A Death In The Limelight / Western Animation

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• Used in Season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender with Jet in the episode "Lake Laogai", who receives some backstory as he goes from brainwashed to friendly over and over again. He also ends up being one of the only characters ever Killed Off for Real in a show that generally stayed away from that, despite its themes of war.
• Beast Wars' second season gives Dinobot a major role in two or three episodes leading up to "Code of Hero" where he's seen at his best, and then bites it at the end.
  • Seeing as season two of Beast Wars had 12 episodes, those three episodes do form 1/4 of the entire season, so it may not be a negligible amount of time.
• The Hobbit: Bombur, a minor character in the book is one of the only dwarves who is pushed into the background. He also takes a level in kindness and acts as a mentor to Bilbo when it's not Gandalf...and is killed off.
• Infinity Train has Tuba, who was actually billed as one of the main characters for the third season alongside Simon, Grace, and Hazel. After a single mention of her deceased children a few episodes prior, the episode "The Color Clock Car" has her elaborate more on one of her daughters before explaining that raising Hazel helped her heal from the loss. So naturally, Simon murders her at the end of the episode as soon as Hazel and Grace aren't around to see.
• The Justice League episode "The Terror Beyond". Beforehand, Solomon Grundy was The Brute and Dumb Muscle with no motivation beyond greed. In this episode, Grundy's backstory is revealed, and he's given a very sympathetic motivation to fight alongside the good guys. Naturally, he dies fighting Icthultu and many tears are shed over him. One of his powers is the ability to come Back from the Dead, which was the whole reason he agreed to come along, as a Human Sacrifice was needed to defeat Ichthultu and someone like Grundy was going to present less of a moral dilemma to that end. He returns for an episode of Unlimited but has Came Back Wrong and devolved into The Berserker and has to be killed by Anti-Magic, again Played for Drama. Given the manner of his death, its not clear if he will again return from the grave or was finally Killed Off for Real, but regardless he does not reappear in the series again.
• The Simpsons
  • Season Six's episode "'Round Springfield". Bleeding Gums Murphy, the jazz musician who Lisa met in an early episode in the first season, faded into the background quickly (showing up here and there in crowd scenes for a while) and was almost forgotten until he appeared in the hospital in this episode. There, he tells Lisa his whole previously unrevealed back story, about how he was a successful jazz musician who made a guest appearance on The Cosby Show, and doing a saxophone duet with Lisa. Lisa goes off to school and wins a talent competition, and then returns to the hospital to be told Bleeding Gums has passed away. This occurs in the middle of the episode, and the rest of it revolves around Lisa's quest to arrange a tribute to him. After she succeeds, Bleeding Gums Murphy's ghost appears in the clouds in a parody of The Lion King (1994) (Mufasa, Darth Vader, and the CNN announcer briefly interrupt), and they have one last saxophone duet over the end credits before Bleeding Gums heads off for his afterlife date with Billie Holiday.
  • Season 35 episode "Cremains of the Day" deals with Recurring Extra Larry the Barfly, who it turns out has been dead for a while and the other characters never noticed that his body was a corpse. The episode focuses on how Homer and his friends know absolutely nothing of them while Larry always wished to be part of Homer's misadventures but was unable to do anything but observe him from the sidelines.
• In South Park, Kenny, although always part of the main cast, barely had any effect on the plot up until "Kenny Dies", after which he is killed off (for a season).
  • This also happens to Chef in Season 10's "The Return of Chef." Chef's role in the show had been increasingly deminishing every season by that point. Unlike Kenny, Chef stayed dead.
• In Superman: The Animated Series, the very first episode, "The Last Son of Krypton: Part 1" focuses on Kal El's fatehr, Jor El. Jor El is seen trying, and failing, to convince the Kryptonian planetary council that something is very wrong, and that he has been building a ship to go to earth and enact his rescue plan (extract everyone from the Phantom Zone when he's reached safety). Braniac has Jor El labeled a criminal, to hide the fact that he is right, Krypton's core will blow up soon, and Jor El is hunted down by the authorities. However thanks to his father in law leading the authorities on a wild goose chase, Jor El is able to launch his infant son, Kal El, in the rocket ship, while he and his wife, Lara, share one last kiss.
• Used at times in Total Drama to explain why certain characters get eliminated when they do, those such characters having background roles that weren't really notable before that point that would warrant elimination.
• Discussed in the The Venture Bros. episode "The Lepidopterists", alongside Red Shirt:
  Henchman 21: Yeah, we can walk across this floor and nothing would hit us. But then like this huge log would swing down and take your head off.
  Henchman 24: Hey, here; what’s your name?
  Henchman 1: Henchman Number 1.
  Henchman 24: See, you are nameless.
  Henchman 1: I’m Scott Hall, my name is Scott Hall. Okay?
  Henchman 24: No, won’t help.
  Henchman 21: Yeah, now it’s just pathos. So you’re dying in my lap and I’m all "Scott! Scott don’t you quit on us! Don’t you dare!!"
  Henchman 24: You just made your unavoidable death more pathetic.
• Nabu was introduced in Season 3 of Winx Club as Aisha's love interest ...and that's all. However, the final episodes of season 4 focused on him a lot, showing his sheer badassery, to the point of beating one of the four Big Bads all by himself. Shortly after that, he performed an Heroic Sacrifice.

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