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MockGuffin

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With these, the real treasure really is the friends we made along the way.

Gutman: Fake. It's a phony! It's lead! It's lead! It's a fake!
Cairo: You. It's you who bungled it. You and your stupid attempt to buy it! Kemidov found out how valuable it was! No wonder we had such an easy time stealing it! You... You imbecile!

Our heroes have found a golden helmet, a powerful relic, or magic sword, something of great value, they take it to get appraised only to discover that it's actually... junk.

A hapless man finds a briefcase, locked, in the back of his car. Perhaps it is full of money, secret documents or contraband. When he opens it he discovers... it's full of shredded paper.

An object of absolutely no significance that the protagonist mistakes, either through misunderstanding or excited imagining, as something of great importance, be it a magic sword or mysterious briefcase. Since a MacGuffin is usually defined not by what it can do, but by what people think it can do (and how much they are willing to do for it), a MockGuffin can still drive the plot even though all it turns out to be is completely worthless.

Compare with It's All Junk, Worthless Yellow Rocks. Not to be confused with All That Glitters or It's the Journey That Counts, which are often materially worthless but at least impart a valuable lesson. See A MacGuffin Full of Money for a plot device that can end in this. If someone deliberately creates a duplicate MacGuffin, that's Fakin' MacGuffin.

Its opposite is Grail in the Garbage, where a seemingly worthless object is in fact worth a king's ransom.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • In Dragon Ball, the Sacred Water gives you super strength according to legend, but first Goku must climb the Star Scraper that is Karin's Tower, which takes several days, and then he spends three more days snatching the jug from the very agile Karin. Upon drinking it however, Goku finds that he doesn't feel any different: Karin reveals that Goku's exertions climbing the tower and getting it from him were all that was needed. Crosses over with Secret Test of Character when Tao Pai-Pai visits: Karin can tell immediately that he's not a good person and just gives him the tap water without any fuss, and even gives him a dark Nimbus cloud for the trip down, so that he doesn't become any stronger. Several story arcs later, Karin reveals he does have water that can make someone stronger, but it's much more likely to just kill whoever drinks it, so he saved it until the situation was desperate.

    Comic Books 
  • One arc of Hitman (1993) has Tommy and Natt getting involved in a bloody dispute over a recently found coffin full of cash from the Civil War. In the end, all involved find out that it was full of Confederate dollars, worthless and largely ruined by the years.
  • Double subverted in the Mortand Phil comic La caja de los diez cerrojos. After going to great lenghs to open a misterious safebox, it happens to have a giant jack in a box toy, so angry they throw it to the ocean...and it turns out that inside the jack in a box there was a giant diamond.
  • In The Smurfs comic book story "The Little Tree", the golden tree that Lumberjack and Vini the elf set off to find for its legendary golden pinecones actually only produced regular pinecones. Lumberjack has Painter dip the pinecones in gold paint in order to trick Gargamel into thinking they were actually the gold pinecones they found so he would not threaten Vini's sister (an elf turned into the titular tree) with burning her to death.
  • X-Men Noir: Mark of Cain reimagines the titular mutant superheroes as a gang of hired mercs looking for the fabled gem of Cytorrak in the jungles of Madripoor. It eventually turns out to be a worthless fake made of glass. However, the Big Bad actually knew this all along. He was planning to use the fake gem to wrest control of Madripoor from the natives so that he could use it as a prison for creating brainwashed agents to beat the Soviets. It Makes Sense in Context.

    Comic Strips 
  • One Calvin and Hobbes arc had Calvin trying to find dinosaur bones in his yard. He ended up digging up a bunch of random trash, but until his mother pointed it out, he had no idea that there was something fishy about the "Calvinosaur" having a bottle for a skull, tin cans for a spine, and forks for arms.
  • One of the recurring gags in Knights of the Dinner Table is the players mistaking some piece of random dungeon dressing for a powerful magical artifact. The longest running of these jokes was Dave's "magical" cow Chelsie. And thanks to their Bag of Holding having a nigh unlimited capacity, they would clean out everything in a dungeon including toe nail clippings.

    Fan Works 
  • In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, the four spend three chapters trying to get the Cloud Horn, which can be used as one of the pieces of the Nine-part Key. However, when they finally manage this, it turns out that the thing had been destroyed a while ago and is actually a hologram. They do get a consolation prize of sorts in the form of a rare instruction for putting the Key together.

    Film — Animation 
  • In Flushed Away, both Rita and Toad fight for possession of what they think is a priceless gem. Roddy recognizes it as a cheap glass bead and proves it by smashing it to bits, which doesn't sit well with Rita.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • A couple of these in The Big Lebowski — Walter's briefcase full of dirty undies, Lebowski's briefcase full of phonebooks — both attempts to swindle someone else out of A MacGuffin Full of Money they're expecting.
  • Burn After Reading is a rare case of of a plot that does center around this: Brad Pitt's character mistakes a CD of a low-level CIA analyst's mundane and unclassified memoirs for something top-secret. The analyst is also convinced that it's a vitally important, but only because he's delusional enough to think it has the makings of a "Washington tell-all bestseller." In other words, a MockGuffin becomes a MacGuffin through collective delusion.
  • The cooler in Crank: High Voltage that Chelios assumes contains his heart. Whatever was really in there...
    Chelios: What kind of sick freak carries around something like that in a box? I am shocked to my fucking core. You have got some serious problems, motherfucker.
  • In Duplicity, the formula for a baldness cure that Claire and Ray are trying to steal (ostensibly for their boss, but really for themselves) turns out to just be a formula for an ordinary skin cream...excuse me, lotion.
  • The "Holy Grail" in the Robin Williams film The Fisher King is most likely nothing, but his insanity has convinced him it's the true grail.
  • The Giant Spider Invasion includes a tiny subplot about the "geodes" (diamond-like rock shells) the invading spiders arrive in. One character takes some geode fragments to his diamond-broker cousin to have them appraised, only to be told that the diamond is "industrial quality".
  • How to Steal a Million is about a woman hiring an art thief (he isn't) to steal a statuette worth a million dollars (it isn't) from a Parisian gallery. She knows it's a fake, but wants to have it stolen so her art forger father won't be exposed, and the "thief" knows it's a fake because he's really an expert on art forgery investigating her father, but happens to have fallen in love with her.
  • Indiana Jones:
    • Raiders of the Lost Ark does this twice with Belloq:
      • It's first discussed by Belloq as his main motivation for finding artifacts for profit rather than to send to museums. He muses over how most of the things they find were actually worthless in their day, and are now only "valuable", so valuable that people kill each other over them, because they are old:
      Belloq: Look at this [pocket watch]. It's worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless... like the Ark. Men will kill for it. Men like you and me.
      • Next it plays with this trope and then subverts it in the last scene. After performing the invocation ritual, Belloq opens the Ark and finds it to be just a box full of sand. Toht walks away laughing... and then God's fury comes out of it unleashed.
    • In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when choosing a grail from the many ones in the Grail Chamber, Donovan defers to Elsa as he says he has no way of knowing which (of dozens) could be it. She chooses an large, ornate, gold-covered chalice, which she gives him. After drinking from it, Donovan learns the hard way that he "chose poorly." Indy finds a small, wooden cup painted with gold, which he realizes is "the cup of a carpenter."
    • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: In the Action Prologue, Indiana Jones and Basil Shaw are trying to recover the Lance of Longinus (a.k.a. the Spear of Destiny): the lance that pierced the side of Jesus as he hung on the cross during his crucifixion. The Nazis have recovered the Lance from a fortress in France and loaded it on a treasure train bound for Berlin. However, the Nazi expert realises that the Lance is a replica because it is made of an alloy not available in Roman times, and the engraving on it is too recent. Indy comes to the same conclusion as soon as he gets his hands on it. However, in his researches, Voller discovers something even more valuable; the Antikythera, which becomes the main MacGuffin of the film.
  • In Lockout, the sought-after briefcase turns out to be empty and the actual information is hidden in the lighter that Snow had the entire time.
  • The Maltese Falcon (1941) is something of a subversion, as the fake one in the movie was substituted by the legitimate owner to prevent theft of the real one. At least, that's what Gutman thinks, but really there's no evidence either way. Maybe the legitimate owner always had a fake. Maybe there never was a real one. (Apparently, no-one has ever tried to scratch off the black enamel to see if it's really gold underneath before.) In what's perhaps a subversion of the subversion, a sequel, The Black Bird, has Sam Spade Jr. (George Segal) getting involved with a new group of motley villains looking for the statue that his father kept all these years. Turns out the "lead" was a coating over the real golden bird.
  • In part of National Treasure, Ben Gates buys two copies of the Declaration of Independence at the gift shop (one of them is the real thing that the clerk believes to be a replica, the other a replica). They both become useful; when Ian and his cronies are trying to steal the real one from Gates, he throws them the fake to buy some time.
  • In Revenge of the Musketeers, much of the plot is driven by characters misinterpreting a laundry list and a really bad love poem as secret coded messages, and acting upon what they think these 'messages' are telling them to do.
  • Inverted in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Veteran prospector and miner Howard mocks Fred and Bob for going wild over some pyrite- fool's gold. Real gold, before it's refined, looks like a funny coarse sort of sand. Later, in the film's climax the banditos from before capture a mule loaded heavily with raw gold, which they contemptuously pour out into the desert sands.

    Literature 
  • The treasure map in Below is one, except that Brenish and Naman know it's a fake from the beginning. They get pulled into the quest anyway, because the forger who made it was too good and their boss Gareth is too obsessed. Brenish spends much of the quest trying to steer Gareth towards a fallback plan that would let them survive The Reveal.
  • The (former) Trope Namer is the Golden Helmet of Mambrino (actually a barber's basin) from Don Quixote. (It even gets a song dedicated to it in Man of La Mancha.)
    Barber: But he'll find it is not gold and will not make him bold and brave ...
    Sancho: Well, at least he'll find it useful if he ever needs a shave.
  • Foucault's Pendulum: The mysterious list Col. Ardenti leaves the protagonists. Either it's the Knights Templars' key to harnessing the Telluric currents that can reshape the face of the world, or a shopping list. Trying to get a definitive answer out of this book is rather missing the point.
  • Harry Potter
    • In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix there are a number of students taking advantage of the fifth and seventh years' panic over upcoming exams by selling fake potions and items said to ensure good test scores. Ron mentions that taking powdered dragon claw is supposed make someone clever for a few hours, though he does not seem fully convinced, but whether or not this is true is never examined in series as the individual selling "powdered dragon claw" was actually selling dried Doxy droppings, which are toxic. Luckily Hermione confiscated them.
    • After a life-threatening quest to recover Slytherin's locket, one of Voldemort's horcruxes, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry is devastated to realize it's a fake. Also inverted: the real locket had previously been mistaken for worthless junk lying around Grimmauld Place, and thrown away.
  • The Mouse That Roared is the story of a tiny nation that accidentally acquires the prototype "Q-Bomb," a weapon with planet destroying capabilities. They use it to hold the world hostage. At the end, the weapon's designer realizes that it was a dud.
  • The Radix: Edgar Wurm made a fake Radix. Initially he just wanted to show Brynstone what to look for, but later the fake played a significant role in the story.
  • Running Blind by Desmond Bagley. The protagonist is a retired spy coerced into delivering a mysterious electronic circuit during a trip to Iceland to see his girlfriend. He finds himself being pursued by a former KGB adversary, and comes to realise that the man who gave him the assignment is a KGB mole. After he and his girlfriend nearly get killed on several occasions, he exposes The Mole and delivers the package, only to be told he was supposed to let the KGB have it — the circuit actually does nothing; it was designed to waste the time of Soviet researchers. Of course thanks to their mole the KGB knew that anyway; they were just going through the motions to keep his cover.
  • In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead hits his head on a sack hanging on the ceiling within Pilate's house, which he tells his father. His father then assumes that it must be the gold that he and Pilate found in the cave that Pilate wouldn't let her brother get his hands on, that she actually went back when they separated and took the gold for herself. Milkman Dead and his friend Guitar Bains then break into Pilate's house in the middle of the night to steal the bag, only to later find out that all it contained was the bones of a man that Pilate and her brother had killed in the cave.
  • The Bopamagilvies in "The Space Willies" by Eric Frank Russell do - nothing at all. But the aliens that keep our creative hero prisoner don't know. He finally even manages to end a space war by his bluff.
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • In the novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye, Luke and Leia fight Darth Vader for control of an Amplifier Artifact known as the Kaiburr crystal (not to be confused with the kyber crystals used in lightsabers), that magnified a Force-user's power a thousandfold. Luke claims it after using its power to heal his and Leia's wounds, but it's discovered that the power it granted is only given while within its temple and it's almost worthless off-world. Almost being the key word, as its fragments make for useful lightsaber focus crystals with several Force-sensitives using them over the years.
    • The novel Millennium Falcon is an extended homage to The Maltese Falcon. Guess what the "Lost Treasure of the Old Republic" turns out to be. In the case of Millennium Falcon, it's even more annoying than usual. This "lost treasure" was supposedly left in the dying days of the Republic as something that would critically undermine Palpatine. Once the treasure is revealed, it pretty clearly demonstrates how inept and impotent Palpatine's opposition must've been. The quest to locate the "lost treasure" ends up being an It's the Journey That Counts moment for Han, Leia, and their granddaughter, however.
    • In the Enemy Lines duology, the New Republic forces make use of a Mock Guffin to lure the Yuuzhan Vong into a trap, by creating a quartet of flyable, but otherwise nonfunctional ships, and faking a test firing so that they appear to be a new superweapon.
  • In The Vor Game, Miles finds a body wedged in a drain pipe, who had drowned when the pipe filled up during a storm. Investigating why the man was in the pipe in the first place, he figures out that the dead man had intended to retrieve a package he had stored in a different pipe, only he had entered the wrong pipe, got stuck, and drowned. Miles finds the package and opens it, revealing... some home-baked cookies that the dead soldier had been hiding from his barracks-mates.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In the fifth season episode of Angel entitled "Destiny," Angel and Spike beat the living crud out of each other in their race to drink from the Cup of Eternal Torment. The cup turned out to have a "Made in China" sticker on the bottom and was filled with Mountain Dew.
  • Astrid: The motive for two murders in "Fulcanelli" is a secret treasure of the eponymous alchemist, likened to the Philosopher's Stone. It turns out to be a process for isolating elemental phosphorous, one that has long since been obsoleted by modern industrial chemistry.
  • In Auction Kings, everything from fake swords to a very beat up piano. Even worse is when the item would be worth more if it were real or in good shape.
    • One seller brought in a stamp which they claimed was worth a million dollars. When the expert confirmed that the stamp would indeed be worth a million if it were real, Cindy looked ready to pass out. Sadly, the stamp was a cheaper reproduction.
    • This repeated again with a The Beatles album cover. And again, it was the cheaper reproduction.
  • Blue Bloods: The titular Cool Car in The Bullitt Mustang. The owner, who purchased the real Bullitt Mustang soon after the movie, bought a second '68 Mustang from a used-car lot a week later and had it modified to be identical to the Bullitt car to be used as a decoy to prevent it from being stolen. When he died, he willed the real car to his wife, swearing her to secrecy over it. He then (separately) gave the decoy to his son while also keeping him oblivious to the fact that it was just a decoy in case his rather needy son decided to blab about his ownership of the car for attention, sell it for some quick cash or have it "stolen" to collect the insurance payout, all of which the son did later in life.
  • An episode of Bones has the eponymous scientist thinking she's stumbled across this. A prop sword is treated as much more valuable than its component parts simply because the movie it appeared in is so popular. As with much of anything, Bones does not understand why it is so. Probably because people seem willing to kill for the damned thing. The movie was not so much popular as known to be the first Arthurian film ever made (or one of the first). This made the sword valuable as a part of film history.
  • On Buffy the Vampire Slayer Spike and Harmony are searching for the Gem of Amara, a relic that makes vampires invulnerable. They find it in a tomb full of jewellery and other artifacts. Spike thinks it's a huge gaudy necklace and puts it on. Moments later he tries to kill Harmony in a fit of rage only to discover when he fails that the real Gem was a relatively nondescript ring that Harmony had put on.
  • The basis of Captain Jack Harkness' time-traveling scam in Doctor Who. He found an empty space-ambulance, tossed it past Rose and the Doctor (he thought they were Time Agents) and crashed it in London in the middle of the Blitz. The plan was that he would pass it off as a warship (they have ambulances in wars!), charge an exorbitant amount for it, take half in advance, and the ship would be "coincidentally" hit by a German bomb before the agents could realize they'd bought junk. It all goes wrong because the ship wasn't empty; it was full of confused "nanogenes" that started acting as The Virus and nearly consumed humanity.
  • Gilligan's Island:
    • One episode had a plot where the castaways find a suitcase which, at a glance, appears to contain top-secret spy documents, leaving them in danger of being chased by enemy spies. One Dream Sequence later, the documents fall out and they turn out to be spy documents from World War I, which had ended forty eight years prior and nobody was after.
    • There is also an episode where Gilligan digs up a buried chest wrapped in chains while digging a BBQ pit for Mr. Howell. The Castaways believe it to be full of treasure and spend the entire episode arguing over weather Gilligan or Mr. Howell has claim over it. Mr. Howell ends up buying it off the rest of the castaways for a very large sum of money. Finally opened, it's full of cannon balls.
    • Another episode has them find a talking parrot on the island that keeps mentioning jewels. Believing it belonged to a pirate who buried treasure on the island they spend the whole episode trying to find out where the treasure is. Only to learn that its former owner fed it "jewel" brand crackers and it had been giving its version of "Polly want a cracker" the whole time.
  • Similar to the "Al Capone's Vault" case, Kenan & Kel once found a map to a secret safe (albeit Kel insisted it read "sofa"). Following the map's instructions, they eventually found and opened the safe, and found a sofa. Kenan was understandably disappointed but Kel actually liked the sofa (and the fact he was right).
  • Modern Family: The episode "Message Received" has Mitchell and Cameron going to sell their most valuable belongings to pay for their wedding, with Cameron's being a belt buckle given to him by his grandfather who supposedly got it from Wyatt Earp. The appraiser however secretly tells Mitchell that the belt buckle is actually worthless and that tons of them were sold at a gas station chain in the sixties, meaning that Cameron's grandfather's story about him meeting Wyatt Earp was a lie. Zig-zagged in that Cameron admits to having suspected it was all a lie anyway as he noticed that the dates in his grandfather's story didn't add up, then offhandedly mentions that his compass allegedly belonging to Amelia Earhart that he also got from his grandfather is most likely a fake too.
  • Many Mock Guffins come through Rick's door on Pawn Stars.
  • Red Dwarf: In "Entangled", the crew attempt to get out of giving Rimmer and Starbug to the BEGGs by invoking this trope, attempting to pass off an ordinary spoon as "The Spoon of Destiny", capable of controlling the universe. Unfortunately for them, the BEGGs see right through it.
  • In SeaQuest DSV, Krieg discovers a cache of glowing gems on the ocean floor and hoards as many as he can aboard ship...only to discover that they're bioluminescent fish poop, which trades its glow for an unbearable smell as it melts.
  • They're found in the occasional storage locker on Storage Wars.
  • In "I Am God", a second season episode of Veronica Mars, Veronica is haunted by dreams of the bus crash (the season-long mystery she's trying to solve), and in particular of a drawing of a scythe hanging over nine tombstones, with the words "I Am God" written underneath. She thinks it's a key to how the bus crashed, but it turns out to just be an album cover for an indie rock band.

    Video Games 
  • Goes both ways in Brave Fencer Musashi. Whenever the titular hero finds an unappraised treasure he'll describe it as an "old helmet", an "ancient book", or an "old bracelet". Those items turn out to be a bedpan, a comic book, and the MacGuffin L-Brace, respectively.
  • Breath of Fire I does this with Karn. On a quest to find the hand book that will teach him how to become the greatest thief ever, he has to walk through a trap filled pyramid. When he finally gets to the end, all that it says is 'If you made it this far, you are already the world's greatest thief.'
  • A Running Gag in Final Fantasy is dimension-hopping warrior Gilgamesh's search for the legendary blade Excalibur. Unfortunately, he tends to instead find the Excalipoor, a Joke Item that looks exactly like Excalibur but is nigh-on worthless in combat. He tends to have attacks with it shuffled into his usual attack routine; they always do 1 damage. It can also be wielded by the player, and when held, it tends to show in the stat screen that it boosts your attacking power to ridiculous amounts... but it's still hardcoded to do 1 damage, so that's pointless.
  • In Forever Home, the Union Stone is supposed to be able to work with the Past Stone and Future Stone to fix a mistake from the past. The Union Stone actually does nothing of the sort, though the Bad Future versions of Xero mistakenly believe that it allows them to send their thoughts to the past. In reality, Xero himself is capable of time travel without the stones due to his connection to the Aeon Prism.
  • There are fake Master Swords littered all over the Lost Woods in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The game even starts to remark on how amazing it is that you retrieved it for a moment before revealing the fake. You're not likely to be fooled, though, especially after seeing what the real Master Sword looks like.
  • In Mother 3, Wess sends Duster into a castle to retrieve a magical artifact critical for the safety of the world. Unfortunately for him, he's not told specifically what it is. He finds an interesting urn of some kind and brings it back to Master Wess. It turns out to be something else completely useless (the Noble Spittoon) and Wess is furious. For the record, it WAS Wess's own fault for not mentioning that the item was magical, protected by a doorway that can only be opened by a special dance Duster was taught in his childhood, or anything other than the thing Duster was supposed to get was shiny.
    Wess: As for what this "certain important item" is... No... There is no need for me to tell you. If a thief can't determine the value of what he steals, he's a disgrace to the profession.
  • In NetHack, there are fake Amulets of Yendor that, if you try to use at the end game, will cause you not only to lose the game, but have the gods mock you.
  • The fake Garnet Star in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, much to Bowser's chagrin. The fake Gold Star on the Champ's Belt in Chapter 3 also qualifies.
  • PAYDAY 3: The heist Under The Surphaze contains a fake version of the painting "The Feejee Mermaid" by Uma Ladette which looks identical to the real deal - identifying the authentic painting requires setting up a spectrophotometer in front of either of them.
  • The thief's storyline in the Quest for Glory series, in an obvious homage to The Maltese Falcon, has you run into several fake versions of "The Black Bird", though only the one in the second game really fits this trope; as you have to steal it for Signor Ferrari, who then realizes it's a fake. The fakes you find in the third and fourth games are mostly Easter Eggs, and in the fifth game you can finally get the real Black Bird, which finally serves as a proper MacGuffin (though you can still make a fake to give to Ferrari and pocket the real one yourself).
  • Shadowrun Returns has one with the 100,000 nuyen reward offered by the late Sam Watts, which he just doesn't have. The significance of it depends entirely on whether the player wants to avenge Sam for the reward, or for justice.
  • Silent Hill 3 contains an especially cruel example. That Seal of Metatron you braved the ghastly Brookhaven Hospital to recover? The one that was supposed to put a stop to Claudia's twisted plans? Worthless piece of crap.
  • A quest in The Sims Medieval lets you make these and sell them to the Nobles to sabotage their war effort. There's a sword, staff and suit of armor whose purpose is to look really impressive but actually be low quality. They mostly contain Cruddium.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has the Ankaran Sarcophagus that the entire game revolves around. Everybody thinks it contains some primevally ancient vampire that will usher in the apocalypse. Instead, it contains a crapton of C4, courtesy of Smiling Jack. In most endings, he's shown sharing a drink with the sarcophagus' previous occupant, an ordinary mummy, as he watches the idiot who opened it go up in flames.

    Web Comics 
  • 8-Bit Theater had the armoire of invincibility, which is just regular old heavy furniture. Technically, the armoire itself is invincible, in that it cannot be destroyed. However, the invincibility does not extend beyond the armoire, so it's pretty worthless. Also, the bottom is made of cheap cardboard. And it's not the artifact Fighter was looking for in the first place. Matoya had the Armoire and Armor of Invincibility and gave Fighter the wrong one.
  • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: The book of Inocktek technology from the "Death Volley" story supposedly contains all the great cultural and technological treasures of the ancient Inocktek people. However, when it gets translated, it turns out to be twelve hundred pages about how great tennis is (with a healthy amount of racist overtones). Later we learn that the real book, that contains the secrets of the Radical Land, actually got switched out by Hortense on the plane ride back to the USA.

    Western Animation 
  • American Dad! had an episode where Steve and Roger are tasked with finding an old man's inheritance to his grandson. It's just a burlap bag that lights up when opened.
  • In the Ben 10 episode "Ultimate Weapon", the Forever Knights attempt to retrieve a magical ancient Mayan sword said to have the power to level cities. The leader Enoch manages to get ahold of it, but it ends up being a Meaningless Villain Victory as it crumbles to dust in his hands after millennia of neglect. Furthermore, in spite of the sword being guarded by a Physical God, according to Word of God it never had any magic power to begin with and was just a normal sword.
  • Bojack Horseman: Played for Drama in "Ruthie". One of and the last of the many misfortunes in Princess Carolyn's Trauma Conga Line is being told that the necklace she wears, the same one she got from her grandmother and was a family heirloom is nothing but a worthless piece of costume jewelry purchased at a JCPenny.
  • In an episode of Futurama that parodies the film Titanic, Bender's love interest gets sucked into a black hole, leaving him with only her bracelet (a parody of "The Heart of the Sea") to console the saddened robot (with its monetary value). Upon request, Hermes promptly inspects it and informs Bender that "It's fake, mon," sending him into even greater despair (about its monetary value).
  • The Gargoyles episode "The Silver Falcon", in an homage to The Maltese Falcon, features a crime boss attempting to steal a trove of hidden diamonds. The first place he digs up contains a mocking note informing him he dug in the wrong place, and the second location he searches has a stash of diamonds that turn out to be fake.
  • [adult swim]'s unsold pilot Korgoth of Barbaria features this in its main plot. Korgoth is caught in a Poison and Cure Gambit and sent to retrieve the "golden goblin", a relic of a bygone age, from the tower of powerful wizard after the wizard seemingly disappears. After a dangerous trip that includes massive geographic obstacles, being attacked by living trees, dealing with 50 foot tall pigeons, and finding that the wizard is very much alive and not happy about the intrusion, the legendary golden goblin turns out to be a cheap, kitschy figurine that plays tinny music and dances when a button is pushed.
  • One episode of Stroker and Hoop plays it straight, then subverts it at the very end. Ninjas are trying to find and assemble the pieces of an ancient Chinese sword with vaguely defined mystical powers. When put together, it turns out it just lights up like a flashlight, which Stroker notes was probably mind-blowing in ancient China. After the protagonists abandon the sword and leave the scene, a random person stumbles across it and accidentally discovers that the sword's beam of light can resurrect the dead.
  • In the Wander over Yonder episode "The Battle Royale", thanks to Gossip Evolution and Wander's ill-planned attempt at getting Lord Hater and Lord Dominator to hook up, various villains and their armies of mooks have a massive fight over what they think is a Ring of Invincibility but is really just a blorpberry-flavored candy ring.

    Real Life 
  • The opening of Joanna Southcote's box.
  • A news article reported about a mugger who stole a plastic bag from an old woman walking her dog. The bag, of course, turned out to be full of dog shit.
  • There is a very old form of scam (so old it's incredible people continue to fall for it today) where an apparently mentally challenged man approaches a victim in the street offering her (as it is often an old woman) the chance to buy some "stamps" in an envelope or suitcase. The "stamps" are bills of the highest denomination, so the full content can easily sum thousands or even millions, but the scammer, apparently unaware of the value of bills, asks only for some hundreds in coins. The victim is then approached by another "smart" guy that offers her to buy the "stamps" together and divide them between themselves. The victim agrees, and the smart guy always gets the upper half of the money while she gets the other which, as she realizes when arriving home, it's just sheets of newspaper.
    • In Spain that scam is not only old, it's actually famous, to the point that: a) it has its own name ("el timo de la estampita"), b) said name has become shorthand to indicate that something looks suspiciously scammy, and c) it was acted out in a 60s comedy film (Los Tramposos) as a plot point, with Tony Leblanc as the "retard" and Antonio Ozores as the "smart". The whole scene is here. Of course, with so much exposure, some people still fall for it. It's one of the quintessential scams also because, like all good scams, preys upon the unsavoury characteristics of the victim (greed and unscrupulousness) in a way that if you fell for it you'd be deeply ashamed to confess it.
    • Many scams involve unloading "another man's trash" onto an unsuspecting person, be it cars that look nice but barely run, fake Rolexes, worthless artwork, etc, only to find out they are junk when they try to sell the items themselves.
  • Reports that certain copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone contain a small typo got many hyped that their copy could be worth thousands... except that only the first 500 British copies of the book have it. Especially maddening since the typo version was published for years in Canada.
  • The infamous tale of "The Mystery Of Al Capone's Vaults", one of the biggest screw-ups of Geraldo Rivera's career. In the late 1980s, the Lexington Hotel in Chicago was slated for demolition, until it turned out to be a former hideout of notorious gangster Al Capone. In the hotel's basement, a large vault that presumably belonged to Capone was found. Rivera, itching to get his journalistic career back on track after a recent firing from ABC, jumped all over the story and hosted a massively hyped live broadcast about the excavation into the vault. Viewers were treated to almost two hours of backstory, expert opinions, technical details, and general boasting about what dazzling treasures might lay within. Finally, the vault was cracked open and an eager Rivera led his team in to find... jackshit. The vault had been cleaned out decades ago (if it had ever been used to begin with), and all that was inside was dust, rocks, and a couple empty bottles. Rivera was humiliated on live, national television in front of over 30 million people. His crew reported that the very first thing he did when the cameras went off was down a ton of tequila.
  • The trend of putting garbage, poop, or emptying the cat's litter box into an Amazon box and then leaving it on the doorstep for package snatchers to run up and take. Mark Rober of Youtube has devoted himself to making an entire playlist worth of glitter throwing fart-gas-spraying bombs that he rigs into packages and waits for some asshole to swipe, complete with cameras and tracking devices to catch the dumb schmuck's face on-camera as the thing goes off in their house or car.

Alternative Title(s): Fools Grail

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