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A

Television Animation

Avatar: The Last Airbender is an American series built with genuine respect for the East Asian and Inuit…

Agent Smith is a piece of software that develops contempt.

Ahsoka was introduced in 2008 to widespread hostility.

Albus Dumbledore

Dumbledore is the mentor archetype with a deliberate flaw built in.

All Might is the Symbol of Peace, the greatest hero in My Hero Academia.

Animal is the drummer for the house band and functions as pure id.

Disney Animation

The interesting thing about Anna is that she is the protagonist and almost nobody remembers it.

Annabelle is the most commercially successful thing in modern horror that barely moves.

Ant-Man is a superhero who can shrink to the size of an insect and command ants.

Anya Forger is a small girl who can read minds.

Aquaman spent roughly thirty years as the punchline of superhero comics and then stopped being one.

The Lord of the Rings

Aragorn is the rightful king who spends most of the story refusing to claim it.

Disney Animation

The Little Mermaid ended a twenty-year decline and is generally treated as the start of the Disney Renaissance.

Art is the most successful independent horror character of the last decade and the numbers are genuinely remarkable.

Picture Book Classics

Arthur Read is an eight-year-old aardvark in round glasses who deals with school.

Game of Thrones

Arya's arc is the series' longest sustained argument about what revenge costs.

Ash Ketchum spent twenty-five years being ten years old and losing.

The Chronicles of Narnia

Aslan is the most openly allegorical major character in children's fantasy.

Osamu Tezuka is called the god of manga for reasons this character demonstrates.

B

Disney Animation

Bambi is a young deer growing up in a forest, and his story began as a novel for adults.

Bane is routinely reduced to the drug-enhanced strongman who breaks Batman's back, which misreads him entirely.

Ruth Handler invented Barbie after watching her daughter assign adult roles to paper dolls and noticing…

Television Animation

Bart was the show's initial breakout and, for roughly the first three seasons, its centre of gravity.

Batman is the rare superhero defined by absence.

Disney Animation

Baymax is the rare case of a character design that came out of an engineering lab.

BB-8 is a ball with a dome on top, and the fact that it really rolled is what made it famous.

Beast Boy is Garfield Logan, a green-skinned teenager who can turn into any animal.

Beavis and Butt-Head

Television Animation

Beavis and Butt-Head are two teenage metal fans who sit on a sofa.

Beetlejuice inverts its genre completely.

Disney Animation

Belle exists because Linda Woolverton was hired to write the screenplay and refused to write the heroine…

Television Animation

Bender is an industrial robot built to bend girders, who develops a personality consisting almost entirely of vices.

Fleischer Studios

Betty Boop did not start out human.

Big Bird is written as a six-year-old, which is the key to everything about him.

Preschool Characters

Bingo is Bluey's four-year-old little sister, a red heeler where Bluey is a blue one.

Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics, arriving in 1966.

Black Widow entered Marvel in 1964 as a Cold War antagonist.

Blue is the franchise's attempt to make a raptor a character rather than a threat, and it half works.

Preschool Characters

Bluey is a six-year-old Blue Heeler and the centre of the most critically respected preschool programme in decades.

BMO is a living games console — a squat teal box with a screen for a face.

Bob the Builder

Preschool Characters

Bob the Builder established the format Keith Chapman would later reuse for PAW Patrol.

Boba Fett is the clearest demonstration in popular culture that screen time and popularity are unrelated.

Bowser was designed as an ox.

Television Animation

Brian Griffin is the Griffin family's dog.

Christmas classics

Buddy is a human raised by elves at the North Pole who travels to New York to find his father.

Television Drama

Buffy Summers is the blonde girl who walks into a dark alley in the first reel of a horror film and dies.

Bugs Bunny is the American trickster archetype in its most refined commercial form.

Bulbasaur is national Pokédex number 001, which gives it a structural prominence nothing else in the franchise can claim.

Bumblebee is the smallest and least powerful Autobot.

Buzz Lightyear is a toy who does not know he is a toy, and the first film's best sequence is the one where he finds out.

C

C-3PO's design is a direct lift from Maria, the false robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).

Captain America

Captain America was a political act before he was a franchise.

Disney Animation

Captain Hook is the pirate captain of Neverland.

Carl Fredricksen

Carl Fredricksen is a widowed balloon seller who ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies it to…

Carrie exists because Stephen King's wife went through the bin.

Casper is a children's character with a premise nobody involved has ever wanted to examine closely.

Catwoman has spent eighty years being the character DC cannot decide about.

Charizard is the most popular Pokémon that is not the mascot.

Charlie Brown is a study in persistent failure that never becomes cruelty.

Charmander carries the single most affecting piece of design in the original games, and it is one line of Pokédex text.

Chase is a German Shepherd police pup and, by most measures.

Chewbacca is a character with no intelligible dialogue who nonetheless reads as fully articulate.

Miyazaki has said he made Spirited Away for the ten-year-old daughters of his friends.

Don Mancini wrote Child's Play as satire before it was horror.

Disney Animation

Cinderella saved the studio.

Cinnamoroll is a white puppy whose ears are long enough to fly with.

Christmas classics

Clark Griswold is the father who wants the perfect family occasion so badly that he destroys it.

Cookie Monster began life in a series of unaired commercials Jim Henson made in the 1960s for a snack company.

Coraline Jones is an eleven-year-old who moves into an old house.

Universal Monsters

Bram Stoker's 1897 novel did not invent the vampire but it fixed almost everything modern audiences assume about them.

Courage the Cowardly Dog

Television Animation

Courage is a small pink dog who is frightened of everything and protects his elderly owners anyway.

Crash Bandicoot

Crash Bandicoot was built to be a mascot before he was built to be a game.

The Creeper is a coding error that became the most recognisable thing in the best-selling game ever made.

Disney Animation

Cruella de Vil is half-black, half-white hair, a fur coat and a plan for ninety-nine puppies.

Independent games

Cuphead is a small cartoon cup with a straw in his head who.

Picture Book Classics

The manuscript survived the fall of France on a bicycle.

Cyborg is one of the few superheroes whose powers are unambiguously a disaster that happened to him.

D

Daenerys Targaryen

Game of Thrones

Daenerys begins the first novel as a thirteen-year-old sold into marriage by her brother to buy an army.

Daffy is the most substantially rewritten character in the Warner roster.

Television Drama

Scully was written as the sceptic, and the structural inversion is the show's best idea.

Preschool Characters

Daniel Tiger is a four-year-old tiger in a red sweater who helps preschoolers learn to handle feelings…

Matt Murdock is a blind lawyer from Hell's Kitchen whose other senses were heightened by the accident…

Daria Morgendorffer

Television Animation

Daria Morgendorffer is a smart, sardonic teenager who regards her suburban high school with flat…

Darth Maul speaks only a few lines in The Phantom Menace and became its most marketable figure anyway.

Darth Vader is arguably the most efficient villain design in film history.

Data occupies the position Spock held in the original series.

Deadpool began as a fairly straight 1991 mercenary.

Dobby is the series' most uncomfortable idea and its most beloved character.

Back to the Future

Doc Brown is the mad scientist archetype rehabilitated into something warm.

Doctor Doom is Victor von Doom, the armoured ruler of the small European country of Latveria and the…

Doctor Strange is Steve Ditko's book far more than Stan Lee's.

Disney Animation

Donald exists because Mickey became too popular to be funny.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Donatello is the one who builds things, and his weapon choice quietly reflects it.

DreamWorks Animation

Donkey is the reason the first film has a heart, and the performance is doing nearly all of it.

Donkey Kong was a rescue operation.

Dora the Explorer

Preschool Characters

Dora the Explorer did two things that were genuinely new for American preschool television.

Andrew Stanton wrote Dory for Ellen DeGeneres specifically.

Sherlock Holmes

Watson invented a job that fiction has used ever since.

Dug is a friendly golden retriever who can talk because of a translating collar invented by the explorer Charles Muntz.

Television Drama

Dwight is the show's best-constructed joke because everything about him is internally consistent.

E

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Edna has under four minutes of screen time and is the most quoted thing in the film.

Fullmetal Alchemist opens with two children attempting to resurrect their dead mother and being maimed for it.

Eevee is built around a single mechanical idea that no other Pokémon carries as cleanly.

Disney Animation

Eeyore is the reason the Hundred Acre Wood books have lasted with adults.

Television Drama

Eleven is a character built almost entirely out of restraint.

Ripley exists as a woman by accident, and the accident is instructive.

Elmo existed as an anonymous background monster for several years before Kevin Clash picked up the puppet…

Disney Animation

Elsa was written as the villain, and the song changed the film.

Emperor Palpatine

Emperor Palpatine is the ruler of the Galactic Empire and.

The Enderman is the only genuinely unsettling thing in Minecraft, and the reason is a single rule.

Eren begins as the most conventional shōnen protagonist imaginable.

Television Animation

Cartman is the rare comic lead written with no redeeming qualities at all, and the show is disciplined about it.

F

Felix the Cat is a black cat with a white face and a huge grin.

Pendleton Ward drew Finn for a seven-minute short that Nickelodeon commissioned and then declined to develop.

Fozzie is a comedian who is not funny, and the show is unusually kind about it.

Frankenstein's Monster

Universal Monsters

Mary Shelley was eighteen when she began Frankenstein.

Fred Flintstone

The Flintstones was the first animated series in American prime time, and it was not made for children.

Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's was made by one person in a few months, and the premise came from an insult.

Freddy Krueger is the slasher villain who talks.

The Lord of the Rings

Frodo is a protagonist who fails at the last moment.

Frosty the Snowman

Christmas classics

Frosty began as a song written to follow a hit.

G

Gambit is Remy LeBeau, a Cajun mutant thief from New Orleans who charges objects.

The Lord of the Rings

Gandalf is the template every fantasy mentor since has been measured against.

Newspaper strips

Jim Davis approached Garfield as a market problem before he approached it as a strip.

Gengar is a round purple ghost with red eyes and a wide grin.

Geralt of Rivia

Geralt is a monster hunter who keeps discovering the monster is not the problem.

Ghost Rider is one of the best pure designs Marvel has ever published and the concept is barely more than the image.

Ghostface is not a person, and that is the design.

Television Animation

GIR is a small robot assigned to help the alien Zim conquer Earth.

Gizmo is a small, furry mogwai with enormous ears who comes with three rules.

The 1954 Gojira is a considerably more serious film than its reputation in the West suggests.

The Lord of the Rings

Gollum is what the Ring does given five hundred years.

The Addams Family

Gomez is written as pure appetite, and it is the most cheerful characterisation in the property.

Gonzo is the strangest thing the Muppets ever made and the one the writers have most consistently refused…

Disney Animation

Goofy is a tall, loose-limbed dog in a green hat whose whole performance is falling over with total…

Green Arrow spent his first thirty years as an unembarrassed Batman imitation.

Green Lantern is DC's science-fiction franchise wearing a superhero costume.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Jeff Kinney worked on Diary of a Wimpy Kid for six years before a publisher took it.

Grogu is the most commercially explosive character introduction of the streaming era.

Groot spent forty-six years as a forgotten monster before becoming one of Marvel's most merchandised characters.

Grover is the Sesame Street character who does the actual teaching.

Despicable Me works because it commits to a premise most family films would soften.

H

Disney Animation

Disney's Hades is a blue-skinned god of the underworld whose hair is a flame that flares orange when he loses his temper.

Han Solo exists to puncture the film he is in.

Television Animation

Hank Hill is an assistant manager at Strickland Propane in Arlen, Texas.

Hannibal Lecter

Hannibal Lecter works because he is almost never doing anything.

Harley Quinn is the most successful character in modern comics to have been created for television rather…

Harry Potter is a deliberately ordinary protagonist surrounded by extraordinary people.

Hawkeye is the Avenger with a bow, standing next to a god.

Masters of the Universe

He-Man exists because Mattel turned down the Star Wars toy licence and needed something to compete with…

Hello Kitty is one of the highest-grossing licensed characters ever created and she has almost no story.

Hermione Granger

Hermione is the character who actually solves the books.

Television Animation

Homer began as a fairly conventional exasperated sitcom father in the 1987 Tracey Ullman shorts and drifted.

Howl comes from a 1986 novel by Diana Wynne Jones, and the Ghibli film keeps the character's best joke.

I

Ichigo Kurosaki

Bleach is the most style-driven of the big shōnen series.

Indiana Jones is a deliberate revival of the 1930s cliffhanger serial.

Inuyasha is a half-demon with white hair, dog ears and a red robe, living in feudal Japan.

Iron Man was designed as a provocation.

Isabelle is a cheerful yellow Shih Tzu who works as the player's assistant in Animal Crossing.

Itachi Uchiha is Sasuke's older brother, the prodigy who killed almost his entire clan in a single night…

Izuku Midoriya, known as Deku, is a boy born without superpowers in a world where most people have one.

J

Jabba the Hutt is an enormous slug-like crime lord who rules from a palace on Tatooine.

Jack Skellington

Disney Animation

The Nightmare Before Christmas came from a poem Tim Burton wrote while working as an animator at Disney…

The novel and the film disagree about Jack Torrance so completely that they are effectively different characters.

Disney Animation

Jafar is the Sultan's grand vizier in Aladdin.

Jake can stretch into any shape, which in a normal cartoon would be a power and in this one is mostly a convenience.

Kirk's popular reputation — the brawling, womanising cowboy captain — is substantially a later invention…

Disney Animation

Aladdin was made fast, by a studio at the top of its powers and under enormous time pressure.

Two things about Jason Voorhees are routinely misremembered, and both are worth stating.

Jean Grey is the centre of the most influential storyline in superhero comics.

Jean-Luc Picard

Picard is a deliberate correction of Kirk.

Television Drama

Jesse was written to die at the end of the first season.

Jessie is the toy who has already been through what Woody fears most.

Jigglypuff is a round pink balloon with big eyes and a curl of hair on its forehead.

Saw was made for around a million dollars by two Australians in their twenties.

Television Drama

Hopper is the adult the series is actually about.

Joey is the character the writers had to rescue.

Game of Thrones

Jon Snow is the series' most conventional fantasy protagonist.

Pete Docter started Inside Out because his daughter changed at eleven and he wanted to know where she had gone.

Disney Animation

Zootopia was restructured very late.

K

Kakashi is Naruto's teacher, and Masashi Kishimoto designed him to be read almost entirely from what is…

Katsuki Bakugo is Izuku Midoriya's childhood friend and furious rival.

Kenny McCormick

Television Animation

Kenny McCormick is the boy in the orange parka whose words come out muffled.

Kermit the Frog

Kermit was built in 1955 from Jim Henson's mother's discarded coat and two halves of a ping-pong ball.

Kevin McCallister

Christmas classics

Kevin McCallister is eight years old, accidentally left behind when his family flies to Paris for Christmas.

Kiki is a thirteen-year-old witch who leaves home with her black cat.

King Ghidorah is Godzilla's opposite number and the design is a straightforward statement of that.

Kirby was drawn as a placeholder.

Knuckles is an echidna, which is a genuinely unusual choice.

Kratos is one of the few video game characters to be substantially rewritten and improved by his own sequel.

Kuromi is Sanrio's most successful recent creation and she works by breaking the house rules.

The design brief for Kylo Ren was essentially a critique of Darth Vader, and the film says so out loud.

L

Death Note is a thriller in which almost nothing physical happens.

Lara Croft was the first female protagonist to headline a blockbuster action game.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre predates Halloween by four years and effectively wrote the rulebook the…

The Lord of the Rings

Legolas does very little in the novels.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Leonardo is the responsible one, which in this franchise means he is the character the others resent.

Levi is the most popular character in Attack on Titan by a wide margin.

Luthor's modern form dates from a 1986 revision that turned him from a mad scientist in a jumpsuit into a…

Lightning McQueen

Cars is the Pixar film critics rate lowest and the one that has made the studio the most money, by a very wide margin.

Link is deliberately empty, and the design is explicit about why.

Television Animation

Lisa Simpson is the conscience of The Simpsons.

Loki is the most successful redemption-adjacent villain Marvel has.

Voldemort's best idea is the name, and specifically the fact that nobody will say it.

Lotso is a pink, strawberry-scented teddy bear who welcomes the toys to Sunnyside Daycare in Toy Story 3…

Lucy runs a psychiatric booth out of a lemonade stand charging five cents a session.

Luigi began as a palette swap.

Luke Skywalker is the most-cited modern example of the hero's journey, and not by accident.

Luna Lovegood arrives in the fifth Harry Potter book.

M

Magneto is comics' most successful argument that a villain should be allowed to be right about the…

Disney Animation

Maleficent is a black silhouette with horns, and almost everything about her follows from that.

Marceline is a thousand-year-old vampire with long black hair who plays a bass made from an axe.

Almost every distinctive feature of Mario's design was a solution to a hardware limitation.

Marshall is the Dalmatian firefighter and the show's comic relief.

Back to the Future

Marty McFly is one of the most efficiently constructed protagonists in mainstream cinema.

Marvin the Martian

Chuck Jones built Marvin on a single inversion.

Master Chief is a helmet the player wears, and Bungie was deliberate about keeping it that way.

Matilda Wormwood

Matilda is a five-year-old genius in a family that resents her for it.

Mega Man is a blue robot boy with an arm cannon who defeats a series of robot bosses and takes each one's…

Megatron's original toy transformed into a Walther P38 pistol.

Mewtwo is a genetically engineered Pokémon, created from the DNA of the rare Mew and far more powerful…

The mask that defines the entire slasher genre cost about two dollars.

Television Drama

Michael Scott is an adaptation of a considerably crueller original.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Michelangelo is the youngest brother and the one the 1987 cartoon leaned on hardest.

Disney Animation

Mickey Mouse was created out of a contractual disaster.

Picture Book Classics

Dick Bruna invented Miffy in 1955 to entertain his one-year-old son during a rainy holiday.

Mike is a green sphere with one eye and two legs.

Miles Morales is the most successful legacy replacement in modern superhero comics.

Disney Animation

Minnie appeared in the same 1928 short as Mickey and has been beside him ever since.

Miss Piggy started as a background chorus pig with no lines and became the show's most forceful presence.

Disney Animation

Moana was made under an arrangement the studio had not used before.

Monkey D. Luffy

One Piece is the best-selling comic series in history by a wide margin.

Moon Knight is Marc Spector, a former mercenary who believes he was brought back from death by Khonshu.

Morticia Addams

The Addams Family

Morticia is the still centre of the family and the reason the whole premise works.

Television Animation

Rick and Morty began as a crude short made in 2006 that parodied Back to the Future.

Mothra is the only major kaiju that is unambiguously benevolent.

The Incredibles was the first Pixar film with an entirely human cast.

Mr. Potato Head

Disney Animation

The source here is older than almost anything else the studio has adapted.

My Melody is a white rabbit in a hood, and the hood is the entire design idea.

N

Naruto is built on a specific and unusually well-executed premise.

Nemo has a malformed fin, referred to throughout as his lucky fin, and the film is unusually careful with it.

Neo is a chosen-one narrative wrapped around a genuinely unusual idea for 1999.

Nezuko is the reason her brother's story exists.

Disney Animation

The fox is the film's argument in a single character.

Nightwing is the model case for how to grow a sidekick up.

No-Face is a spirit with no identity of his own who takes on the characteristics of whatever he consumes.

Norman Bates is the point at which horror stopped being about monsters and started being about people.

O

Obi-Wan is the mentor who dies in the first act, which was a structural requirement rather than a character decision.

Disney Animation

Olaf is the joke that turned out to be load-bearing.

Disney Animation

Oogie Boogie is a burlap sack full of insects.

Optimus Prime is a toy that was given a soul by a work-for-hire comics writer.

Oscar the Grouch

Oscar exists because the programme's educational advisers argued that children needed to see a character…

P

Toru Iwatani set out to design an arcade game that women would want to play.

Paddington Bear

Picture Book Classics

Michael Bond bought a single unsold bear from a shop near Paddington station on Christmas Eve 1956 as a…

Pennywise is a shape the creature wears rather than the creature itself.

Preschool Characters

Peppa Pig is drawn with a deliberate flatness that has become one of the most recognisable design…

Television Animation

Family Guy exists because of a student film.

Picture Book Classics

Peter Rabbit began in 1893 as a picture letter Beatrix Potter wrote to entertain the sick five-year-old…

Venkman is the reason Ghostbusters is a comedy rather than a horror film.

Television Animation

Philip J. Fry is a New York pizza delivery boy who is accidentally frozen on New Year's Eve 1999 and…

Piccolo is a tall green Namekian in a turban and weighted cape who starts Dragon Ball as Goku's enemy and…

Disney Animation

Piglet is a very small pig who is nervous about almost everything and brave anyway.

Pikachu was not designed to be the face of anything.

Pinhead is not a demon and not a killer in the slasher sense, which is the detail most people miss.

Pinkie Pie is the show's comic engine and the character Lauren Faust used to establish that the relaunch…

Disney Animation

Pluto is Mickey's dog, and unlike Goofy he is written as an actual dog.

Pochita is a small orange dog with a chainsaw blade in its forehead.

Poison Ivy started as a femme fatale with a plant gimmick and has been steadily rewritten into something…

Ponyo is Miyazaki's loose reworking of The Little Mermaid for very young children.

Newspaper strips

Popeye was a walk-on.

DreamWorks Animation

Trolls is built on a real toy — the Danish good-luck troll dolls Thomas Dam started carving in the 1950s.

Leia's first scene establishes almost everything about her.

Peach's history tracks the games industry's slow renegotiation of what a princess character is for.

The series is named after her and for most of its history she was not playable in it.

Professor Moriarty

Sherlock Holmes

Moriarty exists to kill Sherlock Holmes, and almost nothing else.

Xavier is the most morally complicated mentor in mainstream comics.

Pusheen is one of very few licensed characters whose breakthrough came through instant-messaging stickers…

R

R2-D2 has no face, no dialogue and no articulated limbs to speak of.

Rainbow Dash is the brash, competitive one, and she matters because of what Lauren Faust was trying to…

Christmas classics

Ralphie wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, and every adult he asks tells him the same thing.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Raphael is the angry one, and in the original black-and-white comics that anger is considerably more…

Disney Animation

Tangled was the studio's fiftieth animated feature and reportedly one of the most expensive films ever made.

Raven was created by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez as part of their 1980 revival of the Teen Titans.

William Peter Blatty based the novel on a 1949 case he had read about as a student.

Remy is a rat who wants to cook in Paris, which is about as bad a fit between character and profession as…

Rey is introduced doing something no previous Star Wars lead does: working.

Television Animation

Rick and Morty began as a crude animated parody of Back to the Future and became the most influential…

Robin invented the sidekick, and the commercial logic behind him is unusually well documented.

Rocket is a genetically and cybernetically modified raccoon.

Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky in about three and a half days after watching a journeyman fighter go…

Ron is the only one of the three with nothing to distinguish him.

Zoro is the first crew member Luffy recruits in One Piece.

Ross is a palaeontologist, which the show mostly uses as a joke about him being boring.

Rubble is the construction pup and the youngest of the original team, which the writing uses well.

Hagrid is the first person from the wizarding world Harry meets.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Christmas classics

Rudolph was a department-store promotion.

S

Sailor Moon fused two established Japanese genres.

One-Punch Man began as a crudely drawn webcomic that its author, working under the name ONE, posted for free.

Disney Animation

Sally is a rag doll stitched together by a scientist who considers her his property.

Sam is a small figure in orange footed pyjamas and a burlap sack mask who appears in every story of Trick…

Samara is the American version of Sadako, from Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel and Hideo Nakata's 1998 film.

Metroid's ending in 1986 removed the armour and revealed the bounty hunter inside was a woman.

Independent games

Sans is a short, grinning skeleton in a blue hoodie who tells bad puns and.

Sarah Connor is two entirely different characters across two films.

Sasuke Uchiha is Naruto's rival: the last survivor of his clan.

Gojo is the most merchandised anime character of recent years, and the reason is largely design.

Television Drama

Saul Goodman was written as comic relief for three episodes and became the centre of a six-season prequel…

Disney Animation

Andreas Deja animated three of the studio's best villains in a row.

Wanda Maximoff began in 1964 as a reluctant villain with a vaguely defined hex power and became.

Scooby-Doo was built to survive censorship.

Scorpion is a yellow-clad ninja who throws a spear on a rope and pulls his opponent towards him with a…

Snape is the series' longest-running structural trick.

Shadow the Hedgehog

Shadow was built as Sonic's opposite in every respect the design could manage.

In the 1940s this character outsold Superman, and the resulting lawsuit is one of the most consequential…

Masters of the Universe

She-Ra was created for a commercial reason that is unusually explicit.

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed literary character in film and television history.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Shredder is one of the better-designed villains in children's television and the design is doing almost all of the work.

DreamWorks Animation

Shrek began as a 1990 picture book by William Steig.

The Silver Surfer is a chrome figure on a surfboard who flies ahead of Galactus.

Disney Animation

The Lion King was the studio's B-project.

Masters of the Universe

Skeletor is a blue-skinned sorcerer with a bare skull for a face who spends every episode failing.

Skye is the aviation pup and, for a long stretch, the only female member of the original team.

Slimer appears for well under a minute in the 1984 film.

Snake Eyes is a commando who never speaks and never shows his face.

Snoopy began as an ordinary dog on four legs with no inner life and became.

Snorlax is a Pokémon that does nothing, and in the original games that is exactly its job.

Disney Animation

The industry called it Disney's Folly, and the reasoning was sound.

Goku is the character who set the shape of modern action manga.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic was engineered as a competitor.

Spider-Man changed what a superhero could be by making one who was not admired.

Cowboy Bebop is the series most often credited with bringing adult anime to a Western audience.

Spock is the most consequential character Star Trek produced, and NBC initially wanted him removed.

SpongeBob SquarePants

Television Animation

SpongeBob was created by a marine biologist.

Spyro is a small purple dragon who charges with his horns and breathes fire.

Squirtle is the water starter and the one with the most personality in adaptation.

Peter Quill spent nearly forty years as an obscure character in a magazine nobody read.

Starfire is Koriand'r, an alien princess from the planet Tamaran who can fly and fire bolts of energy…

Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is a joke about advertising that became one of the most recognisable…

Steve is the default player skin and almost nothing else, which is the point.

Television Animation

Family Guy premiered after the Super Bowl in January 1999 and the single joke that carried it was a baby…

Disney Animation

Stitch is a genetically engineered weapon designed to destroy everything he touches.

Storm arrived in 1975 as part of the international X-Men relaunch and quickly became something the roster…

The stormtrooper is one of the very few designs in this category that is not a character at all but is treated as one.

Strawberry Shortcake

American Greetings

Strawberry Shortcake is a freckled girl in a strawberry-print bonnet.

Sulley exists partly as a technical demonstration.

Supergirl is Superman's cousin and, more usefully, his counterexample.

Superman is the character that invented the category.

Sylvester is a black-and-white cat who spends his career failing to eat a very small yellow bird.

T

Tails exists because Sonic 2 needed a second player.

Tanjiro is a shōnen protagonist defined by empathy rather than ambition, and the series is rigorous about it.

Taz appeared in five theatrical shorts in the classic era and then became one of the largest…

Thanos in the comics is in love with the personification of Death, and everything he does is an attempt to impress her.

The Bride of Frankenstein

Universal Monsters

The Bride is on screen for roughly three minutes and is one of the most recognisable characters ever created.

American Greetings

The Care Bears were invented backwards.

The Cat in the Hat

The Cat in the Hat exists because of a magazine article.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

Universal Monsters

The Gill-man is the last of Universal's classic monsters and the only one designed by a woman.

The Cybermen were created by a working doctor, and it shows.

The Daleks saved Doctor Who.

The Doctor is defined by a production accident that became the best idea in British television.

The Big Lebowski

The Dude, whose name is Jeffrey Lebowski, is a relaxed Los Angeles slacker who bowls.

Disney Animation

The Evil Queen is Snow White's vain stepmother.

The Flash matters to comics history out of all proportion to his profile outside them.

Geisel wrote How the Grinch Stole Christmas in the same year as The Cat in the Hat.

Picture Book Classics

The Gruffalo is a monster invented by a mouse to frighten off predators, who then turns out to be real.

The Headless Horseman

Disney Animation

The Headless Horseman is the ghost of a soldier who rides through Sleepy Hollow at night.

The Hulk is Marvel's monster, and the fact that he is on the hero side of the ledger has never quite…

The Invisible Man

Universal Monsters

H. G. Wells published the novel in 1897 and its argument is bleak and modern.

The Joker works because he is the exact structural opposite of Batman and nothing else.

The LEGO Minifigure

For its first forty-odd years the LEGO Group would not put a face on anything.

The Mandalorian

Din Djarin is a Western protagonist wearing science-fiction armour, and the series is unusually open about it.

The Minions are the most commercially efficient character design of the last twenty years.

Universal Monsters

The 1932 film exists because of a newspaper story.

The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther is a tall pink cat who never hurries and almost never speaks.

The Powerpuff Girls

Television Animation

Craig McCracken made the first version as a student film at CalArts in 1992 under a title Cartoon Network…

The Punisher was created as a villain.

The Red Ranger is a position rather than a person, and that is the whole design of the franchise.

The Riddler has a compulsion rather than a plan.

The most frightening thing about the shark in Jaws is how rarely you see it, and that was not a decision.

The Smurfs (Peyo)

The Smurfs are small blue villagers in white hats, each named after the one thing that defines them.

James Cameron has said the character came from a fever dream in Rome of a chrome skeleton dragging itself out of fire.

The Tyrannosaurus rex

The paddock breakout is the most influential effects sequence of the 1990s and almost none of it is…

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Picture Book Classics

Eric Carle's book began as an entirely different animal.

The Weeping Angels

The Weeping Angels came out of a budget constraint and are probably the best monster the revived series…

Universal Monsters

Almost everything popularly believed about werewolves was invented for this film in 1941.

The Xenomorph is the most influential creature design in science-fiction cinema.

The Addams Family

Thing is a disembodied hand and has had one of the strangest production histories of any character on…

Television Drama

Peaky Blinders takes a real Birmingham street gang of the 1890s.

Thomas the Tank Engine

Picture Book Classics

The Reverend Wilbert Awdry invented these stories to entertain his son Christopher through measles in 1943.

Marvel's Thor is an adaptation of a genuine Norse deity.

Disney Animation

The Princess and the Frog was the studio's return to hand-drawn animation after Home on the Range had…

Disney Animation

Tigger arrives late — he is not in Winnie-the-Pooh at all.

Timon and Pumbaa

Disney Animation

A meerkat and a warthog arrive halfway through The Lion King and change its temperature completely.

Television Animation

Tina Belcher is the eldest child of the Belcher family on Bob's Burgers.

Disney Animation

Tinker Bell started as a moving spot of light.

Toad is the character everyone remembers for a line he delivers as a disappointment.

Tom and Jerry hold more Academy Awards than any other character series in animation.

Tom Nook is the businessman of Animal Crossing.

Television Animation

Tommy Pickles is a one-year-old in a blue T-shirt and a diaper who leads his friends on adventures that.

DreamWorks Animation

Toothless is animation's best argument that you do not need dialogue if the animation is good enough.

Totoro is a forest spirit in a film with almost no plot, and that is the achievement.

Trinity gets the opening of the film, and that choice does a lot of work.

Tweety is a much less innocent character than the merchandise suggests, and that gap is the joke.

Twilight Sparkle

Twilight Sparkle is the lead, and the choice Lauren Faust made with her is the reason the relaunch worked.

Two-Face is the most formally elegant villain in Gotham because the gimmick and the tragedy are the same…

Tyrion Lannister

Game of Thrones

Tyrion is the best-written character in the series and the one Martin has said he identifies with most.

U

The Addams Family

Fester is a bald, pallid man in a fur coat who conducts electricity through his own body and demonstrates…

Disney Animation

Ursula is a lavender sea witch with a white bouffant and six black tentacles.

V

Valak was not in the film as shot.

Vegeta is the archetype every shōnen rival since has been built from.

Venom is a design that outgrew its story.

W

Martin Handford was an illustrator with a habit of drawing enormous crowds.

WALL-E's first act runs close to forty minutes with almost no dialogue.

Television Drama

Vince Gilligan described the project as turning Mr Chippendale into Scarface.

Wario is what happens when a designer is told to make an anti-Mario and takes it literally.

Wednesday Addams

The Addams Family

Wednesday existed as an unnamed cartoon child for twenty-six years before the 1964 sitcom required names.

Wicket is the Ewok who befriends Princess Leia on the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi.

Wile E. Coyote spends every cartoon trying to catch the Road Runner, and he never succeeds.

Winifred Sanderson

Disney Animation

Hocus Pocus is the clearest example in modern film of a flop becoming a fixture.

Winnie-the-Pooh

Disney Animation

Winnie-the-Pooh began as a set of stories A. A. Milne told about his son Christopher Robin's actual toys.

Wolverine was created to give the Hulk a Canadian opponent and was very nearly a throwaway.

Wonder Woman was created with an explicit political thesis, which makes her unusual among superheroes.

Woodstock is a small yellow bird who cannot fly properly.

Woody is the more interesting half of the pair, because he is the one with something to lose.

Woody Woodpecker

Walter Lantz Productions

Woody Woodpecker is a red-crested bird with a machine-gun laugh and no respect for anyone.

Y

Yoda is a puppet that convinced an audience it was a person, which in 1980 was not a settled question.

Yogi Bear lives in Jellystone Park and steals picnic baskets, which he considers a sign of intelligence.

Yoshi was an idea Miyamoto had been trying to implement since the first Super Mario Bros.