Captain Ersatz / Anime & Manga

• 500 Manga Creatures, a book that purported to provide manga clipart, might as well have been named "300 Manga Creatures Plus 200 Potential Lawsuits from Game Freak" thanks to its inclusion of somewhat obvious examples of this trope applied to the Pokémon franchise. Kyogre, Dratini, Dragonair, Zapdos, Shuckle, Metang, Metagross, Shroomish, Swablu, and Bagon are just the most blatantly obvious ones.
  • Actually acknowledged in the book's description, where it claims that the characters include "Digimor (sic) and Pokémon-style creatures", among others.
• Angel Blade:
  • This H-series has a few characters that may be pretty familiar to some people, but the most-definitely-not-Kekko Kamen heroine is the most obvious example. AB is basically a parody of Kekko Kamen.
  • At least two characters are ersatz versions of Mai Shiranui (the director apparently includes one in every project he works on as a Shout-Out), three more are basically the female leads and Necrocaizer from Gowcaizer renamed, and one more is Mizuki from Gravion given the same treatment.
• In the 1960s Batman manga:
  • Go Go the Magician is Flash villain Weather Wizard, just with a different name. This is probably due to the fact that the artist had been given some Batman comics and been told to adapt them into a Japanese style - evidently one of the issues was Detective Comics #353, where Weather Wizard bedeviled Batman for a change. The reason for the name change is a little fuzzy, though. Maybe Weather Wizard's stylin' outfit gave the impression of him being one hip swinger, Clyde?
  • Similarly "Professor Gorilla" is fellow Flash villain Gorilla Grodd.
• The basic story of Burst Angel takes place 20 Minutes into the Future, in a Crapsack World, where the main character (a Rei Ayanami Expy no less) pilots a Humongous Mecha. Here are the◊ three◊ leads...◊who they're based on anyway, many elements are lifted straight from Evangelion.
• Cells at Work! & Spinoffs:
  • Cells at Work: Platelets!: Some of the Platelets — namely, Leader and Backwards Hat — in this spinoff are identical to those in the parent series, but it isn't made clear that they are intended to be the same characters.
  • Cells at Work: Baby!: Both Red Blood Cell and White Blood Cell's designs are strikingly similar to Super-Deformed versions of their characters from the original series.
  • Cells at Work and Friends!: The protagonist Killer T-Cell in Friends looks almost identical to his counterpart in the parent series, despite the art style making him look somewhat more youthful and less severe. While their outward behaviors are also similar, they couldn't be much more different in terms of their inner life.
• Since the distinction between copyright free monsters and Dungeons & Dragons originals would remain obscure to laymen for several more years, DND's Beholder managed to infiltrate Japanese fantasy but good.
  • Bastard!! (1988)'s manga originally featured a Beholder. After getting complaints from TSR's Japanese division the comic's supervisor Mr. Suzuki profusely apologized. The monster was slightly altered with comical arms and legs and renamed the "Suzuki Dogezaemon" for the collected volume. Dogeza meaning "apologizing on hands and knees." Whether the incident really happened or was just a funny story that became a rumor within the industry is disputed, but the change gained some entertaining notoriety and led to other creators voluntarily changing their own Beholder appearances.
  • Square must really like Beholders because they have a long history of enforcing this trope with them.
    • The original Final Fantasy featured a Beholder, but changed its sprite and name to Evil Eye in later releases.
    • The original and second SaGa had a very different looking and slightly differently spelled Beholders as just a single floating eye, one more grotesque than the other. It would still be changed in later versions to the Death Eye, probably because the first game already featured another monster called the Evil Eye.
    • The Mana Series had eye monsters called the B-eye-lder and Boulder, with very different designs. Ironically several of them would get renamed to the Beholder in English releases, probably because the name itself can't be copyrighted so long as its appearance and concepts are different enough.
    • Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XI just have fairly different looking monsters called Beholders in them. By this point Square may have just given up renaming them.
  • Enix's Dragon Quest has its own Beholder-clones, the Madusa ("Medusa-ball" in Japan) and the Heyedra.
  • Konami would reference this in their Castlevania games with their own mock-Beholder, the Dogether.
  • Dragon's Crown has its own stand-in, the Gazer. It may be yet another phonetic nod to the joke.
  • The Goblin Slayer books and manga feature a creature blatantly resembling the Beholder but jokingly describes it as a monster who must not be named.
  • Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, the sequel to Ghosts 'n Goblins, came out just a month after the incident with Bastard, so did not have the chance to rename its own Beholders. At least until the Genesis port, where they became Bi-holders. Being swarms of floating mouth monsters that had no eyes, it brings up other questions of whether this was even necessary.
  • Mystic Ark has Beholders with their original names. Despite being recognizable, the seasoned veteran monster designer Hitoshi Yoneda also managed to make it so visually distinct, they presumably avoided any trouble.
  • The West was not immune to this trope.
    • Dungeon Master originally featured mouthless Beholders but renamed them to Wizard Eyes in the ports.
    • The first of the The Bard's Tale Trilogy featured Beholders, though their visuals vary depending on the port. Ironically the Famicom release makes them just look like the D&D Beholders.
    • And then there were the Japanese releases of the Wizardry games. Wizardry Gaiden for the Gameboy featured a very Beholder-looking monster named the Eyeball. Wizardry Empire decided to live dangerously and not only have one named the Beholder but also featured the Undead Beholder, technically renamed from D&D's own Death Tyrant. They would both get remakes where the monsters were further redesigned and renamed to the Bebold and Undead Bebold.
• Early translations of Lupin III had to change the main character into an Ersatz because the original author had never asked permission to create a character based on Arsène Lupin. He would be called "Rupan" or "Wolf" or, in the French version, "Edgar of Burglary."
  • In a Continuity Nod to the original Lupin's Captain Ersatz, Lupin III was forced to face off against "Herlock Sholmes III."
  • In the movie Farewell to Nostradamus near the middle when Lupin is channel surfing one of the shows is a cartoon featuring a woodpecker who looks like Plucky Duck chasing a bear who looks like Buster Bunny with a mallet.
• Glen, a one-shot anime-only villain from Fist of the North Star is an ersatz of the Terminator. He even showed up in Episode 84, which is related to the year of release of The Terminator.
• Gintama featured a large number of Captain Ersatzes throughout the series, most used for short parody scenes, like the intergalactic emperor Breeza and Cello, obviously parodies of Freeza and Cell from Dragon Ball Z, or the old man from the lake, the spirit of Gintoki's sword, who looked pretty much like a red version of the Anthropomorphic Weapon of Bleach's protagonist, Ichigo.
• Kino's Journey's "coliseum" episode. In that story, Kino fights knockoffs of the Batman, Clint Eastwood, and Luke Skywalker.
• In Yatterman, other than the main characters all being Expy of their Time Bokan counterparts, many one-shot characters in the show are either this for real-life people (like The Beatles or Bruce Lee) or for fictional characters from certain stories (like Heidi or Les Misérables) .
  • The 2008 anime features President Onara, film star Johnny Cepp, the direct Steven Sleepburg and many others.
• Kamisama Minarai: Himitsu no Cocotama's main protagonist, Kokoro, is Tanpopo from the Tamagotchi movie with a different eye and jacket color.
• Non Manaka from PriPara is very similar to Onpu Segawa from Ojamajo Doremi. Both have purple hair and eyes, a small ponytail on the right side of their hair with a green hairtie, and seemed mysterious to the other characters in their respective series when they were introduced.
• Fafnir's human form in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is based on Sebastian from Black Butler — Tohru sent him a manga about a "handsome, but devilish butler" with instructions to base his human form off the character. The comparison is taken even further in the anime, where he ends up having the same voice actor as Sebastian.
• In the Snow White episodes of Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics one of the seven dwarfs bares a strong resemblance to Fred Flintstone from The Flintstones.

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