I did not know they had words for those ideas...

[VladimirTherin]

Wow.
www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html
"The Turkey City Lexicon"
Which appears to have successfully reduced/distilled all my pet fanfic peeves( and favorites) into trite, insulting one-liners.
Edit: I realize that more than a few people in this forum might have already seen some version of this but, hey, its new to me.

[Jinx999]

"Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let's just steal one. We'll set it in the Star Trek Universe, only we'll call it the Empire instead of the Federation."
I've seen this done very well. The original Mageworlds trilogy essentially steal the laws of physics and much of the ideas from Star Wars.
However it is very well written.
And only serves to hide the major plot twist in book 3.

[Bob Schroeck]

This is a great resource. The TVTropes site has several of these concepts listed, only under different names... the "Jar of Tang" one, for instance, I entered and called "Tomato Surprise" because that's how it was referred to in the writer's guidelines for Analog magazine in the early 80s.

-- Bob
---------
For Jor-El so loved the Earth, he sent his only begotten son...

[VladimirTherin]

"I've seen this done very well..."
Its all in the execution, mostly.
And even the "cliches" were original the first time.