Mistaken For Special Guest - Television Tropes & Idioms

The cast is expecting a special guest of some kind, be it a long lost relative, a critic who's come to review the restaurant/hotel/nightclub/what have you everyone works at, or even a celebrity. The thing is, the cast isn't sure what they look like or who to expect, and end up mistaking someone else for this guest. Whether intentional or not, the impostor wastes no time in taking advantage of the situation, demanding preferential treatment and leaving the other characters hopping to please them. Sometimes the fraud is exposed and sent packing, while the real guest shows up just in time. More often, however, there are some consequences for the cast, whether it's the real guest showing up after getting mistreated, or the fraud not leaving until he's milked the cast dry.

An inverted form is also sometimes seen, particularly in series where the hero is Walking The Earth: it is the hero who is Mistaken For Special Guest by the Townsfolk of the Week. Sometimes, this will lead to the hero using his assumed authority in his efforts to solve the town's problem, and then moving on just as the real guest arrives. Other times, the real guest will arrive partway through the episode, leaving the hero with a lot of 'splainin' to do — especially if (as is often the case) a dead body has turned up in the mean time.

Chance The Gardener is a related trope where the mistaken guest is The Fool.

Examples:

Fawlty Towers, "The Hotel Inspectors". A similar situation occurs in "A Touch of Class", but in that instance the "Special Guest" is a con-man deliberately pretending to be a Lord to get preferential treatment.
One episode of House Of Mouse had the gang mistaking Mortimer for a restaurant critic. Fortunately, the real critic, Lumiere, manages to have a good time, and even offers to help them get even with Mortimer for the deception.
Real Life: Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt, the legendary "Captain of Kopecnik". In 1906, he bought a German military uniform at a second-hand shop and noted the almost-instinctive German deferrence to uniformed authority. So he commanded some real soldiers to accompany him, and did an "inspection" of the town of Kopecnik. He fined them over 4,000 marks (and signed a receipt) and almost made a clean getaway.
In episode 11 of Keroro Gunsou, Keroro and the Hinatas pander to a pair of alien TV show hosts who take advantage of them at every turn, even landing their spacecraft on Giroro! Fortunately, they turn out to be frauds and are hauled away by the space police. Unfortunately, the real hosts show up only to be mistaken for the impostors by Giroro and chased off.
Spongebob Squarepants has a Mistaken For Mistaken For Special Guest. A food inspector arrives at the Krusty Krab, and Spongebob and Mr. Krabs must cater to his every whim. Then a news report comes on that a fake food inspector has been going around trying to get free food from restaurants, so they come up with a plan to get even, by making an incredibly grotesque Krabby Patty that they serve him. Unfortunately, after they've carried out the plan, another news report comes on saying that the fake food inspector has been captured and that any other food inspector you see is real.
Three examples of the inverted form from Doctor Who:
- "The Curse of Peladon": The Doctor visits the planet Peladon, where he is taken for the expected Ambassador from Earth. He foils an attempt to prevent Peladon from taking its place in interstellar society, then makes a discreet exit just in time to avoid meeting the real Ambassador.
- "Black Orchid": A particularly bare-faced instance, in which the fifth Doctor (the one who's so keen on cricket that he wears a Edwardian-period cricket outfit all the time) arrives in an Edwardian-period country village and is assumed to be one of the players for a charity cricket match that's about to start — they're expecting a substitute about whom they know nothing except that he's a doctor. The Doctor leads his team to victory, but this doesn't do him much good when guests start dying at the after-match nosh-up and the real substitute player sends a message to apologise for not being able to make it.
- In "Paradise Towers", the chief caretaker of a rather disastrous colony believes the Doctor is the Great Architect who designed the place. Unfortunately he's insecure about his position, and orders his underlings to kill the Doctor. Things don't improve after the mistaken identity is settled.
- Used to excess in the new series, abetted by the Doctor's "psychic paper" - a blank piece of paper which the viewer perceives as credentials for whatever position the Doctor needs to pose as. In the episode "The Idiot's Lantern" he even manages to pass for the king of Belgium. Subverted in the third series, where the psychic paper doesn't fool Shakespeare or specially trained Torchwood employees.
- The Big Finish audio play "Bing-Bang-a-Boom" involves the Doctor being mistaken for Commander John Ballard, the new (and newly murdered) commander of Dark Space 8, and presumable Expy of Benjamin Sisko. He's rescued by transmat from the exploding shuttle- he doesn't tell anyone he's not really Ballard until the end of the story.
This is Older Than Radio; it was used in Nikolai Gogol's 1836 play "The Inspector General", where a clerk in Tsarist Russia exploits a group of corrupt, bumbling town officials when they mistake him for a government inspector.
This happened for real in May of 2006. The staff of a BBC show, News 24, was expecting to interview IT commentator Guy Kewney about the legal dispute between Apple Computers and Apple, the record company created by The Beatles. But the studio employee sent to get him from the waiting room, found Guy Goma, who was there for a job interview. For reasons that still aren't clear, Mr. Goma was the one brought out for the interview. Though confused at first, Goma went along with it. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Goma.
- Here's a video of the interview. Guy's expression at 0:07 is priceless.
Film example: The Blues Brothers end up playing a country & western venue, having turned up and claimed to be the "Good Ol' Boys" who were billed. The concert done, the real Good Ol' Boys turn up and Hilarity Ensues.
- But before that they had a huge beer bill to pay; the house didn't pay for the band's drinks, after all.
- One has to wonder just where the Good Ol' Boys had been - it was past closing time when they finally showed up.
Cyborg 009 did this once. 006 mistook a random woman for a restaurant critic. The twist was that she was a con artist who pretended to be a critic to get free food.
The webcomic Terror Island did this, with two characters taking names they chose at random which ended up being the names of actual alumni. Actually, that last strip is how this editor discovered the website.
Seen here in Order Of The Stick, via a "Who's on first?"-style conversation.
Stargate (the movie) and early Stargate SG-1 featured this frequently. As only "the gods" come through the Gate, it wasn't uncommon for the heroes to be mistaken for them. This led to much kneeling and praying whenever they came through... until the real "gods," who were the BigBads, came along and were seldom amused. It also led to some weapons pointed in our heroes' faces when they arrived on a world where the locals knew what the "gods" were all about.
Real Life culture jammers The Yes Men actively seek to get invited to speak at functions by people who believe them to represent large organizations such as McDonald's, usually making speeches designed to embarrass or discredit the organization.
An episode of Hey Dude used this. The very end of the episode has Mr. Ernst telling the staff to be on the lookout for a reviewer from a very famous resort guidebook, that he may be in disguise as any one of the guests. Just as he finishes saying this, a guest checks out and remarks that he had a wonderful stay. As he walks away everybody sees him wearing a jacket with the name of the guidebook in huge letters on the back.
A really weird example shows up in Ocean's Twelve, where the cast invokes this trope; Julia Robert's character supposed looks exactly like Julia Roberts (in-movie), so they camouflage their museum hoist as special guest star Julia Roberts visiting the museum. They are exposed by Bruce Willis who figures out that while she looks like Julia Roberts, she does not act like this. No, Yes, I am as confused as you are. This example would be a brilliant Mind Screw - if it wasn't so dumb.
- This troper would like to point out that it's specifically their last resort plan.
- In Ocean's Thirteen, they pull the fake critic stunt by getting one of their group to act like the hotel inspector so as to get the hotel management to focus attention on him, rather than the actual hotel reviewer. Then, to make sure of a negative review, they proceed to treat the actual reviewer like crud. This involves dirtying his room, filling his room with a god-awful stench and giving him food poisoning. This may seem unfair as he did nothing bad to the characters personally, and so at the end of the movie, they rig a slot machine for him, without his knowledge of course, as a form of recompense.
In the classic The 39 Steps, Robert Donat's character is fleeing the police and enters a political rally to lost them. One problem - he runs on stage, and they mistake him for the speaker. He completely impromptus a stirring speech while managing to consistently hide his handcuffs, and gets a standing ovation after he's done. Crowning Moment Of Awesome?
The cast of Waiting For Guffman mistakes a random out-of-towner for the titular Guffman. (The character is listed as "Not Guffman" in the closing credits.)
In an episode of Seinfeld, George impersonates a man named O'Brien so that he and Jerry can get a limo ride and free tickets to a basketball game at Madison Square Garden. This backfires spectacularly, since O'Brien is actually a secretive white supremacist, leader of the "Aryan Union", who is making his first public appearance.
I Love Lucy used this plot with Lucy expecting an actor from a radio station to pose as her fictional "first husband" in front of Ricky as part of a contest. If Lucy could keep up the charade until midnight, she would receive a generous cash reward. However, she mistakes a vagrant asking for money to be the actor, and Hilarity Ensues as the bum quickly takes advantage of the situation.
Chowder: Mung Daal and Chowder leave on a delivery, providing the first half of one episode. The second half is some random, Mr. Magoo-type character walking into the store and being mistaken for the customer. Truffles orders Shnitzel to entertain him until Mung and Chowder get back. Hilarity Ensues. It only gets worse when the hilariously inept police arrive and inform Shnitzel, by megaphone, that the "customer" is actually a wanted criminal. This is probably among the farthest this trope has been taken, because the customer ends up destroying the restaurant. Thank goodness for the Reset Button.
- Taken even further when Truffles is then mistaken for the Destructive Customer by the police and arrested. Schnitzel is left in the wreckage of the restaurant while the customer wanders away.
One episode of Taz-Mania featured a hotel staff going out of their way to satisfy famed hotel reviewer "F.H. Leghorn". Foghorn Leghorn stumbles into the hotel that day and rattles off a huge list of demands, and the staff goes well out of their way to accomodate him, walking all over a small, quiet, mild-mannered man in the process. Naturally, the victim was the real F.H. Leghorn and Foghorn was just freeloading.
Dunstin Checks In features a hotel owner mistaking the movie's villain for an undercover agent from a Zagats-esque organization after seeing him leaning into an air vent (he's actually looking for his monkey, who steals jewelry for him). This causes her to constantly ignore and degrade another man who naturally turns out to be the real agent.
The play "Moon Over Buffalo" featured a variation of this, where a theater couple was expecting Frank Capra to show up, but their daughter also had her fiance showing up for the first time. Which leads to a situation where the fiance is mistaken for Frank Capra without him knowing it, creating lines like
Theater Wife: remembering Capra movies It Happened One Night
Fiance: What did?
In an episode of News Radio, Dave intentionally sets this up, introducing a man to a recently-quit Matthew as Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who convinces him to return to his job at the radio station. It turns out to just be some guy Dave met on the subway. Of course, the actual Scott Adams has a cameo as the guy standing behind them. It's that kind of show.
In O Brother Where Art Thou?, the main characters being mistaken first for black people (at a Klan rally), then for famous musicians, is an important part of the climax.
- The latter example is really more of an Inverted Trope. By that point in the film their earlier recording had become a hit, so when they infiltrated the benefit show, it became less of Mistaken For Special Guest and more something like "Recognized Unexpected Special Guest"
In A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Con Man Pseudolus tries to pull this with Miles Gloriosus, by impersonating his neighbor, a slave dealer.
An early story arc in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle has shades of this. Our realm-hopping group of heroes lands in a city being oppressed by an evil governor. The townspeople have applied to the higher government for help, but nothing's arrived yet. Our heroes neatly solve the town's problem and move on, just as the government's investigators arrive.