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These movie characters did some very calculated vanishing acts.
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00:00What are movies, if not grand illusions, intended to trick the viewer for better or worse?
00:05Films are all about casting a spell on the audience, about manipulating them into getting
00:09emotionally drawn into a story. This can occur one of many ways, but one especially interesting
00:15feat of narrative chicanery involves removing a character from the fold for a certain amount
00:20of time, only to return them later for dramatic or comedic effect. It can be a tough trick
00:25to pull off in films with small casts and limited locations, requiring directors to get creative
00:30about how they choose to distract their audiences from a character's absence. But when it works,
00:34it really works, ensuring viewers are jolted by a surprise return, or, depending on the type
00:40of movie it is, perhaps extremely amused. So let's take a look at them as I'm Jules,
00:44this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 Movie Characters They Wanted You To Forget.
00:4910. Sergeant Dignam – The Departed
00:52Now, staff sergeant Sean Dignam certainly makes quite the impression in the first two
00:56acts of Martin Scorsese's The Departed, a stern yet quick-witted, wisecracking cop
01:01who doesn't suffer fools lightly. And though Mark Wahlberg's terrific performance netted him
01:06a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, his character disappears quite abruptly ahead of
01:11the film's climax. Following the murder of his superior, an enraged Dignam lashes out
01:15at Sergeant Sullivan and is placed on suspension for two weeks. The rest of the movie plays out
01:20with undercover cop Billy facing off against mob rat Sullivan, while it's assumed that Dignam won't
01:25be coming back. But in the film's very final scene, some 30 minutes after we last saw him,
01:30Dignam makes a surprise reappearance hiding out in Sullivan's apartment in order to shoot him dead
01:35in revenge for killing the captain. It's all the more unexpected given that this never happens in
01:39the Hong Kong film upon which The Departed is based on, which is known as Internal Affairs.
01:44Between this and keeping Dignam out of the audience's mind for so long,
01:47it ensured his last-minute return was a genuine crowd-pleasing shock.
01:529. Alec, GoldenEye
01:54Now, to be fair, the trailers for GoldenEye ruined what would have been a bloody awesome twist. But
01:59if you didn't pay much attention to the movie's marketing, you were in for quite the surprise
02:03when the film's primary villain finally showed up. GoldenEye's pre-title sequence involves a
02:08botched mission in which James Bond and 006 assault a Russian colonel's compound. 006 appears to be killed
02:14when the Russian colonel shoots him in the head, and for a whole hour that indeed seems to be the
02:19case. The movie spends most of its first half establishing several villains, before then
02:24circling back to reveal that 006 faked his own death and is in fact the movie's big bad,
02:29being the leader of the focal crime syndicate. It's a great rug pull if you don't know what's
02:33coming, and the film gamely tries to put him to the back of your mind by focusing your attention
02:38elsewhere, even if the marketing unfortunately worked actively against that.
02:428. Danny McGrath – Billy Madison
02:45Not all movies that want you to forget about a character necessarily do so for the big dramatic
02:49gotcha. Sometimes it's just for a bit of a good laugh. Case in point, we have the classic
02:54Adam Sandler comedy Billy Madison, where upon being bullied after re-entering high school,
02:59Billy decides to make amends with those that he himself bullied as a kid. He starts by calling
03:04and apologizing to Danny McGrath, an old classmate that he tormented at school. Danny accepts Billy's
03:09apology, and the scene ends with Danny hilariously crossing Billy's name off of a people-to-kill
03:14list that is stuck to his wall. That seems to be the end of the gag, except Danny unexpectedly
03:19reappears at the very end of the film some 20 minutes later, showing up just in time to shoot
03:23the villain, Eric Gordon, in the ass with a sniper rifle before he can shoot Billy's love
03:27interest, Veronica. To cap it all off, Billy then quips,
03:30Man, I am glad I called that guy. Comedy is all about timing and upending expectations,
03:36and this utterly nailed both. 7. Catwoman
03:39The Dark Knight Rises
03:41Catwoman is obviously one of the most iconic superheroines ever, and plays a major supporting
03:46role in The Dark Knight Rises. All the same, Christopher Nolan makes a sly attempt to nudge
03:51her to the periphery during the film's third act, as a returning Batman heads into the heart of Gotham
03:55City to take on Bane. We see Catwoman using the Batpod to blow a hole in one of Gotham's blocked
04:01entrances, after which we don't actually see her again for an entire 10 minutes. During this time,
04:06the focus is on Batman getting outnumbered by Bane and his secret accomplice, Talia Al Ghul,
04:11as well as the general chaos that is happening around the city. Talia then leaves to continue
04:15massacring those civilians that are fighting back, while Bane proceeds to execute Batman. But just at
04:20that moment, Bane is blasted with a high-caliber round, revealing that Catwoman arrived just in time
04:25to blow Bane away with the Batpod. Keeping her off screen for an entire 10 minutes in the climax of
04:30the film was clearly a concerted effort to divert the audience's attention elsewhere, enough so that
04:35they didn't see her sudden return coming. As divisive as Bane's death is, the element of surprise
04:40is certainly effective. 6. The Other Bastards
04:44Inglourious Bastards
04:45Depending on who you count, there are about a dozen members of The Bastards featured throughout
04:49Quentin Tarantino's revisionist war epic, the majority of whom are accounted for by the film's end.
04:54But there are a few whose fates are left unknown. Soldiers Hirschberg, Kagan, Zimmerman,
05:00and Sakowicz. Though we all have visual confirmation that the rest of the bastards
05:03either die or survive, this lesser-known quartet basically dips out of the movie before the
05:08climax and is never seen or heard from again. One suspects that this was an act of narrative
05:13streamlining on Tarantino's part. He presumably wanted a punchy ending without having to take time
05:17to address the fates of the minor bastards, even though to this day many wonder precisely what
05:22actually happened to them. To the same token, though, how many of them can you actually name
05:25without having to look him up?
05:275. Little Tully
05:28The Addams Family
05:29In the 1991 Addams Family film, the secondary villain is Tully Alford, Gomez's crooked lawyer
05:35who plots to rip the Addams Family clan off. His blissfully ignorant wife is Margaret, and together
05:40they have a son referred to only as Little Tully. Now, Little Tully appears in the film for just a
05:45single scene at a school play, after which he's oh-so-conveniently never heard from again. Given
05:50that his father ends up dead and possibly buried alive while his mother runs away and marries cousin
05:54It, it's fair to say that Little Tully has had quite the traumatic week. Yet, despite Margaret showing
05:59up again in Addams Family Values and having given birth to a son with cousin It, no less, her firstborn
06:04isn't given even a fleeting mention. Evidently, given the utterly cruel hand that Little Tully was
06:09dealt by the circumstances of the plot, the filmmakers basically just wanted you to forget
06:12that he ever existed, rather than fixate on what horrors became of him after losing both of his
06:17parents. 4. Mustafa
06:19Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me
06:22Dr. Evil's fez-wearing henchman Mustafa played a small but hilariously memorable role in the first
06:28Austin Powers. He was horribly burned for failing to unthaw Dr. Evil's cat Mr. Bigglesworth correctly,
06:34and because that didn't kill him, a guard enters the room and shoots him dead off-screen. But Mustafa
06:38returned in the sequel, when Austin and Felicity Shagwell travel back to 1976, where Mustafa would,
06:44of course, still be alive. When Austin and Felicity are interrogating him, Mustafa is shot with a dart
06:50by Mini-Me, which causes him to fall off a cliff to his apparent demise. Yet, of course, Mustafa survived,
06:55and cries out in pain off-screen as he attempts to get back onto his feet and summon medical help.
07:00Now, that's the last that we see or hear of him in the film proper, but an hour later, the post-credit
07:05scene returns us to Mustafa, who asks if the movie is over, and if anyone in the audience can summon
07:10help. Before again, he tries to stand up on his feet, and, uh, it doesn't go so well. Now, the gag
07:15wouldn't work nearly as well if we had totally forgotten about Mustafa during that interceding hour,
07:20ensuring that his inexplicable return sends audiences home on a riotous final gut laugh.
07:253. Angela Ashford – Resident Evil Apocalypse
07:29Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil movies may not be particularly good, but that doesn't make
07:34this act of character erasure any less weird. The second film, Resident Evil Apocalypse,
07:39introduced Angela Ashford, the daughter of Dr. Charles Ashford, who created the T-virus in order
07:43to treat a genetic disease that she suffers from. As such, Angela is immediately established as one of
07:49the series' most pivotal characters, and Apocalypse ends with her riding away with Alice and the other
07:54heroes. But Angela was bafflingly absent from the next film, Resident Evil Extinction, which offered
07:59not even a passing mention of her fate. We never saw Angela in the three subsequent sequels either,
08:03leaving fans to speculate on precisely what happened to her. Yet, the answer becomes a little
08:08clearer when you consider that, in the novelization of Resident Evil Extinction, Angela is actually
08:13shot dead by Alice while under the mind control of Umbrella head scientist Dr. Alexander Isaacs.
08:18Basically, it seems that the filmmakers realized that they were in a bind. They didn't want to saddle
08:23the franchise with a major child character, but also didn't want to commit to killing her off,
08:27as was shown in the novelization. And so it's a bit of a Schrodinger's cat situation,
08:31where you can either deduce that she is still alive somewhere, or died between the second and third
08:35film somehow. Either way, Anderson and company clearly hope that you just forget that she was
08:40ever a thing to begin with. 2. Mr. Orange, Reservoir Dogs
08:44Mr. Orange, played by Tim Roth, spends the vast majority of Reservoir Dogs laying mortally wounded
08:49on the floor at the criminal gang's warehouse, having been shot in the aftermath of a diamond
08:54heist. Though Orange is always present throughout the film, and flashbacks nicely fill in his
08:58backstory as an undercover cop, it's actually easy to forget that he's just hanging around in the
09:02periphery. This pays off quite spectacularly halfway through the movie, when Tarantino focuses
09:07on Mr. White torturing and preparing to kill a kidnapped cop, Marvin Nash. The theatrical horror
09:12of Mr. Blonde cutting Nash's ear off makes it easy to forget that Mr. Orange is just a few feet away,
09:17albeit badly injured, such that when Orange interrupts the torture and shoots Blonde dead,
09:22it comes as a genuine surprise. 1. Manny, Go
09:26And finally we have Doug Liman's cult classic black comedy Go, which focuses on a young supermarket
09:32cashier attempting to pull off a daring drug scam in order to pay her rent. One of her pals is Manny,
09:37who misguidedly takes two ecstasy pills at once and gets very, very high as a result. And when her
09:43scam gets found out, she stashes Manny in a nearby alley and promises to return for him.
09:48But moments later, she's hit by a car and incapacitated, marking the end of the movie's
09:52first act. The rest of Go branches out to explore numerous different perspectives of the drug deal
09:57before finally circling back to her at the very end as she wakes up in the hospital.
10:01She then goes to work where her other friend Claire asks where Manny is, causing her to finally
10:05remember where she stashed him the night prior. And so, well over an hour after we last saw Manny,
10:10she finally returns to the alleyway and retrieves him, pale and shaking uncontrollably,
10:15but thankfully still alive. The gag wouldn't have worked nearly as well if we ever cut back to
10:19Manny throughout the film. And given that the following hour plus is jam-packed with insanity,
10:24there's plenty to make viewers forget about his very existence. Poor old Manny.
10:28And there we go my friends, those were 10 movie characters they wanted you to forget. I hope that
10:32you enjoyed that and please let me know what you thought about it down in the comment section below.
10:36As always, I've been Jules, so you can go follow me over on Instagram where it's
10:39at RetroJ, but the O is a zero. Hope to see you over there and you can come check out all of the
10:43Warhammer models that I've been painting. And I'll speak to you soon. Bye.
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