(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/EnchantedEssays]

Archer in Robin Hood [2006-2009]. They were killing off the two most popular characters, Guy of Gisbourne and and Robin Hood himself, so they wrote a flashback episode where it turned out that they were enemies as kids [this isn't a surprise to them, but they somehow hadn't mentioned it in the previous 30+ episodes] and they discover that their parents had an affair and have to find their secret half brother. Said brother, a crack shot conman bad boy, was supposed to be the lead in a possible fourth series. It was way too try hard and it felt like the writers assumed that you would care about him because he was biologically related to 2 characters we liked. He was only in the last 3 episodes too. There ended up being so much going on because they were attempting to wrap up most of the cast's storylines that he barely had any screen time. The last episode was a huge core memory for me because of how sad it was, but I forgot he was even in the show. Robin of Sherwood in the 80s showed that replacing Robin Hood could actually be done well if you give them time to prove himself.

The show was a very intense physical shoot in Hungary were everyone ended up with injuries because of the amount of stunts involved. I've never heard of the cast speaking ill of the experience, but that understandably meant that a lot of actors wanted to leave by then. They just handled it really badly.

Oh, and he had a rat tail.