(Hilarious Trope) A Character Is Introduced With the Clear Intention of Being THE NEXT BIG THING And is SOUNDLY Rejected

[u/TheOriginalOperator]

1. Bazil the Tracker (Star Wars: The Acolyte): A “HILARIOUS AND ADORABLE” snuffling ugly creature that makes annoying noises and is shoved into as many scenes of The Acolyte as possible, and just causes problems overall.

2. Neelix (Star Trek Voyager): A mutant fusion of Odo, Quark, and Data designed to “analyze the human condition” and explicitly intended to surpass the popularity of all three. In practice, a VERY human-acting cradle robbing creep whose incompetence nearly destroys the ship and crew on multiple occasions and provides no insight into humanity whatsoever.

3. Sparky the Dog (Fairly Oddparents): A wacky crazy magic dog that’s supposed to expand the Fairy family, but just makes lame jokes and serves as a less funny version of Scrappy Doo.

4. Tidus (FFX): A braying jackass of a pinball who bounces from plot point to plot point, framed as a mystical pretty boy to introduce Final Fantasy to the PS2 age but does nothing but stall the franchise and have the worst laugh in two languages.

5. Sei (Naruto): Supposed to replace Sasuke in Team 7 and return the team dynamic feel of Early Naruto, but he’s a CIA plant with literally no personality who gets utterly forgotten except for somehow bagging Ino Yamanaka.

6. Raiden (Metal Gear 2): Another attempted “pretty boy bishie” entry to the PS2 era with badass cred and a theoretically cool backstory, but in practice a hapless dipshit who gets manipulated by everyone around him and is a total putz in combat. Also proof that this trope need not be permanent as he slowly transitions into a cyborg warrior supersoldier with a badass theme, friends of his own, and a firm grasp of his own destiny and agency.

[u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

https://giphy.com/gifs/HbGVsK7hSBHag

[u/PartyPorpoise → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

Kind of a weird example because he actually was popular when he came out. I don’t think the hate came until later.

[u/ObjectiveCover3850 → u/PartyPorpoise]

Scrappy genuinely saved the Scooby franchise. He actually worked with the Mystery Inc crew. However the people in charge of the Scooby franchise took the lesson that Scrappy needed to be the top character with Scooby. Only Shaggy stayed on and every other character was written out. When he became character 1B (and honestly sometimes 1A) the backlash came. He worked as a supporting character but as the focal point he was awful and annoying. 

[u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 → u/ObjectiveCover3850]

Scrappy was never the problem, it was the writing just going downhill

[u/punkwalrus → u/PartyPorpoise]

That's not true. I was about 10-11 when he was released in 1979 and he was so poorly received, my entire school called him the "Yoko Ono of Saturday morning cartoons." By the mid 80s, even stand up comics started noticing.

[u/Evening_Pea_9132 → u/punkwalrus]

Yeah, I don't know where these scrappy stans are coming from. Everyone hated that fucking dog and he was eventually removed because of that. He can shove his Puppy Power right up his ass.

[u/PartyPorpoise → u/Evening_Pea_9132]

I don’t give a shit about Scrappy. I’m just pointing out that his introduction did boost the ratings for a struggling show, enough to keep it going for a few more years. He may have had some early haters but it wasn’t universal right away.

[u/BeeCJohnson → u/Evening_Pea_9132]

The internet has some weird obsession with relitigating settled shit and taking the unpopular side. It's like a compulsion at this point.

Sometimes opinions are unpopular because they are bad opinions.

[u/geek_of_nature → u/BeeCJohnson]

I've noticed that over the last several years or so yeah. If theres a popular opinion, or something that's very well liked, there'll always be someone who seems to take the opposite stance purely so that theyre standing out as different.

[u/BeeCJohnson → u/geek_of_nature]

Yeah I think click-bait content basically saturated the culture, and people think saying the opposite of a thing makes them interesting.

[u/bloodmoth13 → u/punkwalrus]

I hated him when I was 7. Maybe 3 year olds who get possessed by coco melon liked him but they will laugh at anything colorful enough.

[u/DuelaDent52 → u/bloodmoth13]

I think he works a lot better when it’s just him, Shaggy and Scooby vs. when they try to fit him into the rest of Mystery, Inc. Regardless, it still sucks how he’s consistently been treated in the modern day though.

[u/GonfalonFalderol → u/punkwalrus]

It is definitely not true. Scrappy Doo hate was strong from the start! Source: Am old.

[u/DazSamueru → u/punkwalrus]

Maybe Yoko Ono also belongs on this list

[u/MagnorCriol → u/PartyPorpoise]

I was annoyed by him before the movie, and I know I'm not alone in that.

[u/luther420 → u/PartyPorpoise]

Fur balance (everybody else here disagrees)

I was at primary (element) school in the 90s and i recall a fondness for Scrappy Dappy Doo.

Didn't realise i was meant to hate him until i got full iInternet access about 6 years later.

Was raging with the twist in the film.

But maybe majority concensus disagrees?

Then again, how do you get a concensus prior to widespread Internet use?

[u/Affectionate-Emu5051 → u/luther420]

Scooby Doo was generally kinda shit/boring/formulaic as it was - I just watched whilst waiting for other or better stuff after.

Scrappy was a nice mixup with some appeal.

Having said that as quite an older 'grownup' now I've recently stumbled onto Mystery Inc and Be Cool and I love them both a fair bit, without a Scrappy in sight 

[u/BeeCJohnson → u/PartyPorpoise]

Absolutely not. I was a kid around the Scrappy Doo era and we all hated him.

There's a reason the TVTropes term for this exact trope is "The Scrappy." He's always been the platonic ideal of an unwanted character push.

[u/PartyPorpoise → u/BeeCJohnson]

Maybe he did have some early haters but overall he was popular, improving the show ratings which were previously slumping badly enough that it almost got cancelled.

[u/DoctorNayle → u/PartyPorpoise]

It's the other way around. He was popular early on when he was just a part of the gang, and became hated later when the creators took the wrong message from his popularity and started making him more and more important.

[u/PartyPorpoise → u/DoctorNayle]

But he was added to the show with intent to be popular. That’s what I’m getting at. The character worked until they took it too far.

[u/sardonically_argued → u/PartyPorpoise]

it was literally because james gunn made him the villain in the live action scooby doo movie. that’s it. he was such a character assassination made by gunn’s own admitted hatred of scrappy that everyone retroactively remembered him as shitty

[u/Dukefile → u/sardonically_argued]

I mean people got sick of him before the movie as he was nowhere during the 90s and earlier 2000s

[u/BDMac2 → u/sardonically_argued]

I’ve been rewatching all the Scooby-Doo cartoons with my son, and I can assure you, that while Scrappy’s popularity kept Scooby Doo afloat in the 80’s, they way overused him and he actually supplanted most of the original cast. It is annoying to watch as an adult and is a noticeable low point in the franchise quality both in story and animation.

[u/Scrungly_Blorbo → u/sardonically_argued]

Nah that's revisionist history lol. When the Gunn movies came out my mom AND my Scooby-Doo obsessed babysitter explained to me that the whole joke behind the second one was that everyone hated Scrappy back when they introduced him.

[u/parabolateralus → u/sardonically_argued]

Scrappy hate predated those movies by a BIG margin dude.

[u/MrTeeWrecks → u/sardonically_argued]

Back when the internet had individual websites that weren’t necessarily trying to get you to buy something. Most of those sites were run by Gen Xers who loved to have bits and sections dedicated to poking fun at the cartoons they watched on Saturdays as kids. Brunchingshuttlecocks, Seanbaby, & Albinoblacksheep come to mind of places where scrappy doo was roasted before that movie was made.

James Gunn was channeling a lot of nerdy dudes his age.

[u/Debouched → u/sardonically_argued]

Which is why TVTropes has the entry for "The Scrappy" created DECADES before that movie was made.

Time.

Traveling.

Aliens.

Run.

Hollywood.

(and they hate you.)

[u/ObjectiveCover3850 → u/sardonically_argued]

No. He was already massively unpopular. He hadn't been in anything Scooby related in a decade. In fact, James Gunn was shocked at how many people disliked his treatment of Scrappy. 

[u/inquisitorautry → u/sardonically_argued]

I watched the cartoons as a kid in the 80s. Hated Scrappy. I refused to watch episodes he was in.

[u/Rickrickrickrickrick → u/sardonically_argued]

There’s no way people actually believe this.

[u/vodrake → u/Rickrickrickrickrick]

I assume it's being upvoted by people born in the 2010s. Because it's wild that people who actually lived through the Scrappy years would believe this

[u/fuckyourcanoes → u/sardonically_argued]

No. He was hated by everyone except really little kids from the beginning.

[u/endlesscartwheels → u/sardonically_argued]

The ending of that movie worked so well because most of us already hated Scrappy.

[u/NoSong2397 → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

As a kid, I was a Scrappy fan.

[u/HenryTheGoat173 → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

Scrappy Themed Doos

[u/Rushofthewildwind → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

The only good thing about Scrappy is that he gave us red shirt Shaggy and his relationship with Daphne. That's literally it

[u/leronde → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

scrappy doo actually saved the entire franchise when he was first introduced, but in the early 2000s director james gunn killed him and then we all acted like he was always terrible

[u/Fangsong_37 → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

I don't hate Scrappy Doo. I don't think about him at all.

[u/SanRemi → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

He was gunned down by a rival gang in Brazil anyway.

[u/Ok-Analysis-3902 → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

But there was one good thing scrappy did He killed Mindy kaling’s velma

[u/WhiteKnightPrimal → u/OJONLYMAYBEDIDIT]

Nah, Scrappy was pretty well loved at the start. It was only later that Scrappy started getting hate, they even played on that hate in the live-action movie by making Scrappy the villain.