Wolverine Publicity / Live-Action TV

• Parodied on 30 Rock with "Seinfeld-Vision", in which Jerry Seinfeld is digitally inserted into every single NBC show, whether he's appropriate or not.
• Twisty the clown from American Horror Story: Freak Show was a popular character, so when he reappeared in later season American Horror Story: Cult he was heavily featured in the marketing campaign, even though he only had cameos at best, his role in the story was inexistent, and had been dead for 64 years by the time Cult took place, which made it impossible for him to have any impact in a season explicitly advertised as supernatural-free.
• Blunt: The Fourth Man was a British TV movie from the '80s. The video was released in the late '90s or the 21st century. Anthony Hopkins's face featured prominently on the cover. Ian Richardson played the eponymous Blunt (not a drug reference), the main character, while Hopkins played someone else. But then Richardson never played a cannibal (or at least not Lecter).
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Spike. Friggin' Spike. After he joined the main cast of Buffy he essentially became the face for the franchise as a whole. He pretty much became shoehorned into every following episode even if his appearances were limited to just less than a minute, with the same even applying after he moved over to Angel after Buffy ended. The comics have been no different: Angel's canon After the Fall sequel gave him not one but two spinoff comics that tied in with its main story with Buffy season 9 doing the same. He's also heavily featured in marketing, even if he appears very little (heck, Buffy's third season DVD heavily featured him in cover images, even though he's only in one episode!). By this point it's surprising they don't just call it the Spikeverse instead.
• Children of Dune: Leto Atreides II is the central focus of two of its three episodes, but he's very small on the poster◊, and you don't even get to see James McAvoy's face. This gets rectified for the North American DVD release◊.
• Desperate Housewives in season 7 had Renee, a character who had no major ties to any of the plot lines that season standing front and center on the DVD cover, with all of the other main characters in the background.
• Drake & Josh: Advertisements for Merry Christmas Drake and Josh on Nick, which focus much more on iCarly stars Miranda Cosgrove and Jerry Trainor, despite their characters relatively minor roles in this show. Heck, it won't even say the stars' names until the end, and that's because they're the title characters (and they have to say what show they're advertising).
• This actually happened to live-action sitcoms on ABC, with Steve Urkel from Family Matters at the height of his popularity, being crossed over onto almost every show in the TGIF lineup at one point or another.
  • He even had cameo appearances in shows on completely different networks. "Hey, what's Urkel doing on All That? ... for the third time?"
  • Later syndication advertisements of earlier episodes often were ONLY about his small scene unrelated to the actual plot of the episode.
• A DVD containing Christmas-themed episodes of The Garry Moore Show bore the title, "The Garry Moore Show Presents: A Carol Burnett Christmas", and also had a cover featuring only Carol Burnett. Since early pressings just used the title, "A Carol Burnett Christmas", she actually sued the producers of the DVD for false advertising.
• Nick at Nite did this with The George Lopez Show, during its syndication on the channel. At first, they would look for any excuse they could find to air a George Lopez marathon. ("Hey, it's St. Patrick's Day! How can we celebrate Irish culture? George Lopez is Mexican — close enough!") Then they dropped the pretenses altogether and aired George Lopez marathons without even giving an excuse.
• The Sky1 adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather went to DVD with David Jason front and centre, making him look like the most important character in the story. He was actually the sidekick in what was largely the b-story. He was also used in all their advertising and his name dropped constantly in all promo material.
• Almost every CBS episode promo for How I Met Your Mother heavily features Barney Stinson, so if you didn't actually watch the show, you could be forgiven for thinking he's the main character. In the actual show, he gets lots and lots of entertaining subplots, being a legitimate Breakout Character, but is actually the focus of the A-plot only around 1/4 of the time. So that promo you just saw that dedicated 15 out of its 20 seconds to Barney pulling some crazy stunt? Chances are, said stunt takes up only around three minutes of the episode.
• If you look online, you'd be excused for thinking iCarly was actually iSam or even iSeddie and that the star is Jennette McCurdy and not Miranda Cosgrove.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • The ABC ^note the Australian network, not the American one TV & iview Season 1 trailer lists Sam Reid's name first before Jacob Anderson's even though the latter has top billing because Reid is more famous in his native Australia than Anderson due to starring in The Newsreader, the ABC's most-watched drama program in 2021 which won the AACTA Award for Best Television Drama Series. Furthermore, Reid's character Lestat de Lioncourt precedes Louis de Pointe du Lac in the network's Season 1 characters teaser.
  • In one of the four Season 2 posters,◊ a close-up of Sam Reid's face takes up most of the space while Jacob Anderson is fairly small in comparison.
• Kamen Rider has been doing this to a point with Momotaros from Kamen Rider Den-O. If it's a Kamen Rider production, and Den-O is in it, you WILL at least hear his voice, even if other Riders don't even have a line. (That being said, it should be noted that his voice actor, Toshihiko Seki, being a voice actor, is indeed the most readily available of all the lead actors in the entire franchise when it comes to Role Reprise.) The Den-O series itself counts as well, having more crossovers with other Riders and more spinoff movies than any other in the franchise.
  • Both of the movies for Kamen Rider Decade extend this. There is no real need for Momotaros to be on-screen, but they put him in anyway just because of his Wolverine Publicity.
    • Decade is at least consistent with this; each Rider has a Final Form related to their abilities that Decade can activate but, due to the Demonic Possession that Den-O is known for, his Final Form is Momotaros himself. Diend can also summon former Riders, including Momotaros in one episode. And the first of Decade's movies was the epilogue to the Den-O arc in the show and the second was a Reunion Show featuring every single main Kamen Rider in history.
    • Lampshaded in said second movie. The final line before the credits roll is Momo telling Tsukasa to stop pestering him because he's "super busy" (the Chou Den-O Trilogy of films soon followed.) Busy doing some Wolverine Publicity, we presume...oh, wait, not just Wolverine Publicity: he's also a Wolverine Publicist!... and he even advertised for McDonald's! Choke on that, Wolverine.
    • In the show itself, Den-O's world is the only one to not have any kind of key alteration, for no apparent reason other than to have all the original characters readily there for crossover movie purposes. Even characters that weren't as important (like Naomi, who could have just as easily been discarded or at least given an Other Darrin) were there.
  • The franchise's 40th anniversary movie stars the original Kamen Rider, then-current Rider OOO... and Den-O. And Momotaros is part of OOO's movie-exclusive powerup mode. At least they made it a Time Travel plot, which is right in Den-O's wheelhouse and justifies his presence.
    • Den-O aside, in that particular movie, Double got a bit of this as well, with Shotaro and Philip being the only one(s) of the remaining Heisei Riders to appear out-of-suit and have proper lines. They also appeared prominently out-of-suit in the following year's Movie Wars Megamax, and Double and Accel got to appear with OOO (who got to show up out-of-suit himself) and Birth in the following Movie Wars Ultimatum.
  • Den-O's presence in crossovers has generally been dialed back since then, getting at most a line or two more than other non-leading Riders, though he did have more of a presence in Kamen Rider Taisen. In this case, it's kind of justified: the movie guest-stars Super Sentai, it's traditional for Sentai mecha to use a Rider powerup in such situations, and the Sentai at the time and Den-O shared a Cool Train theme. Having Den-O's train combine with the Sentai train mecha is a natural fit.
• Australian promos for Lost, especially in the early seasons, would sometimes imply that the upcoming episode would reveal that a particular character would be the key to everything. One promo claimed that the season 1 episode with the first Hurley flashback would answer the already answered (off screen) question "is it a dream/purgatory/Truman Show?"
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers:
  • Based on how prominently he was featured in the merchandise for the series, you might think that King Sphinx was a member of the main group of villains, maybe even to the point of being Co-Dragons with Goldar. In the show itself, he was just a standard MOTW featured in a single filler episode who did nothing that would make him particularly memorable and was never seen or even mentioned anywhere outside of Jason recalling his battle in a flashback.
  • After Adam made a brief return in In Space (then believed to be the last season) and "Forever Red" brought back Jason and Tommy for the tenth anniversary special in Wild Force (also believed to be the last season at the time of filming) it's become more and more prevalent for series to try and harken back to the original series and bank in on its popularity and nostalgia. Tommy was specifically brought into Dino Thunder to help boost ratings. Since then, it hasn't been uncommon to try and bring back Rangers/characters/suits/plot devices from the Mighty Morphin' era, knowing that people's nostalgia for that series will prompt a ratings boost and make it a popular/talked about episode, or in the hopes that it will get people to watch the season. The reuse of the theme song from Samurai onwards is also a version of this. Hell, Megaforce has basically marketed itself to older viewers on the fact that, "Past rangers are going to appear in it, so you should watch it for that reason!"
  • Tommy in particular is a very popular choice for crossover appearances in various pieces of spin-off media, which is especially pronounced since he's had several different Ranger forms over the years due to having starred in at least four different entries in the franchise. Much like the Wolverine in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 example listed above, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid launched with two playable incarnations of Tommy ^note Mighty Morphin' Green Ranger and Lord Drakkon as part of the base roster, and Jason David Frank even appeared in the game's launch trailer.
• NCIS: Los Angeles features a Portuguese actress (Daniela Ruah). The Portuguese FOX only stated it a few rare times, and then only in the first few weeks. When the show started airing on Portuguese network TV, she was the focus. As in every single trailer just showed her character.
• The Punisher (2017) heavily hyped up its use of Karen Page during the marketing campaign, presumably to draw in viewers from Daredevil (2015), even though she's only in four episodes and her contribution to the overall plot is minimal.
• For the third and final season of Robin Hood the new characters of Kate and Tuck were widely publicized, outranking every other character except Robin himself. Considering the two of them were Replacement Scrappys for the far more popular characters of Marian, Will Scarlet and Djaq (written out at the end of season two) this backfired rather spectacularly.
• The Stargate-verse franchise has a particular case of this with Samantha Carter, every episode where she appears she is heavily advertised regardless of screentime. A particular notorious episode was early in the first season of Atlantis where she was identified as "guest starring" in the commercials. In the episode, she had ONE WORD and 10 seconds of screen time.
  • Richard Dean Anderson, being easily the most famous star and face of the franchise, started getting this after he left the show. Stargate Continuum was particularly marketed as The Return of O'Neill! when in actuality he appeared for all of two scenes that could have easily been cut without loss.
• Castiel is starting to get this in Supernatural's sixth season, with most of his appearances cameos at best, and Cas mostly showing up to explain why he's too busy off-screen to help out this week. Also, Misha Collins is now receiving credits for episodes in which he doesn't even appear.
  • He also gets his own solo TV bumper (Dean and Sam had to share one) and is one of the only three cast members to be included in the official publicity photos despite only appearing for about thirty minutes total in the entire sixth season so far.
  • Extends to Misha Collins himself—ever since he started appearing in the fourth season he's been doing as many, if not more, interviews as Jared and Jensen and appearing at just about every convention.
• In print ads for the Son of Svengoolie, whenever they ran a film with the word "Frankenstein" or "Dracula" in the title, they'd use a still shot of Boris Karloff as the Monster or Bela Lugosi as Drac, even if they weren't in the film running. Or even if the character didn't appear, such as in Dracula's Daughter.

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