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Orphaned Reference

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An Orphaned Reference is a scene or line that refers to something that has been cut from the final version. In milder cases, this only means that what was supposed to be a Meaningful Echo loses its additional meaning; in more severe cases, the lost background information can cause apparent Noodle Incidents, Plot Holes or Ass Pulls.

Compare The Artifact, The Other Marty. See also Dub-Induced Plot Hole and Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole; all adaptation and dub examples go there. When the reference is found in licensed material, it's Early Draft Tie-In. Some video game examples may overlap with Dummied Out and Missing Secret. Development Gag is when this is done deliberately as a meta joke.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo: Ever wondered why Gunkan/Captain Battleship shows up in the first opening and ending with the protagonists, despite the fact he never joins them? This is because originally, he was supposed to join the heroes after his defeat.
  • Dragon Half: Lampshaded, when Dug Fin is horrified to discover no one knows who he is. He gets a hold of the series' first episode on videotape and reviews it, only to discover all his scenes were cut from the final version!
  • All the English-language releases of Ghost in the Shell Bowdlerized the scene where Motoko has cybersex with two female friends, but retained Shirow Masamune's endnote explanation of it despite having reduced it to a single panel of them frolicking on a boat in swimsuits.
  • One Piece:
    • The cover page of Chapter 1 features Nami alongside Luffy and the Red Hair pirates, despite not even debuting in the manga until Chapter 8. This is because the original first chapter was supposed to feature her joining Luffy as his first crewmate, before it was rewritten to instead be exclusively Luffy's Origin Story.
    • At the tail end of the Syrup Village Arc, Gaimon reassures Luffy that he'll find the One Piece and "buy the whole world". This seems like an exaggeration, until it was discovered that in one of Oda's earlier manuscripts, Gol D. Roger says that whoever finds the One Piece can buy the whole world.
    • During Loguetown, Usopp acquires a fresh set of goggles that become part of his standard outfit from then on, but are strangely never mentioned in dialogue. This is because originally there would've been a storyline where he had an encounter with an old rival of his father that led to him acquiring the goggles, which was cut as Oda wanted the Straw Hats to set off for the Grand Line in Chapter 100. This storyline was added in for the anime.
    • Jinbei's sobriquet is "First Son of the Sea", a reference to a Yakuza term that can be translated as literally "Yakuza of the Sea". The title makes very little sense to be associated with Jinbei, as he has no ties to crime organisations and is one of the kindest and most heroic characters in the series, but is likely a reference to the original plan of him being a villain, with him being the Yakuza boss to Arlong's literal Loan Sharknote .
    • Similar to the above, Doflamingo's codename "Joker" comes from him originally being conceived as an ally/subordinate of Kaidou, fitting in with his other henchmen's card game-themed names.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann does this, possibly unintentionally, in the first Compilation Movie, Gurren-hen. When Kittan and his sisters show up to help the heroes, Kamina reacts with "Wait, who the hell are you?", which seems an appropriate reaction considering that the movie edited the scene where Kamina and Simon first encounter them into a Travel Montage, making this their first real appearance in the movie. "Unintentional" because this same line is present in the original series (which devoted an entire episode to meeting Kittan), but in the movie, it's made funnier.

    Comic Books 
  • The Moench/Jones stint on the main Batman title featured a mysterious puppeteer in the background of almost every issue; the two later confirmed in an interview that he was set up to be a major villain, but the Bat-offices' increasing reliance on line-wide crossovers kept derailing things, and they were eventually dropped altogether with Batman: No Man's Land.
  • Godzilla: Rulers of Earth: One of the initially planned endings for the series was for Godzilla to fight a clone of himself. Toho vetoed the idea, but not before the setup for this ending already made its way into the comic in the form of Godzilla being found frozen in an iceberg after a Time Skip. According to Word of God, this frozen Godzilla was originally meant to be the clone, hence why he's in an iceberg despite being buried at the bottom of the ocean in the issue prior, and no explanation is given how he got there.
  • Justice League of America:
    • Armageddon 2001 was supposed to see Captain Atom undergo a Face–Heel Turn and become the merciless supervillain known as Monarch. Due to that twist leaking out beforehand, the finale was rewritten to have Hawk turn out to be Monarch instead. Despite this, a tie-in Justice League Europe issue still contains a sequence where Catherine Cobert has a nightmare about being attacked by an evil Captain Atom, something that doesn't really fit the rest of the story (which instead sees the League mourning Captain Atom after thinking he died).
    • One of the Justice League of America issues taking place in the aftermath of Final Crisis shows a depressed Red Arrow being comforted by Black Canary. The scene was written to address the absence of his girlfriend, Hawkgirl, who was originally supposed to die near the end of Final Crisis. However, this plan was changed after the Justice League issue had already been scripted and illustrated, which forced Dwayne McDuffie to do some hasty last minute rewrites to explain that Hawkgirl had left Red Arrow for Hawkman. While that would explain Red Arrow's sullen demeanor, the fact that he was inexplicably wearing black and hanging around a cemetery still makes it obvious what the original intention was.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): In the issue following the Endgame arc, where Sally had suffered an almost fatal fall, Sally suddenly starts acting out-of-character, which Sonic notes, but then it gets dropped and never comes up again. It was supposed to foreshadow a twist that Sally really had died during Endgame and her body had been replaced with a robot duplicate.
  • The Transformers
    • The Transformers: All Hail Megatron: During a rant, Starscream briefly mentions Scourge as a Decepticon who could potentially overthrow Megatron. Scourge was originally supposed to appear in the miniseries as a kind of Evil Counterpart to Kup, but Hasbro rejected the idea. To make things more egregious, later issues contradicted the line by showing Scourge as part of the non-Decepticon aligned Dead Universe faction.
    • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: In Issue 12, it's briefly mentioned that Rewind is allergic to ultraviolet light, which was meant to foreshadow a reveal that never came to pass: Chromedome had used mnemosurgery to alter Rewind's memory—mnemosurgery scars having been established as only being visible under ultraviolet light—so that he wouldn't remember the fate of Dominus Ambus (who had infiltrated the Decepticons as Agent 113).
  • Young Justice:
    • The first issue features a buxom villainess called Mighty Endowed, who inexplicably sports a Cat Girl design. This is a holdover from when she was originally going to be called Sex Kitten, which was shot down by editorial over concerns the name was inappropriate for a book aimed at younger readers.
    • When the Young Justice cartoon introduced its own Aqualad, the boy's real name was revealed to be Kaldur'ahm, an Atlantean variation of the name of his stepfather, Cal Durham. The character subsequently became a Canon Immigrant to the comics during Brightest Day, but without the connection to Cal, leaving it unexplained why their names sound so similar.

    Fan Works 
  • In the Good Omens work "I Shall Endure to The End!", A.A. Pessimal speculates on the nature of the lost book of The Bible, the Book of Enoch (see "Mythology and Religion" below), which only exists by inference - St Paul makes approving references to a great book of a prophet of old which the believer must read, but which did not make the final cut of Biblical canon. All you get are two or three enigmatic orphaned references to a prophet called Enoch who is held to be one of the greatest and mightiest ever. Pessimal speculated that the contents of the Book of Enoch were such dynamite that the angel Aziraphale was charged with hiding it and ensuring humans never got to find it again. Ever. Aziraphale, who is temperamentally opposed to burning books, hides it in his library of manuscript scrolls, but ensures enough plausible forgeries claiming to be the Book of Enoch are released into the world to divert the wrong sorts of human minds and stop them doing anything dangerous. There is also an inference in a later Discworld fic that Aziraphale has thought creatively about this problem and has handed the Book of Enoch into the safekeeping of the Librarian of Unseen University - also opposed to book-burning and who can be relied upon to keep it both safe and "lost" - on a different world completely, thus ensuring that it remains lost on Earth and an orphaned reference forever.
  • Queen of Shadows has an example brought about by the original author, Nocturne no Kitsune, disappearing offline and leaving his partner Eduard Kassel to pick up the slack in writing. Early in the story, Jade finds a severed kitsune tail in a cabinet in the Queen's antechamber to the Generals' meeting room. Apparently, Nocturne had plans for it later in the story, but failed to share them with Eduard before falling out of communication. As such, the latter has had no idea what to do with it, beyond a passing reference of Jade pondering why it's there.
  • In the Diary of a Wimpy Kid fanfic "All Because of Uncle Gary", Greg changes his name to "Greta Hauser" after mysteriously turning into a girl. When the writer chose to republish the story as an Imgur gallery, her name was changed to "Stephanie Cooper", likely to avoid confusion with another Wimpy Kid fanfic they wrote. However, at least two instances of the original name were left in, making Greg's comment about being "the only Greta at school" (as opposed to being "the only Stephanie at school") rather confusing.

    Films — Animation 
  • The Peddler in Aladdin who appears at the very beginning of the film who tries to sell the audience his merchandise before introducing the story proper was actually meant act as a full-on Framing Device. The movie would have returned to the character at the end, who would finish up the story by revealing he is the freed Genie. The idea was scrapped, hence why we never return to the Peddler despite him being the storyteller, but the filmmakers loved Robin Williams' improv for the opening scene too much to remove it. The Peddler's design also retains a bit of subtle foreshadowing of this intended twist by giving him four fingers like the Genie, instead of five like all the other human characters. The Broadway musical adaptation also references the twist by having the Genie outright replace the Peddler.
  • The Aristocats: At one point, Duchess says a rhyme about how her and her kittens' owner "never felt alone" with them around, so they must come home. This was originally going to lead to a song, but the song got cut, leaving no explanation for why Duchess was speaking in rhyme.
  • The commentary for Atlantis: The Lost Empire tells a story about how there used to be a mystic named Zoltan (who used to speak in the third person, for some reason) along for the ride. At one point everybody sounds off after falling down a hole. For the longest time he was still there shouting "Zoltan is okay!" even after his character had been written out of the script.
  • From the BIONICLE movies:
    • Much of Mask of Light's ending is basically this. An earlier script draft had the island crumbling apart in preparation for the return of the deity Mata Nui, forcing everyone to flee underground, into the evil Makuta's lair. In the film, only two tremors happen and the island remains intact, Mata Nui does not wake up, and despite the characters making a huge deal out of having to move underground, only a handful of them do so. The climax where they rush through an underground gate and seal themselves on the other side ends up making little sense, as they'd be safe on the surface.
    • Some of Makuta's lines, in particular the one where he attributes his deeds to the Mask of Shadows, were meant to set up his reveal as a conflicted but not fully evil individual. This never happened, neither in the movies, nor in other media. The second movie, Legends of Metru Nui likewise referenced the idea that Makuta was originally a force of good, which was supposed to set up a Makuta origin movie that never got made. However, an alternate backstory that tied into the movie was eventually released in books and online stories.
    • In Legends of Metru Nui, Vakama cries that he saw a vision of the city being destroyed. He did see that in a deleted shot. In the final cut though, all he sees is the city engulfed in darkness. Presumably, the sight of the exploding and crumbling Coliseum tower was too much for a kids' film and got cut, as this was only three years after the 9/11 attacks.
    • In Web of Shadows, Matau stops in his tracks with his mouth agape and awkwardly tries to change the subject when Nuju mentions the "fascinating" noises he heard the night before. It's because the strange sounds actually came from Matau himself as he gave in to his animalistic urges, a scene that got cut from the film but is still in the novelization. Without this setup, it seems Matau is embarrassed about Nuju rather than himself.
  • In Brave, Merida was originally supposed to end up with Young MacGuffin, hence his name being a reference to the plot device. In the final film, his name no longer has any meaning.
  • The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: The "veg bad" spiel that Wallace gives to the rabbits in order to brainwash them is meant to completely echo the "cheese bad" spiel he gives to himself when the Mind-Manipulation-O-Matic first appears. Notice that he doesn't show any interest in cheese after that moment until Gromit used a slice of Stinkin' Bishop to revive him. In the final film, Lady Tottington's call interrupts him just before he turns the machine on.
  • Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within gives a lot of attention to Aki telling a story about extracting the fifth spirit from a little girl with a terminal illness. This girl was a supporting character called Meg, who had a much larger role, but was dropped from the script.
  • In the Rankin/Bass The Hobbit, the Elf King and the Dwarves argue about how the dwarves scared off a party of elves and stole their food. This happens in the book, but they didn't add that scene to the animated film. This also leads to their very first mention being the narrated line "the Wood Elves had returned..."
  • The full-length version of "Great Big World" in Hoodwinked! contained the line "They say that goodies make the woods go 'round" and a shot of Red being carried across the river by a flock of birds. While the general theme of pastries being Serious Business was kept, the exact line doesn't come up again until the climax as part of the Goodie Bandit's Villain Song. In between, Red explains the importance of her delivery job by saying "woods don't go 'round by themselves", which makes little sense without the setup. The scene with the flock of birds also comes up twice later — it's the part of the song the Wolf sees from another angle in his retelling of the story, and the detective Nicky Flippers mentions that she was "flying a flock of birds without a permit".
  • In The Incredibles, after Syndrome shoots down the family's plane, there's a long shot of Helen looking back at the sinking plane. Originally, Helen's pilot friend Snug (who only appears as a voice over the phone in the finished product) was supposed to be flying the plane for her and would've died when it went down. In that part of the sequence as originally scripted, Helen was looking back at Snug's hat as it floated up at her.
  • Many fans of The Lion King II: Simba's Pride noticed that Zira seems to be smiling as she falls to her death. That's because it was originally supposed to be a suicide; however, that was deemed too dark. They added in Zira struggling, removed the most obvious parts of the suicide, and added screaming to make it seem like she accidentally fell. Unfortunately, they failed to change her expression as she fell.
  • In Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Nemo has a dream where he goes down to the pantry and sees a note on the ice box saying "Remember your promise", before water bursts out and floods the house. Viewers watching the old VHS cut would make the connection that Nemo had just broken his promise to King Morpheus, but miss out on the double meaning because of a deleted scene while Nemo was awake where he promised his mother he'd stay out of the ice box and not eat the pie she'd baked. This was fixed in subsequent ports.
  • Monsters, Inc.: When Sully and Mike go back to Monsters Inc headquarters while disguising Boo, one of the CDA officers show Sully's burned gym bag that was left the previous night at Harryhausen's. This is a leftover from the original idea that the CDA blew up the restaurant to decontaminate, but after 9/11, it was changed to a plasma dome covering the building.
  • Pocahontas:
    • The titular heroine's love of the water and hobby of canoeing originally came from a plot point where she received advice from a river spirit called Old Man River. The actor they planned to voice this character - Gregory Peck - said Pocahontas needed a motherly figure instead. Thus they created Grandmother Willow. In the film the canoeing is justified by having Grandmother Willow's tree be near the water, and Pocahontas has to row there to visit her.
    • The end credits have a pop song called "If I Never Knew You" playing over them. This is in fact a cover of a song that was originally a romantic duet between Pocahontas and John Smith right after he has been captured, and a reprise would be sung in their final scene together. The tune of the song can be heard elsewhere throughout the movie's score.
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame, similar to Pocahontas and The Muppet Christmas Carol, used a pop version of "Someday", one of the three cut songs replaced by "God Help The Outcasts", for its end credits. The stage musical reinstated "Someday", albeit in a grimmer context, being sung by Esmeralda just before her execution.
  • In The Road to El Dorado, when Tulio asks why Chel would help him and Miguel steal from her own people, she says, "You've got your reasons, and I have mine." Originally, there was going to be a scene of her almost getting sacrificed to the gods, and then escaping. This is why she is seen being chased by the guards when Tulio and Miguel first meet her. This was cut out of the film for being too dark, but was left in some promotional media like the tie-in book on tape.
  • Sleeping Beauty was originally going to give the three fairies powers based off their names — Flora had powers over plant life, Fauna had powers over wildlife and Merryweather had powers over the weather. These were eliminated from the final film, but are still referenced a couple of times - Flora's plan to turn Aurora into a flower, her transforming arrows into plants and the fairies' gifts to Aurora (Flora's sequence shows flower motifs, Fauna's birds and Merryweather the sun coming out from behind a cloud).
  • The closing credits sequence of Tangled includes references to scenes that were cut from the movie, including Flynn encountering a bear and Rapunzel consulting a psychic monkey. The latter ended up being a character in Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure.
  • Turning Red: The song "1 True Love" was originally written for a scene where Miriam and Mei would have had a sad goodbye after Miriam found out she would have to move away.
  • Up:
    • At one point, Carl unknowingly scares away Charles Muntz's dogs with the feedback from his hearing aid, which was supposed to set up Carl doing it deliberately later in the movie, but the filmmakers couldn't find a place to fit it in.
    • Muntz talks about how easy it is to get lost inside the labyrinth where Kevin lives, and that you can't get out once you're inside. This was the setup for a dropped ending where Muntz follows some balloons he thinks are Kevin into the labyrinth and ends up getting trapped inside.
  • Zootopia:
    • The movie features a meta example. One scene depicts various bootleg DVDs parodying Disney films. Pig Hero 6, Wreck-it Rhino, Meowna, etc. One of them is called Giraffic. This was a case of Production Foreshadowing for their upcoming film Gigantic, however it was stuck in Development Hell and was ultimately scrapped and replaced with Raya and the Last Dragon. This means the reference doesn't make any sense to people who aren't knowledgeable about Disney history, because the film it parodies never came out.
    • One of Judy's childhood friends is a cougar named Bobby Catmull. Kind of an odd name for a cougar right? That's because he was originally going to be a bobcat, but the animators didn't have enough time to build a bobcat model, so he was changed to a cougar.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • (500) Days of Summer has a flashback to the teenage Summer cutting her hair. In the original script, Summer is described as having short hair (making it a Visual Pun that she has a pixie haircut). But Zooey Deschanel wears her hair long, so the flashback seems like a Non Sequitur (although it does fit in with Summer's impulsive personality).
  • Alien:
    • The Alien is portrayed as significantly more intelligent and eldritch than later entries would show it's species as being, as well as possibly supernatural rather than a mere animal, engaging in disturbingly human-like behavior at times and pulling off a few feats that seem somewhat improbable for a mere animal. This is all because the original ending for the film would've revealed the Xenomorph is fully sentient, sapient, and actively malevolent rather than just acting out it's instincts, with it murdering Ripley, piloting the shuttle, and even imitating her voice to send false messages to rescue parties. While the ending was obviously changed, a lot of elements that implied the Alien to be smarter than it seems were left in.
    • The bit where Lambert ponders about the fate of the Derelict's crew was supposed to be foreshadowing the infamous "egg-morphing" scene that was deleted from the theatrical cut, which revealed that the Xenomorph reproduces by turning it's victims' bodies into eggs. The scene's removal meant this and other bits of foreshadowing lost a lot of their point, while also leaving a gap in the creature's life cycle that the second film would build off of. It was restored in the director's cut.
    • The director's cut itself features a rather odd sequence where Ripley out-of-nowhere asks Lambert if she ever had sex with Ash, to which Lambert replies that he never seemed interested. This is the last surviving vestige of an aspect included in the script where the crew of the Nostromo would be established as having casual sex with one another as a contrast to the Xenomorph's sexual assault symbolism. Lambert and Ripley noticing that Ash is the one member of the crew they've never had any kind of sex with and his disinterest in it would've foreshadowed the Robotic Reveal. Most of the dialogue and scenes relating to this - such as one where Ripley and Dallas sleep together - were cut, resulting in the scene where Ripley questions Lambert feeling kind of random.
  • Aliens: The scene where Ripley confronts Burke about being responsible for the death of the colonists doesn't make a lot of sense in the Theatrical Cut due to its context (a member of the company deliberately sent the colonists looking for the derelict ship where the Alien eggs were laid) only being previously discussed in a deleted scene. Nowhere else in the film does it explore why the colony was attacked and it's implied that Ripley (and hence the Marines) believe that it was only a matter of time due to the invasive nature of the Xenomorphs. The Extended Edition available for home viewing reinserts the scene which helps the viewer understand what Ripley is talking about. Most of the other deleted (and later reinserted) scenes are unnecessary to understand the plot and themes, so it's a little strange that there wasn't a quick reshoot or at least a brief ADR to explain this plot point.
  • American Beauty opens with a home movie of Ricky asking Jane if she wants him to kill her father, to which she replies yes. We see the full scene later in the film, and it turns out they're just being sarcastic. But this is a remnant of a large subplot that was filmed and cut. The video would incriminate Jane and Ricky for Lester's murder.
  • Artemis Fowl went through some very heavy reshoots at some point in development, which naturally resulted in a lot of references to plots from the novel or scenes that seem to have been cut. The biggest one is likely that at one point, Artemis states his demand to be "the Acculos... in one of those pots from under a rainbow, I presume." This is a joke that would make more sense in a story similar to the original novel, where he was asking for gold. Notably, the part where he says "the Acculos" has his face off-camera, suggesting it was dubbed in later.
  • The Avengers:
    • At one point, Steve calls Stark Tower "that big, ugly building in New York". This is a payoff for Steve's original introduction, which had him sketching Stark Tower in the New York City skyline while feeling like a Fish out of Temporal Water. The final movie removes that scene.
    • Banner's line that "you could smell the crazy on [Loki]" was supposed to set up a Brick Joke of the Hulk doing just that — Loki would use duplicates but Hulk would find the real one by his scent.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron: There are two regarding minor costume changes in the third act. Steve doesn't have his Captain America helmet, which is explained in a deleted scene where he discards it after seeing graffiti of him with the word "fascist". Also, Wanda is wearing a coat in the finale that appears out of nowhere. A deleted scene revealed that this was Natasha's coat and Steve gave it to Wanda.
  • Back to the Future:
    • The first film:
      • Ever wonder why George had peanut brittle for dinner in 1985? Originally, after meeting with Biff, Marty tries to urge George to stand up for himself when a child selling peanut brittle shows up and the child's father put him down for a case without his knowledge or consent. Instead, he gives in, buying all of it, with the child's father saying "See, I told you we'd only have to stop at one house." It was cut because the filmmakers thought the scene was unnecessary as the preceding scene with Biff already established George’s Extreme Doormat nature.
      • When Marty asks why George was not at school, the day following his encounter with "Darth Vader", George explains that he overslept. An extended version of the "Darth Vader" scene shows that Marty chloroformed George after their conversation and commented to Doc that he hopes he didn't overdo it. This is likely the reason why George overslept, as Marty did in fact overdo it.
      • A deleted scene has the 1955 Doc finding a handheld hair dryer in the 1985 Doc's suitcase, explaining where the "Ray Gun" used by "Darth Vader" came from.
    • In Back to the Future Part II, when Old Biff returns to 2015 after giving his younger self the sports almanac, he is in pain and collapses on the ground. A deleted scene shows that he fades from existence afterwards, with Word of God confirming that in 1996 of the new timeline, Biff's counterpart was killed by Lorraine, likely either because she finally got fed up with his abuse or because she found out the truth about him killing George. While this matches what was happening to Marty in the first film, test audiences were confused about why Old Biff disappeared and there was likely no way to give the explanation in dialogue as Marty and Doc would have no way of knowing about Biff's fate, so the scene was cut. As a result, there's no discernible reason in the final film as to why Old Biff is in pain, and many audience members have assumed he was having a heart attack.
    • Back to the Future Part III:
      • Originally, Buford Tannen and his gang were supposed to encounter Marshal Strickland with his son before Buford's duel with Marty. Strickland lets them go until Buford shoots him in the back, killing him, then saying "I Lied!" before riding off. It got dropped because it changed the tone of the duel. This act was so heinous that it wasn't right that Buford not die (and he can't, because Buford needs to live long enough to extend the Tannen family line). This explains why Strickland's deputy, now wearing a Marshal's badge, is the one who arrests Buford and his gang, with the line "You're under arrest for the murder of Marshal Strickland" redubbed to "You're under arrest for robbing the Pine City stage!" The camera cuts away from the deputy in the middle of this line, presumably to hide the fact that his lips don't match it.
      • 1955 Doc looks at one of the DeLorean's wheels whose tires had rotted away as it is being put onto the tow-truck because in a previous Deleted Scene, the tires turned to dust after Marty and Doc touched them.
      • Marty stepping on manure after arriving in 1885 Hill Valley was going to be followed with Marty involuntarily throwing some of that manure to Tannen while Bullet Dancing, which would enrage him, and culminate with Tannen being thrown on a manure cart at the end (making the line "I hate manure" a Meaningful Echo to that scene and not just to Back to the Future Part II). After the second manure appearance was changed to a spittoon (because stunt coordinator Walter Scott, who actually had grown up in the rural areas of the west, and actually moved his family out there, pointed out to that in the old west, people frequently got covered in manure all the time and never complained at all, whereas the spittoon would provoke a more disgusted reaction), the other manure scenes became isolated events with no relation.
  • Batman & Robin: The fight between Poison Ivy and Batgirl makes a big dramatic moment out of Ivy pulling out a knife. This is because in an earlier version of the script, Ivy used that same knife to kill Bruce's girlfriend Julie Madison, but this was removed due to it being too dark and because Joel Schumacher was interested in bringing her back in the planned sequel, which caused Julie to just vanish from the film.
  • An example of this trope is actually in the title of Batman Forever. The title seems odd to many audience members until they realize it is in reference to a line of dialogue that was in a deleted scene. Though the word "forever" was used in two different dialogues:
    Two-Face: (believed Batman was killed) Farewell forever to that pointy-eared night rat!

    Bruce: (to Chase about his Dark and Troubled Past) I fell. I fell forever.
  • In The Big Lebowski, Walter Sobchak is a Vietnam War veteran, but in the original draft, it was revealed that Walter didn't actually serve in Vietnam. Following Donny's funeral, the Dude was going to yell at Walter, "You were never fucking in Vietnam, Walter". We still see shades of this as the Dude gets angry at Walter for ranting about Vietnam during his eulogy for Donny.
  • Bill & Ted:
    • Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was originally going to have a random medieval guy called John The Serf played by James Bowbitch tag along with the historical characters. He was cut from the movie but was still listed in the credits.
    • In Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the Evil Bill and Ted say "Good luck getting to the concert!" to the originals; while it comes off as petty mockery, in the original script they actually followed up on it by siccing real-world versions of Bill and Ted's Ironic Hells (the Easter Bunny, Bill's grandmother, and Colonel Oates) on the boys to try and stop them. This scene still occurs in the novelization and the comic book adaptation of the film.
  • Blade II: When Reinhardt first appears, he taunts Blade by asking "Can you blush?", as a racial slur. The character was originally envisioned as a racist skinhead, which didn't come across in the final film, thus making the line really random for some viewers.
  • The Breakfast Club:
    • The movie has a deleted scene where Allison breaks into a teacher's locker and, finding a copy of 1999 (Album) by Prince, tells Andy "You know what this means? They're human." The final version of the film has a scene in the library where Allison is shown, in a reaction shot, to be inspecting the album, with no explanation of where she got it or why she has it.
    • There's a deleted scene in which Clair acts out a parodied conversation with her parents, to go along with Bender's "A Night at Big Bri's House" bit, and Brian's response (which was also deleted). What she says informs Bender's later statement about her "Poor, rich, drunk mother in the Caribbean" which otherwise just seems like information he's pulling out of nowhere.
  • Bright:
    • In the film's original draft, Officer Ward was going to be separated from his wife. In Jakoby and Ward's first ride together, Jakoby says that Ward doesn't know anything about love and that he hasn't had sex in a long time. However, that whole subplot is dropped from the final film, where Ward is still Happily Married, making the conversation completely nonsensical and undermining Jakoby's claim to be able to "sense" these things.
    • Tikka's childlike behavior made a lot more sense in the original draft, where she was a child. They made her into a young woman because a scene required her to enter a strip club, but she retains the body language of a child, which makes it seem like something is wrong with her.
    • Tikka doesn't speak to Ward and Jakoby until late in the movie, leading the duo to assume that she doesn't speak English until she proves otherwise—which was also a holdover from the original draft where she was a sheltered young girl who really didn't speak English. This gets the cursory Hand Wave that she pretends not to speak their language while deciding whether to trust them ("So now you speak English?" "Now I trust you."), which...doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
  • In the climax of Carrie (1976), boulders can be seen crashing through the ceiling of the house. This ties in with a planned opening showing Carrie as a child making stones rain down on the roof that was cut. Additionally, the scene would have had the house getting buried by falling boulders. But the machine malfunctioned and they had to just burn the house down instead. This is also why Carrie's grave is under a pile of stones.
  • The matador scene in The Cat in the Hat was the setup for a deleted verse which can be heard on the soundtrack CD and accessed on the "Deleted Scenes" feature on the DVD. It was removed and thus it's a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
  • The 1995 film of Casper had a Cut Song called "Lucky Enough to Be a Ghost", which would have ended with the Ghostly Trio hoisting Dr. Harvey up to the ceiling just as Kat walks in to ask him about having the Halloween party at Whipstaff. This explains Kat's line in the finished film about her father having "hit the ceiling" when he found out about the party. Christina Ricci does deliver the line in a dry enough way to make it non-obvious that this is supposed to be a pun, but it's still hard to imagine the mild-mannered Dr. Harvey hitting the ceiling in a figurative sense either.
  • Dead Poets Society: After Todd finds out that Neil's dead, he despondently runs towards the school's dock, screaming Neil's name. In a deleted scene, Todd and Neil were at the dock helping him rehearse for A Midsummer Night's Dream, showing Todd more open and at ease with himself, which was why Todd ran there.
  • Dogma has Cardinal Glick place an odd emphasis on God being male, considering the final cut has nobody telling him otherwise.
    • And before that, Mallrats had a metric crapton of them-like when Mr. Svenning meets with some network executives about his game show, they mention "trouble (he had) at the Governor's Ball", referring back to a whole opening scene that was replaced due to running too long in focus testing (and in turn, a whole subplot that got removed); some dialogue elsewhere in the movie had to be ADR'd in post and new scenes were filmed to remove further references- but some were still left in (as were references to other, unrelated scenes that got cut).
    • One deleted scene had Brodie tell a group of reporters that he's Svenning's next door neighbor, and that Svenning is a satanist. Later, in the scene where Brodie gives Svenning the tainted pretzels, Svenning sarcastically refers to Brodie as his "neighbor" in reference to this.
  • The first death in Final Destination featured Tod getting startled by a shadow in the mirror, and the water he slipped on in the bathroom retreating back into the toilet to make his death look like a suicide. This is left over from when all the deaths were planned this way, but the filmmakers changed their minds to have the others as accidents.
  • In The Fly (1986), after his tryst with Tawny, Seth is often clutching the left side of his abdomen for the next few minutes; some time later when he has figured out how to Wall Crawl Seth reveals to Veronica that there is a bizarre growth there and jokes "Oh, look at this. What's this? I dunno." The payoff to this scene was part of the infamous "monkey-cat" Deleted Scene that was slotted between Veronica telling Stathis about her pregnancy and her Nightmare Sequence: Seth, alone in The Madness Place and having just created and slain a hybrid baboon-cat creature with his telepods, is on the roof of the warehouse when a sudden pain from the growth causes him to tumble off. Managing to slide down the wall and land on an awning, he is horrified to see an insect leg emerge from the growth — so he bites it off. In the finished film's climax, the right-side counterpart to the severed leg emerges upon his One-Winged Angel transformation (meaning he was supposed to have six limbs, just like a fly).
  • In Four Rooms, Tim Roth's character is given five warnings: "Stay clear of night clerks, kids, hookers, and married arguments" and "Keep your cock in your pants." Over the course of the film he violates each of these... except the one about the hookers. They just never show up.note  Other evidence (some of the animations during the opening credits, and a group of naked ladies fleeing the room at the beginning of the last segment) suggests a fifth story was cut out late in the game.
  • If one looks closely at certain scenes in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, the Monster's lips can be seen moving. Originally, the Monster had spoken dialogue, but all the lines were removed in post-production, leaving these brief bits of lip movement as the only remnant of it in the final movie.
  • During a montage in Ghostbusters II, there's an odd moment where Ecto-1 goes through an intersection while Peter looks surprised. This is the leftover of a deleted sequence where Vigo possesses Ray and tries to force him to crash Ecto-1 before being stopped by Winston.
  • Godzilla
    • King Kong vs. Godzilla was originally conceived as "King Kong vs Frankenstein" until Toho swapped out Frankenstein with Godzilla. In the process, some of Frankenstein's traits—namely being strengthened by electricity—got ported over to Kong.
    • Ebirah, Horror of the Deep was originally supposed to star King Kong, but Toho lost the rights to the ape and had to substitute in Godzilla. Because the change happened so late in production, Godzilla ended up taking on a lot of Kong's characteristics, such as being empowered by lightning and taking an interest in a human female.
  • In The Goonies, there is a deleted scene with an octopus. At the end of the film Data says "The octopus was scary!" while he's being interviewed, despite the fact it was cut. The octopus scene is included in the TV version of the movie, however.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) includes a brief moment late in the film where Drax refers to Gamora as a "green whore", much to her annoyance. As revealed in a deleted scene, this was supposed to refer back to an earlier moment where Drax hears one of the other inmates in the Kyln calling Gamora a whore, and (being Literal-Minded) doesn't understand that it's a pejorative term—leading him to assume that Gamora is actually a sex worker. In the final version, it just makes him look like a misogynistic jerk.
  • Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later:
    • The opening credits show a newspaper picture of a pair of bloody scissors - referencing the ending of the fourth film. Originally the fourth, fifth and sixth films were going to be acknowledged in a scene where one of Laurie's students gives a report on 'the Haddonfield murders'. The finished film ended up being a Soft Reboot that ignored the previous three movies.
    • Michael Myers notably has no burn scars, despite having been in a fire at the end of the second film. While it seems like a simple Series Continuity Error, it was originally a hint to the planned reveal that it wasn't the real Michael, but a copycat killer.
  • Harry Potter:
    • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Early on, Steve Kloves felt that Harry needed a sounding board in the scenes with the Dursleys so that audiences would hear his inner thoughts, which were expressed through internal dialogue in the book. Therefore, Kloves decided to give him a pet spider named Alastair and an army of broken toy soldiers, both of which he would be portrayed as talking to. The concept was later abandoned, but a shot of Harry playing with toy soldiers survives in the eventual film.
    • Justin Finch-Fletchley is Demoted to Extra in Chamber of Secrets, and Harry knowing who he is right before the snake incident in Duelling Club appears to be Remember the New Guy?. An extended version of the scene had Harry meeting Justin in the club and chatting about him being Muggle-born.
    • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:
      • There's one to the original plan to break into Umbridge's office after Harry's vision - where Luna, Ginny and Neville are brought in because they helped. In the film it's just Harry, Ron and Hermione breaking in.
      • Percy Weasley is shown accompanying Cornelius Fudge in several scenes, including one in which he's restraining Harry in Dumbledore's office. There's no in-film explanation for why Percy is in these scenes, and he never even gets any lines. These appearances are just artifacts of the book's subplot in which he got a job at the Ministry and disowned his family.
    • In the attack on the Burrow in Half Blood Prince, Ginny inexplicably does nothing once Fenrir Greyback shows up. As shown in the trailer, he disarmed her from afar. Ginny can be seen picking up her wand as soon as Lupin and Tonks get there too.
  • Hocus Pocus: After being resurrected, Mary says to Winnie “I knew I left this cauldron on, didn’t I tell you?” despite Mary not having said that prior. This line is actually in reference to a bit of dialog that was cut during the hanging scene, where Mary verbally wonders if she left the cauldron on and asks the people of Salem to allow her to go back inside to handle it. They don’t.
  • Hook has a scene where Peter's daughter Maggie sings a song for the pirates. This is a leftover from when the film was planned as a musical. The school play also has a song called "We Don't Wanna Grow Up".
  • House of Wax (2005) had an alternate opening featuring a girl called Jennifer being killed on the side of the road. It was cut from the film, but a waxwork of Jennifer is still given special attention in the third act - as the winner of the 'Miss Ambrose' Beauty Contest. The pageant is discussed a couple of times earlier in the film at least.
  • The Technicolor remake of Imitation of Life was planned as a musical - hence the plot point of Lora becoming a Broadway star instead of a businesswoman, the cameo of Mahalia Jackson singing at Annie's funeral and Sarah Jane becoming a dancer and chorus girl instead of a waitress.
  • In America:
    • Christy narrates over her parents sleeping together "and that's when the baby was conceived". It's implied that she's narrating in the present tense at the same age she is now. She's ten. In the original script she was written to be a thirteen-year-old - explaining why she would know about conception. Sarah Bolger (who was ten) simply gave the best audition and you can just assume that Christy knows more than she should.
    • The film also has a couple of holdovers from when it was going to be set in 1982:
      • The first is the family going to see E.T. in cinemas - and the film having a recurring significance for them (Johnny nearly bankrupts everyone getting an ET doll from a carnival, another character dying pretends he's going to his home planet like ET). The filmmakers lucked out when ET was re-released in 2002 to celebrate its 20th anniversary.
      • Mateo's death from AIDS, given that 1982 was during the crisis, especially the film's New York setting. Given that Jim Sheridan based the film on his own experiences in New York in the 80s, it's likely a fictionalisation of someone he knew with the disease.
      • A minor one is the Sullivans not knowing what trick-or-treating is when they move to New York. Halloween was never a particularly big deal in Ireland (ironically it was Irish immigrants who introduced it to America in the first place), and there wasn't much of an industry for costumes (especially in the poor economy of the 60s and 70s when the parents would have grown up) - explaining why they make their own. So in 2002 (when the movie takes place) the family not knowing about trick-or-treating is especially odd. Making their own costumes, however, is justified by their poverty at the start.
  • The Incredible Melting Man was intended to be a spoof of 1950s monster movies, but the executives insisted that the director make it a straight horror movie. The result is that there are many odd scenes that clash horribly with the film's serious tone, which—along with the film's ridiculous title—are all holdovers of the original comedic premise.
  • Iron Man:
    • Tony's hands are uncovered after Iron Monger falls. The second glove of his armor was taken off in Stane's original death scene where he has one last moment with Tony and tries to take him down with him but Tony disconnected his glove to drop him alone.
    • The War Machine armor was originally planned to appear in the movie, but was cut. Despite this, schematics for the suit still appear during the Creative Closing Credits.
  • The Viral Marketing for Iron Man 2 included a fake commercial for the Stark-Fujikawa subsidiary, which made little sense in the overall context of the film. This is because the character Rumiko Fujikawa (a Japanese businesswoman and one of Tony's love interests from the comics) was supposed to appear in the film, but was cut when the script was rewritten.
  • James Bond:
    • In Goldfinger, Goldfinger's nuclear warhead is stopped with 7 seconds left (displayed as 007), but Bond quips "Three more clicks and Goldfinger would have hit the jackpot" because the bomb originally was intended to be defused with 3 (003) seconds left.
    • In GoldenEye, the BMW Z3 was planned to be showcased in a big action scene where Bond would use it to escape a Drill Tank. This scene was cut from the script, but the car and its gadgets still gets a grand introduction in the Q Branch scene and was all over the film's marketing, even though the only payoff it gets is a tiny moment late in the film where Bond drives it to meet with Jack Wade, and trades it for his plane.
    • In Tomorrow Never Dies, when Q shows Bond his BMW 750i, there's a cage with a live jaguar next to it. In the uncut scene, Q was saying "Your new car..." and opens the crate with the jaguar inside, with the exchange "Jaguar?" "Wrong assignment." preceding the proper reveal.
  • The film adaptation of John Dies at the End faithfully adapts the gag that the novel opens with, in which Dave breaks an axe, replaces the head, then asks the audience if it still qualifies as the same axe. While the joke still works well enough on it's own, it's also rendered meaningless because the film cuts out the whole subplot and big reveal that the joke was foreshadowing in the novel; the Big Bad and his minions are creating monstrous clones of people that Kill and Replace the originals… and Dave is one such clone, having murdered and impersonated the real Dave before the story began, but he is pretty much doing what the real one would have because the cloning is so accurate that Monster Dave Copied the Morals, Too.
  • John Wick: Chapter 2 had a deleted scene as part of the montage of assassins going after the bounty Santino has placed on John, in which he would've fought off a pair of assassins in the streets of Chinatown. The final film however still contains a brief remnant of this scene, with the sequence of the Continental's clerks creating the bounty including a shot of John walking through Chinatown.
  • Jurassic Park:
    • Jurassic Park (1993): The neck frill of the Dilophosaurus (a made-up invention of the films, which was neither present in the novel, nor known from any real dinosaur) apparently came about from a discussion between art director Rick Carter and concept artist John Gurche about a scene where two male Dilophosaurus use some sort of fleshy display structure to intimidate one another, which would set up a later scene where Dr. Grant scares off a Dilophosaurus with a colourful umbrella that resembles the display structure. The scene never made it past brainstorming, but the anatomical feature made it into the final film.
    • The Lost World: Jurassic Park: When the protagonists rescue the baby T. rex from the hunters' trap, it inexplicably has a broken leg. This is left unexplained in the movie, but a deleted scene showed that it got this injury after Ludlow tripped and accidentally fell on it while drunk. This was originally meant to set up the Karmic Injury at the end, when Ludlow has his leg broken by the Tyrannosaurus buck to soften him up for the baby to kill him.
    • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: The Arcadia ship manifest lists Pachyrhinosaurus as one of the dinosaurs onboard, despite this genus never appearing in any movies. This is because the new ceratopsid in the movie, Sinoceratops, was originally meant to be Pachyrhinosaurus, as the latter's name is repeatedly referenced in production notes and concept art, the early merchandise depicts Sinoceratops with a nose boss rather than a horn, and its hole-in-frill design is obviously influenced by the Pachyrhinosaurus main character in Walking with Dinosaurs.note  It was changed after the first trailer for the movie released, presumably because fans complained about how it didn't look much like Pachyrhinosaurus (the design has a large nose horn despite the fact Pachyrhinosaurus is most well-known for not having a horn on its nose, hence its name "thick-nosed lizard").
  • Kingdom of Heaven's final battle features Queen Sibylla cutting all her hair off before going incognito to tend to the wounded. This act makes much more sense with Ridley Scott's planned ending where the character would become a nun - who traditionally cut their hair off as a symbol of giving up their old life to serve God now. But Executive Meddling wanted Balian and Sibylla to end up together at the end. In the Director's Cut the haircut still makes some sense too as Sibylla chose to poison her son as a Mercy Kill when she discovered he had leprosy - so it could be seen as an act of mourning.
  • A Knight's Tale:
    • When Kate is teaching William to dance she asks what he's planning to do with his hair for the evening. Originally William was supposed to appear at the banquet with his hair slicked back and covered in silver after Kate restyles it for him. A single scene, which ended up being cut, was filmed with this hairstyle before the crew realised it looked ridiculous. The rest of the banquet was shot with William's usual blonde curls which leaves Kate's comment as an odd non-sequitir.
    • After Chaucer pays off Simon the Summoner and Peter the Pardoner the duo leave with Simon making a snarky comment that they'll see Chaucer again very soon. Originally they were supposed to appear again later in the movie to inform Chaucer that William's true identity has been discovered but that scene was cut.
  • There's a deleted scene from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist where an old man writes, "MOUTH" on the Chosen One's face. There's a scene or two in the final cut where this writing is still visible.
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • In the prologue of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Sauron holds a dagger in the Mount Doom scene, one that he never uses. He was originally supposed to stab his own palm, which was full of molten gold. The gold and blood would then mix to create the One Ring.
    • In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Faramir's lines "A chance for Faramir, captain of Gondor, to prove his quality," and "Tell him I send a mighty gift" were supposed to be Meaningful Echos of what his father Denethor says to him earlier, in Osgiliath. The scene in Osgiliath was deleted, though it can be found in the Extended Version of the film. Granted, in the book, Faramir did say the first line at about the same point in the story, and Denethor did refer to the Ring as "a mighty gift" that Boromir would not have let slip by in The Return of the King, so the references are merely demoted to "shout-outs to the source".
    • At one point in development, it was planned to have Sauron himself appear at the Black Gate, having regained his physical form, at which he would duel the surviving members of the Fellowship. Ultimately, this was discarded (and fairly late in production, to the point that it was already shot and ended up being repurposed into a battle with a troll-chief), but some scenes that seem to have been intended as foreshadowing stick around. For instance, Saruman at one point claims that Sauron "cannot yet take physical form" (which carries the implication that he'll be able to do so soon enough), and there's a scene in the extended cut where Aragorn confronts Sauron through the palantir that shows a clearly physical Sauron (albeit in the form of stock footage).
    • One paying attention during the scenes of the elves joining the defense in The Two Towers that Haldir claims to be bringing word from Elrond, yet the army appears to be made up of elves from Lothlorien, which is hundreds of miles away from Elrond's lands. Shouldn't he be bringing word from Galadriel, his actual leader? This is orphaned from an earlier cut where Arwen (who, being Elrond's daughter, would be in a fine position to bring word from him) would also be present at the battle and bringing elves, but the whole idea tested very poorly and Arwen's scenes were cut. This is also likely the reason for why the elves seem to vanish from the battle after Haldir's death.
  • The Lovely Bones originally adapted the subplot from the book where Abigail has an affair with the detective. There's a lot of chemistry between the two characters in a scene at the police station - which was clearly meant to start the subplot off. And later in the scene where Jack hugs the detective, he can be seen looking a little guilty.
  • Several in Monkeybone. One involves the stain on Stu's Grim Reaper costume, which is explained from a deleted scene that showed him stealing it.
  • Monty Python's Life of Brian originally had a whole subplot about King Otto, who was to have been A Nazi by Any Other Name. The only mention of Otto in the finished film is when his crack suicide squad show up in the final scene.
  • The song 'When Love Is Gone' was cut from the theatrical version of The Muppet Christmas Carol, but several references to it still appear. Most obvious are the reprise 'When Love Is Found' and the pop song version during the closing credits. It is also prominently featured in the soundtrack's overture. This applies to the Blu-ray release too, which ported over a behind the scenes extra from the extended cut DVD showing the recording of 'When Love Is Gone', even though the song is completely absent from the Blu-ray. However, in 2022, it was announced that the song would be restored for the 30th anniversary 4K rerelease.
  • National Lampoon's Vacation was intended to take place at Disneyland, but Disney rejected the filming request and thus the fictional Wally World was created, represented by Six Flags Magic Mountain. This may explain why a reference to "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" remained in the final cut during Clark Griswold's determined tirade after wrecking the car.
  • In National Treasure, there's a quick moment where one character is seen grabbing a knife. It was never put to use later; the production team was planning on it, but cut that element out (partly for ratings reasons).
  • For National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, they filmed a scene in which the bad guy stabs the protagonist's father; however, they took this out because they felt it crossed the Moral Event Horizon and undermined his Death Equals Redemption moment later. However, there is still a shot in the film in which the actor is acting like he's injured because they didn't re-shoot that scene.
  • "Is this something you could share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?!" This sudden, bizarre appearance of some random older guy with a mohawk in Pee-wee's Big Adventure was supposed to be a Brick Joke. The setup was that Amazing Larry is a magician friend of Pee-wee's that he ran into at the magic shop, who asked Pee-wee for some style tips to help liven up his act. That scene was cut out, but the eventual payoff of him deciding on a loud suit and ridiculous, multi-colored mohawk was left in.
  • The original cut of Planes, Trains and Automobiles was over 3 hours long, before it was cut down to 2 hours, and then eventually 90 minutes. There are several references to the cut material in the finished product.
    • Many scenes on the airplane were cut, including long stretches of Del talking Neal's ear off. This is referred to in the final cut where Neal, during his first big blow-up with him, accuses Del of telling boring, unamusing anecdotes.
    • When Neal accuses Del of stealing his money, he mentions that Del went through his wallet to pay for pizza. This refers to a deleted scene where Del orders pizza their first night, and pays for it with money out of Neal's wallet. This also makes Neal's accusation of theft more believable. The burglar also was not just some random thief who stole Neal and Del's money by sheer coincidence. He was actually the pizza delivery guy from earlier. He broke in and stole their money in revenge for Del paying him a one dollar tip in pennies.
    • The exploding beer can was shown in a deleted scene while Neal and Del are eating pizza, rather than simply being mentioned after-the-fact.
    • The black eye that Del receives out of nowhere near the end of the trip (although implied in the final cut to be the result of an antsy truck driver) was the result of Neal punching him in a deleted scene upon discovering that Del had accidentally driven past Chicago the previous night. This would also explain why the state trooper that pulls them over has a Wisconsin badge. In the original cut, he's the one who informs them of the overshot.
    • An entire subplot was cut where Neal's wife suspects that he's having an affair and that "Del" is merely a persona he's created to explain why he hasn't arrived home yet. The tears of joy when Neal finally comes home was originally supposed to be elation upon discovering that Neal was telling the truth the whole time.
  • Upon its initial release, the 1932 film Rasputin and the Empress featured a scene which implied that Rasputin had raped Princess Natasha, who was a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Princess Irina Yusupov. In 1932, the real Princess Irina Yusupov was still alive and feeling litigious. Along with her husband Felix, she sued and won, which led to the This Is a Work of Fiction disclaimer. The offending scene was removed from the movie, creating a plot hole in which it's not explained why Princess Natasha changes from supporting Rasputin to being afraid of him.
  • The Ring: The bizarre scenes in the cursed video all foreshadow something later on in the film, barring one notable exception: the maggot scene. This was supposed to foreshadow a scene where Noah visits Shelter Mountain Inn, only to learn that the owner died a while back, having watched the video, and the cabin has been abandoned for days, leaving the food to rot and attract flies. The scene was cut from the final film, although it is included as part of DVD extras.
  • Scooby-Doo (2002):
    • Right before she's kidnapped by the villains, Daphne is seen running out of a building and slamming the door shut. This is because of a cut scene that took place inside the girls' locker room - where Daphne encountered a possessed Velma and several other girls. They're who she was running from.
    • Shaggy knows to look for Daphne's soul in the pit after he's found Fred and Velma's. The reason is that he was originally going to stumble upon Daphne's soul being extracted from her body and a monster inhabiting it. This scene too was deleted.
    • Old Man Smithers/The Luna Ghost was originally meant to be the main villain of the movie. In the finished product, he only appears in the film's prologue, but the Luna Ghost was still featured prominently on the movie poster.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. The World has some milder ones:
    • "Is that seriously the end of the story?" — Originally, this was Kim's response to Scott's flashback about how he met Knives on the bus (she dropped her books, he picked them up), later echoed by Ramona when she hears it from Knives. The flashback scene was cut in the final version.
    • In an early, discarded version of Scott and Ramona's first date, Ramona was seen lighting a cigarette, saying she smokes only on special occasions. Scott was supposed to be echoing her after his battle with Roxy, when he says he only drinks on special occasions.
    • Scott has some Adaptational Nice Guy moments with Knives that look like he genuinely cares about her, such as becoming enraged when she got the dye punched out of her hair when he just looked on in the comic. This is because one of the endings was Scott getting back with Knives, but the makers decided not to go with that. The deleted scenes are in the DVD extras.
  • Shanghai Noon: Originally, there was a whole sequence where Chon Wang's fellow Chinese guards are discovered by a conman named Bulldog Drummond, played by Curtis Armstrong, who tries to showcase them to audiences. When they realize what's happening, he gets beaten and they take his wagon, which is what they used to travel to the church. Drummond is subsequently mugged by Wallace and the gang, who reveals where the guards are going, which explains how they show up there in the end.
  • In The Sixth Sense, when the protagonist realizes he's a ghost, there is an echo of the boy saying "I see people". The line "I see people" was not used in the final cut (he only says "I see dead people").
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2020):
    • The film starts In Medias Res with Sonic attempting to outrun Dr. Robotnik and his Eggpod, then the scene freezes and after some narration from the title character, the film rewinds to the beginning of the film's story. During the rewind a brief blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Tom Wachowski's truck driving past an "Oregon Welcomes You" sign is shown, except there's no point in the movie where Tom or Sonic ever visit Oregon, suggesting it's a remnant of a Deleted Scene.
    • At the end of the car chase, Sonic gets a bomb stuck to his hand and desperately tries (and fails) to get rid of it before it goes off. Many viewers have wondered, "well, why doesn't he just take off his glove?" The answer? This scene was scripted with the original, more realistic Sonic model in mind, which lacked the White Gloves in favor of proportionate hands covered in white fur - he didn't have a glove to take off. The model was later changed to something more on-brand, including the familiar big white gloves, but the scene wasn't rewritten around them.
  • Spider-Man: J. Jonah Jameson mentions that "Eddie" has been trying to photograph Spider-Man for weeks, referring to a version of Eddie Brock played by R.C. Everbeck whose scene was cut from the film. Eddie Brock would later appear in Spider-Man 3, played by Topher Grace.
    • Spider-Man 2: A minor example, but the scene where Peter tries to regain his powers by jumping from roof to roof begins with him motivating himself to have "Strong focus on what I want." This was originally written to echo advice given to him by his campus therapist to have strong focus on what he wants to overcome an identity crisis. This interaction is restored in the Spider-Man 2.1 extended edition.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: In the opening captain's log by Sulu, he says that his crew, the Excelsior have been monitoring gaseous anomalies in the Beta Quadrant. During the final battle, the Excelsior crew were supposed to arrive dramatically and use their charting gaseous anomalies equipment to jury-rig a heat-seeking photon torpedo. However, William Shatner insisted that the Enterprise should save itself. As such, what was originally meant to be a Chekhov's Gun ended up being just a throwaway line, causing the Excelsior to arrive just in time to be shot at, and the gaseous-anomalies equipment is magically onboard the Enterprise instead.
    • Star Trek: Generations:
      • The villain Dr. Soran makes a hammier than usual remark about Geordi's heart just not being in a conversation. Which made no sense on its own, but referred to a cut scene that involved him torturing Geordi by repeatedly stopping his heart. You can see the cut scene here. It also has Dr. Crusher saying "I removed the nanoprobe" (that Soran used to stop Geordi's heart), leaving the audience to wonder "what nanoprobe?"
      • The prologue sequence was originally written with Spock and Bones accompanying Kirk on the maiden voyage on the Enterprise-B. When Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley declined, the roles were given to Scotty and Chekov. It's pretty obvious that they were not meant for them, as the two take much more mannerisms of Spock and Bones then ever, including a scene where Chekov, who was the Navigator and later the Tactical Officer/Security Chief, drafts the in universe film crew as medical personnel, and Scotty calls Kirk "Jim", something only Spock and Bones did among the TOS crew.
  • Star Wars:
    • A New Hope:
      • Han's parting words to Jabba in Mos Eisley, calling him a "wonderful human being," made more sense in the scene as originally filmed and then deleted. At that time, Jabba was not yet the giant sluglike alien canonized in Return of the Jedi and was indeed human. The slug design was digitally edited over the original footage when the scene was restored in the Special Edition. Luckily enough, the line was already delivered in a deeply sarcastic tone, making it easy to handwave as a snarky joke on Han's part.
      • Luke's friendship with Biggs was completely cut from the original version of the movie along with the Tosche Station scene, where he met Biggs and discussed his deal with his uncle to stay on the farm for another season and Biggs told Luke that he was planning on joining the Rebellion. As a result, Luke mentions Biggs early on when bemoaning that he's never going to get off Tatooine with no indication of who Biggs is, the scene where he reunites with Biggs in the Rebel hangar before the start of the Battle of Yavin was also cut, his muttered "Blast it, Biggs, where are you?!" during the battle when he has a TIE fighter on his tail (before being saved by Wedge) seems rather random (although it could be interpreted as bitterness that he'd saved Biggs from a similar fate only a few minutes before and Biggs isn't repaying the favour), and Biggs' death at Vader's hands doesn't have the same impact (although Luke's horrified shock at it still made sense in the context that Biggs' death leaves him alone as the last hope of the Rebellion). The Special Edition restored the scene of their reunion in the hangar, making it clear that Luke knew Biggs from somewhere in his past, but with the Toshe Station scene still absent it came across more like Remember the New Guy?.
      • C-3PO's remark as he looks out the escape pod window, "That's funny... the damage doesn't look as bad from out here", originated from the rough draft script where he and R2-D2 were Imperial droids posted aboard the planet-killing space fortress not yet named the Death Star: hearing the sounds of an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to destroy the space fortress, panicking and thinking they were about to be blown up, the two droids fled in an escape pod before realising the space fortress was mostly unharmed. Threepio's line is less funny in the final film, where there wasn't the same emphasis on the Tantive IV taking external damage.
    • In The Empire Strikes Back, the AT-AT pilot General Veers, who disappears after the battle of Hoth, was originally supposed to be killed by Hobbie, who is named by Luke but not seen in-person, crashing his snowspeeder into the cockpit after the targeting of the power generator. A remnant of this scene can be seen when the walker that Luke plants a grenade in explodes at the head rather than the body, and it was also reinstated in the novelization.
    • In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon and Anakin are inexplicably running, with Anakin complaining that he's tired no less, right before Darth Maul shows up and starts dueling Qui-Gon. In the final film, there's no explanation for why they weren't just walking at a normal pace, but there's a deleted scene in which they encountered one of Darth Maul's probe droids and started running.
    • The weird bit in The Last Jedi where Admiral Holdo caresses an unconscious Poe's face and says she likes him is a rather unfortunate artifact from an earlier version of the script where Poe and Holdo were the same age and had a Slap-Slap-Kiss dynamic going on.
  • Stripes:
    • In the theatrical cut, Sgt. Hulka tells the platoon that some soldiers left the base without permission, and threatens to punish the entire platoon before John and Russell reluctantly fess up to that. If you watch the extended cut of the film, you'll find that they tried to desert during Basic, and somehow end up parachuting into somewhere in South America, before running into a group of rebels, accidentally dumping a bunch of LSD into their stew, almost getting killed, and sneaking off before getting put back on the plane and sent back to Basic. Also, Stripes was initially planned to be a Cheech & Chong movie, so such a scene would have fit their comedic style.
    • Similarly, in the theatrical cut, the EM-50 urban assault vehicle climax seemingly comes out of nowhere. A scene in the extended cut shows Russell's been wanting a Winnebago for a while.
    • Originally, Sgt. Hulka was originally supposed to be killed in the mortar accident and replaced by his twin brother, also played by Warren Oates. However, the idea was discarded before filming. This is why John sarcastically says "It. Is. Alive." when Hulka shows up in Italy.
  • Superman Film Series:
    • The Richard Lester cut of Superman II has a few examples due to discarding a number of scenes a shot by Richard Donner:
      • When Clark sees General Zod taking over the White House, Lois tells Clark "You didn't know", only for Clark to reply "He knew". Clark is referring to Jor-El telling him about the Kryptonian villains, but those scenes were removed from the Lester cut.
      • When Clark is about expose himself to red sun radiation in order to rid himself of his powers, the recording of his mother Lara warns him that the process is permanent and cannot be reversed. Bafflingly, Clark is later able to easily restore his powers during the climax with absolutely no consequences. This is because Lara’s warning was supposed to set up the Jor-El A.I. having to sacrifice itself to repower Clark, meaning Clark's decision would have ultimately cost him the last vestiges of his father. Since all footage of Marlon Brando’s Jor-El was removed from the Lester cut of the film, the resolution just looks like an Ass Pull.
    • Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was originally 134 minutes long before being pared down to 90 minutes. Thus, the film features several references that are almost meaningless in the theatrical cut. Most notably, Lex Luthor originally made two Nuclear Men, of which Mark Pillow's Nuclear Man was actually the second incarnation. The original Nuclear Man, played by Clive Mantle, was much less intelligent, akin to Bizarro from the comic books, and had a confrontation with Superman before being defeated by being electrocuted into ashes. Thus, the "dirt" that Lenny Luthor adds to the capsule with Nuclear Man's protoplasm was really the remains of the original Nuclear Man, and Nuclear Man II inherited Nuclear Man I's memories of crossing paths with Lacy Warfield, which was why he was seeking her in the climax, asking "Where is the woman?" and Superman answering "Give it up, you'll never find her.".
  • Super Mario Bros. (1993): The film has a minor Running Gag of the Big Bad Koopa attempting to order a pizza, but he never gets it in the end. Many viewers were confused what the point of the whole thing was, but it was because originally it would've ended with the pizza finally arriving after Koopa had been defeated and devolved into primordial ooze, with the delivery boy tossing the pizza box onto the slime puddle, but the punchline was cut in post-production.
  • Suspiria (1977) was originally planned to have twelve-year-old girls as the protagonists, but changed them to twenty-somethings to avoid being banned. The script was not changed, leading to...
    • When Olga is introduced, she childishly says that Suzie and Sara have the "names of snakes" and sticks her tongue out. Sara follows suit.
    • Suzie prefers to rent a room at Olga's rather than stay at the school, because she doesn't want to feel "like a kid" at boarding school. You'd be hard pressed to find a twenty-something student who'd pass up a free room in the name of maturity.
  • In Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
    • They cut all the scenes of the T-1000's shapeshifting malfunctions before release. Only one was left in, after he neutralizes the Terminator and a single ripple of silver runs up his body, which confused audiences until the Director's Cut was released and explained what was going on.
    • At one point after killing Todd while assuming Janelle's form, the T-1000 is seen leaving the Voight's house, briefly looking into the bathroom as he does. While Janelle is killed offscreen (hence the T-1000 taking over her form), there was originally a scene where the T-1000 kills her in the middle of a shower.
  • Three Men and a Baby has a deleted plot thread about Jack Holden (Ted Danson's character) appearing in a dog food commercial. This explains the cardboard standees of him that pop up in a couple spots in the final cut that inspired a famous Urban Legend.
  • Titanic has one hour worth of Deleted Scenes, so it isn't surprising that the final cut has multiple instances of this.
    • When Jack makes Rose "fly" at the bow, he starts singing the popular 1910 song Come Josephine In My Flying Machine and she laughs. This is because she remembers singing it in an earlier, deleted scene after Jack brings escorts Rose back to First-Class after the party in steerage.
    • When Cal finds Rose near the lifeboats, he is disgusted to see her in a poor-looking chequered blanket. In a deleted scene, she is gifted that blanket by a steerage couple after they escape the flooding hallway. The same steerage couple is seen swimming in the freezing water after the ship goes down.
    • Lovejoy bleeds from his head in his last scene because he had a deleted fight scene with Jack in the flooding dining room. This fight ended with Jack pushing Lovejoy's head into a glass pane. This is also why, though Lovejoy’s penultimate scene in the final cut of the movie, which would have immediately led into the deleted scene where Cal sends him after Jack and Rose, had him talking to Cal, when Cal next appeared, Lovejoy is nowhere to be seen.
    • Before the final plunge, Rose shares a glance with a terrified blonde woman holding onto the rails. This woman, Helga, was originally a love interest of Fabrizio and a Foil to Rose - she would choose her family over her love to their mutual downfall - but her subplot was cut. The only scene that remains in the movie to justify Rose recognizing her is a brief shot of Fabrizio dancing with her when Rose goes to steerage.
    • A Chinese passenger appears twice in the movie: right after Fabrizio and Jack enter the ship, and again when they try to exit steerage through the fenced stairs. He never interacts with anyone but his presence is striking because he's at the center of the screen both times and the only non-white actor in the movie. The Chinese passenger is Fang Lang, a real survivor who was saved by the returning lifeboat; these appearances were meant to set his rescue scene but it was cut.
    • First-time watchers are surprised to see the little girl Cora and her father among the Titanic 'ghosts' in the last scene. A deleted scene showed them drowning behind a hallway fence in steerage (along with their mother and wife), but James Cameron thought it was too depressing.
  • Transformers: The Last Knight:
    • Cogman is referred to as "a Headmaster". Those familiar with the broader franchise will recognize that Headmasters are human-sized Transformers, or organic beings in Powered Armor, that can turn into the head of a regular-sized Transformer and combine with a headless body—whether this is a symbiotic partnership or an unusual form of piloting varies based on the story. In an earlier draft, Cogman would have used this ability to take over the headless corpse of one of the film's Decepticons, Nitro Zeus, but this scene was discarded, and in the final film, he doesn't transform at all, leaving the line as just an inexplicable bit of random terminology. The whole idea even made it into the merchandise—Nitro Zeus's head can detach for no apparent reason, and Cogman's toy's head can turn into a little Cogman that can fit on Nitro Zeus's.
    • Megatron's new design has elements of the dragon mode he was originally going to have, with fanglike shoulders, clawed feet, and an oddly shaped sword that would have been the dragon tail. This also means that unlike any other character, he doesn't have any kibble of the Cybertronian jet mode he has in the movie proper. There is also a scene of him using his Arm Cannon as a flamethrower that he doesn't do again, likely as a holdover from the original script.
  • Laurel and Hardy: The short Twice Two has one of the wives mention a "surprise" for Ollie. We never learn what this surprise was in the film. According to the notes on the Laurel & Hardy Essential Collection DVD set, the script states the surprise as being a 16mm home movies projector. Back in 1933, such a device would have cost a lot of money!
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
    • Eddie scolds Roger for dancing for the bar patrons and potentially blowing his cover while "I'm out there risking my neck out for you." It's a fairly generic line, except that the immediate events don't warrant it; Eddie went from leaving Roger in the hidden room at the bar straight to his office, where he meets Jessica, and then back out to find Roger dancing. The line makes more sense when one considers the deleted scene (included in the comic version and on later home media releases) that would have followed Roger's drop-off, where Eddie is caught snooping in Jessica's dressing room by Judge Doom and is sent to Toontown, where he is given a "tooneroo", a toon pig painted on top of his head. He goes back to his office to wash it off, which then segues to his encounter with Jessica. The removal of the scene where he washes the head off also removes the context of why he was getting out of the shower when Jessica arrived.
    • An early draft of the script included an extra scene where Eddie visits Marvin Acme's funeral, which would feature more animated cameos. Then, Eddie would be spying on a private conversation between R.K. Maroon and Judge Doom, which further raised Eddie's suspicions of the former's involvement and led to him snooping into Jessica's dressing room.
  • In Wing Commander, the Pilgrim is asked at one point about his pilgrim pendant, to which he replies that he doesn't have it anymore. The reason why he lost it is never explained in the movie. The reason for that is because a scene where he stabs a traitor with the pendant was filmed but cut from the final version of the movie.
  • The Wizard of Oz:
    • There's a scene where the Wicked Witch is giving instructions for her flying monkeys to intercept Dorothy's party, and she says, "They'll give you no trouble, I promise you that. I've sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them." This was in reference to a scene where a bug called the Jitterbug stings the main characters, and they break into a dance number, which was cut to avoid dating the film (the jitterbug had been a popular dance in the late '30s to early '40s, but has long since been forgotten now).
    • Dorothy telling the Scarecrow "I think I'll miss you most of all" makes a bit more sense if you know about a cut subplot where Scarecrow's "real world" counterpart, Hunk, was Dorothy's close friend and Implied Love Interest.
    • One of the Kansas scenes has Aunt Em making reference to Hickory "tinkering on that contraption", referencing a wind machine he was working on in a scene that got cut.
  • X-rays of wings can be seen in Stryker's lab in X2: X-Men United. This is because the movie was originally going to have a subplot where Stryker would've kidnapped Angel from the Xavier Institute and forcibly transformed him into Archangel through experimentation. Though Angel was removed from the script, the X-rays were retained.
  • X-Men:
    • At one point, Senator Kelly mentions that Jean Grey is a mutant, despite no prior indication that he knew her secret. The original script had a scene where Jean would've accidentally outed herself as a mutant in front of Kelly, which was cut just before filming was to begin. This is also why there's a deleted scene on the DVD release where Xavier scolds Jean for losing control of her powers in public, something that doesn't actually happen at any point in the movie.
    • The official prequel comic book shows a photo of Logan with a mysterious woman that he knew before his memories were erased, and the woman in question even appears in some of his dreams. This was going to be a minor subplot in the actual movie (and was even referenced in one of the script excerpts Hugh Jackman read for his audition), but was ultimately removed from the script.
    • Storm's Pre-Mortem One-Liner against Toad was meant to be the anticlimactic punchline to a Running Gag of Toad arrogantly boasting about "what happens to a toad when [x]". All of Toad's dialogue setting it up was taken out of the script, leaving us with Storm making a really weird quip out of nowhere before she blasts him with lightning.

    Game Shows 
  • Because Taskmaster records extra tasks in case they need to replace an existing one due to unforseen circumstances or to serve as a tiebreaker, there are a number of tasks that go unseen but are sometimes referenced in episodes:
    • An episode of Series 4 has Greg mention the time Noel Fielding "painted him looking cool on the side of a shed." This was part of an individual task, which they sometimes give comedians just to screw with them, that they never were able to fit into the series.
    • Gregs stolen trousers, which Mark Watson submitted as his prize task in episode 5 of Series 5, were actually from a cut challenge where contestants had to make an outlandish prediction and then make it come true. Mark predicted he'd steal from The Taskmaster and had Ed Gambol steal Greg's trousers, and didn't want them to go to waste.
    • During Series 7 when the contestants are tasked with delivering a task to Alex in the post spectatular way, Phil Wang's task inexplicably just says "Fuck you, James Acaster." James, ever the sourpuss, is genuinely flabbergasted by this as it came right out of nowhere and there's no bad blood between him and Phil. Phil explains that, before they began filming the tasks, he was going to start a rivalry between him and James for fun but then "forgot about it". That F-Bomb was the one and only thing to actually come from his planned rivalry.
    • The opening of each series shows clips of the various tasks. Series 8 shows Paul Sihna in a bath reacting to a loud noise, but no such task appears in the series proper.
    • Similarly, Series 10 features a clip of Richard Herring's attempt at "Make The Longest Continuous Line of Spaghetti", a cut task.
    • Series 13's "Record The Best Multi-Track Song About Your Team" where the men's team references Chris Ramsey feeding Ardal O'Hanlon an aubergine. This is referencing a challenge only the men ended up doing, where one had to transfer an aubergine across a field, which Alex decided to cancel before the women did it because he hadn't considered the Unfortunate Implications of women playing with aubergines.
    • Series 14's opening features a scene from an unused task, where Dara Ă“ Briain is going down an escalator with a croquet mallet. According to Word of God, this task involved hitting a large die around a course, up one escalator and down another and into a ring, with different instructions for rolling different numbers.

    Literature 
  • In the original Igdoof comics that Diary of a Wimpy Kid is based on, Igdoof draws a comic called "Remedial Ralph", in which his roommate Ralph is depicted as an absurdly overweight idiot. Most Remedial Ralph jokes made it into the main series as Greg's "Creighton the Cretin" comic, but the "The Boy Whose Family Thinks He's a Dog" scene in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules scene is re-used verbatim. This includes the scene where Ralph/Rowley says that he's not pregnant but just has "a slight weight problem". Rowley is drawn the same way as the book's regular art style, making the joke somewhat lost.
  • The 2012 edition of The Discworld Companion contains a version of Dr. Andrew Millard and Prof. Terry Tao's rules for Cripple Mr Onion, with a note that this was intended to tie in with an official Caroc deck. As of 2021, there is no official Caroc deck.
  • Dracula essentially created a part of vampire lore as a result of this. In Bram Stoker's earlier drafts, one of Dracula's abilities was that he couldn't be shown by any method apart from looking at him straight-on: he could not appear in photographs (they either come out black or depicting a rotting corpse), and any attempt to paint him never gets his appearance right, usually depicting entirely the wrong person. However, most scenes involving this were cut (presumably, they would have involved the camera Jonathan is mentioned to own), and the only one left over ended up being the revelation that he cannot cast a reflection.
  • An interesting example happened with an issue of People magazine where Betty White was interviewed concerning her 100th birthday. Said issue wound up being released on the day she passed away.
    • The Fathom Event that was held to celebrate her 100th birthday averted this trope. The title was changed from Betty White: 100 Years Young — A Birthday Celebration to Betty White: A Celebration to reflect the fact that she had died.
    • A Woman's World magazine that was published on January 17, 2022 also featured a piece on Betty White turning 100.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, there's an anomaly when Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin first leave the Shire on their quest to Rivendell. They need just one pony apiece to ride, plus a fifth to haul their luggage—yet the narration states they have six ponies prepared. This was a leftover from an earlier draft where Frodo's other friend Fredegar "Fatty" Bolger accompanied him on the journey as well, making for a party of five. In the published novel, Fatty Bolger instead stays behind to manage Frodo's affairs and cover for his absence—yet the number of ponies wasn't corrected to five until the 50th Anniversary Edition of LOTR in 1999.

    Live-Action TV 
  • American Horror Story: Murder House: In the second episode, Constance Langdon mentions having four children but is then only seen with three (Tate, Adelaide and Beauregard) with no further mention of a fourth sibling. The line was a holdover foreshadowing an albino man who was eventually axed in production. This was eventually resolved years later in American Horror Story: Apocalypse where the missing child is instead revealed to be an eyeless girl named Rose.
  • Angel: In "A Hole in the World", Angel is having a phone conversation with Giles, trying to get a hold of Willow to help solve the Fred/Illyria problem. Before the show was cancelled, Willow was planned to show up in Season 6 to help separate Fred and Illyria's souls.
  • Better Call Saul: Midway through the fifth season, it's revealed through crime scene pictures and a witness that Mike tracks down that Lalo had burned down the Travel Wire after he killed Fred Whalen, the innocent clerk, in the season 4 finale. Lalo setting the fire wasn't shown in the season 4 finale when it aired, but the footage was filmed and can be seen in the deleted scenes.
  • Charmed's fifth season premiere has Phoebe and Cole mutually agreeing that their relationship is over - which is very inconsistent with Cole's attempts to win her back for the rest of his time on the show. This is because the episode was going to start an arc with Cole falling in love with Paige instead. When both actors protested the storyline, it was dropped.
  • When the first few hour-long episodes of Cheap Seats were cut down to a half-hour, a few references and jokes were left orphaned. Example: in the "Superdogs/Superjocks" episode, there was a warning in "What 2 Look 4" for an obscene number of dog-puns. The subsequent edits chopped out the majority of them. (there were still some groaners, but not enough to justify a warning.)
  • Chernobyl: In the early minutes of the disaster, Dyatlov mentions that he's "seen worse" but the show never follows upon. Another episode was going to reveal that he had survived a nuclear accident two decades prior, but the relevant scene was cut.
  • The penultimate fight in Season 3 of Cobra Kai was intended to be at the Myagi-Do dojo, but was changed to the Larusso house at the last minute. If the former location had been chosen, it would explain how the Cobra Kai students knew at least a good portion of Myagi-Do would be there, and thus why the entire dojo went to a place where they could only anticipate Sam and possibly Miguel being. A dojo is less sacrosanct than a place of residence, and Hawk and some of the other Cobra Kai's had also previously vandalized it (so invading it wasn't unprecedented,) but but in the finished product, Tory and the Cobra Kais, many of whom are new recruits, seem horrifyingly eager to to to brutalize and possibly kill Sam in her own house because of Tory's vendetta. A break in at a garden-dojo with short fences and likely no security system is also a less serious offense and harder to prove than a balatant break-and-enter in a modern upper-class home, so Daniel would seem far less stupid for deciding to confront Kreese on his own, then accepting the challenge and word of a man who'd just seemingly crossed the Moral Event Horizon, rather than calling the police and getting all of Cobra Kai sent to juvie.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Dialogue in "The Macra Terror" refers to the Macra as being "insects", having apparently not been rewritten when they were changed to giant crabs (or in a couple of cases rewritten as "an insect like a crab"). Parodied in Doctor Who Magazine's "Blogs of Doom" feature, in which the Pilot says that Medok's claim he saw a giant insect that looked exactly like a crab is perhaps less likely than that he saw a giant crab. (Although he didn't see that either, obviously.)
    • In the first episode of "State of Decay", the peasants greatly fear something called "The Wasting", which they all refuse to explain what it is.... and then it's never brought up again for the rest of the serial. It was apparently a holdover from an earlier version of the story.
    • In "Castrovalva", the newly-regenerated Fifth Doctor mentions sensing a malevolent presence at the center of the Tardis. This would've been followed up on later in the season, but the planned story ("The Enemy Within" by Christopher Priest) got dropped, leaving the reference sticking out as an odd aside.
    • In "Survival", when his motorcycle duel with Midge takes place, the Doctor is survives because he is thrown clear of the collision and lands on a pile of rubbish, including an old sofa. As scripted, the duel was meant to take place on a building site or near a disused block of flats, but filming ended up taking place in a wide open field, making the rubbish pile totally inexplicable in the episode as broadcast.
    • Robert Shearman has stated that the reference to Van Statten's birthday at the start of "Dalek" was supposed to be set up for an ultimately cut plot thread that the Dalek had been tortured just to make it say "Happy Birthday" to Van Statten.
    • In "The Doctor Dances", when Captain Jack arrives at the climax, the Doctor shouts to him "Change of plan!", but they never actually made a plan. In the script book, Steven Moffat explains that the plan was in an earlier draft of the script and got cut because it was slowing the episode down.
      • From the same episode, the exchange between the Doctor and Rose near the end of the episode (Rose: "Look at you, beaming away like you're Father Christmas!" Doctor: "Who says I'm not, red-bicycle-when-you-were-twelve?" Rose: "What.") is the remnant of a dropped storyline that would've revealed that the Doctor had been secretly using time travel to alter Rose's life in order to mould her into the perfect companion.
    • In "The Eleventh Hour", the Eleventh Doctor suddenly takes an interest in a duck pond, noting that there aren't any ducks. This was supposed to set up a Brick Joke in the series finale where, as the Doctor, Amy, and Rory take off in the Tardis, the duck pond would've been shown again—this time with ducks, implying that they'd been removed from history by the cracks in time. This got cut after the scene was moved to Amy's garden.
    • In "Twice Upon a Time", during the Twelfth Doctor's speech for his future self, he tells them to "never ever eat pears". This is a reference to "Human Nature", where the Tenth Doctor leaves a list of instructions behind for Martha to follow to make sure his human self doesn't do something bad, including a very passionate speech about how much he hates pears and to never let him eat one. The only problem being that this speech was never audible in the final episode, and ended up in the fast-forwarded bit. This is a bit of an edge case, though, since "Human Nature" aired years before "Twice Upon a Time" was written, and so the reference was already "orphaned" even before it was written. The writers may have intended it as a Mythology Gag, since the full cut of Ten's "pears" speech has become quite popular online, and originally came from the much shorter list in the Doctor Who New Adventures version of Human Nature.
  • Firefly: Inara's syringe in the pilot and her comment in "Out of Gas" about not wanting to die at all were meant to hint at her having a terminal illness, which would have been revealed had the show not been cancelled. It was eventually addressed in the novel "Life Signs".
  • Friends. In "The One With the Kissing" there was a scene where Joey tries to imitate Chandler's "European Greeting" on Monica, the scene was cut but later a scene in the episode had Monica get locked out of the apartment and Joey told her he'd "Knock down the door if she gave him some sugar". Feeling very random and out of nowhere.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Season 1 features a cameo for Jeyne Poole and a couple of lines alluding to her. She gets a big role in the book A Storm of Swords where Littlefinger passes her off as Arya and marries her to Ramsay Bolton. By the time the show came around to adapting this plot, the writers had decided to give the story to Sansa instead, and thus this Early-Bird Cameo amounts to nothing.
    • In Prince Oberyn's first appearances, he writes a poem for his daughter Elia and tells Cersei he has eight bastard daughters. This is true in the books, but when the show introduced the Sand Snakes next season, they only used the three eldest (Obara, Nymeria and Tyene). Tyene is also combined with Elia, who never appears in the series.
  • Parodied in Garth Marenghis Darkplace. The theme song of the Show Within a Show includes an inexplicable clip of the protagonist running away from an exploding ambulance while cradling a baby. We never see any sort of context for it, until one of the interview segments reveals that Garth somehow managed to blow the budget for an entire episode on that one shot, forcing the crew to cut the episode.
  • The Haunting of Hill House (2018) originally had the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue revealed as just another illusion created by the Red Room - showing that they were all still in the house. This explains why the sequence is a lot more sentimental than the show is known for.
  • After Season 4 of Lucifer (2016) was cancelled, two episodes from it which had already been filmed were aired as "specials". Eventually, a different Season 4 was produced by Netflix, which rendered the placement of these two specials as post-Season 3 untenable; Word of God gave both of them new official places in the timeline, prior to the finale of Season 3. This causes an issue with a beat in Boo Normal: when Ella asks Chloe if she deems Ella "crazy" for her claims that she can see a ghost, Chloe denies it and explains that she's seen "much, much crazier things". This was clearly scripted as a reference to her having found out about Lucifer's true nature in the Season 3 finale. If the episode takes place in Season 3, i.e. before Chloe gets conclusive proof of the supernatural, it's not clear what she might be referring to or why she's so accepting of Ella, possibly giving the unfortunate impression that she doesn't believe Ella and is patronisingly humoring her delusion.
  • Once Upon a Time:
    • Season 1's "Skin Deep" has a flashback to Regina walking into Rumpelstiltskin's castle saying she has a problem with a certain mermaid. This is because Ariel was down in the plans to show up in Season 2, but had her debut pushed back to Season 3. In Ariel's actual episode, her flashback doesn't involve Rumple at all.
    • Another Season 1 episode "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree" mentions that the genie is from Agrabah, which was meant to be Foreshadowing to Aladdin's planned debut in Season 2. Like Ariel, he was pushed back and didn't show up until Season 6!
    • The Season 5 "Broken Heart" has a flashback where Snow White sends Lancelot to get help from his mother, who is the Lady of the Lake - and Lancelot's debut episode was indeed titled "Lady of the Lake". He's never seen again. There was a deleted scene showing him seeing the Dark Curse being cast from far away, but be powerless to help anyone. The next episode cut all scenes resolving the Camelot arc, and it went in a different direction in the second half of the season.
  • In One Piece (2023), Shanks frequently says that Higuma spilled a drink on him in their initial confrontation — something that happened in the original manga, but not in this series' version of events.
  • The producer's cut of the Parks and Recreation episode "Halloween Surprise" includes a scene where Chris recommends that Ann try "dating herself" instead of getting involved with any more men, but this was cut from the aired version. In the next episode, "Ben's Parents", Ann mentions that she can't date Chris because she is dating herself. Although she explains what she means, it comes slightly out of nowhere.
  • Person of Interest: In "Aletheia", when Finch tells Shaw to plan an escape route like Reese would, he says, "As you've said, you're a hammer." Shaw did refer to herself as a hammer, back in "Liberty"...or at least, in its trailer.
  • Red Dwarf: The name of the spaceship the Dwarfers discover in the eponymous "Trojan" was meant to be foreshadowing for a later episode which would have revealed a monster on board the Trojan had stowed away on Red Dwarf, which ended up not getting produced.
  • Sabrina the Teenage Witch's "When Teens Collide" is about molecular instability causing things to go haywire in the Spellman house - including the sofa sucking in anyone who sits on it, and a black hole opening in the kitchen sink. When Hilda references these things, she mentions keeping their guests "out of the chair" - referencing another case of molecular instability that was presumably cut for time.
  • The Sarah Jane Adventures: In "Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?", Maria is wiped from time and only Alan remembers her. Chrissie pays Alan a visit after time has been altered and tells him they never had a daughter. Alan protests that Chrissie was at their house earlier and saw Maria. This refers to a cut scene earlier in the serial where Chrissie does indeed visit the house and sees Maria.
  • Seinfeld: At the end of "The Frogger", Kramer tries to block off the street so that George can move the Frogger machine to the other side, but runs out of police tape. This is part of a cut storyline where Kramer uses the police tape to attempt to woo a woman.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: At the end of "Relics", as Scotty prepares to depart, Troi gives him a kiss on the cheek, which seems odd as she's had virtually no interaction with him. However, there was originally a scene between them earlier in the episode, in which she tried to draw him out but he reacted poorly when he realized she was a therapist.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In the episode "Drive", Torres says that Tom was expelled from the academy. Except he wasn't. That was Nick Locarno from the TNG episode "The First Duty" who shares the same actor. Locarno was going to be a main character in Voyager and Robert Duncan McNeill was brought in to reprise his role, but apparently, 7 years into Voyager's run, the writers seemed to forget McNeill is playing a different character.
  • Taskmaster: The final episode of series 13 had a task that required Ardal and Chris to write and perform a song. The song they come up with references numerous tasks from earlier in the series... including, as Chris notes afterwards, ones that didn't actually get included in the show, making some parts of the song (like all the references to aubergines) completely nonsensical.
  • This can occasionally happen on Wheel of Fortune, of all shows. Typically, the producers will edit out a cycle of turns if it doesn't affect the score or the puzzle (for instance, if all three players consecutively call wrong letters, hit Lose a Turn, and/or hit Bankrupt when they have nothing that they can lose to it). In some instances, host Pat Sajak has made reference to such turns — most often in the form of telling a player that a letter was already called, when the first such instance was edited out; saying that a player hit Bankrupt X amount of times; or making some comment conducive to finally uncovering a letter after several wrong ones were called, even though the home viewer only saw one or two at best.
  • One episode of Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger has a Callback to a deleted scene from The Movie. Apparently someone didn't get the message that that scene would be important later on.

    Music 
  • Mike Oldfield: On Platinum, "Punkadiddle" abruptly begins with Oldfield in the middle of a guitar solo, providing a jarring contrast with the previous track, the tranquil "Into Wonderland". This solo is actually meant to be a segue from "Sally", a track that was replaced by "Into Wonderland" at the last minute due to Virgin Records CEO Richard Branson's hatred of it.
  • Genesis: The closing track of A Trick of the Tail, "Los Endos", opens with a riff from "It's Yourself", a song cut from the album but included as the B-side to "Your Own Special Way" from Wind & Wuthering.

    Mythology and Religion 
  • In The Bible:
    • The final chapter of the Gospel of Luke describes how Jesus appeared to his most ardent disciples following his resurrection. The first to see him are two of his followers walking on a road outside Jerusalem. When they realize that Jesus is back from the dead, they rush back to Jerusalem to find the other disciples and exclaim, "The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!" While some books of the New Testament (and other non-canonical scriptures, as well) do mention that Jesus appeared to Simon Peter separately from his appearance to the larger group of disciples, the Gospel of Luke doesn't actually depict any such scene. For some ancient Christians who only had the Gospel of Luke available to them, this exclamation would have left them puzzled.
    • The Letter of Jude in the New Testament quotes from 1 Enoch, a book attributed to an otherwise obscure patriarch found in just a couple of genealogical tables in the Hebrew Bible. First Enoch was not in the biblical canon for the vast majority of Christians throughout history (and many today are unaware 1 Enoch even exists), making Jude's reference this trope. Luckily, a single Christian community—the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church—did uniquely preserve 1 Enoch in their biblical canon, and some ancient fragments were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, shedding light on not just Jude, but other potential allusions and quotations in the New Testament.
    • There is the lost "Book of Jasher", which is mentioned in Joshua 10:13, which talks about a time when the sun stayed up longer than usual and ends with "Is it not written in the Book Of Jasher"? as a rhetorical question, implying said book would be well-known to the original audience (the ancient Israelites). Alas, nothing of the book has been found, other than what is almost certainly a forgery.

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech:
    • Fans were left scratching their heads over the Liberator, a mysterious 40-ton 'Mech that showed up in the assignment tables in early sourcebooks, most notably the first edition printing of the Mechwarrior RPG. Unlike all the other 'Mechs that appeared in the source books, no reference sheet for the machine ever existed, nor could anyone actually place where the thing came from. Some argued that it was meant to be an early version of the Sentinel, but the Sentinel did not appear in any form until nearly 3 years later. Someone on the design team caught on to this mystery 'Mech and finally gave it an identity after twenty-seven years: the Liberator ended up being a Flawed Prototype that suffered from such devastating Overheating problems that it violently exploded from an ammunition rack detonation within a minute of firing its weapons in earnest.
    • The entry for the Vixen in Technical Readout: 3055 mentioned a mech called the Matador, another mech that fans were left scratching their heads about. There would eventually be a mech named the Matador released seven years later in Technical Readout: 3060, but Word of God from one of the writers would eventually reveal that "Matador" had originally been the name used for the mech that was labeled the Phoenix Hawk IIC in Technical Readout: 3055 and the reference had been missed after the name was changed.
  • In Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes several times quote and borrow elements from a set of three short stories: Broadalbin, Ambrose, and Sosostris, all written by Delta Green co-creator and lead writer Jonh Scott Tynes. The problem is, those three stories were published in a very limited run back in the 90s and reprinted to a few obscure anthology books and magazines. The Delta Green: The Conspiracy kickstater finally financed the re-release of those stories so fans won't be lost on the references.
  • In the Dungeons & Dragons module The Temple of Elemental Evil, there's a sequence involving a paladin in stasis under an illusion that causes him to look like a dormant vampire, who carries a magic sword called Fragarach, heavily based on the sword from Irish mythology. Noticeably, Fragarach is a invokedChaotic Good sword, which harms any Lawful character who tries to touch it—yet in 1st Edition, paladins could only be Lawful Good, raising the question of why the guy owns a sword he can't use without hurting himself. According to Gygax, there were a lot of cuts made to the Temple, and one of those cuts was a variant of the paladin he never published—specifically, one with the alignment changed to Chaotic Good and the Frankish theme swapped out for something more Celtic.
  • The Margaret Weis Marvel Heroic Roleplaying books mention certain characters as being included in supplements that either only existed briefly in PDF format (Professor X in Civil War: X-men Supplement), or never appeared at all (Black Bolt in Annihilation: War of Kings).
  • The Mutants & Masterminds Second Edition Silver Age book has a reference to a Supervillain's Handbook that never materialized. According to Steve Kenson, most of the material got turned into the 3E Gamemaster's Guide instead.
  • The Avalon sourcebook for 7th Sea has a Destiny Spread that grants the character a "1 Point Druidic Secrets Advantage." But Druidic Secrets didn't make it to the printed book.
  • The Second Edition Warhammer 40,000 Codex: Imperial Guard made reference to allying with units from Codex: Squats. The Squat race were an embarrassment that Games Workshop struggled to make work, and were unceremoniously removed from the setting with their planned codex canned just after the Imperial Guard codex came out in print. Something similar happened in fifth edition; Ultramarines (and no other Imperial armies) had a rule that they could ally with Tau to the same degree as with other Imperial armies. GW never did really explain what that was supposed to be about.

    Theatre 

Creators:

  • William Shakespeare had to deal with it (or at least his literary executors did): In the First Folio there are various references to things which were changed from the original "final" texts. For example in Henry IV there's a reference to Oldcastle in the stage directions, which is the name Falstaff first had until some descendants of the real Oldcastle complained. There's also a punny line that only works with the name Oldcastle.
    • There is also Hamlet's "I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw". No-one today has any clue what he is referencing, but scholars figure that it references something common in the 1600s that has been lost to time.
    • In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the Host of the Garter Inn repeatedly references a subplot about three German guests at his Inn. These German characters are never seen in the play, but oddly enough, they eventually steal the Host's horses, thus providing poetic justice for the Host's earlier pranks on Caius and Evans. This detail is so odd that it is only reasonable to assume that some material was cut. Either these Germans befriended Caius and Evans, or, as many scholars theorize, they were simply Caius, Evans, and perhaps Bardolph in disguise.

Works:

  • In "Wonderful Music" from 110 in the Shade, Lizzie ecstatically sings, "Now I'm no longer alone" on a soaring phrase that seems to have been inserted to cover a modulation. In fact, it derives from one of the show's many Cut Songs, File's "Why Can't They Leave Me Alone?"
  • Usually, Anne of Green Gables has Matthew sing a song called "The Words," which is reprised by his sister Marilla near the end. However, an alternate song is provided with the book for amateur productions to use as needed if they want to buy more time for a wig swap for Anne in the next scene. Productions that use "When I Say My Say" instead of "The Words" often keep the latter's reprise intact without any context to what it's supposed to be alluding to.
  • Trekkie Monster from Avenue Q was originally a Trekkie but this was changed to avoid copyright problems. The name remained unchanged.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had a scene deleted after the show had been up and running for a while that resulted in this. Willy Wonka's introductory song "It Must Be Believed to Be Seen" has the lyrics "Beyond this door's a factory/Begat from just a bean". Originally, the phrase "just a bean" — referring to the humble cacao bean that serves as the first ingredient in chocolate — turned up in the Opening Narration of the animated prologue "Creation Overture", so the lyric was a Meaningful Echo further strengthened by the audience realizing that the offscreen narrator was actually Mr. Wonka. "Creation Overture" was cut when the show had its first major cast change, so the echo is now lost.
  • Frozen (2018)
    • The melody of the Adapted Out opening number "Frozen Heart" can be heard as background music in several instances, notably during the new opener "Let The Sun Shine On" when Queen Iduna warns Elsa against using her ice magic in public. Said number also incorporates Elsa and Anna's "One two three together, clap together, snap together" chant from the Cut Song "We Know Better".
    • "True Love" was cut from later productions but its lyrics and melody are still heavily referenced in Reprise Medley song "Colder by the Minute".
  • In Fun Home, Alison's line in "Telephone Wire," "I really tried to deny my feelings for girls," is meant as an echo of an earlier song that was omitted from the Broadway version and its soundtrack.
  • In Gypsy, while most of the music and lyrics of "Rose's Turn" are based on or allude to earlier numbers, the "Momma's talking loud" section is a reference to the Cut Song "Momma's Talkin' Soft".
  • Jasper in Deadland originally had a song called "Agnes", involving Jasper singing about his best friend Agnes and why she was so important to him. The song was eventually cut and replaced with "The Killing", however the much later song "Lifesong" suddenly plays the same melody with similar lyrics when it mentions Agnes.
  • In the second act of Lady in the Dark, Liza picks up a book on astrology Allison had left for her, and starts hearing voices mocking her: "Astrology! The stars! And you're clutching at it! Helplessly! You're clutching at anything!" The third Dream Sequence soon ensues, and Liza was originally to have defended her indecisions in a Western Zodiac-themed Cut Song.
  • In the finale of Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey and Seymour (now part of the plant) sing, "We'll have tomorrow!" This was the title of a Cut Song.
  • Madama Butterfly has a modulating theme heard at two different points in the Intermezzo, which derives from a usually-cut portion of the love duet where Butterfly sings it to the Italian lyrics: "Ma, vi dico in veritĂ , a tutta prima le propose invano."
  • In the final number of My Fair Lady, most of the patter section (starting with "I can see her now...") is a Dark Reprise of a section of Higgins' first-act Pep-Talk Song, "Come To the Ball" ("I can see you now..."). The song was cut during tryouts, but the reprise worked well enough on its own and remained.
  • In On the Town, the verse to "Lonely Town" begins with Gabey singing, "Gabey's comin', Gabey's comin' to town." Both the words and the tune of this were an ironic Call-Back to a song cut from the original Broadway production, though later productions have frequently reinstated it.
  • The Ring of the Nibelung: Drafts of The Young Siegfried had Alberich bringing a horde of Nibelungs with him to claim the Ring after Fafner's death, and Siegfried, once he emerges from the cave with the Ring, using its power to order the Nibelungs to disperse (as Alberich does in Das Rheingold). Wagner ultimately decided not to include a Nibelung ensemble in Siegfried, but this helps explain Hagen's otherwise mysterious explanation in Götterdämmerung that the Nibelungs have become slaves to Siegfried.
  • Ruddigore: Originally in the second act, Old Adam was to have changed his name to Gideon Crawle when he turned evil along with his master. This change of name was undone, but one reference to Gideon Crawle inexplicably remained.
  • Due to time constraints, many stage productions of Sweeney Todd cut the second part of the contest scene between Todd and Pirelli, where they compete to pull a person's tooth quickly and cleanly. However, few if any productions alter Todd's line before the contest, that he "can shave a cheek and pull a tooth with ten times more dexterity" than Pirelli. Or even Pirelli's singing "To shave-a the face/to pull-a the toot."
  • In Vanities; The Musical, the intro melody of "Fly Into the Future" is a vestige of the cut song "Nothing Like a Friend". Likewise, the coda of "Looking Good" from the Off-Broadway production and cast album has the line "Hey there, beautiful", the title of another cut song.
  • Wicked:
    • One Cut Song was called "I Hope You're Happy". "Defying Gravity" contains references to the song at the start and end with the "I hope you're happy!/I hope you're happy now!" lines.
    • A deleted song, "Making Good", is referenced by Madame Morrible in the intro of "The Wizard and I", the song that replaced it.
    • The line "We deserve each other" in "Dancing Through Life" is a leftover reference to its precursor, "Which Way is the Party?".

    Theme Parks 
  • To this day, Disney's Animal Kingdom contains several references to Beastly Kingdom - an area in the park that was going to be themed around mythical animals, but was scrapped at the last minute. References to this area include a "Unicorn" section in the parking lot, a dragon silhouette appearing in the park's logo, a stone dragon head on the entry gates, a dragon-shaped fountain that can be seen from the bridge to Pandora – The World of Avatar, and lastly a dragon cave that can be viewed along the long boardwalk from Pandora to Africa.
  • In E.T. Adventure at Universal Studios, Bontanicus tells the guests to bring E.T. home with either a spaceship or their bikes. When the attraction first opened, there was a special vehicle for disabled guests that resembled E.T.'s mothership, which is what Bontanicus is referring to when he says "spaceship". For unknown reasons, the special vehicles were taken out at some pointnote , leaving this part of his holographic distress call a bit of a headscratcher.
  • The queue music for Splash Mountain includes an instrumental version of "Sooner or Later", the Cut Song that was replaced by "Burrow's Lament".
  • The name of The Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash was a bit more relevant earlier in the design process, when it was originally envisioned as a trackless dark ride. It was changed to a tracked design later, making the "Off the Leash" part lose its meaning as a pun.

    Video Games 
  • Arknights originally displayed the success rate when upgrading an operator's Potential, but since the tokens used for this were guaranteed to work every time, it was permenantly fixed at 100%. This feature was presumably a holdover from an earlier version of the game where the tokens had a chance of failing, but in the final game it no longer served a purpose and was eventually removed in a UI overhaul.
  • The Binding of Isaac:
    • Lil Dumpy debuted in the Antibirth Game Mod as a friendly version of the Dumpling enemies that the mod also added. When Antibirth was officially ported into the main game with Repentance, Lil Dumpy was added but the Dumpling enemies were cut, leaving the reference stranded.
    • Antibirth added an item called Jacob's Ladder, a reference to the Biblical story of Jacob seeing a ladder that leads to Heaven. However, Afterbirth+ already added an item called Jacob's Ladder, based on the electric phenomenon. The Antibirth one was renamed The Stairway when it was ported, but the sprite is still obviously a ladder and it's still unlocked by playing as Jacob & Esau.
  • In BioShock, the crawlspace behind a stall in the Farmer's Market contains two corpses hanging on meathooks. This was supposed to relate to a plot about a serial killer operating around the time of Rapture's fall that never went anywhere.
  • Although the Tau Cannon was redesigned between the mod and Steam releases of Black Mesa, the whiteboard in the room it's obtained still shows the schematics for the old version.
  • Child of Light's map includes the Isle of Nereida, which was supposedly planned to be the location of the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, but was left out of gameplay due to the game being Christmas Rushed. In the released game, following the battle with Nox in the Palace of the Sun beneath the Cynbel Sea and Aurora's death/resurrection cutscene, the party goes straight to fighting the Final Boss Umbra in some sort of airborne castle ruin.
  • Colorgrave Universe:
    • Prodigal:
      • Each marryable character was going to have their own small dungeon that would be exclusive to them, and would end with automatic marriage rather than you having to propose. Only the Bjerg Castle, for Mariana, was left in, with the other characters either having sidequests or segments that didn't end with automatic marriage, or involving larger dungeons which were required to be completed as part of the post-game quest.
      • Speaking of the Bjerg Castle, the first room in the Howling Bjerg shows an unreachable door. You were meant to be able to exit through the locked door at the Bjerg Castle and find out that it was that same unreachable door, but there were problems with getting it to work with the code.
      • Oran was going to have a crossbow at one point, which is why Shadow Oran uses one when you fight him in Daemon's Dive, but that idea was scrapped because the developers didn't want to make things too easy by giving the player the ability to shoot projectiles.
    • Curse Crackers: For Whom The Belle Toils:
      • The flying pig seen only on the loading screen and nowhere else in the game was originally meant to be included as part of a scrapped boss battle.
      • The fourth stage of the Swamp has a hidden block that requires the Blaze Cupcake to break it, and leads to the area where Vivian is found, intended as an easier way to get there if you can't make the long jump from the other side. This was added to make it easier for players to find Vivian because freeing her was originally required to progress the game, but testers were still having trouble knowing where to go, so this was changed to Jacky having freed her offscreen if you completed the Library without having done so yourself.
  • Dark Souls III:
    • While not enough to call a Dub-Induced Plot Hole, there is changes in the translation that don't quite gel with the actual motivations and gameplay of Pontiff Sulyvahn and Aldrich. In the original Japanese, Sulyvahn is a greedy, power obsessed madman using Cathedral of the Deep to assume control of Irithyll and Anor Londo, and is forced to cede Anor Londo to Aldrich when he loses to him. That's why Irithyll has so little of the Deep's influence because he just got back and why he has tattered clothes, enters the fight acerbically but gets instantly aggressive when you approach him. As the English translation made them a Big Bad Duumvirate, many of these little details are off but not full plot holes.
    • The riches laden and flooded arena of Yhorm the Giant is at odds with his characterization of a humble and generous leader who offered himself to the First Flame to quell the Profaned Flame. He was originally conceived as a pirate, which fits his arena much more.
  • Dawn of War: In the first game, stealth units couldn't attack while hiding, and could be detected by squad leader units along with minefields (as the tooltips said). In the second expansion (Dark Crusade), stealth units can attack invisibly, but there are only a few units capable of detecting them (and few commanders among them), but the tooltips still say heroes and commanders can detect stealth units and minefields.
  • Deltarune:
    • In Chapter 2, Berdly's first boss fight takes place on a roller coaster. If you use the Bump command, the text says "[member] will attempt to bump into Berdly's car!", and they hit his car. This act can never fail or miss, and there are no obstacles, despite the wording of "attempt" suggesting the command won't always work. The game has unused graphics and code for randomly-spawning obstacles on the track that the characters would ram into instead of Berdly, which aren't in the final version.
    • After defeating Spamton NEO, Susie mentions something about seeing weird "hands" during the fight. An unused attack actually featured hands coming up from the sides of the screen.
  • Destiny and Destiny 2: The lore includes periodic mentions of a location known as "Cassini" or "the First Fleet", which is apparently the wrecks of a bunch of ancient, Pre-Collapse colonial vessels in the rings of Saturn that got wrecked while trying to flee the Collapse and have been there ever since. These sparse mentions of them are all we ever get and the only evidence they even exist because Cassini was originally one the areas the player was able to visit before it got cut during production.
  • In Deus Ex, three in-game newspapers (written by in-universe publisher APR) refer to a place called the "Zhou Enlai Lunar Mining Complex," which is detailed as a place that was fully-staffed and running normally... until an unspecified incident onboard the station led to one of its payloads crashing back to Earth, killing 2,000 people in the Nigerian city of Ibadan. The newspapers are the only reference to an unimplemented "moon" mission, which would have seen lead character JC Denton travel to the complex to face off against a hostile AI named "ADA". This was initially intended to be the last mission of the game, but was cut prior to beta versions, though elements of it remain in the game — notably, enough evidence exists to state that the Ocean Lab level is a repurposed "moon" stage, now set underwater instead of within a crater, as the outside of the facility shows.
  • In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you were originally going to have the options to kill or spare some of the main bosses of the storyline, but this feature was ultimately dropped. Despite this, at the end of the fight with Yelena, she's still alive for a bit and a character asks Adam if he's going to try to resuscitate her, and he says he'll think about it... and then the cutscene ends with her already dead.
  • Disco Elysium:
    • The stripy yellow and blue background to the Detective's portrait was the pattern of his tie in his first revealed design, from before it was reimagined as the paisley, potentially animate Horrific Necktie.
    • The Detective is noted at several points to have heavily scarred hands, but no explanation is given for them (other than that some of it is nicotine damage). A Dummied Out piece of Visual Calculus in the first release of the game is the only explanation for them:
      Perception (Sight) - But the most vicious mark hides inside your weaker hand, as you open your palms — a scar on the left covers your life line, its contour so freakishly pale.
      Visual Calculus (Medium 10) - It could be a defensive wound, i.e. from grabbing a knife.
    • There's a running theme of the Detective noticing unsafe buildings around him, such the high Visual Calculus check on the wooden bridge towards Rue de Saint Ghislane, and the Perception orb warning about the crumbling arch on the rooftop accessible through Cuno's hideout. The Dummied Out Ledger case file "THE COLLAPSING TENEMENT" reveals that members of the RCM are required to take a 'civic specification' in order to round out their skillset, and the Detective's was building safety regulations, explaining why he's so knowledgeable about these.
    • At the end of the game, when Kim describes your behaviour to Jean, he will tell him you haven't been drinking in the past week if you either 1) have not used alcohol ever in the game, or 2) have the Thought "Wasteland of Reality" internalised — even if you had used alcohol before (or even after) you did that. Considering the level of Developer's Foresight in play, this seems like a weird inconsistency. This is because, earlier in development, the "Wasteland of Reality" Thought would be gained if the player did not drink in the first two days of the game, then agreed with Endurance to carry on being sober — so it wouldn't have been possible to have internalised the "Wasteland of Reality" thought if you had used alcohol. In the finished game, "Wasteland of Reality" is earned by agreeing with one of two NPC characters that you need to quit drinking, which is more forgiving to players who wanted to experiment with alcohol before discarding it, but also means Kim's line is a seemingly out-of-character lie.
    • A more detailed summary of the story of "Sixteen Days in Coldest April" (and therefore the history on the Yugo-Graad riots) is only available when looking at the jacket of the book in a Dummied Out scenario where the book is purchased at the bookshop than in the scene where you, er, actually read the agonising, enervating book.
    • When looking at the pile of books in the island fortress, there's a surprisingly tricky check to determine what of any interest is in them, and the check's result isn't anything particularly interesting (all it allows you to determine is that there's a lot of academic theory books from Communist presses). At some point the check would have allowed you to find and take a book to actually read ("Un Pays Infernal") which would have given you a Communism point if you read it, not that your character can make any sense of it. This was cut (possibly making inventory assets for the book was too much?), making the check a bit anticlimactic. note 
  • In Driver, the music tracks "Los Angeles Day" and "Los Angeles Escape at Day" are never used for their intended purpose, as LA lacks a daytime setting in-game due to graphical limitations, though they still play during certain Undercover missions in the other cities.
  • In Duke Nukem 64:
    • The gun shop in the second level, which was originally a porno bookstore, still has a peep show in its back hall, albeit with more modestly dressed women.
    • The Alien Queen is Adapted Out, but her Protector Drones appear as "Alien Beasts" in a few levels.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Morrowind has an Imperial Legion quest which is only partly removed. It is possible to have the dialogue options for the quest appear when speaking with the quest giver, but as the rest of the quest has been cut, you can never actually complete it.
    • Oblivion:
      • There's a quest hook that can be added to your list about the Black Horse Courier needing more staff. The quest itself was never added to the game.
      • There are also references scattered in odd places (a journal entry here, a sign there) of a town called Sutch, near Kvatch. Sutch never made it into the final game, but not all references of it were scrubbed before launch.
  • In Escape Velocity Nova, the Universe Chronology included in the bundled documentation mentioned something called TCTLIDS being discovered and used to create a Fantastic Drug called FATE. The game's FAQ reveals that TCTLIDS was supposed to stand for "The Creature That Lives In Deep Space" before being removed from the Nova universe during its development.
  • In Euro Truck Simulator 2, most cities contain a bus station you can enter and drive around. This is a very odd inclusion for a game about trucking; entering the bus stations are required to achieve 100% map exploration, but otherwise they have absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Their inclusion is a leftover from the original plans for the game; the intent after the game's release was that its map could be recycled to create an "Euro Coach Simulator", hence the inclusion of places you can park coaches. Since Euro Truck became a big Sleeper Hit however, SCS Software instead chose to focus on expanding the game and left the coach simulation in the dust, only very occasionally teasing the idea that they might eventually add coaches as DLC at some point.
  • EverQuest has a few odd examples:
    • In the Misty Thicket (the Halfling newbie area) there are several quests involving killing goblins and retrieving items from them. One Quest Giver says something about goblins using some kind of grappling hooks to scale the great wall that bisects the zone, and asks you to give him one if you find any. After more than two decades no one has found a device that matches what he describes, meaning it was likely Dummied Out and this line was left in by mistake
    • There is one quest where a character asks you for "bull elephant tusks". While bull elephants do exist in-game, there is no such item as "bull elephant tusks". However, mammoth tusks, in addition to being dropped by wooly mammoths, are also dropped by bull elephants, and players correctly inferred that that was what the Quest Giver really wanted. The text was later fixed so she asks for mammoth tusks instead.
  • In Fallout, a holodisk in the Glow details Forced Evolutionary Virus experiments on raccoons and mentions that two pairs escaped. This hints at the Tribe of the S'Lanter, intelligent mutated raccoons which were cut from the game.
  • Considering the sheer amount of content cut from Fallout: New Vegas, there are quite a few of these:
    • The developers created an elaborate series of symbols based on actual "hobo code" that were to be placed on various walls of buildings and settlements, indicating whether an area was dangerous, was worth looting, had clean drinking water, etc., with the player presumably learning the meaning of the symbols somewhere in the game. For whatever reason, the "hobo code" system was cut, but not before someone on the dev team placed a large "Doctor here" symbol on the side of the New Vegas Clinic.
    • Besides Jane, Mr. House originally had another female-programmed private Securitron named Marilyn based on Marilyn Monroe in the Lucky 38 penthouse, who was cut late in development due to issues with her voiceover. However, Veronica still says "I was surprised [House] only had the two robot sex slaves." Marilyn and Jane also both appear on the 2 of Diamonds card in the Collector's Edition card deck.
    • The same card deck features Ulysses, who later became the Big Bad of the DLC in a role quite possibly inspired by his mysterious reputation among fans who noticed his card.
    • After killing the Fiend leader Driver Nephi, Bert Gunnarsson says he hopes his soul finds peace, even though the dialogue option where Bert talks about his past with Nephi was disabled.
    • One of Rotface's tips is "There's a guy out on the main drag who sells second hand adventuring gear. He's got an okay selection, but where does it come from?" which refers to a cut merchant in Freeside named Tom Dooley.
  • In Fe, singing near one of the stranded fish in the drained swamp brings up a song icon that doesn't match any of those that the titular protagonist learns, likely indicating a Dummied Out animal language.
  • The Final Fantasy III 3D remake had a large amount of cutscenes scrapped prior to the final release. While the game's light plot means that most of these aren't too noticeable, they do explain some things about the final game:
    • At one point, in response to Arc mentioning how he would like to ride on an airship again someday, Luneth mutters that he doesn't have too fond memories of their last ride. While the context makes it sound like Luneth is referring to earlier when the party crashed their airship, the unused text implies that it is instead a reference to how Luneth gets sick on airships, which would have been a Running Gag throughout the game.
    • After crashing Cid's airship, Luneth mentions that it feels like they've done it before, despite having never rode in an airship before. Later, Cid reveals that he and the party are actually from the surface world which was cut off by the darkness, after which that entire plot thread is practically dropped. Unused text suggests that it was meant to continue further, with Luneth getting deja vu from the Wrecked Ship and Ingus discovering his home town on the surface world, culminating in Luneth and Ingus privately discussing their vague memories of the airship ride later.
    • Paying close attention to the scenes with the Four Fellows shows Ingus interacting with them the most, both in Amur and in the sewers. This is because an earlier version of the arc had Ingus, fed up with the party's light-heartedness, go into the sewers alone, where the Fellows would serve as a contrast.
    • Towards the end of the game, one of the Warriors of Darkness makes a speech about how light used to exist around a core of darkness and now darkness exists around a core of light. In context, this seems to refer to the Cloud of Darkness being a Yin-Yang Bomb. However, this is actually a reference to the backstory's Flood of Light, and describing how the sun used to revolve around the earth until it happened and reversed the relationship. This was primarily exposited by Doga and Desch, but the cuts mean that only a single reference from the latter, a mention on how the Floating Continent will be "flung away from the sun" if the Tower of Owen's reactor fails, survived.
  • Final Fantasy IX:
    • The optional Memoria boss Hades has a lot of eye imagery on his design — which resembles the motifs found in Terra and Memoria. This is left over from when Hades was planned to be the final boss, but he was replaced with Necron late in development.
    • Mt. Gulug uses a remixed version of the theme of Gurgu Volcano from Final Fantasy. This is because Gurgu was mistranslated as "Gulug."
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • There is a questline in which you can receive the Haurchefaunt emote which makes you do a huge grin while doing a couple of hand gestures. This was a behavior Haurchefaunt would do when he's excited to see the player character in a cutscene that was removed from non-Japanese versions to make him look less like the Chivalrous Pervert he was supposed to be.
    • Prior to 6.1, the final missions of A Realm Reborn had the Player Character being the lead of a squad of elite adventurers. While Castrum Meredenium and the Praetorium still played with multiple characters, Cape Westwind is now a solo instance that is still claimed to have you as the leader of said team.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade has a line claiming that Lloyd's sword can drain the life from those he faces in both the Japanese and international versions. In the Japanese version, he has a Runesword, which does indeed have Life Drain properties, but the international release changed it to a Light Brand (likely to make the fight less annoying), which has no such properties.
    • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn features a localization-only example. In a Base Conversation explaining the weapon forging system, the merchants mention selling unneeded weapons for scrap metal, and offer to not charge you for the materials of the first forged weapon you make. In the Japanese version, forging weapons required "forging points" in addition to gold, and these were obtained by selling weapons. The English version decided to remove the forging points mechanic entirely, but didn't alter this conversation. Similarly, the description of the Silver Card item (buy items at half price) says "Does not earn any Training Points" in the English version, which is a reference to an Obvious Rule Patch on the item in the Japanese version (otherwise you could get infinite forging points by buying a weapon, selling it, buying it again for the same price, repeat) that is meaningless with the system removed.
    • Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
      • The Flame Emperor bears the Crest of Flames, but never puts it to practical use outside of its minor in-battle effect, its significance to the plot being only thematic. The developers revealed that in the original concept, they were supposed to be a direct rival to Byleth and could interfere with their Divine Pulse ability.
      • If any students fell in battle during Part 1 and the player chooses the Silver Snow route, at the start of Chapter 13 Edelgard will mention that some of her former classmates defected to her side. It was originally planned that any student defeated during Part 1 would become an enemy in Part 2 of Silver Snow, but this ended up being cut.
      • It's possible that the Emperor class was intended to have access to magic. It doesn't in the final game, but it still has a 10% Magic growth. This also would've made Edelgard's spell learnset, which is one of the few to include dark magic, more significant.
  • Forza Motorsport 4 Dummied Out Forza 3's Rally di Positano course, which was a 7.5-mile tarmac rally based on Amalfi Coast, but reassigned the Rally di Positano name to the normal Amalfi circuit for some reason.
  • Through no fault of the developers, this is now the case with Uber Jason and the spaceship Grendel being accessible in Virtual Cabin 2.0 of Friday the 13th: The Game. Because of a lawsuit surrounding the legal status of the franchise, all future expansions and content for the game have been cancelled, among them a stage based on Jason X and its particular incarnation of Jason.
  • In the original version of Freedom Planet's script, Carol and Milla didn't get along, and later Lilac commended them for agreeing on something for once. While the relationship was revised to be more cordial, Lilac's comment remained in the game, making no sense at all. A later patch removed this line as well.
  • GoldenEye (1997):
    • The briefing for the Frigate mission says that Xenia Onatopp is on the boat, but the player never encounters her here (she was also on the boat in the movie, but Bond never ran into her there either).
    • Several multiplayer-only character models were obviously intended for the single player. These include multiple civilian models intended for "Streets" (likely cut due to memory limitations), and a Saint Petersburg police officer (likely intended to be fought as regular enemies in "Statue" and/or "Streets", and possibly cut due to objections over James Bond being able to kill policemen).
  • In Gran Turismo 5 and 6, the downloadable track Special Stage Route X has a strange infield course featuring cylindrical tunnels, half-pipes, banked turns, and spiral ramps that was unfortunately never implemented as a playable circuit, but is partially visible from the main oval (as well as in certain promotional videos) and has a number of leftover assets in the game's code, including a track map and a loading screenshot of the half-pipe section. In GT Sport, the visible portions of the unused infield are still modeled, complete with the "End of Cant" signs, though the other assets have since been removed.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:
    • The mission "Doberman" was repurposed from a completely different mission that was cut, which would've seen Tenpenny ordering CJ to murder an informant named Poncho to prevent him from potentially talking to the DEA about C.R.A.S.H.'s corruption. This was changed to Sweet asking CJ to help kill a drug dealer who had been selling to the Grove Street Families. Two major aspects from the original mission remain despite now lacking their necessary context. First, the name "Doberman" references the original introductory cutscene, where Tenpenny gave it as a nickname for CJ. Second, after finding the drug dealer, he exclaims that Tenpenny set him up. This dialogue makes perfect sense for Poncho, but is an odd non-sequitur when said by the drug dealer.
    • In the mission "Photo Opportunity", CJ and Cesar are shouting at each other while doing the stakeout, which stands out as bizarre given that they are trying to sneakily take photos of a meeting across the street. In the beta, you were supposed to take photos from a helicopter, where the shouting makes more sense.
    • In the last mission, main villain Tenpenny angrily calls CJ a "motherfucking piece of shit gangbanging cocksucker." While funny on its own, it was originally a Call-Back to a Dummied Out line in the first cutscene of the game where after hearing Carl swear in anger, Tenpenny sarcastically replies with "Don't swear Carl, you motherfucking piece of shit gangbanging cocksucker." Since the prologue line was dummied out, the final mission line becomes this.
  • The name of the Combine Charger in Half-Life: Alyx is a reference to a cut behavior in which they could pull out a stun baton and charge the player for a melee attack.
  • Halo:
    • In Halo: Combat Evolved, Cortana's "This cave is not a natural formation" line was often mocked for being a case of Captain Obvious, as the cave in question is very obviously artificial. This was a consequence of the game's script being handled by Microsoft's Franchise Division, who were tasked with completing it within a few days only using descriptions of each level and without even being able to look at the game itself. In this case, a writer only had outdated concept art that showed a more natural-looking cave to go by, and felt the clarification was necessary.
    • In Halo 2, the chapter where the Flood first appear is titled "Juggernaut", which was the name of a Dummied Out Flood monster.
    • Also in 2, Tartarus captures Commander Miranda Keyes and Sergeant Johnson. The Chief at one point says of this "That brute has the Index. And Miranda and Johnson." Originally there was going to some Ship Tease between her and the Chief, with him eventually being on First-Name Basis with her. The ship tease was dropped, but the line was kept; leading to the otherwise stoic and professional Master Chief referring to his commanding officer by her first name.
    • In Halo 4, one idea for the Promethean enemies was that they would have Chess Motifs, with each enemy type representing a chess piece. The Knights are the only remnant of that idea. The Pawns and Bishops were rechristened as the Crawlers and Watchers respectively, while the Rook, Queen and King were all cut.
    • In Halo 5: Guardians, much of the Foreshadowing for Cortana's Face–Heel Turn was cut from the dialogue of Halo 4. Had those lines remained, there would have been a much more gradual build-up for Cortana's feelings regarding the underutilization of AI and their treatment by humanity.
    • In Halo Infinite, one of the audio logs makes reference to the Banished running supply convoys using a vehicle called a "Skiff". The Skiff was intended to be a Banished troop-transport vehicle usable in-game, but it was cut. That isn't the only reference to the Skiff either: There's a Mega Construx set based on it, and you can still find the odd mangled wreckage of it scattered around the map.
  • A Hat in Time:
    • In the original release, the Mafia Boss's pre-fight dialogue included a line about how he hadn't seen a Time Piece in over a hundred years, an odd detail that was never brought up again. This was likely a leftover from the game's scrapped Time Travel mechanics — the player would have originally been able to visit the game's stages across different time periods, including a version of Mafia Town in the distant past. Without that context, the line no longer made sense and so was quickly patched out.
    • The option at the end of the game to give a Time Piece to Mustache Girl notes that if you do so, Hat Kid's ship may not have enough power to get back home. Nothing comes of this, as it is a leftover set-up for the game's original True Ending where Hat Kid grows up.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic III: The opening cinematic for Armageddon's Blade shows Gelu, Catherine, and Roland entering an underground bunker that's lit with electric lamps and finding the titular blade in the bunker's center. This makes no sense with the final campaign, where Armageddon's Blade was forged by demons and the heroes take it after defeating them. However, the original plot was completely different; originally it would've centered around the Necromancers of Deyja uncovering Lost Technology from the Ancients and using it to try and take over the world. Armageddon's Blade was also Ancient technology, and the good guys would have to go on a quest to retrieve it and use it to destroy the Heavenly Forge. The entire plot was scrapped due to heavy fan backlash, but it was too late to make a new cinematic by that point.
  • Hi-Fi RUSH: The giant robot that Kale uses in a cutscene to attack Chai and Korsica is The Unfought because its boss battle was cut from the game for time and budget reasons. It still appears in that cutscenes obviously, and there's still heaps of Foreshadowing for a big fight with it just like all the other bosses, but you will never see it in-game. In fact, the devs even went out of their way to add more foreshadowing for it after they cut the boss, simply because they thought it was funny to do so.
  • The 2003 game of The Hobbit originally featured a boss fight with a cave troll near the end of "Over Hill and Under Hill", which was scrapped, although references to it are found throughout the level.
  • Hunt Down the Freeman is filled with these, but the most notorious involves the cut character Brad, who was originally supposed to be Nick's foil, having all his lines given to Nick regardless of context, resulting in Nick constantly flip-flopping on his opinion of Mitchell.
  • Journey to Silius was originally developed as a Licensed Game of The Terminator, but converted to an original IP after the rights were yanked. A few references to the license remain in the game, including the intro cutscene and music, the helicopter boss resembling an Aerial Hunter-Killer, a Tank-Tread Mecha that looks like the ground-based HK's, and the SkeleBot 9000 Final Boss.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The instruction manual in the English version of the first game states that the Pols Voice enemy hated loud noises. Most players had assumed that the monster in question was weak to the Recorder, but when they used it, the monster wasn't affected. This is a case of a literal translation from the Japanese version of the game where Japanese players had to shout into the microphone on one of the Famicom's controllers in order to defeat Pols Voice, a feature that American NES controllers did not have. This was changed in the American and European versions so that a single arrow can kill a Pols Voice instantly and you can kill multiples at once if they're lined up.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening:
      • In the original version of the game, one part of the Chain of Deals has you returning a bikini top to a mermaid, and if you try to dive underwater in the area immediately around her before getting it, she'll call you a pervert. In the English translation, the bikini top was bowdlerised into a pearl necklace, and her message for diving underwater near her has her instead simply tell you that she's already checked the immediate area for it. The narration text still stutters and acts embarassed when you acquire the pearl necklace, however.
      • One Hippo in the Animal Village in an artist's house sits down after Link enters the house. In the Japanese version, she was posing nude for a painting, and wearing a robe around her, leading to her covering herself up once Link enters.
    • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the Wind Temple and the Ice Temple were respectively replaced by the Forest Temple and the Water temple during development yet their respective Medallions still have a whirlwind and a snowflake on it. Their sections in Ganon's Tower also feature fans and ice.
    • Four Swords Adventures was meant to be a prequel to A Link to the Past and feature the Imprisoning War before Miyamoto nixed that idea late in development and Hyrule Historia would officially put the two games in different timelines. Besides the graphical style and the soundtrack of Four Swords Adventures paying homage to A Link to the Past, the final game still has references to the original plan such as the origin story of Ganon's Trident, the presence of the Knights of Hyrule, and the last level being the Dark World. Dummied Out dialogues also mention the Master Sword.
    • Although the Fire Rod was scrapped from The Minish Cap in favor of the Flame Lantern, the European version of the Ice Wizzrobe's figurine still advises you to "hit them with your Fire Rod!"
    • A screenshot from the box art of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is from a beta version and displays the scrapped Magic Meter. This also explains the otherwise useless Green Chu Jelly you can get by killing a Green Chu in the Cave of Ordeals in the Wii version of the game.
    • In Breath of the Wild, Link acquires the Sheikah Slate at the beginning of the game; a tablet-like device which gives him access to his rune powers and the game's map in-universe. The Sheikah Slate was envisioned when the game was still a Wii U exclusive with significant gamepad integration; the player would be able to quickly switch between runes and look at the map on the gamepad without pausing, making the Sheikah Slate a Diegetic Interface for those functions within the game. When Breath of the Wild was ported to the Switch, the gamepad functionality was completely gutted, but the Sheikah Slate was so integral to the game's design by that point that it stuck around, just without the obvious parallel to the gamepad.
  • The Lion King contains several levels and enemies inspired by concept art that never made it into the film, including the scenes that were eventually truncated into "Hakuna Matata". You can see a bit about it here, with Louis Castle of Westwood Studios (who worked on the game).
  • One of Marathon's manual images is a Hunter accompanied by a rejected creature known as the Hound. A wall texture resembling this creature can be seen in the Pfhor Ship levels. Also, the Hunters' alert howl was originally intended for the Hounds, while the Hunters themselves would have used a different sound.
  • Mass Effect:
    • Saren's Obviously Evil Borg-like appearance that just goes inexplicably unmentioned and the subplots about proving his guilt and him letting Sovereign implant cybernetics in him are all the vestiges of an aspect that didn't make it into the final game. Originally, Saren's transformation into a cyborg/Turian-Geth-Reaper hybrid was supposed to be gradually occurring over the course of the game; at the start he'd look like a normal Turian, by the time you face him on Virmire (where he has dialogue about upgrading himself but refusing to let Sovereign touch him) he would have rudimentary cybernetics, and then during the big finale (after Sovereign has almost fully indoctrinated him and manipulated him into accepting Reaper-tech implants) he would have the look he does in the final game, a half-man-half-machine abomination with exceedingly obvious and destructive "upgrades" that make him look like a monster. Essentially, you would watch Saren's indoctrination in the process of it happening. Time and budget restraints put a nix on that, so Saren ended up using his final, post-indoctrination model for the entire game, which has the unfortunate result of making the Citadel Council look like blithering idiots for not being able to discern that something is up with Saren, Shepard's team to not look much better since they never acknowledge the obvious while trying to prove Saren murdered Nihlus and is working with the Geth, and Nihlus himself to seem downright crazy for not noticing that his longtime friend, mentor, and colleague looked blatantly different. As originally scripted, Saren looked perfectly normal during the Eden Prime incident and first Council meeting, and with this in mind all those scenes make much more sense; Nihlus let his guard down because Saren looked and sounded like he always did so there seemed to be nothing wrong, Shepard and company had no physical proof of Saren's corruption without him looking different, and the Council had no reason to doubt the word of their old, trusted agent when he seemingly hasn't changed at all.
    • Tali's recruitment mission and the Arrival DLC side-quest both have lots of discussion about strange "Dark Energy" phenomena that has odd effects on suns, amongst other things. This inexplicably never comes up again afterwards. That's because the whole Dark Energy thing was supposed to be a major plot point and an important part of the Reapers' motivations, but was largely written out after series creator and original lead writer Drew Karpyshyn left and was replaced with Mac Walters. Tali's recruitment and Arrival ended up being the only vestiges of it that made it into the finished games.
  • MediEvil:
    • the cutscene at the start of the Ghost Ship level shows Sir Dan fleeing from a dragon and ends with a purple worm coming out of Dan's skull to warn him about a vulture. The worm never appeared before nor again making its presence a borderline Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. Morten the Earthworm was meant to play a larger role in the game, and was even supposed to have his own level to himself, where he would help Dan unlock the door to the Asylum by going through the keyhole and getting the key from inside. In the PS4 remake, he gets his own entry in the Book of Gallowmere.
    • A book in the Sleeping Village mentions the cut level "The Silver Woods".
  • The instruction manual for the Nintendo 64 port of Mortal Kombat Trilogy erroneously described Rain as a human former member of the Lin Kuei who had become a mercenary, even though the character was stated to be an Edenian aligned with Shao Kahn in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. This was originally the bio for Tremor, a cut character who was later repurposed for the ill-fated Mortal Kombat: Special Forces spin-off.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 features Deadpan Snarker wizard Sand and Pyromaniac sorceress Qara as companions who detest each other. Just before the Final Boss, whichever one of them you have less Influence Points with will betray you to join the bad guys. For Qara, who loves burning whatever gets in her way and hates being told what to do, this makes perfect sense. If Sand betrays you, however, he will weirdly insist that Qara is somehow more dangerous than the Big Bad. This refers to a Dummied Out scene where he confronts her and she reveals that she is significantly more powerful than she appears the rest of the time in order to intimidate him.
  • In Ori and the Blind Forest, after meeting the Spirit Tree, Sein says that the Element of Waters is "beyond the Spider Coves". While in the finalized game, there is no actual area or dungeon given this name, there is a spider web-themed room in Hollow Grove that is perhaps a leftover from a larger concept.
  • In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, several remnants of cut content can be observed:
    • Similar to the Spider Coves in its predecessor, the jungle-themed transitional area between Wellspring Glades, the Wellspring itself, and Baur's Reach is a cut-down version of a much larger zone that would have been titled The Riverlands.
    • The Windswept Wastes has a hidden area with a non-functional elevator, which would have been the entrance to the Dummied Out Gorlek Mines shown in the 2018 gameplay trailer and mentioned by a couple NPCs.
    • Also in the Windswept Wastes, a temple-like structure with a door, similar to but different from the Windtorn Ruins, is seen in the background but is never explored. Development notes describe a cut desert oasis area, which this may have been the entrance to.
    • The Windtorn Ruins, which in the final game is just a linear story exposition followed by the infamously difficult Sand Worm Escape Sequence, was going to be a full length dungeon where Ori would use an upgraded version of the Burrow ability to bore through rocks. In early releases of the game, references to this could be seen in the form of inaccessible areas on the map.
  • Pac-Guy: The first episode of the second entry of the series has Pac-Guy fighting against the BORD, a parody of the Borg from Star Trek. Their presence is oddly inconsistent, with their ship being destroyed after the third stage, and actual BORD only being fought in the seventh stage, with most other stages seemingly being completely unrelated to them (a few do try to tie them in with flavour text though), before their ship makes an Unexplained Recovery, and their king blows himself up, after which the entire faction vanishes for the rest of the series. Their oddly inconsistent presence is a remnant of the game's original plan to be a full Star Trek parody, a plan that lost focus when series creator Brian Quarfoth lost his grandfather during the game's development.
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King:
    • One room in Bowser's Castle contains weapons used by Spikes: their spike balls, and their spiked rollers from Super Mario 3D World. While origami Spikes in this game can spit up and throw spike balls, the rollers are never seen. Despite this, there's a Dummied Out model associated with them that depicts this same roller.
    • The game's museum says that Nipper Plants can spit fire at Mario as an attack. However, in gameplay, their only attack is to bite him. Dummied Out data shows that the enemy is programmed to use a fire attack, but the attack has no actual data, so it's never used.
  • Pizza Tower: At the end of the game, the player is judged by Peppino on their completion percentage, with a different End-Game Results Screen depending on how well and/or how fast you did it. A number of judgement screens seem like non-sequiturs, because originally the player would have also been graded on specific gameplay statistics instead of merely completion percentage and speed. "Confused" (which has Peppino asking the player if they thought not killing enemies granted points), was meant for players which actively avoided killing enemies. "That's the One, Officer!" (a battered Peppino identifying the player to a pig cop) was originally given for players that hurt Peppino a ludicrous amount of times. No Judgement" (Peppino just shrugging), was originally given for players that did not fulfill the requirements for any other Peppino Judgement. In the final game, all three are just given to certain completion percentages (50% to 61%, 61% to 72%, and 72% to 83%, respectively).
  • PokĂ©mon:
    • The Raichu trade in the Cinnabar research building in PokĂ©mon Red and Blue was a combination of this and a translation gaffe. The guy says that the Raichu you traded him went and evolved. Though it sounds like a reference to the scrapped Gorochu, it's actually because the Japanese versions had a Kadabra as the PokĂ©mon being traded. It appears the translators just translated the dialogue without realizing the PokĂ©mon species had been changed.
    • Trainer classes like the Rocket Grunts, Tamer, and a couple others having whips in their sprites was a holdover from scrapped ideas about Trainers fighting after all their PokĂ©mon fainted.
    • The Goldenrod PokĂ©mon Center in PokĂ©mon Crystal was originally a large building called the PokĂ©mon Communication Center which allowed pseudo-online trading and battling via a mobile phone adaptor. Because mobile phones weren't nearly as widespread outside of Japan at the time, this entire feature was cut and the PCC became a regular PokĂ©mon Center. However, a few characters still mention the Goldenrod PokĂ©mon Center having been renovated recently, and all dialogue from the PCC was fully translated into English, just Dummied Out.
    • PokĂ©mon Diamond and Pearl: The Hall of Origin is an unused location where you can find (and catch) Arceus, which was meant to be accessed via the Azure Flute, an event item that was never distributed because it was thought to be too confusing to use. However, the Wonder Card for the 20th Anniversary Arceus distribution, nine years later, explicitly mentions that "Arceus could first be encountered in the Hall of Origin in Diamond and Pearl."
    • PokĂ©mon Black and White has an NPC in Castelia City named Mr. Lock, the "magical clown who can open anything." He has no function in the final game, but he was supposed to be part of a scrapped download event that would've started in HeartGold and SoulSilver. The event would give players an item called the Lock Capsule, which could be transferred to BW via the Relocator, where Mr. Lock would open it, giving the player TM95 Snarl. The event was never released, not even in Japan, so Snarl remained an elusive Dummied Out move, until Black 2 and White 2 gave the Snarl TM through normal means.
    • Several PokĂ©dex entries in the first two generations reference cut elements that were removed during development. For example, Ledyba is the "Five Star PokĂ©mon" because it originally had a star pattern on its back, Umbreon is said to have poisonous sweat because it was originally a Poison-type rather than a Dark-type, and mentions of Vulpix being born with one tail, apart from being a reference to the mythology which inspired the PokĂ©mon in question, were also there because Vulpix originally had a pre-evolution with three tails.
    • The finalized designs for Remoraid and Octillery don't look particularly like they have anything in common besides being water creatures, and although their English names are derived from "raid" and "artillery" and Octillery's Japanese name is often romanized as Okutank (and it learns the move Octazooka), they barely look like they have any connection to military stuff even if you squint. The connection was far clearer at an earlier point in the design process, when they more obviously resembled a gun and a tank, respectively. The Hoppip line, meanwhile, was heavily based not only on dandelions as per their final designs, but also cats, explaining why Hoppip itself has some vaguely catlike traits (which its evolutions now lack) and why its Japanese name includes the word "neko".
  • In Portal 2, while fighting Wheatley, he will comment that he didn't expect you to survive up till then because all the others he tried to escape with died. This was a reference to a subplot that was ultimately dropped, but they kept the line because they thought it sounded fitting and might incite curiosity into what happened while Chell was asleep.
  • In Rainbow Six, the Red Wolf mission originally involved the Free Europe terrorist group taking hostages in a Belgian bank. In the Nintendo 64 port, Free Europe was replaced in this mission with the Phoenix Group, but the building still sports a "Free Europe" banner on its front colonnade. The N64 manual also has a screenshot of the mission briefing for Blue Sky, which was cut from this version.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando:
    • When you meet Angela on Grelbin, she mentions Yeedil having "nasty orbital defenses." This was meant to tie in to a final Star Explorer level that occurred there, but in the final game the orbital defenses are nil and you can just land on Yeedil without hazard.
    • At the end of the game, it was originally going to be revealed that the Protopets are weak to water. This is referenced in a room in the final level, Yeedil, that has a floor made of ice that you can melt into water with the Thermanator, killing several Protopets on it. However, the "weak to water" plot point was removed from the story, making this room come off as a weird Non Sequitur since the Thermanator has no other uses but melting ice and freezing water, and it doesn't solve any puzzles or help with traversal in this room, unlike every other time you used it before.
  • Rayman:
    • In Rayman, there are bonus levels where you pay ten tings to The Magician to have a chance at an extra life. However, if you look at Rayman's sprite while paying, he's clearing handing over Electoons rather than tings. Originally, Rayman was to give Electoons to The Magician in exchange for a scroll, but while this was changed the sprite work was never redone.
    • The cover of Rayman Origins features some scrapped enemies: a plucked bird with an eyeglass, an early design of the Golem, a blue ant-like creature, and a zombie chicken, though the last two are barely visible.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Resident Evil:
      • The original had an entire subplot dedicated to the architect behind the Spencer Mansion, George Trevor, which was completely scrapped from the game, though the developers left his (now nameless) tombstone to be found after defeating Yawn the Snake. His entire subplot was restored in the 2002 Nintendo GameCube remake.
      • Similarly, numerous additional areas were all planned that weren't able to be included due to limited disk space and never actually saw the light of day. The only remnant of these was during a pre-rendered cutscene where you can catch a glimpse of the door on the entryway stairs that would have led to the graveyard which is missing in the actual game. Again, like Trevor's subplot, these areas (and then some) were restored in the remake.
      • The description of the Colt Python informs you it is loaded with "magnum" rounds, implying there to be different kinds of ammunition like the Bazooka. While there are fully functional "Dum Dum" rounds in the game, they were Dummied Out and are only accessible by hacking them into the inventory, and were meant to be slightly more powerful against zombies but weaker against other enemies. The beta and demo versions show that the Magnum originally worked like a somewhat stronger Beretta, able to kill most enemies in 2-3 shots but occasionally scoring a One-Hit Kill against zombies; in the final release, they simply gave the Magnum a huge buff to let it one-shot zombies from the get-go, as well anything else that isn't a boss, and dropped the dum dums for being redundant. Oddly, the 2002 remake contains the same description on the weapon, and the same fully functional but dummied-out rounds.
      • There is a bed in the 2002 remake that, when examined, informs you there are footprints that appear to pass right through it. Rumor is there was originally an escape route that came out from under the bed that was ultimately scrapped. A common Fan Wank is that the mansion is riddled with secret passages only accessible by Wesker and this is one of them.
    • Resident Evil 2 has Sherry remark that she can hear "the monster", a mutated version of her father, calling her name. Originally William was to be able to speak but this was Dummied Out, instead leaving fans to wonder if perhaps he was able to speak before they showed up or if Sherry was just imagining it. The remake expands on this by having his roars very vaguely sound like he's screaming for her, and adding gestures and body language like clutching his head that make it clear he's still somewhat conscious and trying to resist the influence of the G-Virus (you also hear roars that sound somewhat like "help me" as well).
  • Shadow: War of Succession, an obscure Mortal Kombat Mockbuster for the 3DO, has a "Finish Him/Her" prompt when the opponent is near defeat, but no finishing moves were programmed.
  • The Simpsons Hit & Run has the Ferrini - Red, which is the default car for Bart in his second mission. It has this name rather than just "Ferrini" because the Ferrini - Black, the alien car that chases you in the final mission, was originally intended to be unlockable as well.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Hill Top Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has near-identical graphics to Emerald Hill Zone, and has a robotic dinosaur enemy. This is a remnant of the prototype storyline for the game, which would've involved time travel. Hill Top would've been the "past" version of Emerald Hill.
    • The animated cutscenes for Sonic the Hedgehog CD show a scene where Sonic jumps from tile to tile in a ruin-like area not seen in the game. The scene is from a cut level (dubbed "R2" by fans, due to the naming scheme of the folders used by the PC version of the game).
    • The intro to Sonic Adventure shows an early version of Windy Valley that looks very different from the final version. That version was removed a few months before release and replaced with the finalized version.
    • A recurring idea in Sonic Adventure 2 is that Sonic and Shadow look almost identical, to the point that Sonic is arrested for crimes committed by Shadow and even people who personally know Sonic can confuse them. This is rather offputting to a lot of players, as they're pretty easy to distinguish, even at a glance. However, concept art suggests Shadow was originally going to be a lot closer in appearance to Sonic, with streamlined quills, a navy-blue color scheme, and no ruff on his chest.
    • In Shadow the Hedgehog, Shadow proclaiming "This is who I am" in every single ending would have made more sense if they had kept the original theme for the game. Alas, Executive Meddling by the band's producer prevented Sega from using "Who I Am" by Magna-Fi, leading to "I Am... All of Me" by Crush 40 becoming the game's theme at the last minute. However, it can be argued the line still works to some extent with "I Am... All of Me", mainly in the context of the game's branching storylines and Shadow's Quest for Identity throughout.
    • Sonic Boom contains several echidna and hedgehog statues that no one comments on. These are remnants of an older plot for the game that delved into Sonic's backstory and the history of hedgehogs. Sega vetoed it because they prefer for Sonic to have a Mysterious Past.
  • Splatoon:
    • One of the Sunken Scrolls prominently features an unused shirt.
    • The large kitsune and tanuki statues in Inkopolis Plaza are holdovers from when the game focused on Asian mythology (including Moon Rabbits, who served as the player characters — this is also why the moon tends to be so prominent during Splatfests). When the focus shifted to evolved sea creatures, and cephalopods in particular, the statues remained.
  • There were two different versions of Splinter Cell: Double Agent, one on sixth-generation consoles like the Nintendo GameCube and one on PC and seventh-generation consoles like the PlayStation 3, each with distinctly different plots and some characters that are In Name Only to one another. Only the seventh-generation version features Enrica Villablanca's Anti-Villain qualities that make her sympathetic and her budding friendship/romance with Sam, but both games have Sam's fierce objection to killing her and his Heroic BSoD when she dies. This makes it seem completely out of character and out of nowhere when Sam suddenly cares immensely about her well-being in the sixth-generation version. Ironically, the game where she does have these qualities is also the game where framing her for the failure of the cruise ship explosion is an option (and the canonical events, no less), and doing this has Sam stand by and watch her get shot in the head without even flinching.
  • Spyro the Dragon:
    • The first game's manual has a picture of a dragon that never shows up in the actual game and is often assumed to be the intended father of Spyro due to being purple and having similar spiral-y horns and tail.
    • Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!: One NPC accidentally calls Cloud Temples by its original name "Mystic City". This was corrected in the remake.
    • Spyro: Year of the Dragon contains an unused island out in the distance of the Midnight Mountain home level. The only thing on it is three butterflies (life-ups). The island was originally supposed to have a bonus round on it accessible via a tall whirlwind after beating the Final Boss, but the artist went on vacation, the round was moved to another location, and no one ever bothered to delete the leftover island. The island was made accessible again in the remake, though the Super Bonus Round still retains its original location.
  • Super/Return of Double Dragon, which was rushed out as an Obvious Beta, has several.
    • The glass elevator in Mission 1 is cracked when you board it. The enemies jumping onto the lift to attack you were supposed to break the glass.
    • Mission 2 takes you through a baggage claim area with several idle conveyor belts. These were planned to move and drop the player into pit traps similar to the conveyors in earlier DD games, but the coding was lost.
    • At the end of the truck ride in Mission 4, Duke and his henchmen show up, but then disperse without further word. A cutscene would have taken place here, followed by a boss fight with Jeff, who is reduced to a Mini-Boss in the final game, after McGwire fled the scene.
    • In Mission 5, you enter a building at the end of an alleyway, and immediately exit into another alleyway. An indoor factory area was designed for this section, but left unimplemented.
  • In the English script of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, the boss Punchinello introduces himself with the line "The name's Nello...PUNCHINELLO!" This is because translator Ted Woolsey had wanted to rename the character to "James Bomb". The name change was ultimately "nixed" by Woolsey's superiors, but the now rather random James Bond Shout-Out was kept in nonetheless.
  • Noki Bay from Super Mario Sunshine contains a book that doesn't do anything and is mostly hidden from view. The book was originally meant to serve as a way to get a Shine Sprite but was replaced with getting red coins instead. The book itself was never removed. Contrary to urban legends, the book is also left unused in the Japanese version.
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • The "Special Video" in Super Smash Bros. Melee shows unused elements of the game, such as the Temple stage including an extra platform.
  • Tales of Symphonia has a lighthouse in Palmacosta which is blocked off by an NPC who won't let you enter because "anyone who goes up there gets sick", which basically screams out loud of "subquest". However, partway through the game Palmacosta gets destroyed and becomes inaccessable, and you never get the chance to enter the lighthouse. What was up there and making people sick is never revealed, though it's believed there was originally a sidequest there to get the Heart of Chaos weapon, before this was dropped in favor of getting it from Koton instead.
  • Tomba! had a number of levels removed from the game late in development, and notably did a poor job cleaning up any leftovers:
    • Early in the game you find a telescope and peer out over the water, seeing a pair of Koma Pigs rowing toward an ominous-looking pig-shaped island that just screams "The Very Definitely Final Dungeon". This entire area was removed from the game, and instead you face the final boss in The Underground Maze. "Pig Island" is never so much as mentioned ever again save for a brief clip of it collapsing in the end cinematic, unless you have the Japanese version of Tomba!, where it's visible on the world map (it was removed from the North American and European versions). Taking a peek at the game's code features an area named internally as "Outer Wall of Pig Island" but it is actually a completely different area in the game (atop the giant flower).
    • Masakari Jungle and The Village of Civilization were hit hard by this. There's an entire village visible on the map in the jungle that can never be visitednote , and an entire underground area in the Lumberjack Factory that is blocked by an invisible wall and contains only a single berry.
  • Undertale:
    • Sans's theme song plays at Napstablook's snail farm, even though he never actually appears there or has any involvement with it besides an optional phone call where Papyrus compares the snails to him. This is possibly because he was originally intended to appear there, as the game has some unused dialogue from an unknown NPC who mentions that "that skeleton over there" told them about how orange attacks work, which was likely cut because said attacks don't appear until Hotland, where Alphys explains them to you instead.
    • After the "Undertale: The Musical" sequence, calling Papyrus and Undyne will have them mention that you danced with Mettaton even though you could only walk around the stage. This is based on some unused dialogue where Mettaton describes your dancing, indicating that you would have originally danced with him during that scene.
  • Vexx originally consisted of 6 worlds with three levels each, until time and budget forced only 9 of the 18 levels to make it in and the world idea to be scrapped. However, one of the cutscenes has Reia tell Vexx that he has to "activate the outer three structures of Astara," with those outer structures most likely being the three outer worlds of Astara that would be unreachable until a way was found somehow.
  • Warcraft III:
    • Several missions gave you hints on what to do, such as loading Goblin Sappers into Zeppelins or throw a Storm Bolt at a mechanical ship. Being major Game Breakers, this was removed in the expansion, and trying it with the expansion installed gets an error message even as the hint is being displayed.
    • Poking the Dreadlord enough will have him say "No, this is not a dress! It's the standard Dreadlord uniform!". However, he's clearly wearing a suit of plate armor that in no way looks like a dress. This line was a reference to an older model for the Dreadlord that had him in a robe that never made it to the live game.
  • In Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap, the Sega Master System sequel to Wonder Boy in Monster Land, the Mouseman dungeon reuses the cave theme from the arcade version of its predecessor, which was absent from the SMS port.
  • Yo-kai Watch: The important-looking orb on Jibanyan's collar is a remnant of an old ability of his. He originally could transform into humans using a "Transform Orb". In another case of this, his haramaki/belt was originally made of cursed seals that could be peeled off like sticky notes. Jibanyan using seals was scrapped, however his Japanese inspirit still mentions that he uses paralyzing seals.

    Visual Novels 
  • The eighth Episode of Umineko: When They Cry makes a reference to Land of the Golden Witch, an arc which was supposed to be the original Episode 3 of the series. When the author saw that everyone found both Legend and Turn to be too difficult, he scrapped Land and released Banquet of the Golden Witch instead. In-universe, Land of the Golden Witch is the third message bottle from Rokkenjima that was never found.
  • Partway through the final trial of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, the Big Bad tries to escape from the courtroom, Phoenix yells at them, and they stop the attempt and say "I'm not going anywhere". This is a reference to an earlier draft of the script, where they did escape the courtroom, which would've led to another investigation sequence.

    Web Games 
  • You get much advice on how to fight Kofo-Jaga scorpions in the Mata Nui Online Game, even though their minigame has been scrapped from the final release.
    • Images adorning the Great Telescope's base were meant to foretell significant events or characters that would appear during the game. Most of these are pretty straightforward, though fans can only speculate about some, including a pair of cryptic face or mask-like carvings. Bionicle was originally planned to be much more spiritual with more overt inspiration taken from real life Polynesian cultures and god figures. These were removed due to complaints from actual Maori tribes, leaving parts of the game's imagery without clear-cut explanations.
    • The mechanical circuitry pattern that briefly appears in the background when the Toa Kaita show up were an orphaned reference for about 17 years, until unfinished alpha versions of the PC game The Legend of Mata Nui got leaked to the net, revealing there was an actual area under the island that looked like the inside of a giant computer which the Kaita had to traverse. Without this info, it seemed the pattern seen in the web game was just a random artistic choice.

    Web Original 
  • On This Very Wiki...
    • Tropes are frequently named in reference to other tropes — and sometimes, that other trope ends up renamed or cut.
    • Sometimes, an example will claim to be the source of a page's image ("As you can see in the page image, this character is a good example of this trope"). If the image is changed via Image Pickin', but the example isn't, this can lead to some confusion. This is why it's a bad idea to write such examples.
    • Examples might have wording that puts them in reference to another example on the page ("As stated in the previous example...", "See this other trope for more details."). If that other example is found to be misuse and gets removed, the trope is deleted via Trope Repair Shop, or gets renamed and moved to a different position, this might make the example nonsensical. Our How to Write an Example page specifically advises against this.
    • One game on the Forum Games thread is called "The Name's the Same Game", a reference to the now-cut trope "Name's the Same".
    • Official votes on the site are referred to as "crowners", referencing a time when Moments pages were referred to as "crowning moments", only allowed one example, and people had to vote on said example.

    Web Video 
  • Aaron has Adam comment on Chris's house being messy. This line was written for the original house they were going to film in, but they had to change locations at the last minute. The kitchen itself is much cleaner and tidier.
  • Dragon Ball Z Abridged has their version of Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan tease an abridged version of the next movie, Bojack Unbound, by having Goku break the fourth wall to tell Gohan that it'll be his movie next. That project was was eventually cancelled on September 2019, due to the crew experiencing burnout from the source material being difficult to work with.
  • Late into Act 1 of Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware the Science Team meet up with Benrey again, but he introduces himself as "Stong" and acts as if he's never met Gordon before. In the commentary streams, the cast allude to this being part of a Running Gag that never took off where Scorpy would keep showing up as different security guards who all happened to look, sound, and act the same, but had different names.
  • When Inugami Korone of hololive played Actraiser, the game's composer, Yuzo Koshiro, created a remix for her off the game's sound found. Known as "Koroneraiser Inu-more", the song is popular with her fans (even scoring a metal cover from Jules Conroy). However, the original Actraiser streams have been taken down following a massive legal obstacle that required every game to get permission from the publisher to stream it. Some older streams got restored, but Korone's Actraiser stream still remains missing.
  • In season 4 of Red vs. Blue, when Church asks Sheila where Simmons - who had defected to the Blues earlier - had gone to, she tells him to ask their captured Warthog jeep in an agitated tone. This is a nod to an earlier plot point where Sheila would have been upset at Church for valuing collecting the team's vehicles instead of worrying about the other Blue Team members who were on their own plot. The vehicle scene in question was in the episode proper for the web release, but was relegated to a deleted scene in the home video version as the plot point didn't go anywhere beyond that.
  • Vinesauce: In the highlights video for Vinny's New York City Bus Simulator stream, he comes across an "Old Con Creamery" while exploring Times Square, which is accompanied by a piece of fanart of him being served some disgusting-looking ice cream while an offscreen clerk cheerfully informs him "I'll be four dollars!". That last bit was a reference to a similar mistake in the subtitles when Vinny tried to order a beer later in the stream, but that part didn't make it into the highlight reel.

    Western Animation 
  • Amphibia
    • The three human girl main characters were intended as being 15-16 years old, but Disney insisted on calling them 13 to be more relatable to younger audiences. Pretty much nothing in the show itself was changed to account for this, so there are lots and lots of holdovers that make it apparent how old the characters were actually written and designed as being, to the point that a viewer going in blind would probably assume they were all 16; the girls have tall spindly teenage-looking designs, Anne mentions taking driving lessons and playing varsity tennis, Marcy is shown studying for SATs, and the Distant Finale that skips ahead ten years portrays the girls in established, long-term careers that aren't totally out of the realm of possibility for 22-23 year olds right out of college, but would still probably make more sense for 26 year olds that had been working for a while, like Anne being a herpetologist and Sasha being a therapist.
    • In the flashback to Anne stealing the music box in the second episode, Marcy has a smug expression on her face, which doesn't fit the affable, nerdy personality she had for the rest of the series (even taking into account the later reveal that Marcy knew what the music box could do). According to Matt Braly, Marcy was originally intended to be a more cold and calculating character, but after Haley Tju was cast in the role in season 2, she gave a much warmer and more playful performance as Marcy, which caused the creative team to rethink her character.
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force: In the episode The Granite Family, Shake tries to get a reboot of a Flintstones parody. This episode was made to parody the announcement of a Seth MacFarlane reboot of The Flintstones, but the reboot entered Development Hell and never happened, rendering the episode borderline incomprehensible when watching it today.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender: Early in development Uncle Iroh was conceived as an evil mentor/uncle that was sent to keep Zuko from actually completing his goal of finding the Avatar. While this was discarded early, the first episodes keep some of the beats, most notably Iroh sounds genuinely angry at Zuko for looking for Aang and this is the only time he legitimately helps to catch Aang, if very half-heartedly, despite knowing how vital he his to the world.
  • Beast Wars usually has the characters use weapons that look like they came of the beast mode of the transformer and only characters that have flight capable beast modes can fly, a distinction stretched when Inferno came but flying ants aren't unheard of. This means that Optimus Primal's twin swords and jetpack look out of place on a gorilla but would have been more appropriate for the bat form he was originally conceived with. It looks less out of place after the upgrades when more once earth bound bots got flight modes.
  • Bluey: In "The Sleepover", Bluey says that Muffin likes plants, but Muffin yells, "I HATE PLANTS!". One airing cut out the "I hate plants" line, but left the setup for the joke intact.
  • Early episodes of The Cleveland Show had a few of these on account of certain scenes getting deleted from the final cut, while still leaving behind a few callbacks that seem like non-sequiturs out of context.
    • The title of the episode "The One About Friends" was obviously a reference to the idiosyncratic episode naming of Friends, though there's not much of a reason that justifies why they chose to make that reference. The Season 1 DVD shows that there were supposed to be a number of scenes throughout the episode, featuring a miniature "C-Story" of Rallo getting addicted to watching Friends, which got cut from the final product, likely due to time constraints.
    • In the episode "Cleveland Live!", the entire cast of the episode gathers together at the end for a celebration, including a drill sergeant who never appeared at any point in the show. A deleted scene exclusive to the Season 2 DVD showed that there was originally supposed to be a cutaway gag where Cleveland went to boot camp and this drill sergeant was his instructor.
    • In this same episode, Cleveland also mentions Roberta's Iranian friend, Tassie, who had never appeared before. A deleted scene from the Season 1 episode "Love Rollercoaster" showed Tassie made her on-screen debut, telling Roberta that she was a fan of an Iranian terrorist comedian named Jad Astro Vani. Apparently, this "Tassie" was intended to be a recurring character but she sort of disappeared from the show before she even debuted on account of her debut scene being cut.
  • In the Danny Phantom episode that introduces Vlad Masters, Danny somehow knows that he uses "Plasmius" as a supervillain name, though Vlad never calls himself that in the version that aired. This and many other things about Vlad (both names, plus the overall look of his ghost form) are leftovers from the original plan of him being a vampire.
  • The Fairly OddParents!:
    • In "Timvisible", Cosmo and Wanda are seen as students in Spanish class. The teacher asks, "Where is the government cheese?" (in Spanish), and Cosmo takes it out. It's a funny Non Sequitur in the final episode, but in an earlier version, there was a scene where a disguised Cosmo and Wanda eat lunch with Chester and AJ. Chester takes out his government cheese, and Cosmo trades for it (he wishes up a brand new car for Chester, which he then drives out of the school and crashes), making it a Brick Joke. Later reruns would change the phrase to "Where is the stinky cheese?".
    • In "Oh, Brother!", the people seen admiring Timmy's new wished-up brother Tommy are Chester, AJ, and Sanjay. While AJ and Sanjay appeared as people with big brothers that led Timmy to make his wish, Chester wasn't. In an earlier draft of the episode, there's a scene where Chester has signed up for the Big League Brothers of America program and got Mark McGwire.
  • Futurama: In "Parasites Lost", Hermes is shown scooping some of Amy's popcorn with a cesta (a scoop-like device used in the sport of Jai alai), referencing a deleted scene where he announces that the crew will be using alternative utensils due to the kitchen's plates going missing.
  • Gargoyles: the villain of the third season John Castaway who leads the Quarrymen in their crusade against the gargoyles was intended to be revealed to be Jon Canmore who continues his father's vendetta against the Gargoyles. In the final version, Castaway's motives are never explicitely revealed but there are a few references notably in the final episode when Goliath berates Castaway for destroying innocent lives for a mere "ancient hatred". The Comics (that ignores The Goliath Chronicles past the first episode where the Quarrymen are introduced) explicitly identifies John Castaway as Jon Canmor.
  • Gravity Falls:
    • At the end of Bill Cipher's introductory scene in "Dreamscaperers", he randomly rattles off conspiracy-theory nonsense ("Reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram, buy gold, BYE!"). This was a holdover from his original (vastly smaller and less malicious) concept as a prankster who fed Dipper cryptic information that was actually nonsense.
    • Gideon Gleeful's suit and American flag pin are a holdover of the original concept for the character (as seen in the pilot) where he and his father were government agents.
    • In "Scary-oke", Stan's biker helmet can be seen in his room, which was meant to foreshadow an ultimately scrapped episode where Stan's old biker friend comes to visit.
  • In the Infinity Train episode "The Corgi Car", the Steward demands that Tulip "return to her seat." It's an odd line, since assigned seating isn't exactly a thing on the train. When the show was in development, however, Tulip would have started her journey in such a seat, waking up alongside other passengers who were stuck gazing at hypno-screens that prevented them from trying to explore the train. This was still the intended plot when the pilot was written, of which "The Corgi Car" is a reworked version.
  • In the Invader Zim episode "Tak the Hideous New Girl", we get a commercial break after The Reveal that Tak is an Irken trying to conquer the planet. Upon returning, we get a few seconds of Zim defeating a ham demon. It's the kind of non-sequitur you'd expect from the show normally, but that particular gag was a reference to a scrapped B-plot from when the episode was intended to be an hour-long special.
  • Jem:
    • In one episode, Stormer has a line that love has been hard for her. This was originally supposed to lead into a song, however the song was scrapped.
    • In "Culture Clash", Pizzazz records "Surprise Surprise" in a studio and sings "Wait'll you see, what's in store for you". This line isn't in the actual song. It was originally in the song and exists on the mastertape, but the song was shortened in development and the line was cut.
  • Justice League Unlimited has "To Another Shore", which was written as an Aquaman episode initially, but had to change things up due to WB planning a TV series based on him at the time (WB had a policy of not featuring the same characters on multiple shows). They changed it to Wonder Woman, due to the two having relatively close powersets and the plot hinging on them being a representative of a fantastical nation. Despite this, it's still pretty darn obvious that it was an Aquaman episode: most of the action takes place by the water, Wonder Woman is unusually aggressive and isolationist, and most importantly, there's a clear Captain Ersatz of Aquaman's main archnemesis Black Manta, going by Devil Ray, who spends most of the episode fighting with her.
  • The Legend of Korra: The entire Love Triangle subplot in the first season is a giant artifact from the original plan of the season's plot, in which Asami was the Sixth Ranger Traitor working for the Equalists instead of her father Hiroshi, with her suspicions that Mako had feelings for Korra being the final push into villainy and Mako rejecting any possible relationship with her in response, leaving him free to get with Korra instead as her Love Interest. The writers decided against this for a number of reasons (concept Asami was too much of an Obvious Judas, wouldn't have had much story use after The Reveal, and was felt to be too cool and likable to waste that way), so late in production, her and Hiroshi's roles were more or less flipped, which unfortunately resulted in the romantic drama both losing much of it's purpose and having to be a extensively rewritten into an actual Love Dodecahedron instead of a subversion of one. This also adds an additional layer to the fact that Asami is voiced by Seychelle Gabriel; Gabriel had portrayed Yue in the ill-received live action adaptation of the original series, making her playing a new character who seems like a hero but is really a villain into a Mythology Gag and Take That! at the aforementioned live-action film. Once the season was rewritten, this joke was lost.
  • In The Lion Guard, the Villain Song in the opening movie is “Tonight We Strike”. It doesn’t seem to fit because the attack happens in daytime. That’s because the song was written for a version of the plot that was ultimately scrapped.
  • The Loud House: In "Home of the Fave", Rita tells her husband Lynn Sr. not to get their daughter Lola a pony again because it "didn't work out". This was originally going to be the setup to a Black Comedy joke, where the pony's grave would be seen in the yard, but as the gag was cut, it comes across more like a Noodle Incident.
  • Scooby-Doo: Velma and Shaggy were originally intended to be brother and sister. It's why Velma has Shaggy's cough medicine with her in "What a Night for a Knight" and why Shaggy is the one carrying Velma's spare glasses in "A Decoy for a Dognapper".
  • The Simpsons:
    • "Homer's Odyssey" was meant to air before "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire", which ended up being the pilot episode. Not only is this the intended introduction of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, but Bart asking Otto about his tattoo was meant to foreshadow his own attempt at getting one in the Christmas Special.
    • In "Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part One", Mr. Burns stomps on scale models of Springfield landmarks, saying "Take that, Bowl-A-Rama [Barney's Bowl-A-Rama]! Take that, convenience mart [Kwik-E-Mart]! Take that, nuclear power plan- Oh, fiddlesticks.". The producers originally intended to have Barney Gumble be the one who shot Mr. Burns, so Burns stomping on Barney's Bowl-A-Rama was meant to foreshadow this. It also explains why, despite being listed as a main suspect, Wiggum, Lou, and Eddie never investigate Barney.
    • In "You Only Move Twice", there's the Running Gag of Marge taking a sip of wine... which is then followed by a Scare Chord. Originally, Marge was going to become The Alcoholic (due to having nothing to do in a house that cleans itself), but that was deemed too depressing and much of the family's subplots were cut down to make more room for Hank Scorpio. In the final episode, the plotline ends anticlimactically when Marge mentions she only drank one glass all day (even though her doctor recommended she drink two).
    • In "Lisa's Date with Density", when Marge is driving Lisa home, she occasionally squints out the window, the remnant of a deleted scene where she turns out to have night blindness, bad enough she can't tell whether she's on the road or not.
    • In "Brother From Another Series", the original script included a scene where Cecil speaks to a woman he identifies as Maris, referring to Niles' unseen wife on Frasier. The producers of Frasier, who were allowed to review the script before production, asked for it to be cut. He still makes reference to her when Bart covers his eyes.
    • Done intentionally in "The Canine Mutiny". Lisa's pep-pill induced rant to Bart seems to come out of nowhere, but it was actually part of a cut subplot about Lisa becoming addicted to the pep pills Bart gave her. The writers said they left it in because it was the only part of the plot that worked on its own.
    • The "Boo-urns" bit in "A Star is Burns" was intended to be the setup for a Brick Joke at the end of the episode where Mr. Burns' second attempt at a film festival would have won, and the audience shouted "Boo-urns!".
    • When Homer is sobbing over a bad impulse purchase in "Tis the Fifteenth Season", he says "This is even sadder than Tuesdays With Morrie!" It feels pretty random without the context from a deleted scene on the animatic: after setting up a low quality Christmas tree, Marge suspects Homer spent the money on something else.
      Marge: Homer, is there something you're not telling us?
      Homer: (nervous) Oh, okay, I confess that I actually don't have allergies. I was crying during Tuesdays With Morrie.
  • South Park:
    • In the unaired pilot, Chef's plan to get the boys out of school is to get them to eat his extra-hot tamales so they can trick the school nurse into thinking they all have fevers. However, the fifth graders show up and dare Cartman to eat all the tamales on his own, which causes him to start farting fire and gets the nurse to send them all home. In the broadcast version, Chef's plan is simplified to pulling the fire alarm and Cartman's flammable flatuence is turned into a side-effect of his anal probe. Despite this, the next scene still has Kyle telling Cartman "You can stop farting fire now", even though it no longer played a part in getting the boys out of school.
    • The episode "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig" has a scene where Stan is lying down in a puddle of water. This is a reference to a deleted scene where his sister Shelley set him on fire and threw a bucket of water to douse the flames, only for her to repeat the process over and over again.
  • Steven Universe: Despite the Crystal Gems generally distancing themselves from humanity and getting around by Warp Pad, Pearl knows how to drive a car without explanation. This is a remnant from an abandoned idea where the Crystal Gems would hang out among humans incognito, and Pearl drove them around.
  • In TaleSpin, Kit was originally intended to be Rebecca's son. While this got changed, some remnants of this idea can be seen with Kit's design having a resemblance to Rebecca and through his sibling-like relationship with her daughter Molly.
  • The Transformers:
    • Dinobot Swoop's blue torso, contrasting the otherwise uniform color scheme of his team, is a holdover from his original Diaclone toy (the progenitor of Transformers); his Transformers toy and appearances in concurrent media appropriately have red chests.
    • "It's a miracle we survived that blast," says Optimus Prime in the episode The Key to Vector Sigma, Part 1, in reference to an explosion that was cut from the finished episode.
    • When Rodimus Prime appears to be dying in "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 2," he says to his comrades that his "time in the light is short," which Arcee remarks is what Optimus Prime said on his own deathbed... except he didn't say that. This is meant to be a Call-Back to a line from an early version of Prime's death scene in The Transformers: The Movie—it was cut from the film, but not the show.
    • The episode "Starscream's Ghost" contains a number of odd lines and sequences that seem to indicate the episode was originally written to star Blitzwing, but was hastily rewritten to feature the newer character Octane instead. Most notably, when the eponymous specter first appears, a frightened Octane becomes stuck in a malformed state halfway between his truck and robot modes, which is consistent with Blitzwing's official bio but has no basis in Octane's. Starscream also disparagingly refers to Octane as an "older model", which works as a bit of meta humor in regards to Blitzwing (his action figure was over a year old at the time) but seems a bit inexplicable for Octane.
      The episode is meant to follow on from the end of "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 5", which concluded with Galvatron banishing Blitzwing from his ranks (Octane even quotes this dialogue word-for-word when discussing his own banishment); the final episode references the events of the episode "Thief in the Night" instead, which had yet to air and didn't actually end with Octane leaving the Decepticons in bad faith. It all makes for some pretty significant Continuity Snarl in a series that tended to be very light on continuity anyway.
  • Transformers: Animated:
    • The first season finale was meant to have a scene where the rebuilt Megatron fights the Dinobots, but it was cut for being poorly animated. The final episode still has a scene reintroducing the Dinobots in the first part and the Autobots fighting the Decepticons on their island, leaving their absence rather conspicuous.
    • In Wreck-Gar's debut episode, he temporarily teams up with human villain Angry Archer, whose mannerisms parody John Cleese. This was a holdover from when his role was going to be played by Eric Idle, making it a little cheeky reference for those in the know. In the final product Wreck-Gar is played by "Weird Al" Yankovic, resulting in the reference being mostly lost.
    • The Grand Finale has a rather strange scene where Slipstream appears, mentions she's looking for Starscream, shoots Optimus Prime out of the air when she realizes he isn't him, and is never seen again. This was meant to set up a scene where she would find Starscream's body and revive it with a piece of her AllSpark fragment, which was cut when the crew knew for certain the third season would be the last.
  • Transformers: Prime: Breakdown was originally drafted as a new version of the transforming bomber Lugnut from Animated but was changed when the writers wanted more ground based Decepticons. Breakdown's characterization still has elements that would be Lugnut's, for one Starscream never disapproves of his alt-mode like all the other non-jet-based Decepticons, his rivalry with Bulkhead was a carryover and his entire personality of being a hard-hitting bruiser is much more Lugnut then Breakdown, whose schtick is that he is always about to have a breakdown rather then cause one. This is particularly notable if his history in War For Cybertron is taken into account where he was G1 Breakdown to a tee.
  • Wallace & Gromit:
    • The robot cooker in A Grand Day Out is a leftover from an earlier script, where the Moon would have had a vast civilisation of other aliens and characters, largely obstructing the duo's vacation. When it became clear the premise was too complicated to create with current time and resources, they scaled everything down, though the cooker remains, seemingly alone, still serving as a parking attendent for some reason.
    • Feathers McGraw's entire presence in The Wrong Trousers is one to the originally concieved premise of the short, which would've saw a flock of penguins taking up residence in Wallace and Gromit's house during a bad winter.
  • What If…? (2021): In What If... The Watcher Broke His Oath?, When Uatu recruits the Guardians of the Multiverse from characters throughout the season, we see a version of Gamora with Tony Stark on Sakaar from a story not seen at all in the season. This is from an episode involving Tony Stark becoming stranded on Sakaar and creating a Hulkbuster-esque suit out of salvaged technology, which ended up being pushed back to season 2 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic complicating production of said episode, and many more.

 
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Parasites Lost Deleted Scene

You noticed that Hermes is shown scooping some of Amy's popcorn with a Jai-alai (a scoop-like device used in the sport of Jai-alai) during Fry's colonoscopy, right? This is because it was referencing a deleted scene where he announces that the crew will be using alternative utensils due to the kitchen's plates going missing. Removing that particular scene in the final product makes it an insignificant plot hole.

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