If Covers Always Lie, trailers can, too. Sometimes Tonight Someone Dies or hyping The Reveal might not be enough. And with the Internet an open window these days for writers and directors to viewers' likes, dislikes, hopes, predictions, and Shipping loyalties, it's easy to know exactly how to bait fans into watching the next episode. Be careful not to believe everything you see, though, because as all Fan Vid makers know, any scene can be mixed-and-matched with another to look completely different from their real context. In the worst examples, it'll actually drive away those who would have otherwise enjoyed it, by completely confusing the relevant demographic.
Indeed, the creation of fake trailers to make a movie look like it's from a completely different genre has become one of the Internet's most beloved recent art forms, such as The Shining as a family-oriented romantic comedy, the one that started it all, or Mary Poppins as a slasher horror flick.
Another way it can backfire is if you can't find enough good footage to make a decent trailer, Genre Savvy audiences can extrapolate just how bad the rest of the material must be.
If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
See this list for more examples.
Specific types:
Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game - The opposite of the above, a character featuring prominently in the promotional materials doesn't really play a significant role.
Missing Trailer Scene - Where the trailer includes a scene that's been cut from the film.
Billing Displacement - The big-name actor plays a smaller part than they were 'supposed' to get.
Ship Tease - When the trailer includes a reel which seems to include two partners who don't actually get together.
Yes, commercials count now. This trailer for Snickers' Super Bowl ad leads you to believe that the guys in it really have Betty White on their team. In the actual commercial she is called "Mike" and is told, "You play like Betty White!" She then eats a Snickers, and after a brief cutaway, she's replaced by a guy, proving that she only appears in the ad to support the tagline: "You're not you when you're hungry." And so does Abe Vigoda.
The film Something Borrowed has a great deal of comic elements in the previews, making it seem like a comedy. In fact, these seem to be the only upbeat parts of the film.
Defendor had this as well. It's trailer painted it as a heartful comedy following some doofus that gets into hilarious situations trying to be a super hero, while the movie is much much darker and not really even a comedy.
The Ice Harvest, directed by HaroldRamis, was marketed as a comedy, playing up Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa fame. The movie itself is more of a drama/thriller.
One woman felt that this trope warranted a lawsuit when she felt mislead by the trailer for Drive which, in her opinion, had little to do with driving cars and more to do with anti-semitism.
In the mid-90s Jim Carrey was a huge comedy star, so when The Truman Show came out commercials made the movie look like it was a comedy, when it is really a Paranoia Fuel inducing drama.
Theater
When Waiting For Godot made its American debut in Miami, its marketing prominently featured stars Bert Lahr (The Cowardly Lion) and Tom Ewell (from The Seven-Year Itch). Posters declared the play to be "the laugh sensation of two continents."
Web Animation
An egregious example is the trailer for the third Arfenhouse movie. The actual movie turned out to be a few seconds long (not counting credits) and was a Take That to all the creator's fans who were nagging him to deliver on his promise of a sequel, though real sequels were eventually made.
Parodied by Legendary Frog in the One Ring to Rule Them All: Special Edition, in which a "One Ring 3" Teaser includes shout outs to the movie Speed, the Incredible Hulk, and Charlie's Angels. Lampshaded by Sauron, who asks "Will any of this be in the actual movie?" His goblin assistant, Wayne, tells him that it'll all be cut in post-production.
The season 7 trailer for Red vs. Blue showed both Church and Tex watching over the Red and Blue teams in Valhalla. Neither actually appears in that season. In fact, according to Word Of God, the "original" Church actually died at the end of the last season, so it seems likely Tex did as well.
The difference here is that Red Vs. Blue trailers are more like prelude episodes than actual previews. The season 7 trailer contained no footage from later episodes because it wasn't supposed to. Church and Tex seem to have been inserted into it to encourage Wild Mass Guessing as to what unseen role they may have had in the season.
Webcomics
If you arn't familiar with Sluggy Freelance then the first half of this video would have you convinced that the comic revolves around... Well a relatively minor side character. After that it breaks down into half a dozen tiny trailers not to be entirely trusted, before finally giving up and summarizing the comic in one sentence.
Western Animation
Shipping was also taken advantage of in the very first trailer for the second season finale of Avatar The Last Airbender by exploiting familiarity with the Locked in a Room trope. Later trailers served to help put the wham into the outcome of the finale.
They did it again with the trailer for the second half of Season 3. Somewhat disappointingly, fans fell for it.
The commercials for upcoming episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force always use actual clips from the episode, but often show them out of context, out of order and with misleading narration.
In Asia, there was a Cartoon Network trailer for The Woody Woodpecker Show which consisted entirely of classic Woody clips, as though CN was going to put more classic toons on, a reverse of the trend which has seen classics dwindle to just Tom and Jerry. It turned out to be the 1999 cartoon. (A change in station graphics package resulted in a more accurate promo using clip from the newer Woody. Incidentally, CN Asia did add another classic a few months later: various incarnations of The Pink Panther Show.)
Some commercials for the Happy Tree Friends DVDs make it look like a harmless happy-go-lucky kids show. Anyone who watches the show or internet shorts will tell you otherwise, the footage usually consisted of the first few minutes/seconds of the cartoons.
The trailer for Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder features a clip of Professor Farnsworth lamenting that Planet Express is closing down, making it seem as if this is a major plot-point. However this scene mostly just exists to lampshade the fact that Fry, Bender, and Leela haven't worked for the entire movie and is directly before the company is hired for a huge job that Farnsworth just has Hermes, Zoidberg, and himself do it instead.
There's also a part in the trailer where Zoidberg declares Fry is dead, and it's played for dramatic value. In the actual movie, this happens in the first ten minutes, and a couple seconds after Zoidberg says it, it's revealed he was only knocked down, albeit in pain.
Granted, the mere fact that the "death" scene is shown in the trailer is a strong hint that it's a bait-and-switch, since, if it were real, it would be far too important a plot point to be spoiled in the trailer.
A Network Ten (Australia) advertisement for the Simpsons episode "Mommy Beerest" (where Marge takes control of Moe's bar) made it look like a Lost parody, cleverly putting scenes together and putting in an image of the Lost logo with Simpsons characters.
Their promo back in the early 90s for the episode Brother from the Same Planet had Bart's line "Tom's a better father than you ever were" over Homer bawling his eyes out, implying a somewhat emotional episode, but anybody who's actually seen it will know Homer in that scene was actually crying about record clubs jacking up prices.
There was also a more recent episode that was hyped as having Metallica as its guest stars. They were only on screen for about thirty seconds.
The previews and tv guide ad for The Simpsons episode "Fear of Flying" all focused on the Cheers "reunion" (Ted Danson, Rhea Perlman, Woody Harrelson, George Wendt and John Ratzenberger appeared reprising their roles from Cheers). In actuality, that was an extremely minor throwaway joke that had no bearing on the plot.
The previews for the hour-long SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Truth or Square?" featured Spongebob saying "Remember the day Sandy and I got married?" and shows the other characters reacting with shock, making it look like the episode is about Spongebob and Sandy getting married secretly. In reality, the episode is just about the characters getting lost in the Krusty Krab and having random flashbacks about different things. Spongebob and Sandy getting married is just one of those flashbacks, it is only shown for about a minute, and it turns out that Spongebob and Sandy are just getting married in a play.
Technically they are married since the priest didn't know it was a play.
The previews for another special "The Clash of Triton" led us to believe that Neptune locked his son in a magical cage thousands of years ago because he was out of control and caused destruction and chaos throughout the sea. Turns out he was locked in the cage because he was the opposite of that and actually liked mortals. Instead of being Sealed Evil in a Can, Triton became evil because he was sealed away.
Well, a jerk anyway.
It also led us to believe that the episode was about SpongeBob doing battle with Triton to save the sea but it wasn't until half the episode was over until Triton started terrorizing the town. Furthermore, the only heroic thing SpongeBob did was free Neptune so he could stop Triton, and that only took a few minutes.
In general, the creators love making the episode sound far more exciting than it actually will be. It's become extremely predictable that whenever they say the Krabby Patty formula will be revealed, they're not telling the truth.
The promos for "Mystery With A Twistery" made it seem like somebody other than Plankton stole the Krabby Patty formula. Nope, it was Plankton as usual.
All 30-minute so-called "specials" aren't really specials. They're just normal episodes promoted as specials to grab ratings.
This trailer for Venture Brothers is intentionally misleading by showing clips from the episodes out of context.
Family Guy tend to do this a lot recently, especially with episodes featuring an A-Plot with Meg or Chris and a B-Plot with Brian and Stewie. The promotional image for "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven" was Stewie with the ST:TNG cast, as well as the summary. six minutes onto the episode, Peter announces that it's going to be a Meg Episode (although in the end it was more about Brian). The Star Trek cast got like one or two lines each. Another similar example is Stew-roids. All the promotional images and summary were about Stewie muscling up *
, and implied that the story involving Chris, Meg and Connie was a minor subplot.
Another episode "April In Quahog" had been advertised as a cross over episode dealing with the end of the world and the Griffins interacting and teaming up with the cast of The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and American Dad, this does not happen instead the end of the world plot turns out to be a hoax set up by Tom and Diane and the rest of the episode deals with Peter attempting to be a better father when he admits that he doesn't like his kids.
The standard preview snippet for Growing Up Creepie shows a misleading scene of Creepie discovering her friends in giant cocoons, horror movie-style. This attention-grabbing moment comes from a campfire story.
A case of the actual episode being more "interesting" than the trail, from Winx Club Season 4: The trailer for ep 24 showed Sky slumped on the ground in disappointment. Many viewers interpreted it as that Bloom would be mortally injured by the Black Circle wizards, but would then be saved by the Black Gift (the Chekhov's Gift that they had gotten in ep 23), and/or there would be some sort of dilemma between using it on her or Duman. Wrong on all counts: It was Nabu who got injured, Duman was destroyed long before the Black Gift came into play, and the remaining wizards took it away.
One episode of Drawn Together claimed that two characters would be caught on tape making out, with scenes of Spanky and Clara kissing. This was technically true...in the sense that everything that happens on the show is "caught on tape." The same trailer claimed that "Somebody dies," which is accomplished in the last thirty seconds when a bunch of aliens randomly bursts in and vaporizes everybody, only for them to turn up alive the next episode, as usually happens on this show.
The season two opener also claimed a major character would be Killed Off for Real, with images of the rest of the cast at their grave (which also turned into a case of Trailers Dropping Major Hints, since everybody but Wooldorf and Tootie were there). On the episode Wooldorf seems to die, but halfway through the episode turns out to be Not Quite Dead. Then another character dies, but she had been introduced that episode.
Wakfu suffers from this, presumably because its erratic airing schedule justifies trying to make each next episode look as Crazy Awesome as possible. A specific example is the trailer for episode 16, which included frames of a character surrounded by flames, wielding his demonic sword and screaming with black tendrils growing up his arms, which led fans to believe that he would finally lose control of his demon in a much more dramatic way than previously shown. In the actual episode that scene only served to make him look cool.
Hilariously, the one one time the trailer was trustworthy, most fans didn't believe it due to the above. The trailer for the season one finale made is so obvious that Sadlygrove would die most people chalked it up to Like You Would Really Do It. Guess what? Oh, I'm sorry, did I say "hilariously?" I meant unbelievably, brutallyheartwrenching.
A promo in December 2010 for The Cleveland Show pulled this. Not only was it promoted as a special hour-long episode (it wasn't, it was just two back-to-back new episodes) but the trailer promoted the appearances of Peter, Quagmire & Joe, who only appeared in the second of the two episodes, and for maybe five minutes, having no bearing on the real plot.
Transformers the movie from 1984 had a 4 minute trailer which was 100% footage that was either cut or changed in the actual movie.
In the Adventure TimeChristmas Episode, the trailers portrayed it as some sort of Clip Show with cool sweaters. Most of the actual episode is focused on Finn and Jake trying to interpret the actual tapes.
