Margaret Thatcher that they'd recorded and set for
pre orders in two thousand and five. They recorded in
two thousand and five because they were like, when she dies,
we're gonna release this, and they didn't release it until
(08:59):
the day she died, and they quoted it as saying
it was a part of a quote segment of celebrations.
Wow Chumbawama, I get knocked down, but I get up again. Yeah,
is an anarcho punk band and tub Thumping was a
weird one hit wonder song that they just didn't really
they didn't really care about.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
They're like, we could I bet we could do this.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Eh, that is wild that's in wildness mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
A point of note here, artists generally do not like
being called one hit Wonders, right. Why Well, because this
would suggest that they were defined by a single piece
of work, not their entire body of work. As you said,
a lot of times, I actually have a lot of
successful tracks, I get very popular, they just don't quite
make it into that top forty slot. And so even
if all of their tracks have really successful singles off
(09:44):
of them, if they don't get quite to the same
point they're like, dude, we're like, we've been a touring
band for twenty years. We sell out shows, we sell merch,
we sell albums, like we're doing great. Calling is the
one that Wonders seems a little unfair, you know, uh huh, Yeah,
that definitely happens to a few of them. Actually, it's
been Doctors an EXAs this where they're pretty much known
for their one track, but they actually had a bunch
of songs that you actually probably recognized many of them, yeah,
(10:05):
because they actually were they were a group for a
long time doing their thing.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
I mean Third Eye Blind is an example too, Like,
I mean, I wouldn't say they were one hit wonder
because they've had a couple other hits, but like most
of their hits come from their first album, and they've
had multiple albums since then that are really good. Ever
Clear is another one too that had like a couple
really good hits, but they've got great albums beyond those records. Yeah,
so I think it's really important to I mean, maybe
that's just like relevant to us.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
But so also this term.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Is an exclusive to music. This happens with movies and
books too, and there are some notable examples, like the
director of Donni Darko, Richard Kelly hasn't really had a
successful movie since Donnie Darko. He has directed some things,
but that was big, his big thing, and that was
his debut movie.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Duncan Jones, director of moon Man. That movie was good. Yeah, Wow,
moon was so good.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Interesting. So apparently got that one out there and then
hasn't been able to land anything quite a successful since.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Hanks the actor is considered a directorial one hit wonder
because he really only directed that Thing You Do to success.
Everything else that he's done has not really reached that level.
And that Thing You Do is great.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Actually never seen that.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I need to Oh Space, it's so good, it's so good.
Paul W.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
S Anderson not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson.
Very different different, yes, very different act.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yes it is.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
He directed Event Horizon and the Resident Evil series, so yeah,
also falls in that.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, his only good movie being Event Horizon is the
point of that one, right, yeah? Yeah, Resident Evil fun
not good. This happens with books too. So Margaret Mitchell,
the author of Gone with the Wind really only put
out one book. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, really
isn't known for any of her other works, if they exist.
Emily Bronte is another one, for Wuthering Heights. She Again,
(11:50):
these are folks that have a body of work, but
they're pretty they're not as well known as like these
particular works.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Oscar Wilde, author author of Picture of Dorian Gray. Anthony Burgess,
author of a Clockwork Orange good book too. Yeah, them
leaving out the final chapter of that book from the
movie I think was not the best choice.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
And then finally Ken Kesey Kessey Casey, author of One
Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest also sort of again only
known for the one thing that they.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Did right, kind of wild I mean, But so I
think the point is is, like, there are lots of
contingencies that lead to this, but at the end of
the day, there's no true one like one true cause
it's just kind of like lightning in a bottle type
of situations. And it's unfortunate because these artists are doing
good work and really putting out incredible things beyond that
one particular piece, and many times they don't like it,
So be nice to them.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
One Hit Wonders, it's that nice.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
If you'd like to sell us your thoughts on One
Hit Wonders, you can email us directly info WWDWWD podcast
dot com and would you look forward to hearing from you. You
can also reach us on the social media platforms. If
you like to support us, give us all the stars,
leave us a nice review, and you can tell a
friend and make them like and subscribe. You like and
subscribe so that you catch all of our episodes, and
you can join us on Patreon. You get early episodes,
(13:06):
add free episodes, bonus content, and I'll read your name
in our list of supporters at the end of our
full length discussions. And it really helps us be a podcast.
So we do appreciate everyone over there. Thank you so
much to my team of people. Thank you for recording
with me today, Shane and your awesome job putting together
these notes.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Hey, thanks for having me and let me do it.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Thank you all for listening. Is there anything you would
like to add or that I forgot before we wrap up?
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Nothing for today? All right? Then, this is Abraham and
this is Shane.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Why We Do What We Do Mini is out.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Bye.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
You've been listening to Why We Do What We Do.
You can learn more about this and other episodes by
going to WWD wwdpodcast dot com. Thanks for listening and
we hope you have an awesome day.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Mo
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