any universe that started out 'grounded' then veered to fantastic latter

[GloatingSwine]

Does the WWE/WWF universe count? It used to just feature very competitive, athletic wrestlers, but then superhumans who can temporarily become impervious to attack like Hogan show up. Then come these malevolent creatures of the night who conjure lightning (The Undertaker) and fire (Kane). Yes, these latter wrestlers can revive themselves too after being burned alive or buried in cement.

At some point, the owner of the company even had a tag team match with his son against HBK and...well, if you know, you know

I will point out that when the Undertaker joined WWF there was also a wrestler who dressed as a giant turkey.

It was never not silly.

[Wintermoot]

I've got it! Pick a universe where a live action sitcom or drama gets a later cartoon version.

like Punky Brewster. A typical orphan being raised by a rich guy in a condo transitions to a cartoon and gets a wish-granting alien sidekick.

I feel like there were several of these over the years.

[ben-zayb]

I will point out that when the Undertaker joined WWF there was also a wrestler who dressed as a giant turkey.

It was never not silly.

I was just giving out the more famous examples. There were a bunch of other magical and fantastical characters that weren't present during the company's inception*, and this includes the Gobbledy Gooker that only debuted back in 1990.


* That would be 1970s if we are going to ignore the WWWF (1960s) or even CWC (1950s) further back. But considering WWE recognizes the wrestlers from these era, Bruno Sammartino being the most prominent one, then it's reasonable to date the genesis of the universe during the 50s.

[danzibr]

Berserk, basically anything after Golden Age and starting at Kushan Empire.

Ah yeah beat me to it.

There are some martial arts-type manga/anime that do this. Starts out with people performing totally mundane feats, then their martial arts clearly enters the realm of fantastic. From what I recall, Kenichi does this.

[Peelee]

I've got it! Pick a universe where a live action sitcom or drama gets a later cartoon version.

like Punky Brewster. A typical orphan being raised by a rich guy in a condo transitions to a cartoon and gets a wish-granting alien sidekick.

I feel like there were several of these over the years.

Like Better Call Saul and Slippin' Jimmy?

[Masonicon]

Spoiler: read this at your own risk

Show

our world can get this treatment, if we slapped at least some things that considered conspiracy theories there

[Eldan]

Oh, our universe literally applies. I mean, we started out nice and easy, knights, peasants, all pretty orderly, reasonable storylines, wars, dynasties and so on. And then they just had to ramp it up. Bigger and bigger wars, they had to drag the whole world into it, and then at some point, we literally had a space arc,where the two rivals were competing about who'd get to the moon first. And then in the next season, they just forgot about it.

[Fyraltari]

Oh, our universe literally applies. I mean, we started out nice and easy, knights, peasants, all pretty orderly, reasonable storylines, wars, dynasties and so on. And then they just had to ramp it up. Bigger and bigger wars, they had to drag the whole world into it, and then at some point, we literally had a space arc,where the two rivals were competing about who'd get to the moon first. And then in the next season, they just forgot about it.

It used to be so simple, the world was a disc with three continents and a ball of fire going around it. And now it turns out there are two huge additional landmasses that apparently where just always there beyond the water around the world which is apparently a sphere but the people on the ubderside don't fall off for some reason and the ball of fire is actually really shiny gas that's making metal (who came up with that) and we're the one turning around it and there are like lots of others just like it. And I hear that that matter is actually made up of thousands of little things too small to see that behave like waves half the time aren't even things but, like, fluctuations of local relaity or something.

It's like they decided to throw out all of the old lore at some point, it's insane.

[Rynjin]

Ah yeah beat me to it.

There are some martial arts-type manga/anime that do this. Starts out with people performing totally mundane feats, then their martial arts clearly enters the realm of fantastic. From what I recall, Kenichi does this.

Kenichi has the supernatural elements from the start, the only thing is that Kenichi himself isn't cool enough to access them until later.

One of the best examples I can think of for the OP is the Truesight trilogy. It starts as a hard sci-fi series with a colony of people who are blind by choice due to pseudoreligious belief that a blind society is superior and promotes a more closely knit community.

The main character starts developing the ability to see, due to a flaw in the genetic editing technique they used to engineer everyone to be born blind. Drama ensues, as his newfound sight uncovers secrets he wasn't meant to know and threaten to overturn their peaceful society.

Anyway, the second book is called "The Seer".

[Morgaln]

It used to be so simple, the world was a disc with three continents and a ball of fire going around it. And now it turns out there are two huge additional landmasses that apparently where just always there beyond the water around the world which is apparently a sphere but the people on the ubderside don't fall off for some reason and the ball of fire is actually really shiny gas that's making metal (who came up with that) and we're the one turning around it and there are like lots of others just like it. And I hear that that matter is actually made up of thousands of little things too small to see that behave like waves half the time aren't even things but, like, fluctuations of local relaity or something.

It's like they decided to throw out all of the old lore at some point, it's insane.

Of course there are those guys who insist the old lore is actually accurate and point to the skript of season 18 as their proof. When we all know that season later turned out to be a coma fantasy (as was obvious from the goldenrod-colored pages of the book).

[Ionathus]

Roomies!/It's Walky!/Joyce and Walky!/Dumbing of Age is a wacky example to me.

It starts out with Roomies! - a comic strip about college roommates. Very traditional: there are standard cartoonish elements like oversized props, but it's mostly grounded.

And then some of the cast is alluded to have been briefly kidnapped by aliens...but it's a throwaway gag and they get returned, and it isn't really brought up or called back to very often. Could have been a dream/hallucination.

But then suddenly it's NOT a dream, and another cast member gets kidnapped, and it's very traumatic for them? So they get carted off to a secret government organization? And the roommates comic just kinda continues, but then it's interspersed with the spies arc, but the focus is on the roommates for a long time and they get a full conclusion to their arcs (for the most part)...and then the roommates comic gets fully retired for the spies stuff.

The comic rebrands itself as It's Walky! and continues for years with the "spies fighting aliens" premise. Things get absolutely whacky. Mindwiping, resurrection, soul-swapping, omnipotence, armageddon, alien invasions, losing your virginity...you name a fantastical story element, it's in there.

Then that wraps up and the main characters retire from spy stuff, get married, and go to community college! The comic rebrands again as Joyce and Walky! Very lighthearted.

Then it gets sci-fi wacky AGAIN. Time travel and parallel universes. Realities are in danger once more. I haven't finished that part yet.

And then, finally, the whole thing gets a hard reboot in the form of Dumbing of Age. All the same characters, but they are all actually just going to college. Absolutely no fantastical elements have surfaced in the 12 years this webcomic has run. It's literally just about a sheltered homeschooled girl going to college and making friends and learning about the world. The alien villains from It's Walky! are featured in an in-universe comic book and animated series that gets routinely brought up as a lore gag.

A truly buck-wild journey to go on, all starting with a comic strip from the 90s that first ran in an actual, honest-to-god college newspaper.

[tyckspoon]

Roomies!/It's Walky!/Joyce and Walky!/Dumbing of Age is a wacky example to me.

Also the Shortpacked! rendition of the universe, which features the cast working in a toy store and mostly deals with interpersonal drama and commentary about particular aspects of Fandom. But also Resurrected Ronald Reagan and Real Historical Jesus as employees. And has a 'Drama Tag' that is a physical object which when pulled changes the metaphysics of the world so that previously light hearted topics take a turn for the melodramatic and traumatic. And ends with Soggies (literally the milk-villains from that one series of Captain Crunch commercials) invading the world from alternate dimensional portals.

[MCerberus]

I find it interesting that Space Dandy somehow qualifies.

See, at first the premise isn't too much. Monster hunters, perverts, warp drive is on the fritz. You laugh off that they keep dying thinking it's negative continuity. Haha groundhog's day episode, zombies, save a kid. Then the last episode of season 1 is 50% the metaphysical impact of a robot growing a soul and using the tears in reality to kaiju fight the cult that has his girlfriend ending up in him drinking coffee.

Things start to unwind. Eventually getting a metaphysical journey of a soul accepting its own death followed by parts of the multiverse spilling into itself. Then the premise is explained and that faulty warp drive, oh boy.

it ends with

Spoiler

Show

Google's, as in the actual corporation google with a founder as emperor, lead scientist using the tears to attempt to destroy the multiverse (there are betrayals) only for Dandy to pilot the statue of liberty in a heroic sacrifice where he rejects the throne of god (the narrator) and creates a new multiverse(?) without one

[Peelee]

Oh, our universe literally applies. I mean, we started out nice and easy, knights, peasants, all pretty orderly, reasonable storylines, wars, dynasties and so on. And then they just had to ramp it up. Bigger and bigger wars, they had to drag the whole world into it, and then at some point, we literally had a space arc,where the two rivals were competing about who'd get to the moon first. And then in the next season, they just forgot about it.

I actually have a whole thing about this my IRL friends are (probably overly) familiar with! We started with sticks and stones, and here we are, capable of talking instantaneously with people a quarter million miles away by way of a box filled with sand and lightning.

[Aeson]

my URL friends

Some of your friends are websites? I guess the chatbots must be pretty good these days.

(Yes, I realize that this was a typo.)

[Peelee]

Some of your friends are websites? I guess the chatbots must be pretty good these days.

No, robot police.

[Rynjin]

I find it interesting that Space Dandy somehow qualifies.

See, at first the premise isn't too much. Monster hunters, perverts, warp drive is on the fritz. You laugh off that they keep dying thinking it's negative continuity. Haha groundhog's day episode, zombies, save a kid. Then the last episode of season 1 is 50% the metaphysical impact of a robot growing a soul and using the tears in reality to kaiju fight the cult that has his girlfriend ending up in him drinking coffee.

Things start to unwind. Eventually getting a metaphysical journey of a soul accepting its own death followed by parts of the multiverse spilling into itself. Then the premise is explained and that faulty warp drive, oh boy.

it ends with

Spoiler

Show

Google's, as in the actual corporation google with a founder as emperor, lead scientist using the tears to attempt to destroy the multiverse (there are betrayals) only for Dandy to pilot the statue of liberty in a heroic sacrifice where he rejects the throne of god (the narrator) and creates a new multiverse(?) without one

You forgot to mention the part where the "faulty" hyperdrive isn't faulty at all.

Spoiler

Show

It just works not by making the ship go warpspeed/hyperlight/any of that stuff, but by shifting the ship to an alternate reality where you've already arrived at your destination, which is why a lot of the wacky **** can happen and the status quo is still maintained.

[MCerberus]

You forgot to mention the part where the "faulty" hyperdrive isn't faulty at all.

Spoiler

Show

It just works not by making the ship go warpspeed/hyperlight/any of that stuff, but by shifting the ship to an alternate reality where you've already arrived at your destination, which is why a lot of the wacky **** can happen and the status quo is still maintained.

well it was faulty on the first episode leading to the "why Dandy" part of

Spoiler

Show

Him being the only other being to exist, presumably, in every version of reality, hence... emo Dandy. Although if the narrator became a zombie, wouldn't that mean that he should be a zombie in all the other timelines?

[Anteros]

Oh, our universe literally applies. I mean, we started out nice and easy, knights, peasants, all pretty orderly, reasonable storylines, wars, dynasties and so on. And then they just had to ramp it up. Bigger and bigger wars, they had to drag the whole world into it, and then at some point, we literally had a space arc,where the two rivals were competing about who'd get to the moon first. And then in the next season, they just forgot about it.

I know this is a common myth, but we've actually been back to the moon a bunch of times. It's just not as exciting as the first, and it turns out there's not a lot to really do up there.

[Peelee]

I know this is a common myth, but we've actually been back to the moon a bunch of times. It's just not as exciting as the first, and it turns out there's not a lot to really do up there.

Are you kidding? There's a ton to do up there! That's like saying there's not a lot to do in LEO. It's not that there isn't a wholeot to do up there. Hell, we sent as many as we did because we had so much to do up there that we couldn't fit it all in one flight, and had to keep sending more. The astronauts weren't chosen simply because they could fly. They had brains. Niel Armstrong has a Master's of science in aerospace engineering. Buzz Aldrin wrote his doctoral thesis for orbital mechanics on guidance techniques for orbital rendezvous. We didn't send pilots up there. We sent scientists who also could fly up there. There's an enormous amount of stuff to do on the Moon.

What to do on the Moon is not and never has been the problem. The cost of it is. If the price and logistics were in the same ballpark as those of the ISS, we'd have never left the damn thing.

[Anteros]

Are you kidding? There's a ton to do up there! That's like saying there's not a lot to do in LEO. It's not that there isn't a wholeot to do up there. Hell, we sent as many as we did because we had so much to do up there that we couldn't fit it all in one flight, and had to keep sending more. The astronauts weren't chosen simply because they could fly. They had brains. Niel Armstrong has a Master's of science in aerospace engineering. Buzz Aldrin wrote his doctoral thesis for orbital mechanics on guidance techniques for orbital rendezvous. We didn't send pilots up there. We sent scientists who also could fly up there. There's an enormous amount of stuff to do on the Moon.

What to do on the Moon is not and never has been the problem. The cost of it is. If the price and logistics were in the same ballpark as those of the ISS, we'd have never left the damn thing.

You realize that saying we sent scientists doesn't actually prove....anything. Right?

But yes, it's not a complete lack of projects that's the issue. It's a lack of projects that catch the collective interest of the public. Landing on the moon for the first time is exciting. 50 years studying moon rocks is not. Not to mention that many of the things you'd want to study on the moon can be studied just as well from a space station.

[Peelee]

You realize that saying we sent scientists doesn't actually prove....anything. Right?

Yes, it's almost as if that was a supporting example and not the entire cfux of the argument.

But yes, it's not a complete lack of projects that's the issue. It's a lack of projects that catch the collective interest of the public.

Not at all. How much of the work the ISS has done in the two decades it's been up there has "caught the collective interest of the public"? Barely any, that's how much. It's nothing but an international laboratory, and I can name one experiment off the top of my head that evne made the papers. They don't care about public interest. They care about getting stuff done.

Not to mention that many of the things you'd want to study on the moon can be studied just as well from a space station.

And many of the things cannot. That's not much of a statement. For example, anything dealing with the actual Moon. Why do you think we send so many rovers to Mars? Is putting an RC car on Mars for the eleventh time so interesting to the public that NASA does it for the fanfare? It's cheaper and easier than sending people. If we could send people instead, we'd do it in a heartbeat, and not for the "collective republic interest". If you want collective public interest, go make a movie about it or something. They want to get stuff done. The astronauts have jobs to do up there. The Apollo astronauts had full itineraries that the collective public couldn't have given two ****s about. The first landing was a spectacle, the rest not so much, and yet despite losing the "collective interest of the public" we kept sending rockets. Almost as of the "collective interest of the public" was irrelevant and they had other missions planned.

The only reason anyone cared about "collective public interest" to start with was to help fund it in the beginning, and even that isn't much necessary anymore. The JWST was going to be built regardless of how the collective public interest felt about it, because it's an easier, more affordable goal. Going to the moon is the most difficult and most expensive manner mission we are known to be capable of. Those are the only factors keeping us off the moon. Not the "collective interest of the public". Not a lack of experiments to perform.

[MCerberus]

I think the problem here is that there's different and perhaps conflicting views of fantastic going on here. On one hand, yes the observable universe is beautiful and vast beyond humanity's wildest imagination and we're attempting to understand it piece by piece. However, there's no civilizations on the moon. There's no intelligences vast and cruel coveting the Earth from Mars. We're just sort of alone screaming into the void with whatever new invention we hope will get a response, knowing deep down we will never get one. And where's the damned moon colonies anyway?

So yes, space is at once more and less fantastic than we imagined.

[Peelee]

There's no intelligences vast and cruel coveting the Earth from Mars.

Well, if NASA would send one of my rovers instead of insisting on making their own, I could at least change that.

[Trixie_One]

Frasier for sure. Starts off entirely mundane as a spin off of an equally mundane show, sure one of the characters claims to be a psychic but she's a kook and the occasional vision that does seem to be legit are all played entirely for laughs that can be excused due to rule of funny.

Then later in the show John Glenn turns up, confirms aliens are real, realises he's said to much and then leaves taking the evidence with him with the main characters none the wiser at the bombshell he just dropped. Possibly also confirming that a certain would be senator from an earlier season maybe wasn't so crazy after all. Then there's the psychic visions getting plot relevant involving a dragon confirming for sure that Daphne does indeed have powers.

[MetroAlien]

I mean... Harry Potter?
at least the first book. Although the focus is entirely on exploring the magical stuff, so it just kinda leaves the mundane behind altogether.
I assume this is not what you mean.
The exact same paragraph could be written about Narnia.

HunterxHunter doesn't start 'grounded', but not really 'fantastical' either.
At the start it's sort of just this alternative earth. But as the story progresses, increasingly mind-boggling phenomena are explained to the audience, which are treated as natural by the characters.

Come to think of it, most adventure-style anime fit in here... Bleach, One Piece, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.... even YuGiOh!
Some of them escalate more quickly than others.

The game series Saint's Row could be argued to fit, but the change you're looking for doesn't happen within the scope of one game.

DanganRonpa 1 isn't 'normal' at the start, but the game kinda revels in how it gets progressively more absurd. The trend of increasing craziness also persists across games.

YIIK is another gaming example, but... let's just say it's notorious for other reasons.

In terms of non-anime, there's Twin Peaks. Though you can argue about how 'fantastical' it starts/gets.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (the BBC America show) is weirdly similar to DanganRonpa in that way, because it also gets increasingly absurd and revels in it.
I'd argue Stranger Things fits as well.
There's the early 2000's french film-series Taxi, where cars get implausible gadgets in every new movie, but somehow I doubt that's what you're looking for.

I think somebody already mentioned Kung-Fu movies? They generally tend to work like that.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there could plausibly be a plethora of K-Drama too, but I'm no expert in that regard.

[J-H]

Sluggy Freelance started as fairly grounded with some friends in a modern American environment, I think college. The only fantastical element was originally a bunny with a bad attitude and a switchblade.

By the time I stopped reading webcomics, the Dimension of Pain was real and one of the main characters had fought a demon lord there, there was a cloned alien that fought the friendly cloned alien, I think there was timetravel, Zoe had a tattoo that turned her into a camel if someone said the wrong word, and the crazy-assassin-obsessed girl apparently respawns after she dies, and... I think a few more things.

[Willie the Duck]

The Expance starts off with only arbitrarally efficent fusion drives. Then people start exploiting the maguffin. The last book I read had half-alien tech battleships that could disintegrate matter with magnetic fields strong enough to rip apart atoms.

If we're discussing sci fi that started off on one level and moved to the next, I think Red Dwarf should be mentioned.

Mind you, it started off with some convenient sci fi tropes like cast-convenient artificial gravity, absurdly efficient fusion*, and a their man frozen for the future occurs through a temporal stasis field instead of cryogenics. Still, it is most grounded in that the ship is a mining ship, which physically attaches to asteroids and strips them of minerals. The science is semi-grounded in that there aren't force fields, people generally have to go to places and do things (with tools) rather than use transporter beams or invert the polarity of the deflector dish or the like, and most of the absurd elements are in the 'absurdly convenient' rather than 'outright impossible' (example: cats left to roam on the ship with no surviving humans evolve into a something almost identical to humans except for fangs, pointed ears, and extra nipples, also they speak English). There aren't even aliens (all the other lifeforms they end up meeting are Earth-derived or human-created).
*and/or a absurdly full interstellar medium. Either way they have a Bussard ramjet drive which works

As season one progresses, we find out the ship has a lightspeed drive, which causes temporal mirages (see events from future) -- clearly fantastic, but hewing to the vague 'lightspeed-time dilation-somethingsomething' level of reasonableness. After that, it dives madhouse deep in negative space wedgies, alternate universes where time runs backwards, force fields, hard light, whatever the plot demands. The series was never big on continuity (it was a comedy where rule of funny trumps all), but later seasons definitely are recognizably more fantastic than the show beginning.

There exists a shared universe of sitcoms—Perfect Stranger, Family MAtters, Full House, Step by Step, and Boy Meets World... Possibly a few others now that I think about it.

The existence of Urkel turns them into a comic book setting, in terms of super-science.

Literally, given Urkel's appearance on Scooby Doo and Guess Who?, which established that Urkel consists with the Justice League.

If we're doing the whole 'if someone cameos in another series, they are canonically in the same universe' rules, here's an odd one:

Kramer from Seinfeld lives in an apartment he sublets from Paul Buckman of Mad About You. Mad About You is a TV show that George from Seinfeld is seen watching. In one of the later (horrible) last two seasons of Mad About You, Paul runs into Jerry Seinfeld, star of the tv series Seinfeld. In each series, the people from the other series are real people living alongside them in New York, as well as characters on TV shows that they watch. This is either fantastic, or both groups are part of a Truman Show-like experience that is being broadcast in their home municipality that they somehow have never run across (No one on the Seinfeld side of things ever decides to check out the prime time comedy series Seinfeld listed in their TV guide, etc.).

[Phobia]

Boy Meets World also canonically exits in the Sabrina the Teenage Witch universe.

[sidhe_blooded]

Boy Meets World also canonically exits in the Sabrina the Teenage Witch universe.

So does mortal kombat, at least the movie version. Shang Tsung is Sabrina's uncle