And sadly, a year or two from now, the old school guys will remember, but so many others will willingly dismiss it as a mistake, and many others won't even know about it. They'll do their best to scrub it from the internet, and they'll be back pretending nothing ever happened.
If you have the money you can literally do anything on the Internet.
Remember back to the infamous Super Bowl where the Falcons lost a big lead to the Patriots? And the Falcons owner Arthur Blank and his wife were repeatedly shown dancing in a chorus line while celebrating with his team up 28-3.
Then the Patriots and Refs got irritated and it quickly turned into this face:
Later, there were videos and GIFs of him and his wife dancing like idiots posted all over the Internet, but when you search on Google now, all you get is results of Blank dancing in the locker room after the NFC Championship. Obviously he spent a LOT of money on getting all those scrubbed as there were thousands of them online and at the time every football fan was parodying him and posting meme after meme after meme.
It reminds me of sports cards at the moment. Wow, you got some 1/1 Lebron James card.
Yeah, but there are like 500 1/1 cards of a player each year.
You have sets with dozens of parallels to like /299 /250 /199 /150 /125 /99 /75 /50 /25 /10 /5 /1.
Most of this newer stuff is artificial scarcity, not actual scarcity.
Exactly and this "artificial scarcity" technique is clearly designed to hook the newbs.
The truly valuable pop culture rarities are those items that were originally available in 6- and 7-figure mass market numbers, but attrition has whittled those down to only a few nice copies, and the genre or subject matter is still popular today.
That's actual rarity.
Like a 1952 Mickey Mantle baseball card or a copy of Action Comics 1.