For Halloween I Am Going As Myself / Western Animation

• In Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, the main trio of monsters went trick-or-treating without costumes. It was a rare occasion that they met humans and made no effort to scare. Then they confuse a human child dressed as a red bunny with Ickis...
  • In another episode, the monsters attend a horror-themed TV show where the audience members wore costumes. A parent even asks Oblina where she bought her "ugly wax lips," to which Oblina replies "darling, you do not buy ugly, you inherit it!"
• In Filmation's The Adventures of Batman animated series, the Scarecrow did this at the Halloween charity auction, hoping everyone would mistake him for the disguised Commissioner Gordon.
• In Adventures of the Gummi Bears, the bears take advantage of Folly Day in Dunwyn, with two variants; the occasion takes place strictly in the day and at 5:00 pm there is the traditional unmasking which means the bears have a strict deadline to leave lest they be exposed. It fails — Duke Igthorn and Toady sneak in disguise, spot Sunni and instantly recognize her as the real thing.
• A subplot of an American Dad! has Hayley try to help Roger with his self-esteem in public, with disastrous results. She then learns about an upcoming sci-fi convention and takes Roger there, who's now happy due to not having to wear a disguise.
• American Dragon: Jake Long has the episode "The Halloween Bash". Jake trips and ends up in the street in his dragon form and people started yelling... Over how great his costume looked as Halloween was just getting started. This gives Jake the idea of throwing a party for both magical and non-magical beings.
• The titular character of Atomic Betty wears her Galactic Guardian uniform for Halloween in the episode "When Worlds Collide". Naturally, she ends up called to duty when a member of her Rogues Gallery just happens to be hiding on Earth.
• The Batman's "Grundy's Night" sees Batman, pursuing Clayface posing as Solomon Grundy, and runs into a partygoer who mistakes him for another partygoer. Bruce just rolls with it and asks where his "friend" is.
• An episode of Beetlejuice has B.J. permitted by Lydia to be seen in our world as a reveler as it's Halloween.
• Inversion: The Bugs Bunny cartoon "Hasty Hare" has Bugs coming across Marvin the Martian and K-9 and believing it to be Halloween. He gives them both trick-or-treat candy. (Whether or not it was Halloween is not relevant.)
• In an episode of Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot, Funshine travels down to Earth in order to help a little boy. He wants to show him to his Mom, but Funshine explains that he'd prefer to only be seen by kids because "adults don't always understand." During a later scene, the boy's mother enters the attic before Funshine can hide himself. He successfully poses as a stuffed toy.
• Carmen Sandiego:
  • When they're in Rio for Carnival, La Chevre wears a goat costume (with a mask and additional frills not part of his usual outfit). He's repeatedly berated for disguising himself as himself, but he insists it isn't a disguise, just a costume. Averted by the others in the episode; most V.I.L.E. agents indeed wear their standard outfits, but none are passed off as a costume. Meanwhile, Shadow-san wears a crow disguise.
  • Come a Halloween party in season 3, Tigress and Paper Star attend in their standard uniforms. Tigress scoffs that "at least a tiger's a thing," since Paper Star's outfit really doesn't resemble anything one could consider a costume. Once again averted by everyone else in the episode. Even Chase attends in a banana costume that earns him the ridicule of his team.
• Casper the Friendly Ghost once tried to hide his see-through body on Halloween by covering his whole body in a layer of white paint to look more like he was just wearing a ghost costume.
• Darkwing Duck:
  • Darkwing once goes to a masquerade ball in his costume and is frustrated by everyone telling him he couldn't pull it off. "The real Darkwing Duck is taller..."
  • His rival Gizmoduck once attends a ceremony in his honor, full of fans in homemade gizmo suits... all of whom thought he is a dressed-up fanboy too. Bonus points for Launchpad being mistaken for the original by being the only one in a formal suit. Plus a random contrivance.
  • In another episode, Launchpad spends a good amount of time agonizing over what costume to wear to a party, before announcing he is going as "a flying ace!" Darkwing starts to point out that that is the same outfit Launchpad always wears, but quickly gives up.
• In DC Showcase: Catwoman, Catwoman briefly pretends to be an exotic dancer in a Catwoman costume in order to get closer to Rough Cut.
• Subverted in the DuckTales (2017) episode "The Trickening", where a bunch of stereotypical monsters all dress up as characters from more modern horror franchises because kids aren't afraid of the classics anymore. However, it's played straight at the end of the episode when they go to Scrooge's 24-hour candy store as themselves, with some of the kids even complimenting them on their "costumes".
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • Cosmo and Wanda pull this off in one of the Oh Yeah! Cartoons, where they go to a costume party at Vicky's school. They even win second place for their costume, even though both are far too short to be high school students.
  • They later go undisguised to a comic book convention, saying that no one would notice they were fairies, and would just assume that they are big-headed kids in costume.
  • Mark goes to Trixie's costume party as himself with some encouragement from Timmy. Timmy's fairies do this again at the same party.
• Gargoyles:
  • The gargoyles love Halloween for just this reason. The younger gargoyles, getting into the spirit of the holiday, wear actual costumes (such as a pirate outfit) and are complimented on wearing "a costume over a costume". Goliath, meanwhile, goes out as himself with Elisa (who goes as Belle, both as a Shout-Out, and because their relationship is also Beast and Beauty). Apparently the fact that he's 6'10" passes unremarked upon as part of his "costume".
  • When Halloween comes around again in the comic book continuation, Elisa keeps a theme by being Princess Jasmine and Goliath once again doesn't bother. Neither does Delilah, who, not knowing better, explains what she really is when asked; "dressing up" as a DNA mashup of both Goliath's ex Demona and Elisa, his current love interest, causes quite the awkward moment. Meanwhile, Angela, Broadway, Lexington and Brooklyn go as Dorothy Gale, the Cowardly Lion, a cyborg and Supergoyle, respectively.
  • The following year (shown in the Dynamite comics' Halloween Special) somewhat subverts this, as the gargoyles have by this point had their existence exposed for a while and had recently made some progress in public acceptance of them, and so most of the clan attends the Greenwich Village party by invitation, no longer needing to pass off their nature as costumes (several of them do still dress up anyway, while Elisa continues her theme this year as Alice). The clan's youngest member, Nashville, still plays the trope straight when going trick-or-treating, but also somewhat subverts it in that he insists he's not wearing a Blackbeard costume over a gargoyle "costume"; rather, Blackbeard was a gargoyle, so he's being historically accurate.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Ever since Grim cut off Jack's head and Jack got a pumpkin for a replacement, Halloween was the only time of the year Jack could go out shopping.
• Jamie's Got Tentacles!: In "Tentacle Man", Jamie takes off his costume and pretends to be Tentacle Man—a character from a comic book—at Mitch's comic store. This proves to be popular.
• The Life and Times of Juniper Lee averts this. Since a barrier renders all magical creatures invisible to normal humans, child monsters instead dress themselves as humans for Halloween.
• Men in Black: The Series: In "The Jack-O-Lantern Syndrome", Halloween is a favorite holiday of aliens living on Earth, though instead of going as themselves, they often dress up as a different alien species.
  • In "The Star System Syndrome", several "monstrous" aliens star in monster horror films using their real appearance, while the film crews believe that they're human actors under a lot of make-up. The Hollywood branch of MIB specializes in getting entertainment contracts for aliens.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • While he isn't trying to hide his identity from anyone, Spike the purple dragon performs a literal interpretation of this trope as his Nightmare Night costume is... a purple dragon.
  • Princess Luna, whose Superpowered Evil Side was the inspiration for Nightmare Night, Averts this when she visits Ponyville, as her 1000-year banishment made her unfamiliar with the custom of dressing as demons and monsters for the holiday.
• PJ Masks
  • In the episode "Halloween Tricksters", both heroes and villains go trick or treating in their usual outfits, and everyone thinks they are just wearing costumes. Still, the heroes still have to be careful not to use their powers in front of others.
  • In the episode "PJ Party Crashers", Amaya holds a Slumber Party but knows Luna Girl is planning to ruin it, so she makes it a costumed party so she can attend as Owlette without raising suspicion (again, as long as she makes sure her guests don't see her using her powers).
• In the episode "Quintuplets" of the 2010 version of Pound Puppies, Lucky, his team, and the adoptees were able to get into a Poughkeepsie Pups basketball game by he, Cookie, and Niblet dressing in human clothing and buying tickets. Lucky's team used the same tactic to get into an actual Halloween party in another first-season episode, "Nightmare On Pound Street".
• Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja: In the episode "Dawn of The Driscoll", Ninja!Randy manages to quietly sneak into McFist's house because the former assumed that he was just another trick-or-treating kid in a ninja costume.
  McFist: Another ninja costume? How original.
• In the Halloween special of Ready Jet Go!, Jet, a humanoid alien, dresses up as a stereotypical alien. And as a bonus, he easily gets away with telling people he is from Bortron 7.
• Shimmer and Shine: Shimmer and Shine pass themselves as kids wearing genie costumes during a Halloween Episode.
• The Simpsons:
  • Inverted in "Treehouse of Horror XX", in which Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, a Werewolf, and the Mummy go out on Halloween, and are made fun of for having old-school costumes. As such, they dress up. So much for their original plans...
  • In another "Treehouse of Horror" episode, someone dressed as a witch wins a costume contest at the city-wide Halloween party. But it turns out that she really is a witch, and she promptly gets disqualified for not wearing a costume. Due to the people of Springfield this way having pissed off a real witch, with magic powers and all, it is only natural that now chaos ensues. To be precise: she transforms everyone into the costumes they are wearing — which means that this trope afterwards technically applies to everyone in Springfield.
• The ending of the Sofia the First episode "Ghostly Gala" has Sofia share her Halloween party space with Sir Dax and the other ghosts, and everyone thinks they're animatronics.
  • A later Halloween episode has Lucinda's witch friend Indigo go dressed as a witch, in a slight variation of her default outfit. Though considering witches are more of a social class of magic users than a secret in this world, she might have been dressed as another in-universe witch (like how a person dressing up as Albert Einstein could be classified as "a person dressing up as a person"), but it never specifies.
• In the South Park episode "Hell On Earth 2006", Satan sees somebody dressed like Steve Irwin with a stingray barb in his chest at his Halloween party, and goes kicks him out for being insensitive, as Steve had only just died recently. When it turns out that he actually is the deceased Steve Irwin in Jacob Marley Apparel, Satan apologizes profusely for his mistake... and then kicks him out anyway for not wearing a costume.
• Spider-Man:
  • In The Spectacular Spider-Man, Peter gets caught in-costume at a Halloween festival as Spider-Man, so he goes with it and winds up getting compliments from Mary Jane and Liz Allan on how well he fills out his costume. This actually comes in handy later, when Peter being seen in public as Spider-Man is later shown as evidence that he ISN'T Spider-Man. And judging by her cameo at the same carnival, Black Cat likes the holiday too.
  • In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Spidey is fighting the Sinister Six with his powers working inconsistently. He manages to convince Rhino that he is actually the Chameleon, and redirects The Brute to attack a distant shadow that is actually his teammate Shocker.
  • The short-lived The Adventures of the Spider-Man features an episode where Peter has no way of getting home without his identity being revealed (his headpiece is gone but he still has his main suit on). He then gets spotted by a crowd of people who all shout out: "great costume man!". Conveniently it is Independence day and a huge fancy costume party is being held in the Star Junction, so Peter just blends right in to the crowds.
• Super Noobs: The Halloween episode "Happy Noob-O-Ween" has aliens Memnock and Zenblock try to learn about Halloween by going trick or treating in their true alien forms and no costumes although some of their neighbors mistake their forms for costumes. Both Mem and Zen end up getting more than what they bargained for in terms of more than just candy through their alien identities and use of their battle balls.
• The Teacher's Pet Halloween Episode "Costume Pity Party" had Spot intend to wear a Ferdinand Magellan costume for the school's Halloween party, but his costume unravels after getting caught on a thorn bush, which results in him instead pretending that his human persona Scott Leadready II is wearing a dog costume for Halloween.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons:
  • Used by the turtles in an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), where Splinter suggests they go as themselves to a Halloween party. They lose to someone who went as a Teenage Mutant Ninja AARDVARK (Who also happened to be the boss of the place).
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): It is revealed in “All Hallows Thieves” that for years Halloween was the only day Splinter would take the turtles to the surface and that they would trick-or-treat all day.
  • In the 2003 episode "Return of the Justice Force", the Turtles visit a comic book store which, as Casey Jones points out, is having a Costume Day.
• Transformers cartoons:
  • In one of the early episodes of Transformers: Cybertron, the Autobots worry about revealing themselves on Earth. Bud jokingly suggests they pretend they're cosplayers (as Transformers are basically urban legends). Cue communal sweatdrop when Optimus Prime actually takes the suggestion seriously, apparently not realizing that twenty-foot robots cannot get away with pretending they are costumes.
  • However, in the first-generation cartoon they did exactly that. In "Auto-Bop", when Tracks and Blaster are investigating a trendy New York nightclub, a patron is very impressed with their "outfits".
    Clubgoer: Hey! Where'd you get those threads? SoHo?
    Tracks: Cybertron.
    Clubgoer: What's the address?
• In the Tutenstein episode "Day of the Undead," Tut walks among mortals on Halloween, impressing trick-or-treaters with how much his costume looks and smells like a long-dead mummy.
• The Unstoppable Yellow Yeti: In "Gotta Get Goosey", Gustav goes sans disguise to audition as the yeti mascot for Winterton's hosting of the Winter Olympics.
• The Venture Brothers:
  • In "Love-Bheits", the trope was exploited off-camera when the Impossible family won a Best Group Costume award as the Fantastic Four.
  • An inversion is discussed in "A Very Venture Halloween". Since Dr. Orpheus is almost never seen without his Ominous Opera Cape and Mystical High Collar even in mixed company, wiseguy Dermott joked that on Halloween he expected to see Orpheus in sweatpants.
• Winx Club: In "Hallowinx!", Bloom gets invited to Alpha Bitch Mitzy's Halloween party. She decides to go along with her friends. They decide that their fairy transformation outfits are going to be their costumes because no one would believe they are actual fairies.
• The cartoon adaptation of W.I.T.C.H. tops the comic: the girls move around the city in the Guardian outfits, Nerissa doing the same, Phobos going around in his evil prince outfit, Matt turning into Shagon, and Cedric and Miranda going out in his slippery dippery long mover-man and giant spider forms respectively. and the only attention he drew was on how he filled the tail of his costume. The only attention they get are Cornelia's mother glancing at Hay Lin's 'endowments' and commenting "I didn't know Halloween costumes came with that kind of padding." and people wondering how many guys are inside Cedric's costume. Then they start battling, and everyone mistakes it for a show.
• In WordGirl, one of Becky Botsford's friends, Todd "Scoops" Ming, realizes that she may be the titular superhero, citing several reasons including "You dress up as WordGirl every Halloween!" When the Narrator reacts, Becky responds "Well, I already had the costume...." In addition, a supporting character, Violet, dresses as the titular character in the Halloween-themed episode "Tobey's Tricks and Treats", and is mistaken as the superheroine by Tobey himself.
• In the X-Men: Evolution episode "Cajun Charm," the X-Men find themselves in the middle of Mardi Gras in New Orleans while looking for Rogue, who's been kidnapped. A random person comes up to Kurt, who's in his X-Men uniform and not wearing his image inducer, and tells him that his costume is great. Kurt's response? "Thanks! They are one of a kind."
• In the Young Justice episode "True Heroes", Forager intends to go to the Happy Harbour Halloween party by dropping his Fred Bugg disguise. Cyborg, while not wanting to go at all, is apparently also going to pass his implants off as a costume. However a mission comes up, so they don't attend after all.

---