r/TopCharacterTropes • u/mp3help • 18d ago

miscellaneous [Interesting Trope] Attempts at fanservice/virality that failed not because they were hated, but because nobody noticed them or cared at all.

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1) Hoopy the Hoop, Portal (2007) When you defeat GLaDOS and her room is destroyed at the end of the game, debris rains down in the final cutscene, including a big metal hoop that bounces around a bit. Developer Erik Wolpaw said the team dubbed it "Hoopy the Hoop" and expected it to become the big meme of Portal. Of course, none of the fans paid much attention to the hoop since "The Cake is a Lie" became the biggest meme of the game, and overall one of the biggest video game memes of all time.

2) Burgh, Pokemon Black and White (2010) When designing Burgh, developer Yusuke Ohmura said Gamefreak had many of their female employees give input on his design to create their ideal handsome man. However, as someone who's been in the Pokemon fandom for almost 3 decades, in the 15+ years since Pokemon Black and White released, I have personally never seen any fans swoon over Burgh, or even mention him in general. If anything, characters like N and Colress are far more well-known within the fandom as the most handsome and beloved male characters of Pokemon Gen 5.

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u/Any_Zookeepergame445 18d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/fYl6op4uTBUBy

This guy, made him 3 movies with him as the MC only for the Minions to take over the entire franchise like Urkel did.

164

u/SoVeryTroublesome 18d ago

I maintain that the Minions weren't supposed to be in the movie, originally, but when the idea was pitched, Illumination said "Yea, ok, but you gotta use these little mascot things we came up with, they'll be amazing for mercendising. They can be his Minions or something"

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u/SenritsuJumpsuit 18d ago

Frozen was rewritten over a song so

36

u/Budsygus 18d ago

Every animated movie needs some little side character for people to obsess over. Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, Illumination... They all do it to some extent, but it's getting less and less subtle.

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u/Awkward-Sentence-712 18d ago

Mort is the most GOATed example of this.

He's such an interesting and complex character.

3

u/tinyrottedpig 16d ago

The first movie definitely had them as an core addition, they're a lot more sinister looking and overall do actually assist Gru in doing dangerous shit like taking the moon.

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u/AustinHinton 17d ago

That's what happened with the Penguins, they were scrapped ideas for a beatles-esque penguin rock band for a movie called "Rockumentary" that was gonna be sorta like what Surfs Up did (making it seem like it was filmed live), but the idea was scrapped. They ditched the band angle and stuck them in Madagascar as a team of commandos.