Never Trust a Title

"What the fuck? You can't even trust the damn title!"
Logo

NOTE: No battle actually takes place at Procyon.

— Disclaimer in the credits of Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon

Sometimes, a title makes no sense. Sometimes, however, a title will make a sort of sense, but on later ponderings, will be seen as misleading. Sometimes this is due to the title being an Artifact Title or perhaps the writer simply thought it was a cooler name. It also sometimes leads to instances of I Am Not Shazam.

Compare Completely Different Title when it changes the original title to a misleading one and Non-Indicative Name. Contrast Work Info Title. By definition, all examples of "Untitled" Title have inaccurate titles. See also Ironic Episode Title, Deceptively Silly Title, Sarcastic Title, Trivial Title, Secondary Character Title. Inverted by Spoiler Title, which is so accurate that it manages to give away important plot points. Inaccurate or misleading titles are an essential part of a Clickbait Gag, which mocks online uses of this trope among other manipulative online tropes.

WARNING: Spoilers are afoot.

Example subpages:

Video Games

Other examples:

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Anime & Manga

Anorexia: Shikabane Hanako wa Kyoshokushou has nothing to do with anorexia. It's a horror manga about cannibalism.
Basilisk doesn't include any actual Basilisks; the title is metaphorical.
Black Jack: Anorexia: The Two Dark Doctors: The patient does not have anorexia, but a parasite that makes her involuntarily vomit whenever she eats (which is closer to bulimia).
Bubblegum Crisis sounds like a wacky slapstick comedy, but it is actually a gritty Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk series.
Code Geass: "Shirley at Gunpoint": Shirley is not held at gunpoint at any point in the episode, and the ending has Shirley picking up a gun and pointing it at an injured Zero.
The Japanese title of the fourth Dragon Ball movie, Dragon Ball Z: Lord Slug, is "Super Saiyajin da Son Gokū" (Super Saiyajin/Saiyan Goku), during which Goku takes a form that was supposed to be a Super Saiyan, but since it was made before the manga reached the point where Goku became one (by only a few weeks, no less), it's not what most people would recognize as such (there's no change in eye or hair color, and it's a completely Unstoppable Rage instead of Tranquil Fury). The form was later retconned by a sidebook to be a "false" Super Saiyan form.
Drifting Classroom is about a whole school, and it doesn't drift — it makes one big jump and then stays put.
Fist of the North Star ostensibly refers to the main character, but Kenshiro's martial art is actually named for the Big Dipper, and official sources tend to leave the Japanese name for it ("Hokuto") untranslated. The Big Dipper is a constellation often used to locate Polaris, the North Star, but the star is not a part of the constellation itself (it's in the Little Dipper). A more literal translation of the Japanese title, Hokuto no Ken, would be "Fist of the Big Dipper", but that doesn't sound nearly as cool. "Ken the Great Bear Fist", the localized title suggested by Toei's International Sales & Promotion Department (source), is a bit closer - Ursa Major or the "Great Bear" is another name for the Big Dipper - but also doesn't sound all that great.
Grenadier: No one actually uses any grenades.
Haruhi Suzumiya: The "Endless Eight" story arc does, in fact, end. Also, the "eight" refers to the loop taking place in August, not the number of repetitions, which is more like fifteen thousand. (The anime confuses this further by showing eight repetitions, one episode each. We only see the final one in the light novel.)
How I Became a Pokémon Card does not relate to becoming cards in any way. It's a bunch of Slice of Life one-shots, and the name comes from the manga being drawn by people who draw the Pokémon cards and the fact each chapter comes with a Pokémon card.
The title of I Became a Girl So I Had to Break up With My Girlfriend is only half-right. The protagonist turns into a girl, but the girlfriend rejects the breakup attempt and insists on continuing the relationship with her girlfriend.
If My Wife Becomes An Elementary School Student Despite what the title seems to imply, the protagonist's wife does not de-aged into a child but instead she was dead from the beginning of the story and reincarnated as an elementary schooler.
The first two Inuyasha movie titles, Affections Touching Across Time and Castle Beyond the Looking Glass, are rather deceptive. Both of those things have a very small role in the movies. This is quite a contrast to most TV episodes, where the plots are often spelled out quite literally in the title. For example, episode 36 is titled "Kagome gets Kidnapped by a Wolf Demon".
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: Well... apparently the answer is yes, because the protagonist never does that. His (skeevy) grandfather Zeus told him a dungeon would be a good place to get a girl, but this happens in reverse with his main love interest. Also note that the localized title isn't a direct translation which would instead be "Is It Wrong To Meet New People In A Dungeon?" which definitely fits the series plot better and is the basis for nearly every arc.
Total number of "Crazy Shrine Maidens" in Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens: 0. The closest thing is Nagi claiming to be a shrine maiden as her cover story. (We eventually meet a real one in the manga, but she's a minor character and not crazy.)
Surprisingly few characters are killed in Kill la Kill (unless you count all the cannon fodder that goes flying at every explosion). Of the four characters who die, only Suzuki, the student from the opening scene, is directly killed by another character. Two of the others (the Big Bad and her Dragon) commit suicide and the fourth dies in a Heroic Sacrifice. Most battles are resolved non-lethally with Seni-Soshitsu. This is a pun because in Japanese the "kill" in the title is written and pronounced like "kiru," a verb meaning "to wear [clothes]."
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Movie 1st The Comics is not a prequel to the Movie, but an Alternate Continuity.
Makura no Danshi: For a show about sleeping with the audience, not a lot of sleeping occurs. While the first couple of episodes and almost certainly the last one has the viewer going to bed with the episode's focus, others are more of character studies with only the viewer only going to sleep near or after the end of the shorts. One episode has a guy even bring a sleeping bag, at nightfall, and nobody sleeps.
Martian Successor Nadesico: The two leads, Akito and Yurika, are from Mars and are on the crew of the Nadesico. The Movie introduces a faction named the Martian Successors, which the Nadesico is not affiliated with. Not demonstrated at all by the Japanese characters of the title, reading "Kidou Senkan Nadeshiko", which translates to Mobile Battleship Nadesico. The constituent words of the title are especially meaningful, given the series being an Affectionate Parody of the likes of Mobile Suit Gundam and Space Battleship Yamato.
My Hero Academia starts out as being a straightforward case of students being taught how to become pro heroes before shifting into the opposite, when it turns into an action series revolving around trying to stop the despicable League of Villains organization. Not quite the light-hearted concept indicated by the title.
"The Midnight Parasites" is an animated re-imagining of the works of Hieronymus Bosch. Only two of the creatures seen are portrayed as parasites (specifically, reproductive parasitoids), and there's no indication it takes place at midnight.
Neon Genesis Evangelion's episode 24 is titled "Saigo no Shisha". Usually translated as "The Final Messenger", it also means "The Final Casualty". While Kaworu's is chronologically the last character death in the original series, The End of Evangelion is thought to be occurring at the same time as episodes 25 and 26 and includes multiple on-screen deaths.
One chapter of One Piece is titled "Luffy's dream". We do not find out what his dream his, but we do see other characters' reaction to hearing him tell them.
No legends are ever awakened throughout Pokémon: Genesect and the Legend Awakened, and Genesect's too ancient and Mewtwo too recent for either of them to have any legends focused on them. Presumably, it refers to Mega Mewtwo Y, but no big deal is made of it in-universe, and the special episode acting as a prequel to this shows that Mewtwo was using it since day one of its life. The Japanese title for the movie is written as "ExtremeSpeed Genesect: Mewtwo Awakens" which makes it clearer that the "awakening" refers to Mega Evolution (oh, and ExtremeSpeed is a move that Genesect uses in the movie by the way)
Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
- The name makes it pretty clear that it's about a magical girl named Madoka. Except... Madoka does not become a magical girl until the last episode, and even then it's hard to call her a magical girl because she turns into an abstract godlike concept. However, before this happens we do find out that Homura originated from a timeline in which Madoka did become a magical girl earlier on, meaning that Madoka becoming a magical girl did start the plot in a way.
- The other problem is the "Puella Magi" part, which sounds like a rebranding of "Magical Girl," but the Gratuitous Latin term never appears in-universe—it's only in the title. It does appear once in the sequel movie, as part of the name of a group of magical girls, but neither Madoka nor anyone else is ever referred to as a "Puella Magi." It's also just wrong from a language perspective, translating to something along the lines of "girl of the mage" rather than "magical girl", but given that the whole plot revolves around the girls being manipulated by Kyubey, the "Messenger of Magic", that might be intentional.
There is a Ranma ½ episode titled "Ranma and Kuno's... First Kiss." Be thankful that you really can never trust a title.
Robot × Laserbeam must involve mecha or something, right? Nope. It's about golf. The main character's nickname is "Robo" because he's absurdly analytical and emotionless. He turns out to have incredible innate skill at golf through Awesomeness by Analysis, launching balls with (as the other characters put it) laser-beam precision.
The Sands of Destruction anime is subtitled Sekai Bokumetsu Rokunin, "The Six People Who are Going to Destroy the World". Well, two of those six are actively working to save the world, and another three don't want to destroy the world; they're just stuck with the one girl who does. But even this one girl spends precious little of her screen time actually trying to destroy the world or figure out how to use the device she believes will do it for her. And the world isn't destroyed in the end, either - even she decides it's not such a bad place after all.
School Rumble is described by Funimation as "The absolute funniest show you'll ever see that's not about anything that rumbles... ever!", although admittedly there is at least a school...
This can happen when an author does not know as much English as they think they do and decides to append an official English version of their work's original Japanese title. For example, one would think that something called Stella Women's Academy, High School Division Class C3 would be about the members of a particular class, right? Nope! It turns out to be about a club of girls who are of disparate ages and none of whom (as far as we know) are in the same class as one another. The original Japanese title, Tokurei Sochi Dantai Stella Jogakuin Koutouka C3-bu more accurately translates as Preferential Measure Organization Stella Women's Academy, High School Division, C3 Club.
Tamagotchi!: The English name of episode 7a, "What? Swapping Personalities", is inaccurate. It's bodies that Mametchi and Chamametchi swap rather than personalities. Mametchi retains his intelligence, and Chamametchi her childishness, when they swap bodies.
Though the titles do make some sense in context, ...Virgin Love and its sequel ...Junai no Seinen (The Young Person's Pure Love) do not do a very good job indicating how smutty the works are.
There's a manga entitled Yandere Kanojo, which you would expect to be about dating a lovesick girl, especially due to its female lead's first appearance carrying a bloody baseball bat. Not so, as the "yan" in the title is for "yankee" - his girlfriend is a deredere juvenile delinquent. The female lead's mother, on the other hand...

Arts

Abaporu: Despite its name meaning "man who eats people", there isn't anything in the painting itself indicating the Abaporu is a man-eater. Instead, the title comes from the reading Tarsila do Amaral's husband had of the then-unnamed painting — the Anthropophagy movement which postulates that Brazilian artists should "swallow" the dominant European styles and turn them into art that is culturally and aesthetically Brazilian instead of just imitating them. This means shedding off the excessive formal academicism, attention to realistic proportions, and idealization of the past.
Stock in trade of Matt Adrian AKA The Mincing Mockingbird some genuinely good pictures of birds along with bonkers titles that are regularly full sentences: "She Drunkenly Approached Me In A Bar, Asked If I Would "Do Her A Rudeness"—And Your Mother And I Have Been Together Ever Since" or "If A Leprechaun Appears And Advises You To Get Your Glandular System Checked, Don't Drown Him In A Ditch Like I Did—Get Your Damn Glands Checked".
The Laughing Cavalier, a 1624 portrait by the Dutch artist Franz Hals, wasn't given an official title of any sort until its arrival in England during the Victorian era, hundreds of years after its creation. As such, the title is very misleading. The anonymous subject of the painting is smirking, not laughing, and it's impossible for him to have been a Royalist supporter of King Charles I, since the English Civil War didn't take place until the 1640s. The subject, whoever he was, was most likely Dutch, and a Calvinist (meaning he would probably not have taken the side of the Episcopalian Royalists even if he had been English).
The Bayeux Tapestry that depicts the famous Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest of England wasn't made in Bayeux, France - the evidence points towards it being made in England, not long after the Conquest. It was displayed in Bayeux for centuries, and may have been commissioned by the Bishop of Bayeux. It also technically isn't a tapestry, since it's stitched into cloth (which is embroidery). Tapestries are made with a loom. 'The' is still accurate.

Asian Animation

Happy Friends: Episode 20 is officially titled "Running Away from Home", but doesn't feature anybody actually running away from home. It's actually about Little M. mistaking Big M. mysteriously disappearing as him leaving Planet Xing for Planet Gray, their home planet.
Link Click, or at least its official English language title, would have you believe that the story centers around or involves the internet in some fashion. It's actually a time travel story, and the main characters use photos or videos in order to time leap. The internet does get used, but only as one of many, many media for the mains to choose from.
The Motu Patlu (2012) episode "Angry Clouds" implies in the title that there is more than one cloud who is angry. In the episode itself, only one cloud, the god of clouds, chases Motu after he angers him.

Audio Play

Jan Tenner: Episode 38 of Classic is titled "Logars Rache" (engl. "Logar's revenge") — despite Logar himself being a prisoner throughout the vast majority of the episode and his captor Thol being killed before Logar is freed.

Comedy

David Cross released two comedy albums where the track titles have nothing to do with the routines within, being either mockeries of common routines ("You Go, Girl!", "My Daughter's First Date , "Even Though I Am in the Closet, That Won't Prevent Me from Getting Cheap Laughs at the Expense of Homosexuals!") or just absurd ("Shaving the Pope's Pussy").
- His DVD Let America Laugh similarly uses chapter titles that have nothing to do with the content - this time they're all taken from Chick Tracts.

Comic Books

Alan Moore's The Ballad of Halo Jones is actually incomplete. Moore left 2000 AD before finishing it.
BIONICLE:
- Comic 25: Birth of the Rahaga is an apt description of the comic's story. The alternative title on its cover, The Final Battle, not really. Unless one means that it's the final battle between these specific characters over this specific artifact. It's also a flashback, which makes the title more bogus.
- The Underwater City: The underwater city Mahri Nui only appears on a few stray panels and has little bearing on the plot.
The Flash: The Return of Barry Allen is, in fact, not about Barry's return (which wouldn't happen until Final Crisis), but rather Wally West dealing with an amnesiac Eobard Thawne from before he came into conflict with Barry.
Spider-Man: While Gwen Stacy indeed dies in The Night Gwen Stacy Died, it happens during a confrontation between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin in the morning.
The Tales from the Dark Multiverse one-shot supposedly being about Crisis on Infinite Earths is actually about The Last Days Of The Justice Society with the only real connection relevant to Crisis being that in that version of events, it was Earth-Two that ended up being the basis of the post-Crisis Earth instead of Earth-One, with Earth-One's Superman and Lois Lane joining Alexander Luthor Jr. and Superboy-Prime in exile instead of the Earth-Two versions.
The Transformers 2019: The war does not end in "War's End". In fact, it's only beginning.
Ultimate Marvel: Many things happen in Ultimatum, except anyone actually giving an ultimatum.
Watchmen: The title refers to the graffiti, and the philosophical question "Who watches the watchmen", not a group of superheroes.
Wacky Races: The Gold Key run of takes the titles of two episodes and turns them into entirely different stories. "Free Wheeling to Wheeling" was changed into an original story while "Race Rally to Raleigh" was changed into a loose adaptation of "By Rollercoaster to Upsan Downs."

Fan Works

An Arc for every season: The chapter titled "Nothing Bad Happens" ends with Jaune being forced to kill several White Fang members when they kidnap him for Adam.
Bandit's Belt: While Bandit does try to belt Bluey at one point, his belt is by no means a major part of the story.
The Bank Called, Your Reality Check Bounced has nothing to do with banks, phone calls, or checks bouncing. According to the author, she just couldn't come up with anything better.
No Boldore appear in Boldores and Boomsticks until a brief appearance 32 chapters in, and nobody uses a shotgun. The title was taken from a pun the author's friend made on Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
The Bolt Chronicles: As Mittens (and the reader) discovers in "The Party," there is no party to be found during the course of the story.
There are no bunnies in Bunnies. Laverne makes a reference to feeling as helpless as a bunny in a blender, but that's it.
In Coveralls, only one character wears coveralls, and he's only shown for one sentence.
In Creamed Cherries, there aren't any actual cherries — it's just a funny name that Bambi gave to mashed-up apples.
Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles). This My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic is not about making cupcakes! Well... not just about making cupcakes.
Danganronpa Mauve's full title is Danganronpa Mauve - Hiruto Iwada and the Twisted Academy. The prologue is shown from his perspective until the very end, where Nozomi Miyuki takes over as the protagonist. Hiruto plays a minor role in the story overall, as he becomes the victim of Chapter 1.
DIGIMON 3: PREDATOR VS DIGIMON: The Predator isn't the villain; in fact, Digimon has to help him with his dilemma. The actual villains are the FBI. Of course, what did you expect with legendary Troll Fic author Peter Chimaera?
The Equalizer: The title "The Equalizer" doesn't really describe a parody fanfic in which the protagonist is a crazy maniac obsessed with causing explosions.
Friday Night Funkin' Vs. Sonic.Exe's main antagonist isn't Sonic.exe at all. It's actually an impersonator known as Xenophanes. The real sonic.exe does make an appearance as "Lord X", but he's buried behind a secret sound test code and only has one song to his name.
Harry Potter and the Lack of Lamb Sauce: The title of the fic is a spoof of the infamous Hell's Kitchen meme, and at no point in the story does the lack of lamb sauce become a plot point. The quote in the meme is briefly dropped in the final chapter as a gag, however.
In Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, no such portrait actually appears.
Inkopolis Chaos: Inkopolis Chaos 3 hardly even takes place in Inkopolis, mostly focusing on Cuttlefish Cabin or Octo Valley. Inkopolis is only visited twice, in parts 6 and 14.
marge simpson anime doesn't have much, if anything, to do with anime. Most of the art isn't animesque either.
In Marshmallow Pie, there isn't any actual marshmallow pie— it's just an Affectionate Nickname that Leni Loud has for Chaz.
The title of Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku! would have you believe that Izuku is going to take up Deku as his Hero Name. He's not. Because he's Superman.
Pineapple: There isn't a single moment in this fanfic where the word "pineapple" comes into play in the story, not even with someone eating a pineapple or something. It turns out that it's just part of Imyoshi's signature brand, where he names all his fanfics with a One-Word Title based on foods (like cherry, mango, or carrot), colors (like green, pink, or yellow), or metals (like gold, lead, or silver).
In The Prayer Warriors, Chapter 10 of The Evil Gods Part 2 is called "Piper and Jerry goes to Washington DC to Find out Who the Tractor is and Defeat them Once and for All so they would not be terrorized by them ever again for as long as God allows Time to go on For." The only thing that happens is the Prayer Warriors going to Washing Dick — I mean, Washington D.C.
Robb Returns. While Robb's return does provide the impetus of the story, the major storylines have focused on the North, and eventually all of Westeros, preparing for the imminent invasion of the Others.
The first chapter of Swimming in Terror is called "Island and Kuma". Monokuma first shows up in the next chapter.
The Loud House fanfic Whipped features no actual whipping.
The name of the Alternate Universe My Little Pony fic Slice of Velvet and Pear comes from the names of Twilight Sparkle and Applejack's mother's, Twilight Velvet and Pear Butter. Who in this universe, meet while they're daughters are still fillies and become best friends. Seemingly setting them and their relationship up to be the main focus of the story. But no. While they are prominent characters, especially Pear Butter, the main focus of the story is the butterfly effect their meeting and their daughters becoming friends early has on the future events of the series.

Films — Animation

Asterix Conquers America: Asterix doesn't conquer America, he only visits it. A case of Completely Different Title, since the original French title was Asterix et les Indiens ("Asterix and the Indians").
Bambi II is a midquel to Bambi, not a sequel.
Batman: Assault on Arkham: Batman is featured, but not the central character. It is more of a Suicide Squad film with Deadshot as the protagonist.
There is no "New Generation" in Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation. The film is actually a prequel, as we see the origins of the Care Bears. The only generation the title could refer to is the fact that the Care Bears and their Cousins are all babies and grow up about halfway through the movie, but it's a stretch.
DC Animated Movie Universe:
- While Justice League vs. Teen Titans does see the two titular teams fight, it's mostly due to the League undergoing Demonic Possession and the film is about the Titans fighting Trigon. The film is instead an adaption of the beginning storyline of New Teen Titans as well as the "Team Building" arc from Teen Titans (2003).
- Justice League Dark: Apokolips War is a borderline example. The first Justice League Dark movie was about Batman gathering a team of supernatural heroes to take down a demonic threat. In Apokolips War, even though John Constantine and Raven are central characters, the villain Darkseid relies on tech rather than magic. Also, the film is the Series Finale of the entire DC Animated Movie Universe and every hero ever featured in the movies is given screentime (one way or another). So even though Raven and Constantine save the day, it's not really their movie, and there is no specialized team of magic users, leaving it debatable as to whether or not the "Dark" subtitle is warranted. On the other hand, one could argue that this is possibly the darkest movie in the lineup if one wishes to go that route. A third option, due to the DCAMU being heavily based upon the New 52, is that the movie is instead based upon Darkseid War.
Eight Crazy Nights hardly has anything to do with Hanukkah (outside of a few brief references) and may have very well just been a film set during the Winter season.
The First Christmas from Rankin/Bass Productions isn't a retelling of the Nativity story. It's the story of an orphan boy who comes to live at an abbey with kindly nuns after being struck by lightning and left blind. The climax is simply a children's play of the Nativity in which the boy plays an angel.
The Lion King 1 ½ goes under the Market-Based Title The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata in some regions. Problem is, it's not a direct continuation of the first two; rather, it's a P.O.V. Sequel focusing on what Timon and Pumbaa did before meeting Simba in the original movie.
An infamous rip-off of Kung Fu Panda is named The Little Panda Fighter. Except that the titular panda is not "little" but one of the largest characters in the movie. Plus, he only fights for thirty seconds at the end of the movie, and he gets his ass kicked.
The My Scene movie My Scene Goes Hollywood does feature a Hollywood movie and actors, but the whole movie takes place in New York City where the girls live.
The Princess and the Frog: Considering the movie takes place in America, the eponymous "Princess" isn't a princess, she's just a waitress who gets mistaken for one. The "Frog" is the one who's of royal descent, and the protagonist only becomes a princess after marrying him at the end.
The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue: While Timothy Brisby is called "Timmy" as a child in the original film and in the early scenes of the sequel, he spends the majority of the film as a young adult who goes by "Tim". The movie would have more accurately been subtitled Tim to the Rescue.
When Nickelodeon aired Shrek 4D in 2-D in 2007, they marketed it as Shrek's Never Before Seen Adventure, even though it had been featured at Universal Studios since 2003 and was released on DVD in 2004 as Shrek 3-D.
Spirited Away is known as La città incantata in its Italian dub. The title means "The Enchanted City"; the film only focuses on a single bathhouse.
In the Disney film Tangled, Rapunzel's magic hair never gets tangled, in spite of the many things, it is brushed over, tied to, etc.
Tarzan II is not a sequel to Disney's Tarzan, but rather a midquel set during Tarzan's childhood.

Films — Live-Action

Not all of the Jurors in 12 Angry Men are angry.
Abbott and Costello:
- Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff: Can you guess who the mysterious killer in this film might be? Could it perhaps be the evil Swami, played by Boris Karloff? Isn't this a Spoiler Title?... Nope. Not even close. The hotel manager did it.
- Abbott and Costello Go to Mars: The duo goes to Venus, although they do think they're going to Mars.
Abduction has no kidnappings whatsoever.
Across the Pacific: The Pacific is never seen, let alone crossed. The original plot was supposed to involve a Japanese plot to bomb Pearl Harbor. When the real-life Pearl Harbor bombing occurred, the plot was hurriedly rewritten to be about an attack on Panama, but the title was not changed.
Adam at 6 A.M.: In-universe example. A man rants to Adam about how he expected Blowup to be an action war movie, but it turned out to be one of "those depressing and pervert-type movies" instead.
The titles of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Alice Through the Looking Glass aren't completely off base, since the first movie is about Alice being in Wonderland^note and the second one does have her passing through a mirror at one point. However, they are somewhat misleading; the first one isn't a retelling of the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but rather a sequel (of sorts), depicting Alice as a young adult, and includes elements of Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there. The sequel has even less to do with the original books.
Avengers: Infinity War: While the title works in the context of the movie (it's about a war fought over the Infinity Stones), it's an adaptation of The Infinity Gauntlet, not The Infinity War.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: That's only the first part of this six part anthology Western.
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever: Though Ecks and Sever have a very brief scuffle after a chase scene early in the film, they never truly face each other as "enemies". They even end up fighting on the same side by roughly the halfway point of the movie.
Batman Returns is true in a meta sense, as this movie is a sequel. In-universe, Batman has not left Gotham or ceased his activities in between the films and doesn't during the story.
The Bloody Video Horror That Made Me Puke on My Aunt Gertrude lies a lot, given it's not bloody and lacks an Aunt Gertrude, and at most has a puking scene... and lots of video, given it's shot on VHS tapes.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 contains no plot-important book of any kind. In Wicca, a Book of Shadows is essentially a witch's diary — where she puts her spells and power thoughts into. The tapes which provide the answers to what happened would therefore be the proverbial Book of Shadows for the characters.
The Boxer's Omen sounds like a boxing movie in the vein of the Rocky sequels. It's NOT - it's a Mind Screw of a film with voodoo, reanimated animal corpses, female demons, detachable flying heads, alligator monsters and all kinds of weird stuff.
Blue Monkey is about a black bug.
Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave has absolutely nothing to do with Bruce Lee returning from the dead, outside of a Cold Open where someone is seen leaping out of Bruce Lee's grave. Aside from that, the storyline involves a man named Wong Han investigating the death of his friend at the hands of a drug smuggling ring — with the only other thing to link the film to Lee being lead actor Jun Chong being credited as "Bruce K.L. Lea".
Canyon Passage does not feature a canyon that has any kind of major role in the plot (possibly it was an Artifact Title from the novel it was based on).
The Cars That Ate Paris: The title might imply that it's a campy Attack of the Killer Whatever movie about Sentient Vehicles, but it's really a Black Comedy about a remote town, and the "ate" part is more about the conscience of the townspeople than anything else.
The 2020 Lifetime TV movie Cheer Camp Killer doesn't actually involve a murder plot against cheerleaders, not even one carried out by the film's Alpha Bitch antagonist, Victoria, who engages in various duplicitous schemes to one-up her rival Sophia, but only comes as close to committing murder as knocking out Sophia with a rock and then tying her to a tree above a short cliff in the woods (Sophia winds up freeing herself).
Chinatown: Only one scene takes place in the eponymous neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The Dawn Rider contains a lot of riding, but none of it takes place at dawn.
Deranged is sometimes marketed with the subtitle Confessions of a Necrophile, which is very misleading as Ezra never engages in necrophilia at any point, although as Simms points out on several occasions, the word can also refer to one with an obsessive level of interest in death and corpses.
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: Supposedly, the house of horrors refers to Dr. Schreck's Tarot deck, which constructs horrifying futures for people, but this is never explained. Even the name Dr. Terror is barely justified, with a brief conversation explaining that Dr. Schreck's name would translate into English as Dr. Terror. Nobody ever addresses him as anything other than Dr. Schreck.
In the 1991 Farce The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish the favour kicks off the plot and the watch is vital to the backstory, but the very big fish is just an odd side gag disposed of — by a tertiary character whose idea of cooking is pulverizing stuff into slurry — within the first 15 minutes.
Frankenstein Conquers the World couldn't be farther from the truth in terms of the film's plot since Frankenstein never so much as tries to conquer the world. The original Japanese release title, Frankenstein vs. Baragon, makes sense since the film builds up to the grand fight between the titular monsters.
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan: Jason spends most of the movie en route to New York, rather than in the city. Some critics have joked that a more accurate title would be "Jason Takes a Cruise", and it's not hard to see where they're coming from.
Future War: It doesn't take place in the future and doesn't have any war.
Ghost World does not have any actual ghosts nor do the protagonists ever visit a world filled with ghosts.
Gringo: The protagonist isn't the white American that pejorative usually describes, but a black immigrant from Nigeria.
Godzilla:
- All Monsters Attack's American name is Godzilla's Revenge. Godzilla doesn't get revenge on anyone in the film.
- Godzilla vs. Gigan's widely publicized American title was Godzilla on Monster Island, despite only a couple very short scenes taking place there. The highlight is Godzilla coming to the Japanese mainland to a theme park inspired by his likeness.
- Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993) is not a sequel to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974), mainly since the films are in two different continuities, plus the latter film already had a sequel. The Mechagodzilla in the 1993 movie, therefore, is usually named "Mechagodzilla 2".
The Grapes of Death. Awesome title, but the grapes themselves don't kill anybody. Farm chemicals applied to the grapes cause people to go berserk.
Green Book: "Green Book" is short for "The Negro Motorist Green Book", a travel safety guide for African-Americans visiting the Deep South on where to find friendly places where they could eat or stay during the period of the film. However, this only gets mentioned briefly in the film, and used once. While the difficulties Don faces as a black person in the South do feature, most of it's not really about that, and this is one source of criticism.
There are no witches in Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The closest there are to witches is a mask that looks like one, but the real antagonist is a novelties company. That being said, "witch" is sometimes used as a gender-neutral term for a "practitioner of witchcraft", and in that sense, it fits the male Big Bad quite well.
The characters in The Hangover (and its sequel) do wind up with a hangover after a binge-drinking session gone wrong, but its What Did I Do Last Night? plot isn't the result of a hangover: it happens after they're accidentally drugged without their knowledge.
The movie Hearts in Atlantis. This is due, however, to it being an Artifact Title from the novella: the original novella was called "Low Men in Yellow Coats" and "Hearts in Atlantis" was an entirely different story (called so because the main character — avoiding going to Vietnam by being in college and thus it feeling like Atlantis — played the card game Hearts a lot (It Makes Sense in Context)). The movie doesn't attempt at explaining the title... Brautigan refers to the sunken continent at some point in the dialogue, but that still doesn't make explicit the "hearts" part.
Help! I've Shrunk the Family appears to be a rip-off of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids if you go off the English title and poster, but it's actually a dub of the Dutch movie Wiplala, which is based on a book that predates Honey by over three decades.
A Hero Never Dies ends with both the heroes dead.
The Hills Have Eyes (1977): There are no sentient eye-possessing hills, just a bunch of hill-dwelling cannibals. Same goes for the remake.
The kid in Honey, I Blew Up the Kid doesn't explode, but instead grows to a very tall height. Technically, the title is referring to how the kid gets blown up in size, but it would likely confuse most people nowadays.
While the title may make sense figuratively — in that the house is responsible for many deaths if Stoker is to be believed—no actual blood appears in The House That Dripped Blood (which is odd for a film involving vampires.)
I Care a Lot: The protagonists are not caring towards anyone and are in fact heartless, greedy people who torment elderly people for financial gain.
I Dismember Mama (the alternate title for Poor Albert & Little Annie): While Albert does attempt to kill his mother, he does not succeed, nor does he actually dismember any of his victims.
I Killed My Mother: Hubert has a tumultuous relationship with his mother but he does not murder her at any point.
If Looks Could Kill is about a teenager who's mistaken for a spy and sent on a dangerous mission. With that title, you'd expect the kid to have been confused with the spy because they look alike, right? Nope. He's confused with the spy because they both have the same name.
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is not a campy, counter-culture romp that the title implies. It's a straightforward horror-ish film. The zombies are actually of the traditional "hypnotized" variety and not the undead variety, so they don't "stop living" when they become zombies.
Invisible Ghost (1941) does not have a ghost in it, nor is anyone or anything invisible.
The Iron Bodyguard: Despite what the title claims, at no point in the film is Wang-wu body-guarding anyone.
It Comes at Night: Nothing comes at night. There's no tangible "it", anything supernatural, or any actual antagonist at all. It was doubly misleading because the marketing also sold it as a monster horror movie.
The Jerk, the main character Navin Johnson (Steve Martin) isn't really a jerk, he's more of a well meaning idiot who unintentionally causes problems for people. Technically, he does fit an older, alternative definition of "jerk" which describes a bonehead or schmuck rather than a cruel or unpleasant person, but this meaning is no longer in common use today.
Kangaroo Jack is very much a supporting character in the roo's own movie. And it doesn't talk aside from a brief hallucination.
In The Karate Kid (2010), the central martial art is kung fu, not karate.
King Kong Lives: Kong does not survive the film.
The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James actually covers a span of 38 years: 1877 to 1915.
The Last King of Scotland is actually about the Last Dictator of Uganda (and the viewpoint character is a Scottish doctor). Idi Amin did claim to be the King of Scotland among his many other self-applied titles.
Law Abiding Citizen: The main character is a vigilante who definitely doesn't try to follow the law.
From the title, you might be expecting Marathon Man to be an inspirational sports film like Chariots of Fire. The marathon aspect barely factors into the movie (other than justifying why Babe can run like hell so well), though, which is an espionage thriller from start to finish.
Margarita with a Straw: The title is just a drink order Laila made at one point. It really has nothing to do with the plot overall.
Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future is not about time travel. "20 Minutes into the Future" refers to the setting of the film: the dystopian near future. The phrase isn't used anywhere in the telefilm, but it does appear as a title card in each episode of the series. The telefilm was released on video with the more straightforward title The Max Headroom Story, but no one bothered to change the title screen.
Russian movie Mermaid: Lake of the Dead is about a water siren of sorts, but it's not a mermaid. Blame it on the Slavic Myth of the Rusalka being often translated into "mermaid" given both are water entities - although the Rusalka is fully human instead of half-fish.
Mermaids (1990) doesn't contain any actual mermaids; it's a mundane family dramedy.
The monster featured in Mexican Werewolf In Texas is actually a chupacabra.
The bag of money in Millions actually "only" contains 229,520 pounds, but there's a Title Drop when the brothers go through it and think it contains millions.
Monster a-Go Go has a monster (sorta), but he doesn't dance - nor does Go-go dancing figure into the threadbare plot it has.
My Life as a Dog isn't a human-canine body-swap comedy, but rather a Swedish coming of age dramedy. The closest it gets to literalizing the title is when the main character has a breakdown and pretends to be a dog.
Night Of The Strangler includes murders by stabbing, shooting, drowning, snakebite, and arrow, but no strangulations.
Night Passage: The only thing that could be considered a 'passage' is a train journey that takes place during the day.
No Time to Die concludes with James Bond's death.
At least half of The Pink Panther movies don't involve the Pink Panther jewel. It's an Artifact Title. Don't expect to see the character The Pink Panther past the intro credits.
Orphan: First Kill:
- The film starts after Leena has been institutionalized in the Saarne for murder, so Leena's first kill isn't depicted in First Kill.
- Also, in this story, her child grift sees her posing as a missing child with a family rather than an orphan, leaving the franchise title Orphan inaccurate to this story as well, at least until the ending, when both of her "parents" are dead.
Red Wolf is one of the many "Die Hard" on an X-style movies released in the 90s, and doesn't have any red wolves. Nobody has this as a nickname either, nor are wolves referenced at any point.
The two old ladies in Rabid Grannies are neither rabid nor grannies.
The Rare Blue Apes of Cannibal Isle does feature rare blue apes who live on an island called Cannibal Isle, but there don't seem to be any cannibals there, going by the dictionary definition anyway: The closest thing would be the antagonists, the Swampies, alligator people who basically spend the whole film trying to eat everyone but other Swampies.
Rashomon is NOT a Mons movie. It's about various people testifying for a murder, each adding different details: a bandit, the victim's wife, the dead man's spirit through a miko, and a woodcutter. The name Rashomon means "city gate" in Japanese, but said murder does not happen anywhere near a city gate. The title refers to the location where the framing device takes place.
The Ref. The title implies something sports-related, and the holiday setting suggests something happy, but the movie is about as black a comedy as one will find from mainstream Hollywood. The eponymous character is a cat burglar who kidnaps a dysfunctional married couple in an attempt to evade a manhunt and winds up having to "referee" their bickering while he plots his escape. In retrospect, the title fits, but a first-time viewer would have no idea what to expect. Averted in some countries, where the film went by the more straightforward title "Hostile Hostages" instead.
The 1993 film Rigoletto isn't actually based on the Giuseppe Verdi opera, and they have very few similarities. It's more like a modern reimagining of Beauty and the Beast (with a little bit of The Phantom of the Opera thrown in) set in America during the Great Depression. There isn't even a character named "Rigoletto".
In Riot on Sunset Strip, no riots occur onscreen.
The Room. Despite the title, the characters are neither trapped in a room nor is there anything particularly strange about their apartment. According to director and star Tommy Wiseau, the title refers to a person's Happy Place, which only makes sense for about three seconds. According to Greg Sestero in The Disaster Artist (Oh hai, Mark), it was supposed to be a play that all takes place in the same room, to save money on sets. He just never changed the title when transitioning to screen.
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is a perfect example of this trope. Both of the titular characters barely get any screen time in the entire film, plus the Ice Cream Bunny has nothing to do with ice cream!
Scarface (1983): There's a very brief exchange of two lines of dialogue in the opening scene calling attention to Tony's facial scar. It's never mentioned again and the fact that he has a scar has no bearing on anything else that happens in the movie. It's just there to justify the title of the film, which is of course a loose remake of the 1932 Scarface that is much more obviously about an Al Capone stand-in.
The title Scream and Scream Again has no bearing on the film at all (and makes it sound like a Slasher Movie rather than the science fiction conspiracy thriller it actually is.
The made-for-TV horror movie Silent Predators is about rattlesnakes, which are actually the loudest of all the snakes.
There's an old joke about a little old lady who decides she'd like to watch a nice, peaceful film. So she sees The Silence of the Lambs.
Sodom and Gomorrah is set in Sodom. Gomorrah is never so much as glimpsed and only gets a few throwaway references.
Sorcerer (1977) has nothing to do with magicians or even anything supernatural. Instead, it's about a group of men who ship truckloads of nitroglycerin. Sorcerer is the name of one of these trucks.
Sorceress: There isn't a single sorceress in the whole movie. The twin heroines are warriors, not sorceresses. Instead, there's the main villain, a sorcerer (though the title could be interpreted as an alternate spelling of "Sorcerous").
Half of the 1963 Disney film Summer Magic, starring Hayley Mills, actually takes place in autumn, with the film's ending taking place at a Halloween party.
Judging by the title, you'd think The Squid and the Whale is an over-the-top, So Bad, It's Good Syfy Original Movie, but it's actually a heartfelt comedy-drama about a couple going through divorce; the title is a reference to the Squid and Whale exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.
Teen-Age Strangler is a case of Ambiguous Syntax - when it appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000, the characters even briefly debated whether it referred to a strangler of teenagers or a teenager who strangled people. Ultimately it turns out to be the former, which is the less intuitive interpretation of the title.
One of Universals' Sherlock Holmes b-pictures Terror by Night is a Train set thriller set on an overnight London to Edinburgh train. There's a single murder, a fight and a pretty serious assault but the passengers are more annoyed than terrorised (as they might well be). The train even continues its' journey on schedule.
In the original four The Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, very few people are killed with a chainsaw. In the original movie, for example, only one character dies by chainsaw- two are killed with a hammer (one of whom is later seen being cut up post-mortem), another ends up suffering an Uncertain Doom when she's left in an icebox, and yet another, one of the villains, is hit by a truck. The second and third films continue this trend with few characters meeting their end at the saw but the fourth film turns into an Artifact Title; nobody is killed with a chainsaw.
They Cloned Tyrone: The name of the main character being cloned is Fontaine, not Tyrone. Tyrone doesn't show up until The Stinger.
The Thin Man movies have an Artifact Title. The thin man of the original movie referred to one of the prime suspects in the murder case who turned out to have also been murdered himself, and not the main character. The third film is called Another Thin Man for no reason, setting the precedent for the rest of the series.
The movie Three Kings actually has four main characters. The name comes from the Christmas carol "We Three Kings", whose opening lyric is changed by one of the characters.
A Time for Drunken Horses is a notable aversion. You'd swear it was a metaphor, but it really does have drunken horses.
Troll 2 is not actually a sequel to Troll (1986) and doesn't even have trolls in it (they're goblins).
TRON isn't really about the supporting character Tron so much as it's about Flynn. TRON: Legacy even more so.
Tyrannosaur: No, despite the title and the movie's poster showing a T. rex skeleton, the movie is not about dinosaurs. The title is explained as an in-universe nickname the main character applied to his late wife as a jab at her weight causing thundering footsteps.
The Vampire Doll: The vampire is not a doll.
At no point in Vision Quest (1985) does anyone embark on a vision quest; rather, the title metaphorically refers to Louden's coming of age and his mission to drop two weight classes in order to wrestle Shute.
War of the Gargantuas was originally made to be a loose sequel to Frankenstein Conquers the World but the English version acts more like a standalone film with all references to Frankenstein removed and the monsters dubbed as Gargantuas instead. Additionally, compared to the Japanese title Frankenstein's Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira, the English title is misleading because, between the titular monsters, Gaira gets the most screen time while Sanda doesn't appear until the midpoint of the film. Besides this, the first fight between them doesn't occur until the last third of the film so the film isn't technically about a war between them.
The question of Who Killed Captain Alex? is never answered, and after a very cursory investigation, the issue is dropped entirely from the film, despite Richard's obvious frustration. Even the director doesn't know who killed Captain Alex. Smart money's on this oft- abused rat.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are both misleading about their actual central characters. Wonka has a major presence in the former film but Charlie's character arc is ultimately more important to the plot, whereas the latter film focuses on and develops Wonka much more than Charlie. While the original novel was also titled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was sponsored by a confectionery company with the idea of defictionalizing Wonka candy, so it was decided that Wonka should become the title character for the sake of brand recognition.
The 2016 Hallmark Channel movie Summer of Dreams, starring Debbie Gibson, very clearly doesn't take place during Summer as the plot revolves around the main character becoming a music teacher at the school where her sister is vice principal. It is even stated that there are 3 months left in the term. The title was merely made up to coincide with the film's August premiere.

Literature

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die contains a list of 1001 movies the author considers must-see movies, with each entry accompanied by a short essay explaining why. Except it's not 1001 movies, it's 1001 entries — Olympia parts 1 and 2 are combined in a single entry, as are the two parts of Ivan the Terrible, the three films in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and the four Toy Story films. Moreover, two of the entries are Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Decalogue (a 10-episode miniseries) and Lars von Trier's Riget (an 8-episode, 2-season TV series), aren't movies to begin with. Also, the book is updated annually (and has been since 2003), with the total number of works included numbering 1245 as of the 2021 edition.
American Girls Collection:
- Kit Kittredge's stories are labeled 1934; however, her books do not reach that year until the last book in the main series, and the first book begins in 1932. Averted with the film adaptation that starts on May 2nd, 1934.
- Julie Albright's stories are labeled 1974, but they start in September 1975 and last through 1977, including the mysteries.
An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay by Grant Allen has an accurate title, but an untrustworthy subtitle. The African millionaire who is the central character of the novel is named Charles Vandrift; Colonel Clay is a conman who repeatedly targets Vandrift with scams designed to expose his corrupt dealings, leading to the novel's conclusion that the career criminal is no less respectable than the millionaire.
In Alice the Fairy, Alice is actually only pretending to be a fairy.
In Aliens Took My Daughter, aliens didn't really take the man's daughter— he just thought they did.
Some of the later Animorphs books got really bad about this. Titles like The Suspicion (where nothing is suspicious), The Prophecy (which features no prophecy), and The Hidden (which features a bizarre morphing buffalo that is definitely not hidden) come to mind. Strangely, these are all books from Cassie's point of view; make of that what you will. There's also the first Megamorphs^note book The Andalite's Gift, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Morphing Cube, the titular gift that the kids receive from the Andalite soldier Elfangor at the start of the series.
Arabian Nights: The popular translated name Arabian Nights comes from the earliest English translation titled Arabian Nights Entertainments, which is rather misleading. The stories included have diverse origins that can be traced to all over West and South Asia, and regardless of what version you read, there is little chance the stories are all from Arabia. The famous frame story itself is speculated to originate from India, while what is theorized to be the earliest prototype of the work was Persian. The original title of One Thousand and One Nights has no such issue.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is neither a history of tractors nor in Ukrainian.
Azuro: "Azuro a disparu!" (Azuro has vanished) is about Azuro accidentally being shrunken by a potion. However, the plot moves on from that midway through when he suffers the effects of other potions, including one that makes him giant.
Bas-Lag Cycle: Perdido Street Station has almost nothing to do with the eponymous station, beyond a scene in the climax. On the other hand, it's hard to find a title that would fit with a book like that.
BIONICLE Chronicles #3: Makuta's Revenge. Makuta's sole presence are two short monologues at the beginning and around the middle, and the rest of the story doesn't concern him, nor is he responsible for releasing the enemies, the six Bohrok-Kal. Their awakening was an automatic response to the heroes' victory over the regular Bohrok swarms and the Bahrag queens, from the previous book. Now, Makuta did release those, so technically he's indirectly responsible for unleashing the Kal as well, but the title's still a stretch. Later story material then Retconned out the "revenge" part, too.
- Chronicles #4: Tales of the Masks, bearing the subtitle A New Quest..., makes it seem like it's about the Toa Nuva (featured on the cover) re-enacting the tedious mask-collecting from the first book, but with new masks. The real focus is on exploring the relationships between the Toa and Turaga priests, through the Framing Story of the six Turaga reciting the tales of the mask-hunt, which is of lesser importance overall.
- Legends #11: The Final Battle, though the last of the Legends series and the climax of the original 2001-2008 saga, was by no means the final battle the heroes had to endure.
Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty: a book containing scripts of the series, does not cover the whole dynasty. It doesn't contain The Cavalier Years and Blackadder's Christmas Carol (and was released before Back & Forth).
Bridge to Terabithia is notorious for this. The book isn't so much about Terabithia than it is about the friendship between Jesse and Leslie. Nor is there a bridge to Terabithia (i.e. to the woods across the creek) until the last chapter. Jesse and Leslie get there by swinging on a rope, until the rope breaks and Leslie falls into the creek and drowns, after which Jesse builds a bridge so that no future children who play there will face the same risk.
"The Six Suspects", the original title of one of Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers stories. The culprit is not among the eponymous suspects. In its book publication, the story was renamed "Out of Sight".
Burnt Offerings has no offerings, burnt or otherwise.
There isn’t really much fighting in The Butter Battle Book. It’s more of an arms race with minimal actual combat.
In the Doc McStuffins book Chilly Catches a Cold, Chilly doesn't actually catch a cold. He just gets the toy equivalent of hypothermia and needs to be warmed up by the fire.
A Clockwork Orange is a Word Salad Title that only makes sense in a variety of metaphorical senses, depending on which of the conflicting stories that Burgess has given to explain it that you believe. Suffice it to say that there are no literal clockwork oranges in the story.
In The Day I Lost My Superpowers, the girl never actually had any superpowers to lose— she just pretended to have them.
The Decline Of The West is a non-fiction book by German philosopher Oswald Spengler which inspired many people to grief about the coming end of civilization. Spengler wasn't completely happy with the title (which seemed to imply that the western world had to fall, like the Roman empire) and commented that he could've changed the title to "The fulfillment of the West", which would be closer to his intention - i.e. the west transforming to a stable but stagnant empire in the end. The fact that many fans only knew the title and didn't care to read the book didn't help.
The Dinosaur Art books are collections of paleoart in general, and several featured artists mainly or exclusively produce artwork for prehistoric mammals. However, this is par for the course for books on prehistory aimed at the general audience — the word 'dinosaurs' is more marketable, so all sorts of unrelated animals get to be lumped together with them.
In Dirty Bertie, the story "Burp!" doesn't feature burping. The school meals change, but they don't give anyone gas.
The Sesame Street book "Ernie's Little Lie" - Ernie doesn't actually lie. While he is tempted to pretend that he painted the painting his cousin sent him, he immediately decides that that would be wrong, and Bert merely mistakes the painting for one Ernie did, without giving Ernie a chance to explain.
While Everybody Loves Large Chests does have boobs in it, those are not the chests that the author means.
Fear Street has a book called The Mind Reader which focuses on a teen who has visions of the future. You can see the problem with the title.
In Agatha Christie's short story "The Four Suspects", the killer turns out to be a fifth character not counted among the so-called suspects.
Goosebumps has a few offenders, such as The Birthday Party of No Return. The birthday party in question has little bearing on what is actually going on.
The Goblet of Fire has a relatively brief appearance in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and merely serves to trigger the events of the book, after which it's pretty much never seen or mentioned again. "....and the Triwizard Tournament" would've been significantly more descriptive.
I Fell Into a Reverse Harem Game!: The alternate world isn't actually a videogame, it just seems that way at first because of the Sudden Game Interface.
John Dies at the End: John "dies" a short way into the book and then gets better. The title is due to the book's origins as web serial.
To Kill a Mockingbird: No mockingbird is killed, nor are instructions on doing so stated in the book. The closest it comes is a Title drop, mentioning that it's a sin to do so.
All of the Land of Oz books spend at least a little time in Oz, but often the bulk of the story is set in one of the other "fairylands" that share Oz's unnamed continent, with the characters only arriving in Oz near the end. The books are also frequent offenders of the Protagonist Title Fallacy, as the publishers, rather than the authors, often named the books based on a character's popularity rather than their prominence in the story.
J. R. R. Tolkien conceived The Lord of the Rings as a single work, divided into six "books", or sections—each of which would have its own title. When the decision was made to split the work into three separate volumes, each containing two of the originally-conceived "books", Tolkien had to make up new titles on the fly. His choice for volume II, The Two Towers, was meant to be deliberately vague, to represent the divergent subject matter covered by books III and IV; Tolkien himself admitted that it was anyone's guess which pair of towers the title referred to. (The film ran with the idea that it refers to Orthanc and Barad-Dur.) He later came to regret the choice, however, feeling that if anything it was better suited to the third volume:
I am not at all happy about the title The Two Towers. It must if there is any real reference to it in Vol II refer to Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol. But since there is so much made of the basic opposition of the Dark Tower and Minas Tirith [in Return of the King], that seems very misleading.
Max Havelaar, of de koffiveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelsmaatschappy. The subtitle means 'or the coffee auctions of the Dutch Trading Company', but neither the company nor its auctions are mentioned anywhere in the book. Multatuli did this deliberately to get as many people as possible - particularly those interested in the coffee trade - to read his Author Tract.
Michael Vey: The Hunt for Jade Dragon: The titular Jade Dragon was already captured before the events of the book, meaning no one has to track her down; the main characters just travel to Taiwan to rescue her.
Mog: In "Mog on Fox Night", there is no occasion actually named "Fox Night". The foxes just came in to eat Mog's uneaten food.
An in-universe example in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: the eponymous rats find a story called "Rat Race", and are disappointed to find no rats in it.
Monty Python's Big Red Book has a blue cover.
The third and final installment of The Mysterious Benedict Society has the title The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma. The Prisoner's Dilemma is only featured at the beginning of the book and has nothing to do with the overall plot of the story.
Mystère à Venise ("Mystery in Venice"), a republication of the French translation of Hallowe'en Party, refers the French localization's title of A Haunting in Venice, the novel's 2023 film adaptation.^note The novel isn't set in Italy but is entirely set in England.
My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!'s title is a "lie" on many levels:
- Catarina may have been reborn into the body of the villainess of a game, but the moment that she regains her Past-Life Memories, any sort of villainy becomes an impossibility for her.
- Despite the statement that "all" of the routes end with doom, there are actually only six of twelve that do.^Spoiler The routes for Alan and Nicol have nothing to do with Catarina at all, and neither do Raphael's good end or the Friendship route. That means that there's an even six-six split between good endings for Catarina and doom endings, even ignoring said reincarnation's potential to throw things entirely Off the Rails.
Naked Lunch is not about naked people eating lunch. The writer, William S. Burroughs, said that he meant 'naked' more as in 'exposed': "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork." However, that doesn't happen either in the book - at least not literally. However, being the absolute Mind Screw that the novel is, it would be hard to come up with a more descriptive title for it.
The Neverending Story ends. Well, the book has a bunch of subplots left with No Ending, apparently to inspire children to become writers by actually encouraging them to write their own fan fiction. It's very meta. Of course, it's technically not possible to have a neverending story even if it has No Ending. It will simply stop eventually. Still, you'd think a book with that name would at least be a Doorstopper.
The second book in The Nightmare Room 's "Thrillogy" is called What Scares You the Most?, implying the protagonist will have their face their worst fear. This is not the case, unless her worst fear happens to be witches.
Of Mice and Men: There aren't any mice. The title is a reference to the old proverb "the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry", referring to how a major running theme in the story is the dream of the protagonists to get enough money for a farm of their own—which, naturally, does not go as they'd hoped.
Old Mortality: The title character appears only once and has nothing to do with the plot. A more accurate title would have been "Henry Morton" (the actual protagonist), "The Covenanters" (the people Henry reluctantly joins), or even "The Battle of Bothwell Bridge" (the defeat that ends the Covenanters' rebellion).
One Fine Day is a children's book with a very misleading title. While that is the opening line of the book, the entire story is a depressing tale about a fox who gets his tail cut off and goes out of his way on a frustrating journey just so he can get it sewn back on. There is certainly nothing fine about this fox's day at all!
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish: It may be the opening line of the book, and the first few pages may be about fish, but the rest of the book has nothing to do with fish at all. A more representative title would have been "Funny Things Are Everywhere" since that is the recurring theme of the book.
Neil Gaiman's short story "Other People" has only one character. The title is, presumably, a reference to the saying "hell is other people."
Pippi Longstocking: Pippi Goes On Board: Readers might think – along with the characters – that Pippi will end up sailing away with her long-lost father when he comes back. As it turns out, she does go on board her father's ship at the end... but then gets right back off when she sees her friends Tommy and Annika crying and chooses to stay after all.
The Princess Bride isn't technically a princess; Buttercup was the daughter of a dairy farmer, but as she was almost inhumanly beautiful, Prince Humperdinck had insisted on her being his bride. His advisors, troubled by the idea of him marrying a non-royal, quietly arranged for her to be known as the Princess of Hammersmith (a tiny portion of the realm) and shipped her off to royalty school for training.
- According to William Goldman, the title came first — he asked his two young daughters what his next story should feature, and one said "princesses" and the other said "brides," so he built the story around the title.
Reign of the Seven Spellblades: The Seven Spellblades are actually a rather minor feature of the setting rather than a major driving force; also, there's initially only six. Newcomers to the series also sometimes have to have it explained to them that the title does not refer to the six main characters, either: their proper collective name is "the Sword Roses" (which is only coined in volume 2), whereas a "spellblade" in the lore of the series is an Unblockable Attack.
Roys Bedoys: In "Roys Bedoys Saves the Day", he never actually does any grand-scale heroism; he just does kind, but relatively mundane, acts such as cleaning his brother's grazed hand.
The Silver John story "Why They're Called That" is John describing a monster called a gardinel, its appearance and eating habits, but in the end, he admits he doesn't know where the name comes from.
Most of books in Space Marine Battles have self-explanatory titles and sometimes fall under Spoiler Title, but some are pretty non-indicative:
- In Death of Antagonis, planet Antagonis is blown up one third into the book, and the story itself focuses on rise and fall of Taharan rather than anything connected to Antagonis.
- In Purging of Kallidus, the eponymous harbor is purged off-screen by PDF Red Shirts, while the heroes go around purging power plants.
The second omnibus of The Spirit Thief novels is titled Revenge of Eli Monpress, and while there is some revenging going on, Eli's not the one doing it.
Harry Harrison's gamebook You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat: Actually, not really. You are assuming the role of a new recruit in the Special Corps. But Stainless Steel Rat Slippery Jim Digriz is your mentor. He sends you on the mission and assumes a role not too dissimilar to Al Calavicci. So it's the next best thing to being The Stainless Steel Rat himself.
The Shadow: The title of The Five Chameleons refers to the five ruthless and daring criminals who the book follows living in plain sight as respected citizens as they rob and kill, but counting their equally respected and secretly ruthless twist villain patron, there are actually six of them.
Star Wars Legends: The Completely Different Title of the German translation of X-Wing: Rogue Squadron is X-Wing: Angriff auf Coruscant, i.e. "assault on Coruscant". However, the novel is merely about the beginnings of the New Republic campaign to eventually take over Coruscant – the actual assault on Coruscant itself doesn't happen until later.
In There are No Cats in This Book, there actually are cats— they just wish they weren't in a book and want to enter reality.
The Three Musketeers is actually about the fourth musketeer who meets and joins the original three. While the main characters are members of the historical "musketeers", the plot focuses on their private dueling and brawling with swords rather than their wartime fighting with muskets.
Time to Orbit: Unknown: The time to orbit is one of the few things that is known for sure.
The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human: The title refers to the protagonist Ike, but he's not the actual strongest magician in the Demon Lord's army until much later in the story, with his mentor Cefiro being stronger than him for most of the series.
The Wakefields of Sweet Valley, a prologue novel to the Sweet Valley High series, is about a family of women not named Wakefield who do not live in Sweet Valley.
Warrior Cats usually averts this, generally having titles that are either vaguely ominous (Dark River, Forest of Secrets) or Mad Lib Fantasy Titles](Bluestar's Prophecy, The Last Hope). However, in Cloudstar's Journey, there is no literal journey. Not odd unless you know about the character: he was famous for taking his entire group of cats away from their home and journeying for days to find a new one. You'd think the novella would be about that. You'd think...
The Widow of Desire seems like a romance story, but while it is about a widow, the desire isn't for her as much as taking over her fur coat company or finding Soviet takeover secrets her murdered husband had found out and hidden.
Winnie-the-Pooh:
- In "Piglet Meets a Heffalump", Piglet doesn't actually meet one— he just mistakes Pooh with a jar of honey on his head for a Heffalump.
- In "Tigger is Unbounced", Tigger is never actually "unbounced", i.e. made less bouncy— Rabbit, Pooh, and Piglet attempt to unbounce him, but they fail.

Live-Action TV

24 Hours in A&E: This show technically stays within the premise that all the events of an episode (barring the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue) occur within 24 hours... but few, if any, episodes cover that long a period - most just follow a single day or night shift.
Angel is not a show about an angel, nor does it feature any angels, although there are unseen Powers That Be who guide the hero by sending visions to one of his sidekicks. The main protagonist is a vampire detective named Angel (which goes back to his little sister mistaking him for one after he died; his original name was Liam).
The Big Bang Theory is mainly about the social misadventures of six socially-awkward scientists and one not-scientist. The titular theory may be mentioned occasionally in passing, but it's hardly the focus of the show.
The Book of Boba Fett is a Disney+ show rather than a book, that doesn't even have a book factor into the plot. LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy acknowledges this when the main character, Sig, suggests that he and his friends turn the pages of The Book of Boba Fett with their imagination. Arguably, the two episodes in which Boba doesn't speak aren't "of Boba Fett" either.
Dark Angel is likewise not about an angel, neither the regular kind nor a Fallen Angel, but rather a genetically engineered Phlebotinum Rebel whose beauty makes her the figurative "dark angel". Although Max is essentially an uncostumed superhero, she never uses the name Dark Angel or any other hero codename. The name was also likely influenced by Battle Angel Alita, which is known to have been one of James Cameron's inspirations in making the show.
Doctor Who:
- "The Doctor Dances" could be seen as this. While the Doctor does dance at the end of it, it has nothing to do with the central plot of gas-mask zombies in Blitz-era London.
- "The Next Doctor" centers around a man who seems to be a future incarnation of the Doctor. It turns out he only thinks he's the Doctor because his brain was scrambled by a Cyberman cartridge carrying information about the Doctor.
- "Let's Kill Hitler", in which the Nazis and the genocidal dictator himself have little to no influence on the real plot. They either wasted a perfectly good plot or plotted a perfectly good waste, depending on your perspective.
- "The Bells of Saint John" is just a joke about what medieval monks call the phone incorporated into the TARDIS, which has the "St John Ambulance" logo on it, but is not a plot point.
The ninth episode of Gilligan's Island is named "Goodbye Island". Of course, this being the series it is, the castaways don't get off the island in it.
Emergency!: In the fourth-season episode "Parade," John and Roy have completed restoration of a vintage British fire truck; over the course of the episode, we see them trying to get it ready for the parade. We never actually see them in a parade, because while they are on the last call of the episode (a structure fire), part of the wall of the building falls on the truck, defacing it beyond recognition, and sending John and Roy back to square one to restore and refinish it again, off-screen (they do it at the end of the episode before the credits).
Happy Days: In "The Fonz is Allergic to Girls", Fonzie is not actually allergic to girls; he just thinks he is.
The Honeymooners: Both of the main couples have been married for a significant period, so no honeymoons are depicted.
iCarly: The episode "iCarly Saves TV". They don't save television, the gang gets the opportunity to turn iCarly (the in-universe webcast) into a TV show, it gets massive Executive Meddling and they give up and go back to the Internet.
Idol x Warrior Miracle Tunes!: Sometimes the titles of the episodes only touch upon a minor plot point in the episode. For example, episode 6 is titled "Mai's Cooking Trouble" and Mai being a Lethal Chef only took place within the first 5 minutes of the episode.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episodes will often have a title "The Gang X" that suggests the Gang does something that actually doesn't happen during the episode.
Only three of the twelve episodes of Jurassic Fight Club involve the Jurassic period in any way. Its European-Australian title Dinosaur Secrets is more on point, though two episodes don't feature dinosaurs. The host acknowledged the title's problem, but the final say wasn't his.
Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger: In some markets, this show was localized as Galaxy Rangers, even though the only characters who are outside the Earth are the main villains.^note
Matt Houston: Neither the title character (a Texas oilman transplanted to the City of Angels) or his portrayer (Lee Horsley) are actually from Houston, Texas; Horsley is actually from the Northwest Texas town of Muleshoe, near the Texas-New Mexico border.
Invoked in an episode of Maury entitled "I'm Praying My Brother Isn't My Baby's Father!" The title implies Brother–Sister Incest, but it turns out the woman cheated on her boyfriend with his brother, thus the line is spoken from the boyfriend's perspective. Because this is a daytime talk show, it turned out neither man was the father.
In the UK, Mayday episode "Gimli Glider" is called "Deadly Glide", even though Everyone Lives.
Played for Laughs in the Netflix reboot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring Avalanche. Kinga develops a device called the "Don La Font-aine 3000", which converts phrases into genre logos and they don't match at all. I Wanna Do One is done up in a style meaning for a "Ladies-weepy" movie, A Lighthearted Neil Simon Project is done up in the style of a "balls-to-the-wall action flick" and Okay, We Get It is the next Star Wars title!
The Nevers: Absolutely nothing and no people in the show are referred to as "The Nevers" (the empowered characters are called "The Touched"). Apparently the title is a very, very stretched play on the Victorian saying "Why I never!" Presumably it sounded funnier in Whedon's head.
Odd Squad: In the episode "Back to the Past", the main characters are sent to the future.
Our Miss Brooks: Some episode titles are deliberately misleading. For example, "The Hurricane" does not have Miss Brooks and the gang survive a hurricane. Miss Brooks and Harriet mistakenly think there's a hurricane coming when they hear the storm warning on Walter Denton's homemade radio. They fail to listen to the rest of the broadcast, missing the reveal that they were listening to a station broadcasting from Bombay, India.
British Radio Announcer: Tether your elephants! I repeat, tether your elephants!
Power Rangers Samurai: The first episode aired is titled "The Team Unites". Yet there is no uniting, at least not in a Recruit Teenagers with Attitude sense. The Rangers already have their powers^note, and the episode is primarily focused on the Green Samurai Ranger, Mike, who technically could be said to "rejoin" the team in the latter part of the episode. It's all but confirmed that it was supposed to be Episode 3, and the true "first episodes" of Samurai came in the form of Origins Episodes mid-season.
The DIY Network series Rehab Addict is about a woman who's addicted... to rehabilitating old homes.
Revolution: "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia". The title implies we'll see events during the Blackout, but the episode proves to be anything but.
Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace provides an English-only example. Its original title, Legend of Ruyi, follows a frequent pattern for titles of Chinese period dramas. Someone somewhere decided a direct translation wasn't good enough, so when choosing the official English title they picked one that's nothing like the original. Worse, it gives the impression this is a cute, romantic series. It isn't.
Saturday Night Live is a downplayed example, since it's mostly live but has included filmed sketches going back to its earliest days (i.e. commercial parodies, animated shorts, and the Digital Shorts), and these often become breakout skits. Also, over half of the episode takes place after midnight on the East Coast and is thus technically aired on Sunday there. A few sketches also have misleading names, such as the "Rosie the Riveter" sketch, which is about the search for the factory woman to serve as the model for the iconic poster. Rosie is there, but most of the focus is on the three crude "slug thumper" women who also work in the factory.
The Spencer Sisters: The title characters are actually a daughter and mother duo who are mistaken for sisters due to their Strong Family Resemblance.
Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis: Beyond the first few seasons, these shows would often go entire episodes without mentioning or showing a stargate, with spaceships becoming the more common method of travel.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is primarily set on a Space Station. There is very little "trekking" involved, especially for the first two seasons. It's named that solely because it's the same universe as the previous Star Trek shows.
Star Trek: The Next Generation isn't about the original characters' kids, nor is it set one generation into the future. It's actually set a whole century later. It's not even the next ship to be called Enterprise after the one the original crew were last seen using in the movies (the Enterprise-A), with two others coming between that one and this one (the Enterprise-D).
Star Trek: Voyager: In "The Disease", no one actually gets a disease— Seven of Nine makes an analogy that compares romantic love to a disease, that she later even denounces as inaccurate.
In the Supernatural series finale, "Carry On", rather than the And the Adventure Continues ending suggested by the title, the episode brings the series to a very definitive close.
In True Blood, the blood is actually fake.
Zero Zero Zero: The miniseries centers on an international shipment of pure cocaine from Mexico to Italy. The phrase "zero zero zero" is never uttered, and its meaning isn't apparent from watching the show. It's the nickname among Italian narcotraffickers for the highest quality of cocaine, referencing the highest grade of pasta flour.

Music

Bob Dylan's oft-bootlegged "Royal Albert Hall" concert from 1966 was actually recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester (hence the quote marks on its official release).
The first song on Twelfth Night's self-titled album is entitled "Last Song."
The sixth song on Foo Fighters' In Your Honor is called "The Last Song", though It Makes Sense in Context of the song itself.
A Flock of Seagulls' "The End" is the next-to-the-last track on The Story Of A Young Heart.
The Rolling Stones: Sympathy For The Devil" doesn't portray the Devil very sympathetically at all, although he does sarcastically ask the listener to "have some sympathy".
Intestinal Disgorge's "I'm Going to Fuck Your Kid." They even acknowledge this partway through:
This song has nothing to do with fucking kids, by the way...
The song called Long Happy Life by Soviet-Russian Punk Rock singer Yegor Letov describes (in a very bizarre way) his And I Must Scream state of anhedonia, depression, and anguish during abstinent syndrome after numerous alcohol and drug overdoses.
Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats. The genre is way off and the number of songs falls short by 9. If you include the bonus tracks on the latest reissue, it overshoots by 2.
Ween's 12 Golden Country Greats. Unlike the Throbbing Gristle example, the songs do belong to the indicated genre; however, there are only ten of them. There were two B Sides, so the number of songs produced during the sessions adds up to 12, but neither of those tracks ever appeared on any official release of the album itself. A popular theory holds that the the album title isn't describing the songs themselves, but Dean and Gene Ween's backing group for the album, which consisted entirely of veteran country session musicians - however, even if you count vocal quartet The Jordanaires as one entity, a total of thirteen backing musicians were credited.
Though the chorus of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "This Song's Just Six Words Long" indeed contains just six words, the lyrics have far more than six words in them.
Invoked by original Beatles drummer, Pete Best, who infamously named his first album ''Best of the Beatles'', confusing fans of The Beatles expecting a Greatest Hits Album.
"Jack the Ripper" by Nick Cave is (unlike a huge amount of his songs) not a Murder Ballad. It has nothing to do with the historical serial killer but is about a dysfunctional relationship in which, among other things, the protagonist's woman accuses him of being a sex maniac whenever he makes advances to her.
Jazz from Hell by Frank Zappa: The music is not Jazz at all, but computer music with one live guitar solo, recorded during a concert.
The Complete Recordings by Robert Johnson. It is the most complete collection of Johnson's work around, that's true, but it's not entirely complete. There is one alternate take of "Traveling Riverside Blues" missing.
Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka is an album that was merely produced by Brian Jones and doesn't feature him on vocals or instruments at all. Instead, we hear the wonderful performances by the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a Moroccan folk group.
Elvis Presley: Arguably the most notorious, yet atrocious concert album in his career is Having Fun with Elvis on Stage, a 35-minute collection of nothing but Elvis cracking jokes with the audience, without any music or context of what is going on. Not only is the record painfully unfunny, but a lot of it also is technically not even a joke, just Elvis saying random things in interaction with his audience. Half of the time he is just rambling, before deciding his jokes are falling flat or his story isn't going anywhere.
John Zorn: Several tracks on Music for Children are too difficult, noisy or scary for children to appreciate them.
Daniel Amos played with this on their album Vox Humana. The title is Latin for "voice of the human"—but it's an album of New Wave Music and Synth-Pop and the least-human sounding album in their discography. The irony was intentional since a major theme of the lyrics is discerning "the voice of the human" among the background noise of 1980s society.
Many of Fall Out Boy's song titles prior to their hiatus prioritized clever phrasing and pop culture references over actually having anything to do with the lyrics or genre. Examples include "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More Touch Me", "The Carpal Tunnel of Love" and "The Take Over, the Breaks Over" have nothing to do with the songs. From Save Rock and Roll onward, this tendency has lessened as more of the song titles show up in the lyrics themselves.
"Punkrocker" by Teddybears is electro-pop, not Punk Rock, even though the lyrics are meant to be about punk rock, and actual punk rocker Iggy Pop provides the vocals.
The second song on Pain of Salvation's Remedy Lane is called "Ending Theme".
A majority of the songs by System of a Down have titles that are completely irrelevant to the subject matters of the songs.
Ben Folds Five is a trio.
Darius Rucker has repeatedly stated that he is not "Hootie", and that his (now former) band Hootie & the Blowfish doesn't have anyone named Hootie.
The J. Geils Band: J. Geils is the guitarist, not the singer. Not only that, but from 2012 through 2015, the band toured under that name without Geils himself participating. (The band no longer performs as "The J. Geils Band", and Geils died in 2017.)
Mike Rutherford's band "Mike + the Mechanics" plays with this. He did try singing lead at first, but then he decided to have other people sing lead instead.
This trope has been known to happen to artist/producer duos. One example is "Loggins and Messina". Kenny Loggins (later of Footloose, and Danger Zone fame) originally intended to be a solo artist from the start, but producer Jim Messina contributed so much to what would have been his debut album, that it was called "Kenny Loggins with Jim Messina Sittin' in". As a result, the act was called "Loggins and Messina" from that point forward until 1976 when they broke up (on good terms).
ABBA's compilation Thank You For The Music: A Collection Of Love Songs. Even being very generous and allowing songs about platonic and parental love to qualify, love songs still don't make up even half of the album.
Songdrops: In "Striper the Kitty", Striper is actually a skunk that was mistaken for a cat.
While the Bob Marley song "Three Little Birds" does indeed have three birds in it, the focus is mostly on the message of not worrying.
The Irish rebel song "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" is not actually about challenging the infamous and brutal police units who were often called the Black and Tans (due to wearing patchwork uniforms at the start of their existence, with the dark green of the Royal Irish Constabulary and khaki of the British Army), but rather the writer's loyalist neighbors, who the lyrics are likening to the Black and Tans due to their continued loyalty to an oppressive foreign government. While it might be tough to tell that with no context or from just a surface understanding of the lyrics, the big clues are when the singer refers to their opponents as Seoinín, an Irish word meaning an Irish person who hates their own people and tries to emulate the English upper class, and calls out deeds of theirs (like cheering for the executions of the leaders of 1916 Easter Uprising), that happened before the Black and Tans came to Ireland. (Indeed, one thing the song decries is "how you slandered great Parnell", as in Charles Stewart Parnell, who argued for Irish Home Rule in the 19th century and died in 1891... almost thirty years before the Black and Tans came into existence in 1920.)
Train: "50 Ways to Say Goodbye" is actually about ways to die, and only eleven are listed. Granted, the song was supposed to be called "50 Ways to Kill Your Lover"…
"Monody" by TheFatRat at no point consists of a single melody line — there is always a harmony line.
Thirteen Unlucky Numbers by Wax is sort of a Pun-Based Title, playing off the 13 Is Unlucky trope and "numbers" as in the vaudevillian term for "songs" - however, the album only has ten actual songs on it; they put three short tracks of silence at the end of the album, just so the total number of tracks on the CD would still be 13.
The original version of "20 Minutes" by Carbon Based Lifeforms, from their Interloper album, is only 7 3/4 minutes long. However, they would later produce an extended version that is indeed 20 minutes long.
Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5" is not a mambo, nor is it the fifth instalment in a series.
Kamasi Washington's "Fearless Movement" ends on a track called "Prologue"; Kamasi has explained that it's titled as such because he feels endings are in fact beginnings and opportunities to move to something new and grow, especially with life.
Only Fire (FUCK IT UP) is fond of this:
- The song that put him on the map, "ASMR", is not actually about ASMR. It's an incredibly crass song about sixty-nining in a speeding car near a cliff and risking dying in a horrible fiery car crash because the bumpy road supposedly makes it better.
- He uses Mockbuster titles to sucker in people into thinking they're listening to the newest Ariana Grande or Taylor Swift song, only to not actually hear Ariana Grande's "Seven Rings" be about shopping, but about extremely catty Alpha Bitch Straw Feminist Psycho Lesbians who find sucking certain parts of mens' anatomy disgusting; in Taylor Swift's case, "Cruel Summer" isn't about another Taylor breakup song, but it is about getting over a breakup by snorting a mountain of cocaine, asking if the singer's anatomy was slightly imperfect, and then sleeping with a LOT of people.
Caravan Palace: The title of "Human Leather Shoes for Crocodile Dandies" has nothing to do with its lyrics.

Pinball

The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot: Except for the title, no one ever refers to the titular Machine as "Bride".
No Fear: Dangerous Sports has the "No Limits" Major Challenge, where the value of each shot starts at 20 million points, and each one collected adds another million... only to cap out at 70 million.

Puppet Shows

The Oobi episode titled, "Sleepover". This episode mostly focused on Uma missing Oobi while he's at Kako's sleepover, the titular sleepover isn't even shown until the end of the episode.

Radio

The Brewing Network with The Sour Hour. It is theoretically an hour-long, but more episodes are an hour and a half or longer than those with times closer to an hour. There's also the fact it isn't exclusively about sour brewing but goes into all types of funky brewing such as the use of brettanomyces.

Tabletop Games

All Flesh Must Be Eaten — you spend the game working to avoid that.
Chinese Checkers is neither Chinese (it was invented in Germany) nor a variation of checkers.

Theatre

Four Saints in Three Acts has four acts, and fifteen Saints in the Dramatis Personae having different names (there are two Saint Teresas). This is lampshaded in the Prologue to Act Four of this Mind Screw.
Fun Home is a diminutive Funeral Home, which is the family business. Their actual home life is dysfunctional at best.
The 1946 Broadway musical Park Avenue was set entirely on Long Island.

Theme Parks

Star Tours: The Adventures Continue is an updated version of the original Star Tours attraction at the Disney parks. The title could imply this is supposed to be a sequel to the ride, but it is a prequel since it is supposed to take place before the events of the original ride.
The former Twister...Ride it Out attraction at Universal Studios Florida was a special-effects show, not a ride as its title would imply.

Visual Novels

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony of Danganronpa uses the same title as the rest of the games, which translates to "truth bullet." There are in fact Truth Bullets being used in this game still, but more often that not, the protagonist has to use a Lie Bullet to move the plot forward, and even later on, it turns out that truth and lies being part of the theme goes to great extremes to the point that it's hard to tell what of the franchise was truthful in the first place, calling into question why the game was called "Truth Bullet" even though there isn't any real truth involved.
No murders take place in DRAMAtical Murder, although the villain Toue plans to brainwash people to the point of being brain-dead, which is the mental equivalent of murder.
Famicom Detective Club: While they are teenagers, the protagonist and Ayumi Tachibana are assistant PIs working for an actual detective agency, not members of a school club. We learn in The Girl Who Stands Behind, a prequel to the rest of the series, that Ayumi did start a detective club in her first year of high school with her friend Yoko (whose death is the opening murder in said entry), but that's ultimately a footnote even in that installment. The only other mention of a "Detective Club" is in the fourth entry, where the protagonist pretends that he's in one during an early conversation. Of course, the "Famicom" part of the name would become an Artifact Title as the franchise went on to receive remakes and new entries on later consoles.
The Great Ace Attorney: The 5th case of the first game, "The Adventure of the Unspeakable Story", is subtitled "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in its title card. The case is not an adaptation of the novel and its culprit is not based on the Baskerville killer, that would come in the sequel. And while the unpublished manuscript of the in-universe Hound of the Baskervilles story features in the case, it's not a major plot point, mostly serving to justify the Inciting Incident and act as a Sequel Hook.
The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen: The titular Lily only actually dies once, shortly after the prologue of the game. All other times that she appears, it's actually the demon Kalnash in her body.
Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk: The sequel shows that the girl bought a carton of milk, not a bag.
Mystic Messenger: While the "Messenger" part of the title is accurate as the game takes place almost entirely on a chat messenger service, the "Mystic" part is misleading because there is absolutely nothing mystical or supernatural about the messenger or anything else in the game. Mysterious Messenger would have been a much more appropriate title for the game... but it's hard to deny that Mystic Messenger just has a better ring to it.
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: As the title suggests, the game feature nine people that have nine hours to find their way through nine doors. However while they start out with nine people, the ninth member of the party is killed off before the opening cutscene is even over, meaning that the game only has eight participants. While his bracelet can still work and thus participate, later on it's revealed there's more people stuck with them with their own bracelet, pushing the participant number higher than nine. There are also more than nine doors, with the reveal that the "9" door found is not the true one, and the second one is the one that really leads to the exit. Finally, the True Ending actually lasts longer than the allotted nine hours, with the final puzzle happening as the group tries to escape the apparent sinking. It turns out the characters were not on a sinking ship at all.
Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. In one scene early on in the "game", John is seen playing air guitar with a plunger while wearing a tie (which, admittedly, his mother expects him to wear despite his insistence that plumbers don't wear ties). The only reason the game is likely called this is that in the ending, Jane says plumbers don't wear ties when John tells her he's a plumber.

Web Animation

Milly, the titular cow from Cow of the Wild, is actually a minor character. The series is actually about the wolves in the pack that she left her home to join, particularly Lupis and Luna.
Each episode of The Cyanide and Happiness Show has a title that's completely unrelated to any of the sketches within it. For example, Episode 2 is called "Why I Hate Summer Camp"; the sketches are a Moby Dick parody, a guy in the bath, and a guy trying to propose to his girlfriend. Summer camp isn't mentioned once. Averted with the depressing episode.
Happy Tree Friends: While most of the characters are indeed friends with one another, the show is definitely not a very happy one and despite being set in a forest, trees aren't that big a part of it.
Overly Sarcastic Productions is a show that analyzes media, mythology, history, and tropes, without being overly sarcastic.
Strong Bad Email:
- Strong Bad tries to answer fifty emails in "50 emails", but he doesn't quite manage it as Homestar accidentally breaks his computer partway through.
- In "2 emails", Strong Bad does indeed answer two emails... one of which is the email asking him to answer two emails. The actual focus of the email is Strong Bad waiting for his "Ladies' Choice Awards" event that he's hosting.
- In "dangeresque 3", Strong Bad shows off a "director's cut" of the first Dangeresque Movie Within a Show, because he hasn't actually made Dangeresque 3 yet.
- "what I want" is about the types of gifts Strong Bad doesn't want for Decemberween (the Homestar Runner universe's Christmas equivalent).

Webcomics

180 Angel: The title of Episode 12, Cookies!, makes it sound like a happy, light episode, right? Wrong, it is the episode that reveals that Chloe's parents were murdered in front of her by a demon when she was a little kid.
Despite the main cast being teenagers, nobody in The God of High School is actually shown attending school.
Buttersafe has very little to do with butter, or the safety of it.
Crystal Heroes is a deliberately cliche-sounding fantasy title to emphasize how much the setting and characters deviate from genre standards.
Girl Genius: The arc "Maxim Buys a Hat" is all about how Maxim can't buy a hat, because it has to be plunder from a Worthy Opponent. His gambit to get the most worthy hat from the most dangerous enemy, however, does involve Maxim buying a sandwich, and forcing Old Man Death to choose between his reputation as a fighter and his reputation as a sandwich maker. The latter wins, and Maxim gets his new hat for the price of a sandwich.
Gunnerkrigg Court:
- "Faraway Morning and Three Short Tales" is the title of Chapter 34, which does have characters telling three short tales. It sounds like a short chapter, right? It's actually one of the longest chapters to date thanks to all of the Character Development and plot revelations going on between each of the tales.
- "Coyote Knew This Would Happen" is the title of Chapter 90. The chapter involves Coyote being absolutely blindsided by what happened, throwing a tantrum about it, and coming to a very wrong conclusion concerning it.
Homestuck is only about a kid stuck in his house for about a few dozen pages out of several thousand. Apparently, Andrew Hussie was going to name it Sburb, the name of the game on which the story is based, but thought it was too boring.
MS Paint Adventures is only 3 stories and 1 Orphaned Series and the current one hasn't been an adventure ^noteIE, written by user suggestions. in years. Nothing aside from the first panel of the first adventure has been made in MS Paint.
Mountain Time is not particularly concerned with mountains, time, or the Mountain Time Zone, with the exception of one comic.
Orange Marmalade is about a vampire, Ma-ri, dealing with humans at her school (mostly a boy with very tasty blood who has a huge crush on her) on the backdrop of vampires being allowed to live within society and lots of Fantastic Racism. No marmalade at all. In an FAQ, when asked what orange marmalade was (in regards to the story), the author simply explained how one made orange marmalade.
One page of The Order of the Stick, set while Vaarsuvius is fighting a dragon, is called "A Dragon's Victory." Vaarsuvius wins by turning into a dragon.
Penny Arcade generally features home console or PC releases.
- There's the subseries in the comic Twisp and Catsby, featuring the surreal adventures of the titular cat and demon. The cat is Twisp, the demon is Catsby.
The Perry Bible Fellowship has nothing to do with The Bible, fellowships, or anyone named Perry, rather being a series of one-shot Black Comedy comics.
While petri dishes do crop up in The Petri Dish, they're not the main focus.
Questionable Content
- It doesn't have much questionable, i.e. risque/pornographic, content. There's a decent quantity of sex jokes — the protagonist's mom is a dominatrix, and his pet robot is a pervert — but there are hardly any sex/nudity scenes (none at all for the first thousand or so comics) and naughty-bits are always kept out of sight. The entire compendium is less questionable than any random Oglaf comic.
- In an in-universe example, the Show Within a Show "Ass Swordsman Tetsuo", about a guy named Tetsuo who can pull swords out of his ass, goes at least 22 episodes without Tetsuo pulling a single sword out of his ass. Marigold "can't tell if it's a brilliant deconstruction of shonen anime tropes or it's just garbage".
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, in much the same way as The Perry Bible Fellowship, is a bunch of one-shot philosophical and/or Black Comedy strips. No relation to cereal, or Saturday-Morning Cartoons, or anything else the title might imply.
Sleepless Domain: Ironically, unlike most cases of schoolkids having nightly superhero adventures, the magical girls of Sleepless Domain attend a special school that starts late in the day so they can get a full eight hours of sleep (from 2 AM to 10 AM). The only chronically "sleepless" character is Rue, who goes to normal school because she doesn't trust the government. The title apparently comes from an in-universe magical girl celebrity magazine, though this never comes up in the story. This page pokes fun at the inconsistency:
Kokoro: A good night's sleep is the first step to kicking ass.
Alt Text: It's called SLEEPLESS DOMAIN! You're all doing it wrong!
Terror Island: The comic's plot has nothing to do with terror or islands. Lampshaded by the former Tag Line, "I'm not sure why it's called Terror Island". Within the comic itself, Ned Q. Sorcerer a.k.a. "The Obvious Dentist" is neither a sorcerer nor a dentist, and Centre of the Earth University is actually on the surface of the Moon.
Wright as Rayne is, in spite of its name, about Badass Normal superhero Alex Rayne being part of a one-sided "Freaky Friday" Flip with teenage girl Dorothy Wright. Apparently "Rayne As Wright" doesn't have the same ring to it.
xkcd may seem like an initialism for something, but it doesn't mean anything. It's just a string of random letters that creator Randall Munroe liked, as it's one of the few combinations of 4 English letters that can't be pronounced at all. It has, however, been pointed out that the numerical values of the letters add up to 42.

Web Original

TV Tropes itself.
- The website focuses on storytelling devices rather than figures of speech.
- If a page is listed in This Index Is Not an Example, you shouldn't take a page title at face value. If it gets so far out of hand that it only confuses tropers and readers, however, this often leads to a rename.
- The site discusses other media besides television.
- This very page, if you decide to take the title literally and not trust that it's about misleading titles.
- Stuffy Old Songs About the Buttocks, which are neither stuffy nor old, and rarely do they make use of the term "buttocks" in full.
IGN's 6 Video Game Titles That Lied Straight to Your Face.
Kiwi Farms (NSFW), a forum notorious for their harassment and stalking campaigns against mentally ill and LGBTQ individuals on the Internet, has fooled plenty of people into thinking it's a site about farming literal kiwi fruits/birds. The original title was CWCki Forums, but the title was changed allegedly to mock someone with a speech impediment attempting to pronounce it.
One of the most baffling non-indicative titles is a story about Ricochet, a would-be service dog that instead became a surfing dog that helps disabled children (a website dedicated to her can be found here). Logically, a clickbait title would play up the dog's change in career, but instead the story could be found with a completely unrelated title: "Mom Delivers 10 Babies, But There's Something About Her NINTH That Stuns Everyone". Ricochet's story has nothing to do with mothers or unusual ninth of ten babies, human or dog.
Chinese Troper Teslashark wrote a webfic that's called Time to Shoot Down the Moon. The rock-satellite of Earth suffers nothing in the story. In fact the author did it on purpose, to mock sci-fi series and war fictions with outrageous names.
The Day the Music Died has absolutely nothing to do with the fatal plane crash immortalized in "American Pie". It is, however, about how a fictional fandom experienced every possible drama bomb at once. "American Pie" does show up, but only at the tail-end of the story.

Web Videos

When The Annoying Orange heard about Inside Out, his first thought was that people's heads would turn inside out. Pear had to tell him it wasn't that kind of movie.
The Atop the Fourth Wall arc "The Clone Saga", while dealing with copies of Linkara, really doesn't have the clone Linksano made play any role. Its title, as it was during the series's tenth anniversary, is ultimately an homage to the fact the first episode was a review of an issue of the Spider-Man storyline of the same name with the clone having been killed off even before the story began and the copies being Mirrorkara and a Came Back Wrong Mechakara.
Bishop Barron's video "on The Doritos Commercial" is only about Doritos at the beginning. The rest of the video is spent discussing the philosophy behind abortion advocacy, the separation of truth and will in the thought of William of Occam to Renee Descartes, and The Pope Benedict XVI's theology.
CLW Entertainment:
- The now-cancelled Fujiko F. Fujio block was going to have episodes of Doraemon, Perman, and Ninja Hattori. However, Ninja Hattori is made by Fujiko A. Fujio, not Fujiko F. Fujio, meaning the title is not entirely correct.
- The video "Thumbs" has nothing to do with thumbs.
One of Defunctland's Jim Henson videos is named The Curse of Sesame Street. No mention of The Production Curse is made there. It actually refers to Henson's fear of ending up in a "children's show ghetto", which led him to create The Muppet Show.
Dumb Lawyer Quotes IRL but in Ace Attorney is, as the name implies, Ace Attorney characters re-enacting lawyers asking stupid questions in court. However, in some of the later videos, the witnesses are sometimes the ones who are saying the stupid things, while the lawyers are reasonably intelligent.
The Weather: The work is called "The Weather", episodes are named after weather terms like "Sunny", and there are transitional-segments of people living their life in whatever weather is presented... but the actual skits are only loosely based on the weather at best, and completely unrelated at worst.
Jay Bauman of RedLetterMedia has a personal Youtube channel that is one long Running Gag. Every video purports to be part of a vlog about prosaic pop culture topics but is instead a short, ominous still life. During a Previously Recorded stream, he criticized the concept of deliberately mislabeling Youtube videos.
Discussed in the Scooby-Doo episode of Reviewed in 10 Words or Less. As a rule, the quality of a Scooby Doo movie is inversely related to how bad its title is. Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase? Cool title, bad movie. Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur? Terrible title, great movie.
Screen Rant Pitch Meetings isn't an example in and of itself, since it shows the creator's imaginings of the pitch meetings for the films and TV shows it covers, but it does sometimes discuss this trope.
- In the pitch meeting for Avengers: Age of Ultron, the Producer is surprised to hear that the film takes place over "a couple of days," and asks the Screenwriter if he knows what "age" means.
- In the pitch meeting for Clash of the Titans (2010), the Producer notices that there are no titans in the movie- just humans, Greek gods and some monsters.
The main character of Unwanted Houseguest is, by all indications, the rightful owner and sole resident of Aberfoyle Manor. One storyline even involved him fighting to reclaim his home. Other characters sometimes address him as "Houseguest" or "Guesty," implying it could be his legal name.
VG Myths isn't about solving or investigating video game-related rumors, but rather doing Self-Imposed Challenge runs. This is lampshaded in one of the couch gag introductions:
"Welcome to VG Myths, the online internet video game TV show that doesn't solve mysteries, has never solved mysteries, and is shocked and appalled by the accusation of ever having associated with busters of the myth variety."
In the Tony Zaret skit "I Survived 7 Days On COPE ISLAND", the title (albeit a parody of MrBeast titles) does not accurately describe the time either character spends on the island. MrContent is invited off the island on the first day, while MlamberZooShipper stays for ten years.

Western Animation

101 Dalmatians: The Series may have 101 Dalmatians, but a majority of the show focuses primarily on three pups and a chicken.
An in-universe example happens in Aesop and Son. Aesop tells his son a fable called "The Aardvark and the Lion", which was really about a cruel lion dealing with a pesky moth. At the end of the fable, when Junior tried to inquire where the aardvark came in, Aesop brushed it off.
There's a The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius episode called "Raise the Oozy Scab" in which Jimmy, Carl, Sheen, and Cindy look for a treasure called The Oozy Scab. Despite the title, The Oozy Scab isn't raised at all.
The Angry Beavers: Only one of the beaver main characters, Daggett, was angry; Norb was fairly easy-going at the beginning, and even when he Took a Level in Jerkass, he was more of a smug, self-centered kind of jerk than actually angry.
For Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the title of the show itself. The show is about a group of Anthropomorphic Food. It has no focus on water, none of the main characters are adolescents (or have any confirmed age). The hunger is only slightly relevant, due to them being food, but the fact that they are edible is rarely brought up. The force part was relevant for the first three episodes as a plot to simply get the show airing, as the actual premise of the show would sound ridiculous otherwise.
The Around the World with Willy Fog episode "Shipwreck". Despite its title, this is a Breather Episode in which Fog and his companions relax onboard ship; it's also the episode where Fog and Romy take a stroll among some exotic flowers in Singapore. The travellers do become caught in a typhoon towards the end, but they don't get shipwrecked and the following episode reveals that they made it to Hong Kong safely.
Arthur:
- Arthur is barely even in the episode "Arthur and the True Francine" (which was adapted from the book The True Francine); he's only in the title because he was in every episode's title back then, and this happened to be the only episode so far that wasn't about him.
- In "Emily Swallows a Horse", she doesn't; the title comes from a dream she has in the episode, wherupon the Snowball Lie she tells is likened to "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" as both involve Serial Escalation.
The The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes episode "Iron Man Is Born" does not retell the origin of Iron Man, nor does "The Man in the Ant Hill" show Hank Pym exploring an anthill. These titles come directly from the heroes' first comic book appearances. Many other episode titles are homages of this sort, but they still sound relevant to the plot; it's these two that stick out.
You would think that the Baby Looney Tunes episode "I Strain" would involve Petunia developing a bad eye condition, especially since the plot of it involves her watching a lot of television. Not once is it ever brought up, nor is she ever warned about it,
Big City Greens had an episode called "Bleeped"; ironically, the swear words were not bleeped out; they instead use made-up swear words such as "blort".
In the Caillou episode "Caillou Joins the Circus", he doesn't. Instead, the episode involve Caillou being grouchy because he got ready all by himself to go to the circus, only to realize he was a day early. To cheer him up, the family has a pretend circus themselves at the house. The closest thing to the title in this episode is Caillou having a dream at the start where he's a tiger tamer.
The Casagrandes: "No Egrets" actually does feature three egrets.
The Acme Hour on Cartoon Network was 2 hours long on Saturdays but was otherwise inverted.
The CBeebies Bedtime Hour block has been one hour and 15 minutes long ever since 2019, making it longer than an hour.
The Craig of the Creek episode, "The End Was Here" is not set in the day that the world ends.
The Fairly OddParents!: Despite the name of "Married to the Mom" and the title card of Crocker seemingly marrying his mother, nothing like this happens in the episode. Instead, the plot is about Timmy and Chloe wishing up the perfect girlfriend for Mr. Crocker so he'll stop being so mean to them.
In Family Guy:
- The episode "Chitty Chitty Death Bang" sounds as though it is about a vintage car, which, like the titular car of Ian Fleming's (1908-1964) book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (©1964; it was published two months after Fleming's death), can fly through the air and float on the water, and has a mind of its own, and has been programmed for crime by a criminal network, and the Griffins somehow thwart it, getting the criminals arrested in the process, and reprogram the car for good uses. In the original book, the villains, Joe the Monster and his gang, drive a black 1950s Rolls-Royce convertible; the "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" car resembled a green 1920s racing Bentley convertible.
- Neither title of the two-part episode "Stewie Kills Lois/Lois Kills Stewie" is accurate. In part 1, Stewie appears to kill Lois, but she turns out to be Not Quite Dead. In part 2, Stewie does get killed, but it's Peter who kills him. To top it all off, both episodes turn out to be a computer simulation.
The Fantastic Four (1967) episode "The Menace of the Mole Man" adapts a comic titled, "The Return of the Mole Man!", while "The Return of the Mole Man" adapts a comic titled, "The Mad Menace of the Macabre Mole Man". The former episode's title doesn't match its comic because Hanna-Barbera had yet to adapt the first Fantastic Four issue. (When they finally did so, they left out Mole Man's scenes to boot.)
Played with by the title of the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Foster's Goes to Europe". Given the way this type of title is typically used, you'd think it's about things the cast do while they're in Europe. It's actually about the trip to Europe, specifically, everyone trying to get ready to leave the house. And even though most of the cast miss their flight, Madame Foster, who stole their tickets, actually manages to get to Europe.
- No one's life is at stake in "Race for Your Life, Mac and Bloo". The title was a reference to the Peanuts film Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.
Fred and Barney Meet the Thing. Fred and Barney do not meet the Thing, if you can call him that; they're in segments that never cross over.
The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: "The Incredible Shrinking Mandy" has Billy attempting to shrink Mandy, but he accidentally makes her giant instead. (This was likely done intentionally.)
The animated short Hector's Hectic Life doesn't feature any character named Hector. The main character is named Princie, his owner is a woman, and the three puppies are unnamed.
In the Iron Man and His Awesome Friends episode "Special Delivery for the Iron Friends", the delivery isn’t even for the Iron Friends.
Let's Go Luna!: Mukandi herself doesn't appear for much of "Mukandi's Farm."
Little Princess: In "I Want My Treehouse", the Princess spends most of the episode not wanting her treehouse.
In The Loud House episode "Cheater by the Dozen", there are no actual cheaters; Bobby was Mistaken for Cheating.
Milly, Molly: The animated adaptation has several of these:
- In "Sock Heaven", there is no such place, Milly's dad just joked that lost socks might go to sock heaven.
- In "Aunt Maude is an Alien", Maude isn't really an alien; the girls just lied that she was.
- In "Magic Muffins", the muffins aren't really magic, it's just what Maude calls them.
In the Milo episode "Milo's Sore Tummy", Milo only fakes having a sore tummy.
Minuscule episodes usually have titles that are self-explanatory, but some titles are vaguely related metaphors or complete non-sequiturs:
- Episodes featuring buzzing insects usually have "ZZZZZ" meshed into their title, but "Zzzepplin" focuses entirely on the spiders.
- "Go Blue Go" has blue and green dragonflies competing in what can only be described as bug-Quidditch. The blue team loses.
- One would assume the series' Bizarro Episode "Night of the Mandibles" centered around the cast fighting off an army of undead insects. What they actually face is MUCH worse. Plus the episode takes place almost entirely in broad daylight.
The titular Monster Buster Club technically doesn't fight monsters, since they're alien hunters.
"How to Say I Love Roo" from My Friends Tigger & Pooh is about Roo trying to find an "I Love You Day" gift for Kanga, rather than the reverse.
The "my" in My Little Pony stopped meaning anything the second it made the hop from a toy line to a cartoon; only the first iteration has featured any human characters, and not only were they not the ponies' owners, they didn't even live in the same part of the world. Even before that, it was really only relevant in the sense that the toys themselves belonged to the kids who owned them, which is true of all toys.
- My Little Pony 'n Friends has the first serial "The End of Flutter Valley". Naturally, the heroes prevent it from actually ending, though it comes pretty close to.
None of the aliens in Pet Alien are actually Tommy's pets, and are actually more akin to roommates or houseguests. Scruffy is the closest thing to a "pet alien", but he's Dinko's pet, not Tommy's.
Ready Jet Go!: You would think that the episode "Asteroid Patrol" would be about the kids trying to look for asteroids from the treehouse. In the episode, Sean does set up an asteroid watch station in the treehouse and gets the rest of the group involved, but most of the episode revolves around Jet trying to fix Sean's telescope.
The Rick and Morty episode "The Ricklantis Mixup" only features the prologue and epilogue of Rick and Morty's Atlantis adventure. The bulk of the episode is instead a Vignette Episode focusing on the Citadel of Ricks. At the end of the episode, Rick taunts the audience for missing out on the Atlantis plot.
- "The Vat of Acid Episode" actually subverts this. It starts off by making it look like the whole episode will be about Rick and Morty in a vat of acid. This plot is dropped after a few minutes. At the end however, the vat of acid becomes a Chekhov's Gun meaning the episode really was about the vat of acid after all.
Rugrats:
- The spinoff All Grown Up! features the characters as tweens rather than adults.
- Angelica doesn't actually break a leg in "Angelica Breaks a Leg", she just pretends to.
- Spike doesn't actually become a dad in "Spike's Babies", he just looks after some stray kittens temporarily.
- In "Cynthia Comes Alive", she doesn't come alive. The babies just think Cynthia has come alive after seeing a girl who looks like her.
- In "Chuckie Grows", he actually only thinks he's grown because his clothes have shrunk.
The Secret Show: In "Alien Attack", the titular aliens never attack at any point in the episode. In fact, they actually try to tell humanity how to revert the side effects of eating them. The solution is to let the humans eat them since they will be reborn when they burp, as it's part of their lifecycle.
The Simpsons:
- In "The PTA Disbands", the PTA most emphatically does not disband, though at one point, a guy mistakenly believes it has, panics and jumps out a window (then jumps back in when informed of his mistake). The episode got its title because writer Jennifer Crittenden thought that that was the worst thing that could happen to a school.
- In-Universe example in "Bart On The Road", after Bart, Milhouse, and Nelson finish seeing the film Naked Lunch.
  Nelson: I can think of at least two things wrong with that title...
- "Homer vs. the 18th Amendment": Homer's actual dispute is with a city statute and the 21st Amendment, ending national Prohibition but allowing local jurisdictions to continue to ban alcohol, by proxy.
- "22 Short Films About Springfield" only has 19 segments (17 if you count Lisa's three segments as one short). TheRealJims, in his 60 Second Review of the episode, resorted to counting two transitional scenes and the show's standard Title Sequence as short films to get up to 22 "without any sort of cheating".
- "A Milhouse Divided" is about Milhouse's parents separating, but Milhouse himself isn't focused on in the episode.
- Parodied in "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner" when Lisa sees "the cane from Citizen Kane" on display at the Planet Springfield restaurant.
  Lisa: Wait a minute, there was no cane in Citizen Kane!
- In "Any Given Sundance", while at the Sundance Film Festival, Marge tries to see a movie called "Regularsville", which shows a scene of a depressed man in his underwear putting on makeup, and "Candyland", which depicts drug use rather than anything to do with the board game. She concludes that the titles are the opposite of what the movies are about and tries to apply this logic to "Chernobyl Graveyard", but while we don't see it onscreen, it's implied that the title is to be trusted in this instance.
- In "Bart's in Jail!", at no point in the episode is Bart in jail (though it wouldn't be the first time); instead, the story deals with Abe being tricked by scammers who convince him that Bart is in jail in a reflection of real-life "grandparent scams." Bart himself is only a bit player in the story that results.
- "Bad Boys... for Life?" does not actually involve multiple "bad boys", but only one (Bart).
Smiling Friends has something of a fondness for this, often mixing it with episode descriptions that are completely made up.
- "Charlie Dies and Doesn't Come Back": He comes back.
- "Smiling Friends Go To Brazil": The characters are stuck in the Brazilian airport the whole episode because Pim didn't book a hotel. So they hardly get to experience Brazil at all, and just fly back home.
- "Charlie, Pim, and Bill vs. The Alien": There are actually multiple aliens, and Bill isn't as prominent as the title implies given he is dissected as soon as the three are abducted. The episode description ("This episode tells the story of a thirty-four year-old boy named Pim who sets out to save his mother on Mars after she is abducted by Martians.") is not only non-indicative, but actually describing Mars Needs Moms.
- "Pim Finally Turns Green": Not only does Pim not turn green, but the official episode description ("Pim mysteriously turns bright green after eating an ancient artifact and his friends and rivals are horrified; they eventually learn to accept and love the new Pim.") is completely phony as well.
The Smurfs (1981) episode "Hefty And The Wheelsmurfer" is called "Fortachon y Pitufina" ("Hefty And Smurfette") in the Spanish dub, although the episode isn't exclusively about Hefty and Smurfette in any sort of relationship.
SpongeBob SquarePants:
- The Simpson family don't visit Greece in "Lisa the Greek" (the title is a play on football commentator Jimmy Snyder's nickname "Jimmy the Greek").
- Nickelodeon has a bad habit of advertising certain episodes with different titles. One particularly misleading example is "Goons on the Moon" being advertised as a Christmas special called "SpaceBob MerryPants", even though Santa Claus plays a relatively minor role, and the episode doesn't take place during Christmas anyway.
- "Gary Takes a Bath": The entire episode centers around Gary avoiding taking a bath and SpongeBob going to increasingly elaborate measures to get him to do so. In the end, SpongeBob is the one who takes a bath, and Gary never does.
- "Shuffleboarding": Despite the title, Shuffleboarding itself is never seen in the episode as SpongeBob and Patrick won the game off-screen in a very short amount of time. The main plot of the episode is SpongeBob and Patrick dressed as Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy arresting random people of Bikini Bottom.
- In "Bossy Boots", the title of the episode can be seen as quite misleading as the conflict/theme was never about Pearl being over-controlling or bossy (she was a reasonable boss) but more on the Krusty Krab undergoing dramatic changes that the employees didn't enjoy.
- "To Save a Squirrel". The episode is about SpongeBob and Patrick joining Sandy on a wilderness expedition. Based on the title, you'd expect the plot to include them needing to save Sandy from some kind of danger while on the trip. Instead, SpongeBob and Patrick fall off the truck just seconds in. The episode is about them getting stranded in a cave, going insane and trying to eat each other, egged on by a mysterious survivalist who turns out to be Sandy in disguise.
Steven Universe:
- "Steven the Sword Fighter", in which Steven never once touches a sword. The closest he gets is imitating a sword move in a movie with a mop handle.
- Kiki is only seen delivering one pizza in "Kiki's Pizza Delivery Service", with the episode focusing on Steven helping Kiki fight her nightmares caused by doing her sister's delivery route for her. Though with a character named Kiki delivering pizza, the pun on Kiki's Delivery Service was irresistible.
- "Dewey Wins" is about Beach City's Mayor Dewey running for reelection. Guess how that ends for him. This is seemingly a reference to the famous false "Dewey Defeats Truman" newspaper headline.
- The show has episodes where the title is technically accurate to what happens but still misleading. For example: "Hit the Diamond" sounds like it's referring to the Diamonds, when it's a Baseball Episode. "Kindergarten Kid" sounds like it's about something being born in the Kindergarten, but it's actually about Peridot trying to catch a Gem monster in the Beta Kindergarten. "Gem Harvest" sounds like it's referencing Peridot's throwaway line where she was worried about being harvested, but it's really a Thanksgiving special.
- Steven Universe: Future is a reference to the Time Skip past the original series and the movie, and stays its own present for the entire duration. This is explicated by the hook in its theme song, "Here we are in the future".
Tamagotchi Video Adventures clearly has the word "Adventures" pluralized in the title, and in the actual program there's a Tamagotchi Toons logo at the beginning - again, with "Toons" pluralized. This implies there's more than one "adventure", but it's only one VHS program. It's thought to be a pilot for a direct-to-video Tamagotchi cartoon that never got greenlit.
Teen Titans Go!:
- "Serious Business" is about rules on how to use the toilet.
- "The Return of Slade" is not about Slade at all. Slade is only mentioned at the beginning of the episode, cut away to a non-existing fight with a title card that says "Three episodes and a made-for-TV-movie later" it cuts back to them winning, explaining stuff that would have happened if they showed it. That's the last time he's mentioned. The rest of the episode is about Cyborg and Beast Boy wanting a clown, which quickly devolves into another one of the show's mean-spirited jabs at its haters.
- "Batman vs. Teen Titans: Dark Injustice" is the April Fools' Day episode, so of course it's about April Fools' Day pranks, with Batman not appearing to fight the team at any point.
- "Breakfast Cheese" is not about breakfast or cheese. It's about Starfire trying to get the Titans to be less violent. There's mention of Breakfast Cheese at the end of the very end of the episode by Starfire after she finishes singing but it doesn't even make sense there.
Thomas & Friends:
- "Rusty Saves The Day" doesn't take place within a day, but rather 2 weeks.
- "Fergus Breaks The Rules": Fergus doesn't break any rules.
Toonsylvania: The Ace Deuce segment "Attack of the Iguana People" does not have any iguana people, with the only unusual creature of note being a giant insect.
The Transformers: Generation 1 episode "A Decepticon Raider in King Arthur's Court" conspicuously does not feature King Arthur's court. Even the wizard isn't called Merlin. There is a character called Nimue, but she has virtually nothing in common with the Arthurian character beyond also being female.
Transformers: EarthSpark: A season 2 episode is titled "The Butterfly Effect", but contains no real or fake butterflies, time travel, or anything adjacent to chaos theory in general nor the butterfly effect in particular.
In Transformers: Prime Beast Hunters: Predacons Rising, the Predacons are very minor side characters who have little to no impact on the overall plot. Technically, some Predacons are risen, however, they are zombies who fight against the real Predacons. The title probably came to be because Hasbro wanted to advertise their beast-themed Transformers figures, even if the movie's story barely focused on them.
A Visionaries VHS released in the UK was given the title "The Final Conflict" which appears to suggest that it featured a final showdown between the Spectral Knights and the Darkling Lords. It actually contained the episodes "Honor Among Thieves", "Sorcery Squared" and "Dawn of the Sun Imps", but the only thing "final" about these is that they are the last three episodes in the series.
You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown doesn't even enter the Super Bowl.
You're (Not) Elected, Charlie Brown. Yes, Charlie Brown isn't elected, but he's not even running. It's about Linus campaigning for Student Council President.

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