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alt title(s): Chuck Cunningham Syndrome Hey, remember when Bakura used to be in this show? Neither do I!
Usually if the writers want to remove a character from the show, they will either kill that character or put him or her on a bus to explain their absence.
A Brother Chuck simply disappears and is never mentioned again. The name comes from Chuck, Richie Cunningham's older brother on Happy Days.
Also known as Chuck Cunningham Syndrome.
Usually a secondary character, but even more jarring when it happens to a regular.
Sibling in spirit to The Other Darrin. Also see Trivial Pursuit, where the disappeared character is important, or at least relatively important; Uncle Ned; and The Poochie, who gets an excuse in the show for disappearing.
Contrast with Remember The New Guy. For characters who are written out of the story but don't quite cease to exist, see Isn't It Sad?.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- In Beyblade, the Saint Shields, Team Kane, and a good chunk of the PPB All Starz are all absent in season 3.
- Anko disappears after the Chuunin Exam Arc on Naruto.
- Also, previously major characters like Lee, Neji, and even Gaara received this treatment early after the Time Skip.
- To be fair the manga hasn't visited the Village of Sand since his last appearance, and he's probably busy as Kazekage.
- Jigglypuff in the Pokemon anime.
- Medabots. Simply 70% of the cast dissapeared in american season 3 (japanese season 2), being replaced by way less interesting characters and killing the only good aspects of the show. Some say this had something to do with the series being produced in a different studio.
- Doctor Tofu from Ranma 1/2, who was written out midway through the series because his role as Mr Exposition for weird martial arts was adequately filled by Cologne, one of the Trickster Mentors in the series. Fanfic writers tend to keep using him to provide a second opinion, or comedy relief, though it was a joke in the fan community that he had actually fallen into an open sewer and died. This was only in the manga where he last appeared about a third of the way through, but he made minor appearances in the anime throughout the series.
- This was repeated almost exactly in Rumiko Takahashi's later work Inu Yasha. Hojo seemingly disappeared as the manga focused more on the feudal era arcs. And again, the anime differed by including him in later filler episodes.
Comic Books
- Comic strip example: In Garfield, Lyman
 was a black-haired guy with a bushy moustache who, originally, owned Odie. After a few years, he quietly disappeared, while Odie remained a regular, and is ostensibly owned by Jon.
- Rumor has it that you really don't want to look in Jon's basement.
- Shermy from Peanuts was the first character to get a speaking line in a strip, and Charlie Brown's best friend early on, but then vanished without a trace. It was probably because he was too normal; he didn't have a quirk like Linus's philosophical tendencies, Pigpen's messiness, or Lucy's bossy personality, he was just an ordinary kid with nothing to hang gags on.
- Actually, several Peanuts characters disappeared for the same reason, as creator Charles Schulz has admitted - they just weren't that interesting. The roster of the eventually-missing also includes Violet and Patty, as well as one-note types like Frieda and Pig-Pen. (Shermy was replaced by Franklin, the strip's first black kid.)
- Mad Magazine pointed up Shermy's disappearance with a feature they ran several years later in which he comes back to the strip and finds everyone in it has let stardom go to their heads.
- King Muskar XII of the fictional Balkan kingdom Syldavia was a major character in the Tintin story King Ottokar's Sceptre (written in 1938), and ends up a close ally of Tintin. Yet he is completely absent for the post war stories dealing with Syldavia - in fact it is even unclear whether Slydavia is still a monarchy. Possibly a case of Reality Subtext: Muskar was based mostly on King Zog of Albania, and after World War Two all the Balkan kingdoms became communist dictatorships.
- For King Zog, it didn't even take that long; Albania was invaded by Italy in 1938.
- In the comic strip Zits, Jeremy once had an older brother in college. Now he doesn't seem to.
Film
- Transformers (2007) featured a Decepticon named Barricade who featured heavily in the middle of the movie, and was seen briefly near the end, but did not participate in the climax, and unlike other characters who survived (Starscream flew out into space during the credits - all other Decepticons were destroyed and dumped in the ocean), was not shown afterwards. He seems to have simply disappeared.
- He was supposedly killed during the highway scene after Optimus Prime took out Bonecrusher, but the scene was removed as they decided to save him for the sequel. The scene is even in the comic adaptation.
- In the original animated Transformers movie, one of the five Dinobots, Snarl, vanishes during the attack on Autobot City. He is not seen or referred to for the rest of the movie.
- Snark never was with the rest of the Dinobots when they came to Autobot City.
Literature
- In Harry Potter, the character of Colin Creevey all but vanished during the last two books, partially replaced in Half Blood Prince by Stalker With A Crush Romilda Vane. In the films, he was replaced by a movie - only character named "Nigel". Colin did, however, make an appearance during the final epic battle, where he was killed by a Death Eater after sneaking back into the school to fight.
Live Action TV
- Selby, Paul's friend in the first season of Mad About You. (Lampshade hung in one episode when Paul, complaining about their lack of friends, yelled, "Like Selby, what the hell happened to him?")
- About 70% of the girls who were in the first season of The Facts Of Life, including Molly Ringwald ("Molly Parker") and Felice Schachter ("Nancy Butler").
- Judy Winslow, the youngest daughter on Family Matters, simply vanished after the fourth season. (Apparently being Brother Chucked off the show was so traumatic that Jaimee Foxworth, the actress who played her, ended up going into porn under the name "Crave".)
- She was the first of many to fall off the face of reality as The Urkel continued to take over more and more screentime. Seeing how he's a Mad Scientist, that's slightly suspicious...
- What do you mean she vanished? She was upstairs cleaning her room!
- Carl Dixon (played by Moses Gunn) married Florida Evans in Good Times to give Esther Rolle's character a reason to leave the show when the actress quit in 1977. However, when she came back to the show in 1978, Dixon was conveniently forgotten and never mentioned again.
- Actually, this was justified (or at least handwaved) by establishing early on that Carl had terminal cancer, and he and Florida moved to Arizona so he could live out his final days in comfort. It's assumed, but never explicitly stated, that Florida moved back when Carl died.
- Dr. Ben Samuels was a major character in the first season of St. Elsewhere who simply stopped appearing. His plot arc was never resolved, and none of the other characters mention him again.
- Constantly used in Step By Step.
- Kendra on Degrassi The Next Generation was a recurring character in many second and third season episodes, and vanished without a trace in the fourth season. This was particularly strange because her brother and boyfriend were still on the show. (One wonders why she wasn't there to react when her brother got expelled and re-admitted, found religion and abandoned it...)
- Mandy on The West Wing was a publicity relations manager for the first season, who disappeared after it. According to Rob Lowe, the writers referred to any character who had disappeared and not been used when they seemed they'd be more important as having 'gone to Mandyville.'
- Walt Finnerty on Grounded For Life was gone after season 3 without explanation.
- And younger brother Henry was gone after season 4. Nothing happened to him...he was just always in the other room or something.
- Henry did show up in the series finale, possibly with a lampshade of some kind.
- Walt never completely vanished from the show; he just became more sporadic in his appearances. (This troper would put money on the Channel Hop leading to a budget cut, so veteran actor Riehle got his role reduced.)
- Maggie Doyle on ER.
- Also Bob. Some people now call this trope "being Bobbed".
- Bob from Becker was said to be "on vacation" in the first episode of Season 6, and never returned.
- Spin City was well known for this — of all the characters who left, only Mike (Michael J Fox) actually had an exit storyline. This meant that, over the course of the series, Stacy, James, Nikki, Janelle and Angie all disappeared without trace.
- Mike's girlfriend Ashley was awkwardly Put On A Bus in the middle of season one, then never again mentioned.
- Seven, a Cousin Oliver introduced in Season 7 of Married... With Children, was written out without explanation when he proved unpoular with the fans. Lampshaded in one episode when his face was seen on a milk carton.
- Cat Grant on Lois And Clark disappears without a trace after the first season. Thank God.
- Too many students to be named in Saved By The Bell: The New Class (it happenened in the original Saved By The Bell too, but to a lesser extent).
- Dr. Grace Miller, on Scrubs, was introduced with much fanfare in series 3, then promptly vanished off the face of the earth. Series creator Bill Lawrence later explained that this was because Miller had been a failed attempt to create a female Dr. Cox character. This didn't work because A) it was redundant, as Jordan more than adequately fulfils that role, and B) Dr. Miller was an unfunny, unlikeable shrew.
- Unlikeable. It says so right here in her personnel file, unlikeable.
- A bitter, unlikeable loner whose passing shall not be mourned.
- SHALL NOT BE MOURNED.
- That's what it says. Very formal. Very official.
- It also says she's adopted, so... OK, that's enough.
- JD is also never seen actually breaking up with his love interest Jamie (Tasty Coma Wife, played by Amy Smart). Considering that their relationship was based on drama, however, it's likely that they simply broke up off-screen, as she was gone as the third season began.
- In an early Boy Meets World episode we see Topanga's older sister, Nebula. She is never referred to again and indeed Topanga is later stated to be an only child.
- More notably, Minkus, the nerd from the early seasons, completely and inexplicably disappeared when they moved on to high school. During the very last episode in high school, he finally
made a cameo ran into Cory, and lampshaded his absence by pointing out that he was in classes at the other end of the hall (behind the cameras).
- An interesting reversion is Cory's little sister Morgan, who vanished during the second season, then suddenly appeared again in the third with a new actress, saying "That was the longest timeout I ever had!"
- During the transition between Power Rangers Turbo and Power Rangers in Space, Lt. Jerome Stone, as well as the Angel Grove Youth Center and Juice Bar, disappeared and was replaced with Adelle and the Surf Spot, while Bulk and Skull attached themselves to an alien-obsessed scientist. Worth noting due to the fact that, despite traveling to at least one other planet and back, it is strongly implied that no more than a week has passed.
- What ever happened to Spearchucker Jones or Ugly John in MASH?
- Spearchucker was removed for historical reasons, (That Other Wiki: "there is no record of African-American doctors serving in Korea")
- In a 1970 episode of the soap All My Children, a teen named Bobby Martin goes up in his family's attic to wax his skis. The actor was then abruptly fired and so Bobby was never seen again. Years later, the show (sort of) lampshaded this by having a character go into the same attic and find a skeleton with a pair of skis.
- Fox comedy The Loop is a particularly bad example of this. Between the first and second season, both female leads simply disappeared without a trace. The reason this is so unnerving is one of the female leads was the main character's love interest, and their relationship was left completely unresolved.
- This troper likens it to the idea of writing off Pam from The Office between seasons 1 and 2 with no explanation or fanfare, which is simply ridiculous.
- Wally, Maya's roommate in the first season of Just Shoot Me.
- Kate Lockley in Angel, ostensibly because she was fired from her job as a police detective and could no longer function as Angel's police contact. In reality, actress Elisabeth Rohm took a regular role on Law&Order.
- She does return in the canon comic continuation though.
- N'grath, the insectiod crime boss from Babylon 5. He completely disappeared after the first season with no explanation.
- It was a running joke among fans that he left the station of a broken heart after Delenn's chrysalis didn't turn her into a insect, but rather a human-Minbari hybrid.
- The real reason for his disappearance was the animatronics that "played" him becoming irreparably damaged sometime between seasons 1 and 2.
- One episode of the Postscript Season casually mentioned his death.
- In the fifth episode of That70s Show Donna's sister Tina is introduced.. only to never be seen again. Later in the series Donna is referred to as being an only child.
- Subverted with Eric's sister Laurie. After the actress switch after graduation resulted in a negative reaction from fans, she was often referenced as never being around, and giving a toast to her friends and family in the last episode Kitty says, "And Laurie... well, nobody ever knows where she is."
- Crewman Elizabeth Cutler seemed poised to to become a recurring character on Enterprise, but when the actress died unexpectedly, the character just vanished. Much later a reference was made to her character having died in battle.
- Lt. Carey is an odd case from Star Trek Voyager. He vanished from the actual crew season one, but he would reappear whenever characters had a flashback to season one, or whenever Time Travel threw people to season one's time, so the actor was still on staff. He finally showed up again in real time in season seven, only to get shot.
- Also Samantha Wildman, which is pretty weird since her daughter Naomi remained on the show with Seven of Nine basically taking over the mother role for her. Word of God is that the writers somehow got the idea that they'd killed Samantha in an episode where she almost dies but pulls through.
- This might become a problem for the Australian medical drama All Saints now that the actor playing one of the main characters has died unexpectedly right in the middle of an important story arc.
- In Stargate SG 1 Dr. Lam, who appears as the SGC's resident doctor in season 9 vanishes by season 10 and the two following movies. Similarly, Teal'c love interest,
T-Pol Ishta vanishes after season 8 and is never mentioned again.
- Dr. Lam is in two episodes late in Season 10, one of which features an arc where, (seeing Vala reject her father, General Landry enlists her help to reconcile with his ex-wife.) But yeah, after that she's gone.
- After Thomas Haden Church left Wings, Brian Haley was brought in to play Budd Bronski, the replacement character for Church's Lowell. However, Budd's personality was neither as memorable nor as well-defined as Lowell's had been, so after a few appearances, he disappeared from the series without explanation, and the writers decided to build up the show's other supporting characters (chiefly Antonio and Casey) instead.
- On Til Death, Jeff and Steph Woodcock (Eddie Kaye Thomas and Kat Thomas) were lead characters, on equal footing with Eddie and Joy Stark (Brad Garrett and Joely Fisher), and the whole basis of the show seemed to be about contrasting a newly-wed couple and a long-time married couple. After the first 2 seasons, however, they vanished without a trace, and Jeff's sidekick role was taken by Kenny, played by J.B. Smoove. This was further confused when unaired episodes from Season 2 aired in the middle of Season 3.
- The snakeman, the conjoined twins and number of the other regular freaks from the carnival in Carnivale disappear between Seasons One and Two, never to be heard of again.
- The Sarah Connor Chronicles appears to be quietly dropping the high school story arcs from the first season. "Appears" is the key word, because the writers seem intent on keeping Riley around....
- Santiago on Friday Night Lights just seems to have disappeared from existence between season 2 and 3.
- Peter's girlfriend Caitlin, from the second season of Heroes: abandoned in an apocalyptic future that will no longer exist and never mentioned again (you'd think that at least Peter would get all angsty about it).
- This was how every cast change on Mission Impossible was done.
- * Juliet Darling in Dirty Sexy Money. Word Of God has it that the character will make future appearances as a non regular, but no on-screen reason for her disappearance (or even mention of her existence) has been given. Especially jarring as the final episode of the first season took the time to set up a storyline for her.
- The most recent episode ("The Family Lawyer") has Karen Darling say that Juliet is off on some island on the other side of the world, which does match up (somewhat) with the storyline set-up in the first season's final episode.
- Bizzarely, recurring character Dusty Farlow suffered this fate by accident on Dallas: He appeared in a few episodes at the end of the 7th Season, then left town a few episodes into the 8th. Unfortunately the 8th Season was also the infamous Dream Season and the producers apparently forgot about Dusty (despite his father being a main character), so that per canon he simply vanishes without explanation.
Video Games
- The Koopalings from the Mario series exemplify the trope by disappearing, never to be seen again after Super Mario World, only to be replaced by Bowser Jr.
- To be fair, they did make a cameo in Mario And Luigi Superstar Saga.
- Full sets of brand new sprites for all of them have been discovered in the data for Super Princess Peach, suggesting that they were at one point intended to appear in that game, presumably as bosses. By the time the game was finished, however, they'd vanished again.
- And notably, in Super Mario Sunshine, Bowser Jr's debut game, they have FLUDD show various scenes from previous Mario games as he scans for Mario's history, including a boss fight with Iggy Koopa in Super Mario World. This scene does two things... Put Bowser Jr firmly in the same world as Iggy Koopa and thusly the other Koopalings and foreshadow the eventual appearence of Bowser Jr by showing that this has happened before.
- A mid-story issue of the Super Mario Adventures comic strip, which ran in Nintendo Power for a time, featured this. Toad uses a Cape Feather to fly up to a pipe sticking out of a cloud (allegedly the one Mario and Luigi entered at the beginning of the story to unknowingly wind up in Dinosaur Land), and gets "help" - which is actually Bowser's Koopa Troop in disguise (the cloud was actually an airship of sorts in disguise). After the Princess gets kidnapped, Toad is shown being held hostage by two Koopas, delivers one line about the Koopas "taking over the Mushroom Kingdom", and then is never seen or mentioned again for the remainder of the comic. (So they just left Toad in the Koopa Castle dungeons.)
- Dynamo in Mega Man X5 and X6. The only antagonist in the series to remain alive and intact (that is, not coming Back From The Dead), he worked for Sigma in X5, returned in an arbitrary cameo in X6, and vanished off the face of the earth.
- And what the Hell happened to Dr. Cain, the guy who found X and created the reploids and started the whole mess?
- Well, Maverick Hunter X had him retconned as having been apparently killed in the first attack, but otherwise yeah.... maybe he died in one of the attacks or old age.
- While we're on the subject of Megaman, several episodes of the Ruby-Spears cartoon had Megaman interacting with characters who would never be seen or mentioned again (be they good or bad). It's worth noting that only one of the good ones, Brain Bot, managed to piss him off.
- In Xenogears, Billy's dad Jessiah disappears (much like most of the game) when Disk 2 starts. At least, from the storyline, technically he is still around as he is is the gun/bullet in one of Billy's gear's special moves. Oh, and Kaiser Sigmund too - despite the fact that an early Disk 2 plot point would probably have him heavily involved.
- Lampshaded in Banjo-Tooie, where the face of Tooty, Distressed Damsel of the first game, appears on a milk carton at one point.
- Nastasha Romanenko in Metal Gear Solid, while a minor secondary character in the first game, she's revealed in backstory to have played a very important background role in-between Metal Gear Solid 1 and Metal Gear Solid 2. Despite this, and the fact pretty much every other character in the entire series shows up in Metal Gear Solid 4, she's strangely absent.
- Has anyone seen Ray the Flying Squirrel, Mighty the Armadillo, Bean the Dynamite and Bark the Polar Bear in any Sonic the Hedgehog games lately? Nack the Weasel / Fang the Sniper, too?
- Aren't there enough characters as it is?
- Gooey and Kirby's animal friends from the Kirby series, who were major characters in Kirby's Dreamland 2 and 3, but have since apparently fallen off the face of Popstar. It's been four games since their last major appearance.
- It's worth noting that all the games they appeared in have a different director than the ones they haven't appeared in.
- Mima from Touhou. Never heard of Mima? That's no suprise, as she was only in the PC-98 games. Almost all of them. Not to mention, she had some pretty close ties to co-protagonist Marisa that went unexplained. Fans anxiously await her return.
- Most of the PC-98 characters for that matter. There are at least ten of them who are still insanely popular with fans, but only two (aside from the two major heroines) survived the transition to Windows. Among the casualties was a nuclear robot maid.
Webcomics
- Sara from Questionable Content was a barrista at the Coffee of Doom who had a crush on Marten for the first few strips. She seemingly disappeared early on, when the focus shifted to Faye and Marten. This has been subject to a Lampshade Hanging on more than one occasion. The offical explanation for her disappearance is that she was eaten by an allosaurus, but really she was just a boring character.
- Steve also disappeared, although apparently more people cared. Enough to make the author justify it and post a little note asking people to stop e-mailing him about Steve already.
- In El Goonish Shive, Lord Tedd disappears for arcs at a time. Some of the side characters have fallen into this as well.
- To be fair, he's a villain from another dimension and has never been a regular character. If anything, his few brief appearances so far have been foreshadowing.
- Duane from Penny And Aggie seems to have been Brother Chuck'd right out of the strip. As soon as his relationship with Penny ended, he completely vanished, even though he ostensibly was Aggie's best friend. Now they just play up the Snoopies bunch she hangs out with, to the point where a vaguely-Duane like background character was hoped for by the fans to have been the long-lost only not-insane teenager in the entire strip.
- He finally returns in Chapter Five of "The Popsicle Wars," still bitter over his breakup.
Western Animation
- Thomas The Tank Engine does this a lot - in recent series familiar characters such as Duck, Oliver, Boco and Daisy are nowhere to be seen. Donald, Douglas and Sir Handel were also Brother Chucked, but later made reappearances (Sir Handel had an 11 year gap between appearances!).
- In The Batman, Detective Yin pretty much vanishes after Batman no longer needed her as link to the police at the end of season two. She's only referred to once in an episode set in the future which implied she and Bennet had both become high-ranking police officers.
- Cleveland and Joe's sons on Family Guy.
- Though Cleveland Jr. will be back in the Cleveland spinoff.
Other
- Odin's brothers, Vili and Ve. Whatever happened to those guys?
- There is a theory that one of them changed his name to Lodir, and then to Heimdall. It's not a very popular theory, though. The other one probably went to live with the Vanir on the hostage exchange programme.
- The second season of The Red Green Show greatly expanded the number of characters who appeared in person, as opposed to mentioned by Red in his monologues. Many of these characters were never seen again from the third season onwards, although some of them were occasionally mentioned in passing.
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