It's the big night for a given musical group, usually a show choir. Everyone in the group is feeling great, and ready to perform a routine or set that they've practiced to perfection, only to find out that they're going last, and the performers set to go before them are performing the same routine. The group now faces the problem of figuring out how to make their performance original in the precious little time that they have before their turn on stage.
See also Plagiarism in Fiction.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Skip Beat!:
- Moko and Kyoko have worked out a great routine for their audition, and... The Libby has stolen it from them. They change the skit on the fly and pass the audition.
- Also, Fuwa Sho deals with this problem when a band comes out of nowhere and blatantly plagiarizes his already-published work. Then his soon-to-be-published work as well.
- In Episode 5 of Zombie Land Saga Revenge, Lily enters a talent show, reaches the regional final, and plans to perform a song she used to sing with her father. The other finalist goes first... and announces he's going to perform the exact same song. In the time it takes him to do so, Lily manages to come up with a jazzy, upbeat scat-singing rendition of the song, which she then performs. She doesn't win, but the performance goes viral, and her opponent is left feeling as though the wrong person won.
Comic Books
- In Archie Comics, Betty is in a poetry competition against a cheating Alpha Bitch who swipes her poem, planning to read it first and leave Betty with nothing to show. Archie foils this by swapping the stolen poem with one he was memorizing for English class. At the competition, the rival reads the poem, oblivious to the fact that it's an excerpt from Lord Byron's The Prisoner of Chillon. The adjudicator calls her out for the blatant plagiarism, humiliating her in front of the crowd, while Betty's poem wins.
Films — Live-Action
- The choir of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit finds that they're sharing "Joyful, Joyful" with the choir that has gone before them.
- Bring It On. The plot is kicked off when a cheerleader discovers her competition-winning cheerleading squad's routines were all stolen from a school that normally can't afford to attend. They are later humiliated at Regionals when the squad performing before them uses the exact same routine they paid a choreographer for. It turns out that the choreographer is a known scam artist who sells the exact same routine to multiple schools.
- Happens in A Mighty Wind. Throughout the film we see The Folksmen practicing a song called "Never Did No Wanderin'," but on the day of the concert, the first group to go on, The New Mainstreet Singers, perform it, forcing The Folksmen to pick a different song to open with.
- One of them angrily suggests doing the song anyway. The New Main Street Singers' version is different (and unbelievably cheesy) enough that this is actually not an entirely unreasonable suggestion.
Mark: I think it's very clear what we do. I'm gonna suggest we be bold. We open... with "Wanderin'".Jerry: Did you miss the last couple of minutes? They're currently butchering... turn it back up again. You wanna hear it?Mark: We give the audience... a choice. We say, "You can enjoy <mockingly> a toothpaste commercial <normal> or... folk music.Jerry: I think they've already brushed their teeth by that time.
Literature
- In the Star Trek Expanded Universe book Legends of the Ferengi, one of the stories describes how two Ferengi comedians — whose rivalry was so great, they'd refuse to play a town the other did — agreed to bury the hatchet and both appear on the bill for a major event ... and the one who appeared first did the whole of the other's act before his own.
Live Action TV
- In one episode of Jeeves and Wooster, Jeeves sabotages Tuppy Glossop's act by arranging it so that all the performers before him sing "Sonny Boy", the song he plans on singing.
- Glee: New Directions faces this problem during sectionals when their set list is leaked to the other schools' glee clubs.
- Happens again, when Will and Bryan Ryan realize they're doing the same song to audition for a performance of Les Misérables. The solution? They are forced to sing it as a duet.
- Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas : The eponymous jug band discovers that a guy going before them in the talent show sings the old favorite "Barbeque", which they had planned to sing. Fortunately they have time to go out in the alley and work up a new number.
- In the episode of The Wonder Years where Kevin learns piano, this happens to him at the end-of-year recital.
- Slight variation of this done on the TV show version of 10 Things I Hate About You. Bianca and Chastity find out ahead of time that they are doing the same song, and Bianca has to do a song switch. After Chastity's Auto-Tune breaks during the show, she and Bianca agree to sing the original song together.
- This happened in an episode of Drake & Josh. After a chorus stole and performed Drake's song, Drake and Josh instead perform "Soul Man" from The Blues Brothers.
- On an episode of Are You Being Served?, the gang rehearses a skit they're going to do for Young Mr. Grace's birthday, only to find out the cabaret that was hired are going to do the same skit. They instead redo what they did the previous year.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: In "A Star is Torn", during the tryouts of a kid Idol show, Lisa's original song was "Hush Little Baby", but the girl ahead of her sung it really well. Homer makes up a song about Springfield on the spot for her and she gets into the show.
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Bloo plans a hiccup act for a talent show, but his rival Blake Superior uses the same act, only with burping. This leads to a burp-hiccup competition between the two that Bloo wins. Neither of them, however, wins the talent show; they are beaten by a friend who plays his armpits.
- Adventure Time episode "Five Short Graybles" has LSP about to perform "These Lumps" on the talent show until a group of candy people started singing it.
- The Doug episode "Doug's No Dummy" had Doug work up a ventriloquism act (after Roger entered him in the school talent show), only to see Chalky Studebaker perform a similar act with two dummies.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic does this with a fashion competition in "Rarity Takes Manehattan". Rarity plans to debut a fashion line based on a unique, color-changing fabric—but a rival designer, Suri Polomare, debuts her own fashion line based on the same fabric before Rarity. And it's literally stolen: Rarity invented the fabric herself, but Suri passes it off as her own creation. Rarity has just enough time to throw together a completely new fashion line before her spot in the show, and this last-second creation manages to win anyway.
- Littlest Pet Shop (2012): Zoe auditions for an acapella group, only to be told too late that only cats are allowed. Zoe, always desperate for a spotlight and now out for revenge, makes her own group to enter the competition. The group she auditioned for uses the song she auditioned with and had been planning to use (the cat who kicked her out claimed she thought they had Zoe's permission). In this case, there's a rule that each team must have a unique song, and Zoe doesn't have time to teach her group a brand-new act from scratch. Luckily, they remember a jingle from an old pet food commercial Zoe starred in and enter with that, allowing them to win.
- Tiny Toon Adventures: One episode has Babs decide to try her luck as a stand-up comedian at an open mic night. She ends up last on the card... and the guy before her, Red Hot Rodney, proceeds to do all her material before she has the chance. Fortunately, although she freezes up on hitting the stage, Rodney (who's horrified that he's upstaged her - he thought he was last) comes out and helps rescue her act.
Other
- There's an old joke that uses this trope. Two novice preachers will be giving sermons sequentially at a gathering. The one who'll speak first overhears the other preacher practicing. Realizing the second preacher's sermon is superior to his own, he steals it. The first preacher delivers the (stolen) sermon to thunderous applause. The second preacher starts with, "That was the finest sermon I have ever heard. Since I cannot improve upon it, I will instead repeat it word for word." He does so and wins undying fame.
- Chris Rock has said that if comedians had feuds like rappers do, the worst thing one could do to another would be to do their entire act verbatim right before they go on.
Real Life
- According to Joseph Simmons (Reverend Run of Run–D.M.C.) in his autobiography, LL Cool J was stealing their stage raps and other parts of their performance during the 1986 Together Forever tour (consisting of Run-DMC, Beastie Boys and LL Cool J) and using them during his slot as the opening act. LL was kicked off the tour for it.
- Abba were presumably less impressed when copycat band The Brotherhood of Man came along - composed of two guys and two girls who performed pop songs. They must have been reaching for the lawyers when after the success of their hit Fernando, about a couple prepared to nobly die together for a greater cause in Latin America, the BoM did one called Angelo - about a freedom fighter prepared to give up a grieving lover to die nobly for the greater good in Spain.
