r/TopCharacterTropes • u/MeepMan324 • 3d ago

Hated Tropes (Hated Trope) False advertising

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  1. The marketing makes it seem like the movie is about Austin (the unbreakable boy) who is autistic, but rather it's about his prick of a father who caused a drunk driving accident
  2. The talking kangaroo was included in all of the trailers and the main poster but was only a hallucination and was seen for like 30 seconds (Kangaroo Jack)
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u/HolidayInLordran 3d ago

So if you were a kid in the 2000s, you were bamboozled by at least three movies and their deceptive trailers: Kangaroo Jack, Bridge to Terabithia, or Snow Dogs.

However, there was also the trailer for The Haunted Mansion, the 2003 one with Eddie Murphy.

There was a TV spot that played all the time that explicitly says that the family needed to break the curse of the haunted mansion "before the clock strikes 13."

https://youtu.be/NIl71bCisoc?si=pwgVecW35nMUPWib

And so kid me thought that this was going to be a fun "race against time" kind of movie, and I thought it was an interesting spin on it.

I saw it on a field trip and...that is not at all what the movie is about. It's some insipid "love story" about Eddie Murphy's wife being the possible reincarnation of some guy's dead wife and forces her to marry him, it's all creepy and weird as fuck but it's made out to be some tragic love story in the end where he gets redeemed. (Just ignore the horrifying implications if he went through with the forced marriage, because the movie sure does)

Also the shot of the clock in the trailer is only in the opening sequence and is never shown or mentioned again.

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u/Misubi_Bluth 3d ago

I got bamboozled by all three, but it's worth noting only one of those shouldn't have needed to lie. Bridge to Terrabithia was genuinely good.

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u/SuperSiriusBlack 3d ago

It was also a book that I'd read before the movie came out lol. It was the saddest book of my childhood, the trailer basically gave war flashbacks.

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u/Punished_Squid 3d ago

Yeah but it kinda did need to lie for people who didn't know what it was about. Takes a lot of the pain away if you already know what it's actually about

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u/Thin-Nerve6367 3d ago

To play devil's advocate, he really thought she was his reincarnated wife and that eventually she'd remember everything. The moment he DOES learn the truth he's immediately good

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u/Luster-Purge 3d ago

And the one actually trying to force the marriage is the butler, who is revealed to be the cause of why it's a haunted mansion - he staged the bride-to-be's death to try and steer the suitor away because yeah turns out marrying a black woman when you're a rich family white guy in the late 1800s could ruin the family reputation. The suitor, who didn't give a shit, hangs himself out of grief, and so a curse was placed on everyone there. So the butler somehow had to arrange Eddie Murphy's wife to show up because she just happened to resemble the original bride, all because he's trying to unfuck the situation he fucked in the first place out of pure racism.

He gets rightfully dragged to hell for it in the end.

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u/maxman162 3d ago

Tim Allen was supposed to be in Haunted Mansion, but Disney managed to get Eddie Murphy after his 20 year contract expired. 

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u/Twist_Ending03 3d ago

Snow Dogs? Why does that title sound familiar to me