Creator's Pet/Real Life

Real Life

Any instance of cronyism in politics will be this. The crony appointee will be unpopular, but will get talked up by the politician who appointed them.
At Disney Theme Parks, we have Duffy, the Disney Bear. Originally created for Tokyo Disneyland, he was a massive hit in his home country, so Disney decided to export him to America at the mid-Turn of the Millennium. However, he was generally met with a response of "Who the f*** is Duffy?" It Got Worse, though; he evidently sold well enough (or the executives wanted to push him enough) that he became a meet-and-greet character, and Duffy cut-outs replaced the masks at Epcot. Hell, his meet-and-greets have lasted longer than Ensemble Darkhorses who are actually from the Disney Animated Canon, like Flynn Rider and Prince Naveen, Louis and Dr. Facilier, or long-gone characters such as Quasimodo, Phoebus and Esmerelda, |Hercules and Megara, and Tarzan and Jane.

Sports

One year, FOX's coverage of NASCAR races added a 'Digger Cam'- a ground-level camera in the infield that showed cars coming around a turn. The 'digger' part came from an animated gopher named Digger, who would pop up out of a hole, look behind him, notice the cars, scream, and then frantically get back into his hole. It was kind of funny the first time. After that it became progressively less funny. Then they did it repeatedly, every single race. This was the signal for FOX to render Digger in CGI, give him his own pre-race cartoon, and offer Digger merchandise. The response has escalated to three words: kill the rodent.
Most Major League Baseball fans tend to hate ESPN because they seem to focus only on five large market (Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, Cubs, and Dodgers) They will occasionally pick up on a winning team but many MLB fans (and former ESPN baseball analysts) have flocked to MLB Network because they air games with every team. In addition on their recaps ESPN will show seemingly every play of the above teams games and one highlights from all of the other games
The Big 12 conference and the Universities of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. The favoritism of those three schools (the former two for having lots of money and strong football programs, the last for their basketball program and the former Big 8 headquarters being in Kansas City) has more or less (combined with front office instability) led to the near-collapse of the conference and four schools leaving. The conference defending Kansas's Jerkass attitude over the University of Missouri leaving (who had good reasons, such as the athletic department losing money due to the loss of football rivals Nebraska and Colorado) and the formation of The Longhorn Network (which is considered nothing more than a recruitment tool for Texas) only makes things worse.
A similar case to MLB on ESPN, people from Western Canada hate CBC's Hockey Night in Canada, and its preference for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, and when the two aren't on, the Ottawa Senators. A particularly bad example of this was giving up a Saturday afternoon game, which was a rematch of the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins. Would CBC air the anticipated game? Nope. They aired a game instead between Toronto and Washington, or something.

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