Advertising-Only Continuity

Merchandise-Driven shows need to have toy commercials. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to sell toys to the kids. But the toy manufacturers need to know what the characters look like, as well as the very basic premise, months in advance, so they can create the toys and have them on the shelves by the time kids see the series. The problem is that the plotline probably wasn't included.

The issue is that between the constant rewrites and the meddling executives, a change in the story is made.

It could range all the way from a small but easily made mistake based on Common Knowledge, to something that would get you Gannon Banned on the media's forum. But either the advertiser(s) didn't notice or didn't care, or they don't think the kids will.

This will probably involve Fan Myopia, but please try to make it understandable to even non-fans.

Examples of Advertising-Only Continuity include:

• The existence of Environment Specific Action Figures often causes this to happen, where the merchandiser uses some Misaimed Marketing and seriously doesn't consider the plot. Such as The Flash using a Flashmobile, or Batman wearing a green costume in Gotham city.
• In one of the earliest Power Rangers toy commercials, they had Zordon call for the rangers to morph by saying, "It's Transforming Time!"
  • Another example from the original series was a tie-in comic for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers used the pilot's name of Zoltar instead of Zordon, spelled Rita Repulsa's name with a second s and gave them all different last names (although Word of God would not confirm their last names till years later).
• A Power Rangers Zeo commercial gave the villain's name as Queen Machina instead of her husband, King Mondo, and had them operating out of the original command center when they were actually operating in the underground Power Chamber.
• A Power Rangers Time Force one had the Big Bad, Ransik, searching for them with a Time Machine when it was the opposite way around, and the rangers constantly mentioning the evil Cyclobots as the reason they went back in time.
• Big Bad Beetleborgs had a commercial which claimed that the bad guys and the borgs were aliens from another planet, when they were actually kids who wished to become the comic book heroes, the Beetleborgs.
  • Another Big Bad Beetleborgs commercial had generic mutants represent their enemies.
• Pokémon commercials in season 1 often drastically mispronounced the pokémon names.
  • The series announcer also consistently mispronounced "Poke uh mon" as "Pokey Mon." This sounded ... odd ... when an instant later a clip from the show played with the word correctly pronounced.
  • In one early commercial, they mixed up a Vulpix and a Ponyta.
  • At least one commercial for the Pokémon Trading Card Game advertised the chance of getting a "Dark Raticat".
• Most Bionicle ads fall under this, particularly the Toa Mahri ads that showed some sort of machine attaching their masks and gills before they go underwater. (In the canon, the Toa Mahri's gills were a permanent anatomical feature, and they couldn't breathe air at the time the commercial took place.)
• This is at very least Older Than Merchandise Driven Shows. Commercials for The Andy Griffith Show included the show characters, in character, and often within the plotline of the episode itself, plugging the sponsor's product—and not always in ways that fit the show's continuity. For example, Andy might shuck an ear of corn to reveal Post Toasties...or even more surreal, Barney might put one over on Andy.
• Happens all the time in Transformers. Sometimes it's relatively minor, like a movie Jazz figure recolored as an homage to G1 Jazz being explained in his bio as having been revived by Ratchet, or Beast Machines quietly expanding the small band of surviving Maximals. Other times it's more complex, like how the early Beast Wars toys' bios set up the series as a direct continuation of G1 on modern-day Earth, with Optimus Primal and Megatron being the same characters as G1 Optimus Prime and Megatron (which would later be contradicted by the TV series). In extreme cases, such as the current Kre-O sub-line, on-package bios and commericals may be the only fiction available.
  • TFWiki likes to invoke this when Hasbro applies the Transformers brand name to transforming toys made for a different franchise, such as Star Wars, which makes for amusing pages where the writer pretends to genuinely have no idea Darth Vader has been in anything else.