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Identical Grandson

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Captain Archibald Haddock and his ancestor, Chevalier François de Hadoque.

"Journey to Hill Valley: a place where the gene pool is so shallow, that everyone’s ancestor looks exactly the same as their descendants."

A character's descendant or ancestor is physically identical (or would be, except for small cosmetic changes) to the character himself, and often has the same name. A subsection of Uncanny Family Resemblance. Of course, he might just be his own ancestor.

This is normally the result of budget considerations when casting Time Travel stories, the consequence of having a long-term contract for a star when a show permanently jumps generations for some reason, or an excuse to do an Elseworld story with essentially the same character in a different setting.

If the character and descendant are one and the same, then that's My Grandson, Myself.

Despite the name, the trope is limited to neither males nor grandchildren.

If someone who knew the ancestor (via being a Time Abyss, user of Time Travel or thawed-out Human Popsicle) meets the descendent, they may remark "You haven't changed a bit!" and need to be corrected.

Compare with Visions of Another Self. When it's the life story that's identical, the character is a member of Generation Xerox.

Of course, due to similarities in genetics, this can be compared to a Real Life version of the animation trope Only Six Faces.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • In .hack//Legend of the Twilight, Mireille looks suspiciously similar to Mistral. This is justified, though; the story takes place on the internet and she's using her (revealed to be) mother's account. In any case, it's established that player characters in the .hack franchise are all based on off-the-peg character types. There's a scene in .hack//SIGN where Subaru sees someone she thinks is Tsukasa but is actually a different character with only a few variations of hair color and facial markings. This is also lampshaded in .hack//Unison, where Black Rose and Mimiru have an argument as to who chose the character design first, and Tsukasa meets a younger player with the same basic design. .hack//Legend of the Twilight [Bracelet] begins with Shugo and Rena winning the right to use characters based on Kite and Black Rose (apparently those exact combinations of character customizations were locked by the admins after Kite and Black Rose's adventure, though to be fair Kite's was originally green without Wave marks, changing to his well-known form upon getting the bracelet and thus possible its not normally selectable anyways; additionally, the series uses chibi versions of the characters).
  • Azumanga Daioh: Though she's only seen in the New Year's episode, Kaorin's mother looks exactly like her. She has to wake Kaorin to remind her she was supposed to be going out with her classmates to make her wish for the new year.
  • Baccano!:
    • Huey Laforet appears to have the strongest genes ever, as his traits of being a gold-eyed, dark-haired, pale-skinned Pretty Boy extend even as far as his great-great-grandson Charon.
    • Another one of the immortals (namely Szilard) has an identical many-greats grandson whom we meet in 2001.
    • Claudia looks like a female version of her great-grandfather Claire… But she still inherited her great-great-grandfather Huey's golden eyes.
    • Both Elmer and Aging note that Luchino, while not quite the clone of Huey that Chane, Liza, and Charon are, still has a noticeable resemblance to him. This would not seem so ridiculous if Luchino wasn't three hundred years removed from the man in question (an absurdity lampshaded by Luchino himself), proving once and for all that Huey has the most stubborn genes in the world.
  • The Beast Player: In the manga, Jeh looks exactly like Seimiya, her youngest descendant from three centuries later.
  • Shura Kirigakure from Blue Exorcist looks identical to her ancestor Tatsuko. This is because Tatsuko's descendants are cursed to look just like her.
  • It's a minor plot point in Bunny Drop that Daikichi looks exactly like his grandfather Souichi did at age thirty. Among other things, this causes Rin (Souichi's illegitimate daughter) to get attached to him almost immediately.
  • Every male member of Captain Harlock's family line is named "Phantom F. Harlock," has the same facial features, build and hairstyle, pilots some kind of aircraft, and frequently has an identical scar on his cheek. This has been shown to extend at least back to the World War I era (from a main series set in the far future). His short, squat sidekick Ooyama also has identical ancestors, although they don't crop up quite as often. Gun Frontier had an ancestor named "Westerner Franklin Harlock" who also looked identical to the Harlock in the future stories. They are also voiced by the same English voice actor.
  • In Cat's Eye, the Kisugi sisters looks a lot like their ancestors: Rui (the oldest) and Ai (the youngest) are nearly identical to their mother (especially Rui, whose only difference is a mole on the cheek), while Hitomi is almost identical to her paternal grandmother, differing only in her hair and eye colors. Hitomi is especially egregious, as she's half-Japanese half-German while her grandmother was a blonde-haired green-eyed German.
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba
    • Tanjiro's ancestor from a few generations ago, Sumiyoshi, looks exactly like him but only taller, as he's shown as an older man with wife and child; meanwhile Tanjiro's immediate relative, his father Tanjuro, looks slightly different from Sumiyoshi due to his ill underweight appearance.
    • By the Epilogue, this extends to everyone in the main cast.
  • With the exception of the fact that she has an extra pair of human ears under her hair, Couvert of Dog Days is the spitting image of Princess Clarifier. The confusing part is the fact that they aren't even directly related since Clarifier died before having any children. Couvert is actually a descendant of Clarifier's brother ValĂ©rio and Adelaide. During ValĂ©rio and Adelaide's story about Flonyard's history, we see that most of the other major characters were like this as well.
  • Doraemon has a severe case Strong Family Resemblance syndrome, which dictates that within a family or lineage (be it immediate or extended), everyone looks alike (even wives and husbands). Nobita's grandson wants to change his grandfather's loser's faith and sends Doraemon back in time to help him become a better man. At one time he also sends Doraemon's little sister Dorami to replace Doraemon because he thinks Doraemon isn't doing a good job, but because Nobita's grown attached to Doraemon so they're still together.
  • Somewhat Played for Laughs in the side story of the 20th volume of Dorabase (Baseball spin-off of Doraemon), where the 23rd-century versions of the characters are exactly the same, except for some very minor differences such as name and a few physical traits. Also, they suck at baseball until the main characters come to help them. Obviously justified since 60% of the cast are robots, but still pretty outrageous because they are about 100 years old apart from production year. Also, in the end, it is very much implied that this trope will go on until the next (24th) century. This means that the main teams would still exist for the next 200 years or so.
  • Son Goten of Dragon Ball Z is a particularly egregious example. He's the second child of Goku and looks 'exactly' like him. This, in turn, makes him look like his parental grandfather, Bardock. It might be a Saiyan thing, since Vegeta said that "all Saiyans look similar", which could because of a small gene pool given that Saiyans at their peak only numbered in the thousands (and a Non-Serial Movie further posited that "low class" Saiyans like Goku were bred from similar genetic stock, and Goku gained an Identical Stranger named Turles). Vegeta looks nearly identical to his own father, sans beard. Dragon Ball GT takes it to a ridiculous level, with the future descendants of both Goku and Vegeta looking like exact copies of their great-great-etc. ancestors. Even though they'd be mostly human, and it was already established with Vegeta's son and daughter that human-Saiyan hybrids need not look Saiyan-like at all. Then again, his daughter looks exactly like her human mother. With that said, Goten's personality, as with Goku's are different to Bardock's. Similarly, Goku Jr. was very different from his namesake, at least at first.
  • From Eroica with Love's Dorian and Klaus look exactly like their ancestors, Luminous and Tyrian.
  • The Evillious Chronicles has multiple examples that come up as plot points (or even not) —such as several of Duke Venomania's descendants sharing his appearance, to their misfortune, or the Marlon family having a lot of men with blue hair and similar haircuts. From a meta perspective, this is because most of the main characters in each arc are portrayed by the same Vocaloid as their ancestor in the last one.
  • Laxus from Fairy Tail looks like a younger Makarov, except much taller and more muscular. Hades, who was Precht Gaebolg and the man who appointed Makarov to the title of guildmaster back in the day, actually double-takes when Laxus crashes the party and calls him "boy", which he used to call Makarov, while an image of a younger Makarov is superimposed on him.
  • Fist of the Blue Sky, Tetsuo Hara's prequel to Fist of the North Star, centers around Kenshiro's uncle and Ryuken's older half-brother Kenshiro Kasumi, who is Kenshiro if he lived in Pre-WWII Asia and was a heavy smoker. The manga exactly hasn't established how they're related yet since the Kenshiro from North Star was supposedly adopted…
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Edward's great-grandchildren look exactly like younger versions of him, Al, and Winry (despite the fact that Winry is supposed to be stuck on the other side of the Gate). Other characters have identical grandchildren of them, with a slight twist since they're technically alternate versions of them.
  • Most of the "new generation" characters in Gundam Wing's sequel novel Frozen Teardrop are this, including the second Duo Maxwell,note  Qaterine Winner (younger sister of Quatre) and Kathy Po (daughter of Sally). The most creative they get with this is having Zechs Merquise and Lucrezia Noin's children each look like their opposite-gender parent. It also goes retroactive, revealing that Relena Peacecraft is a dead ringer for both her grandmother Katrina and her great-aunt Sabrina, though this last bit is justified by their being twins. And then it's taken even further with Katrina wearing the same Cool Mask her grandson Milliardo would wear as Zechs Merquise.
  • In Haikyuu!!, where Strong Family Resemblance is a common theme, the current Karasuno coach Keishin Ukai has a striking resemblance to his grandfather and previous coach Ikkei Ukai. This is something Nekomata (Ikkei's long-time friend and rival) likes to make fun of.
  • The only difference between Kaoru and her late mother in I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying is that Kaoru's hair is naturally purple and her mother's was caramel-colored. However, Kaoru started dyeing her hair blonde after getting married to Hajime, increasing the resemblance even further.
  • In the anime of Inuyasha, Hojo's ancestor from five hundred years ago, Akitoki Hojo, looks exactly like him with a different hairstyle and also has the same voice actor.
  • INVADERS of the ROKUJYOUMA!?: Thia and Ruth for their respective ancestors Princess Charl and Lady Knight Flairhan.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Joseph Joestar, in his youth, looks almost exactly like his grandfather Jonathan Joestar. Araki has commented that he gave Joseph a nearly identical design to his grandfather in order to ease the transition for his readers between Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency. However, their personalities couldn't be more different, as is noted in the series. This is subverted in the anime, however, where Jonathan was given an Adaptation Dye-Job from brown hair to blue, and Joseph, while keeping the brown hair, was drawn with very spiky bangs, to further tell him apart from his grandpa. Their faces, however, remain very similar.
    • Also, although not identical, Jotaro Kujo resembles a lot Joseph Joestar, his grandfather, when he was young. Even more so in the manga.
  • Nanami and Yukiji from Kamisama Kiss look almost identical and they share the same voice actress in the original Japanese dub. Yukiji is Nanami's ancestor from five hundred years ago.
  • Karin from Karin looks exactly like her grandmother, Elda, except with a different hair style, hair color, and larger breasts. Anju also looks identical to her maternal grandmother, Cecilia.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid introduces Einhard Stratos and Sieglinde Jeremiah, who look very similar to their ancestors Claus G.S. Ingvalt and Wilfried Jeremiah, respectively. In Einhart's case, she only looks similar to her male ancestor when he was younger. There is also Fabia Crozelg, who also looks very similar to her Cat Girl witch ancestor. Vivio Takamachi's case is different because she's a clone of Olive Sägebrecht, which justifies their resemblance.
  • If you subscribe to the theory that My-Otome is set in the future of My-HiME, then this would apply, surname changes aside.
  • Yotsuya from Maison Ikkoku looks exactly like his grandfather, causing a bit of confusion when his likeness appears to show up in old photos, adding to the mystery who he is and what he does.
  • In Natsume's Book of Friends, it's a major plot point that Takashi Natsume is all but identical to his late grandmother, Reiko: many of his issues are caused by the fact that ayakashi, not very conscious of human sex differences or the passage of time, regularly assume they're the same person and take up whatever grudges they had on Reiko up with him.
  • Rikuo in Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan is almost completely identical to how his grandfather used to look. And his father. Must be some strong genes in that family.
  • One Piece:
  • In Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, Sadanobu looks identical to her grandmother Yoshimune, and given how she idolizes and tries to emulate Yoshimune, Sadanobu's probably aware of it.
  • Oz Vessalius from PandoraHearts looks exactly like a younger version of Jack, his ancestor. This becomes completely justified and subverted at the same time when it's revealed that Oz is not a true Vessalius but rather the soul of the B-Rabbit who is inhabiting Jack's backwards-aging body.
  • While it is taking place in an alternate universe, the one-shot Sailor Moon manga, Parallel Sailor Moon, stars a bunch of daughters of the Guardian Senshi who not only look exactly like their parents, they even have the same names as them. The only apparent exceptions—Usagi's daughters Chibiusa and Kousagi—are simply obscure to English readers. "Usagi" means "rabbit", and "Kousagi" means "small rabbit"; "Chibiusa" is just a nickname meaning "little Usa(gi)"—she's really named for her mother, just like all the other Senshi's daughters.
  • Count D of Pet Shop of Horrors looks exactly like his grandfather… and his father… and his sister… Well, they're not human anyway.
  • PokĂ©mon: The Series: The Seafoam Islands' Professor Westwood ("The Evolution Solution") is completely identical to portraits of his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather.
  • In the Princess Knight sequel Twin Knight, Sapphire's daughter Violetta looks exactly like her… and also has to cross-dress, wear identical clothes, and learn escrima.
  • In the anime of Ranma ½, a time travel episode reveals that in her younger years Colonge resembled her great-granddaughter Shampoo. Although that turned out to be a dream. So it was more just the character who was dreaming expecting this trope.
  • All of the founders of the Vongola family in Reborn! (2004) bear a close resemblance to the tenth generation Guardians, including weapons used at one point.
    • Only Tsuna and Giotto are confirmed to have a biological relationship though.
    • Vongola Secondo and Xanxus look similar in appearance as well, though Xanxus is not the Ninth's son and was actually adopted.
  • Being the past selves of the main characters in the main series, the Saiyuki Gaiden guys fit this, although Minekura originally wanted to make them look completely different to their future incarnations.
  • Sgt. Frog:
    • After being zapped with Kululu's "Midlife Crisis" gun in Episode 9, preadolescent Aki is shown to look very similar to her son Fuyuki (but not close enough that Funimation's dub could resist lampshading it). A later episode involving time travel reveals that teenage Aki also looked a lot like her daughter Natsumi — except for the hair color and the glasses, of course.
    • Fuyuki's son shown in a brief glimpse of the future at the end of the 6th season looks basically identical to Fuyuki's Bratty Half-Pint younger self.
  • Angelica from Superior is the spitting image of her grandmother (minus the eye color and the whole quarter-demon thing). It's also how she and her long lost grandfather Umberto realize that they're related.
  • Utawarerumono: While on her deathbed, Tusukuru says this to her granddaughter, Eruru.
  • Words Worth: Aside from the differences in height and hair color, Miyu is the spitting image of her mother, Maria (seen in the lower-right, here). Astral even remarks on the resemblance, when his memories begin to return and he recalls his encounter with Maria.
    Astral: [voiceover, during flashback of Maria] That girl…! Who *is* she?! She… she looks like Miyu!
  • Apparently, every male of the Doumeki family in Ă—Ă—Ă—HOLiC looks exactly the same, for at least five generations. And Watanuki bears an uncanny resemblance to how his ancestor, Clow Reed, looked when he was young.
  • Shogunyan from Yo-kai Watch is identical to his descendant, Jibanyan. He looks like a blue version of Jibanyan wearing samurai clothes. He looks so identical that Nate and Whisper thought he was Jibanyan cosplaying.
  • The characters from Yu-Gi-Oh! with ties to Ancient Egypt look exactly like their ancestors, except with a different skin tone. It should be noted that the cast is primarily Japanese while the ancestors are Egyptian.
  • In Zombie Land Saga Revenge, during a flashback arc detailing Yugiri's backstory, there are brief shots of young women who are (presumably) ancestors of the other six Franchouchou members. They exactly resemble their modern descendents, right down to Ai's ancestor having anachronistic flower-shaped accessories in her hair.

    Asian Animation 
  • In Happy Heroes, Huo Haha's ancestor Xiao Haha is never explicitly stated to be his grandpa, but the two still resemble each other quite a bit (same head shape, purple robes and purple color schemes in general). One of the main differences between the two is that Xiao Haha has a Wizard Beard and Huo Haha has a Perma-Stubble.
  • In Noonbory and the Super 7, Noonbory bears an incredible resemblance to his grandfather, Hanubi, just with a brighter colour scheme and no moustache/tiny hat.
  • In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, Wolffy looks exactly like his grandfather, Yellow Wolf, save for their fur color.

    Audio Plays 
  • A Commander Korshal of the Galyari appears in Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield audio drama The Bone of Contention and the Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama Dreamtime, voiced in both by Steffan Rhodri. The former is set in the 27th century, the latter thousands of years in the future. According to Ahistory, Word of God from Simon A. Forward, who wrote both stories, is that the Galyari aren't that long-lived, but do pass their names on.

    Comic Books 
  • Asterix:
    • Asterix and the Class Act: Obelix's family tree consists entirely of "big-boned", red-mustached warriors. The modern-day Obelisc'h, whom the authors meet, even wears a blue-and-white striped jersey, reflecting his ancestor's stripey trousers. In Asterix and the Golden Sickle, however, Obelix has a cousin who is tiny, almost down to Asterix size, and appears rather frail. He still has the characteristic red hair, though.
    • Asterix and the Actress introduces the pair's parents, with each father looking exactly like his son except for some wrinkles and white hair and the clothes. Their cloth patterns and colors (and, in Obelix' case, his trademark braids) come from their respective mothers.
  • The DCU:
    • Batman: Thomas Wayne looks exactly like his son, with the addition of a mustache. And sometimes not even that.
    • Booster Gold: Gold's ancestor, Daniel Carter, has not only the same last name but appears nearly identical, despite them being over four hundred years of Carter generations apart. He even manages to have a nearly identical personality, despite all odds. Booster also encounters a First World War soldier who turns out to be Cyrus Lord, an ancestor of ex-JLI manager/sometime supervillain Maxwell Lord. Booster fails to appreciate this at first only because several weeks' beard growth and a bloody great bandage around his head disguise the fact that Cyrus is the spitting image of Max.
    • Legion of Super-Heroes: In one issue, the descendants of modern-day Lex Luthor and Mr. Mxyzptlk look identical and have the same abilities as their ancestors, and are discriminated against by society because of what their ancestors did. The Legion and the stories surrounding it take place a thousand years in the future.
    • Superman:
      • Kal-El looks exactly like his biological father Jor-El, who looked as old as Superman is now when he died.
      • The Kents: 19th century Smallville's Sheriff Nathaniel Kent looks exactly like Superman, despite Clark being adopted... and from another planet and species.
      • The Krypton Chronicles: Superman and Supergirl research their family's history and discover that Kal-El is all but identical to their distant ancestor Erok-El, who lived ten millennia ago.
      • Superman's Return to Krypton: Superman goes back in time and attends his biological parents' wedding on Krypton. One of the attendants remarks on his resemblance to Jor-El's father (ergo, Superman's grandfather)
        Wedding Guest: Amazing, how strongly you resemble that statue! Coincidence, eh?
        Superman: (thinking) Coincidence, nothing! He's... my grandfather! Obviously, it's an old Kryptonian custom for statues of the parents of both the bride and groom to adorn weddings!
      • Supergirl's Greatest Challenge: Whizzy looks so much like his very distant ancestor Streaky the Supercat that Supergirl initially mistakes him with Streaky. They even share the same fur color and distinctive yellow lightning bolt marks on their sides.
    • Wonder Woman:
      • Wonder Woman (1942): In the Golden Age, Wonder Woman's mother Hippolyta resembled her enough that she could disguise herself as her daughter pretty easily. This idea was abandoned in the Silver Age when Hyppolyta suddenly started getting colored as a blonde. But then brought back during the time where she was filling in for a missing Wonder Woman in Wonder Woman (1987).
      • On a couple of occasions where Diana's WWII era adventures are considered canon along with more modern day ones, Etta Candy is the name of two identical friends of hers, one of whom was the original leader of the paramilitary group the Holliday Girls during WWII and the other her daughter or other descendant during the modern day. Steve Trevor is generally dealt with by having him become immortal or spending a bunch of time some variety of dead in the interim before the Olympians and Chthonians brought him back.
  • Doctor Who (Titan): After the Doctor and Sarah-Jane have an adventure in the Victorian era with a woman named Athena, she introduces them to her fiance, Naval Surgeon Albert Sullivan, who looks exactly like Naval Surgeon Harry Sullivan.
  • Gold Digger has an ancient barbarian ancestor of Gina Diggers who looks a lot like her, including circular tattoos around the eyes that look like Gina's big glasses.
  • Marvel Universe:
    • Captain America:
      • Sharon Carter looks identical to Peggy Carter, a hero of World War II and member of the French Resistance. Originally, the two were sisters but were retconned to be aunt and niece to ease timeline issues.
      • Two stories feature The American Revolution hero Captain Stephen Rogers, who looks identical to his descendant. In the second story, he briefly wears a costume created by a British loyalist to satirize the American flag.
      • Captain America: Hail Hydra! shows the history of Hydra from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day. The head of their immortality research is almost always a bald, bug-eyed man with a permanent Slasher Smile. Word of God is that this is the family line of Dr. Geist, the present-day holder of this position.
    • Ms. Marvel: Ms. Marvel (2016) #36 shows a flashback to 1257 focusing on Kamala's ancestor, Kamilah of Samarkand, who's the spitting image of her 21st Century descendant. The sequence also shows counterparts to Kamala's closest friends, such as the Italian knight Sir Brunello (identical to Bruno Carelli, down to an implied crush on Kamilah), Sir Josuah (Josh), and Lady ZoĂ« (Zoe Zimmer); while these aren't stated to actually be their counterparts' ancestors, they look identical to them and share their personalities.
    • X-Men:
      • In the comics, Jean Grey has an identical 17th-century ancestor, Lady Grey, who was a member of the Hellfire Club. Most of the other ancestors of major characters involved with the club are also identical.
      • When Magik and Mirage accidentally visit Ancient Egypt (in the 11th century BC, three millennia before their time), they meet Storm's ancestor, whom they immediately mistake for her descendant. Which is confusing because Storm's maternal family is from Kenya. According to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Storm's maternal family is a line of sorceresses/priestesses descended from a primeval goddess-entity called "the Bright Lady" who is implied to be an incarnation of Gaea the Earth-Goddess. This line is marked by white hair, blue eyes, and bizarre supernatural talents. So in fact, all of Storm's ancestors look alike, and this is justified as a supernatural trait.
  • Nikopol Trilogy: Alcide Nikopol and his son (also named Alcide) look virtually identical, and since the former has spent the last thirty years frozen, they even look like they're the same age.
  • ''PatoruzĂş': Patoruzu's father, Patoruzek I, looks just like him.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): In an early, pre-Cerebus Syndrome issue, Sonic is sent back in time to prehistoric Mobius, where he meets prehistoric versions of himself and the Freedom Fighters.
  • Tintin: Captain Haddock's 17th-century ancestor Sir Francis Haddock (in the original: Francois, Chevalier de Hadoque) looked exactly like him, except for the longer hair appropriate for the period. He had a similar penchant for drinking and swearing.
  • Tomorrow Stories: Cobweb and her sidekick Clarice are descended from priestesses who discovered the secret of parthenogenesis, so they're genetically identical to their ancestors.

    Comic Strips 
  • In the run-up to the Bicentennial, Doonesbury ran comics where Zonker related tales of his Minuteman ancestor Nate Harris, who looked exactly like Zonker in colonial garb.
  • Mafalda once found a picture of a little girl very similar to her. She asked her mom and she answered "That's me" Mafalda surprisedly asks "Why didn't you tell me you used to be my sister?!"
  • The Phantom is about 21 generations of identical men with identical personalities. Although it is hard to tell how physically alike they are under the costume aside from build. One story tells of a Phantom who was noticeably shorter and bulkier than the previous Phantoms and had to seriously modify the costume.
  • In Garfield, Jon's brother Doc Boy looks exactly the same as their dad, only with slightly more hair. Doc takes offence if this is pointed out; Dad takes offence at Doc taking offence.

    Fan Works 
  • Better Bones AU: Ivypool looks just like her great-great grandfather Redtail, barring them having different coat colors. It unnerves Tigerstar, who killed Redtail, a lot.
  • Bitter Repercussions: Sandstorm's son Redkit takes after his grandfather Redtail.
  • Blackadder 40K: Tales from the Black Millennium: The last chapter explains why every Blackadder looks identical: the very first Blackadder was a shaman who used magic to ensure that every time he died, he would reincarnate as the next available descendant, such as a grandson or great-grandson. It also explains the Baldricks: the first Blackadder was the one who came up with the idea of all the shamans collectively commiting suicide and merging into what would become the God-Emperor of Mankind, not to save the world, but so he could steal their jewelry. The Emperor cursed Blackadder into always having a Baldrick to follow him.
  • born of hell('s kitchen): Foggy first disbelieves Matt when his friend claims having a seven-year-old son, but immediately changes his mind when he sees the boy — who shares a startling likeness with Jack Murdock.
  • Confusion from longing goes with the theory that some Air Nomads escaped the genocide by passing as other ethnicities. Aang notices that Ty Lee is the granddaughter of an Air Nomad friend of his due to their extremely close resemblance.
  • "Destiny and Voyager Crossroads": Indirectly features when Voyager crosses into a parallel universe and encounters Destiny. After Destiny crewmember Doctor Lisa Park has her sight restored by the Doctor, the Destiny crew are shocked to "recognise" him as Richard Woolsey. Checking historical records, the Doctor determines that his programmer, Lewis Zimmerman, is a direct descendant of Richard Woolsey's counterpart in his own universe, prompting both crews to be surprised at the coincidence.
  • Diaries of a Madman: Cadance is a descendant of Sombra and mentioned to be the splitting image of Sombra's daughter.
  • Limpet AU:
    • In "Driving Lord Vader", Darth Vader reflects on how Jaina looks almost identical to her great-grandmother Shmi.
    • In a more metaphysical sense, Vader's and Luke's Force signatures are so similar to one another that it took some time for Luke's infant son to realize that his father and grandfather are, in fact, different people.
  • Meg's Family Series has Chris and Jillian's twins Tilly and C.J., the former taking after her mother aside from being brunette (Though Family reveals that Jillian is actually a natural brunette) and the latter taking after Chris (The narration even notes that he even sounds like Chris but higher pitched).
  • Naru-Hina Chronicles: A flashback in Chapter 127 reveals that Hashirama Senju, the First Hokage, gave a mission to find new jutsu to Chihaya Namikaze, who was Minato's great-grandfather (and thus Naruto's great-great-grandfather). Said flashback shows that he looked an awful lot like Minato and Naruto. Also, Chihaya did that mission alongside a woman named Masuyo Hyuga, who looked identical to Naruto's lover Hinata Hyuga.
  • Operation Epic Beer Run, a The Martian fic: Dr. Beck tells a story from his med school days and notes that one of the uncles he mentions in the story is often mistaken for his father since they look so much alike. It's never explicitly stated but strongly implied that this uncle is Bucky Barnes under a cover identity.
  • PokĂ©mon Reset Bloodlines: Used for a major revelation in Chapter 24. Giovanni visits Felgrand in his cell and shows him a photo of Belladonna. After giving her a good look, he's left in shock at her resemblance to his mother Heratia (whom he and his brothers killed years ago), enraging him to see that one of his brothers broke their pact of never having children.
  • Principal Celestia's Family Reunion: This is the basis of the story. Every member of Celestia and Luna's family looks like Celestia and Luna and has for fifteen generations, which is how there can be mortal human counterparts to the immortal alicorn rulers.
  • Shard: When he first meets Pyrrha, Aero notices she looks very similar to Quinn, a friend of his from Totum, and asks if she has an ancestor by that name. Pyrrha doesn't know.
  • Storm on the Horizon: Elisabet Sobeck, and by extension Aloy, was Chloe Price's daughter. Aloy's resemblance to Chloe, especially in her voice, is Max's first clue as to who Aloy really is.
  • The Story of Silver Ketchum:
    • Silver looks a lot like her great-grandfather Ash.
    • Stoney is the spitting image of Brock and has his same personality as well.
  • Tekka Dread: Ukyo XVII and Xian Pu are said to the spitting images of Ukyo Kuonji and Shampoo, the girls who could have been Ranma's fiances if he didn't get engulfed in the Tekkapod.
  • Tunnel Vision, a Kim Possible fic:
    • Kim and Ron travel through various different time periods as a result of a malfunctioning time-travel experiment. When they arrive in the time of the Revolutionary War, they encounter Kim's distant ancestor General Zim Possible, who looks almost exactly like Kim's father James (Zim's great-plus grandson), and his daughter Pim Possible apparently looks exactly like Kim herself (although Pim does not appear in the fic herself). They also run into the ancestors of Bonnie, Drakken and Shego in that time period.
    • The spin-off AU Bridging the Gap (which depicts Kim and Ron being stuck in the past between 1903 and 1909) includes Kim and Ron encountering Kim's great-great aunt Mim Possible ("Rewriting History"), who initially mistakes Ron for her old friend Jon Stoppable while Ron assumes that Mim is Kim until they each clarify the other's identity.
  • Unexpected Surprise: The main plot is kicked off when Adrien returns to Paris and finds a girl with Marinette's freckles... and his mother's face.

    Films — Animation 
  • In Coco, Miguel's straight-parted and messy bangs, beauty mark, and dimple makes him resemble his great-great-grandfather. It's Foreshadowing that it's HĂ©ctor who is Miguel's true great-great-grandfather, not Ernesto, who has curled bangs and slicked back hair. This also is a subtle plot point - this was how Coco was able to remember HĂ©ctor all these years, because her great-grandson reminded her of her father.
  • Abuela Madrigal from Encanto very much resembles many of her children and grandchildren when she was younger.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In AlienÂł, Lance Henriksen plays the designer of the Bishop android (although some theories consider him an android instead of a human). In AVP: Alien vs. Predator, set more than 150 years earlier, he plays Charles Bishop Weyland, the co-founder of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation and possible ancestor of the designer.
  • In Ask a Policeman, the aged Constable Harbottle looks almost identical to his even more ancient father (both played by Moore Marriott).
  • Assassin's Creed (2016): Justified just like the games due to the Animus which makes Callum appear identical to his ancestor Aguilar.
  • One of the first things Austin Powers does after being thawed out from a Human Popsicle is mistake Felicity for her apparently-identical mother.
  • A plot point in Baahubali; Sivudu/Mahendra's resemblance to his father Amarendra makes him instantly recognizable to the people of Mahishmati. In fact, being Mahendra being born the instant his father dies, and inheriting all his strength and fighting skill, all but confirms that he simply is his father reincarnated.
  • Back to the Future:
    • No matter what timeline Marty McFly went to in the trilogy, his ancestors/descendants all resembled him or his mother (except for his father in the first movie). The same goes for his nemesis, Biff Tannen. In the animated series based on the films, wherever Doc and his family travel in time, they find identical and similarly named ancestors to Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer (who, ironically, does not look identical to herself, having been recast after the first film), including the age of dinosaurs.
    • It's worth noting that, according to Jeffrey Weissman (George in parts II and III), the role of great-grandfather Seamus McFly was originally written for Crispin Glover. In the Telltale game, Marty's grandfather Artie McFly does end up looking and sounding like Crispin Glover.
    • In Back to the Future Part III, Marty's ancestor Seamus McFly is identical to Marty (both are played by Michael J. Fox), but the ancestor's wife Maggie is identical to Marty's mother (both are played by Lea Thompson) despite not being her ancestor. Director Robert Zemeckis has stated that McFly men are just attracted to women who look like Lea Thompson.
    • About the only characters immune to this would be Doc (old enough that he appears in several time periods looking exactly the same) and Strickland (the Marshal is played by the same person as the Dean Bitterman, but pains are taken to make them look fairly different).
  • Partial example: In 2007's Beowulf, both Beowulf and his son, Wyrm, are played by the mighty Ray Winstone. Although they both look pretty different. To be fair his son did have gold skin and lacked the facial hair of his daddy. Otherwise, his physique is exactly what Beowulf's was like when he was younger (y'know, when he isn't all scaly and firebreathing).
  • Bicentennial Man: The adult Amanda Martin (Little Miss) and her granddaughter, Portia Charney, were both played by Embeth Davidtz. Andrew is perturbed at this at first, but eventually warms up to it by falling in love with Portia.
  • Chiquititas: Rincon de Luz is a prequel to the TV series, showing the creation of the Rincon de Luz orphanage in the 19th century. All the ancestors of the main characters are played by the actors who played their descendants in the TV Series.
  • In the 1925 silent film Cobra, there's a brief Flashback in which Rudolph Valentino plays his character's ancestor from The Cavalier Years, seemingly as an excuse for the film to Genre Shift to Costume Drama for a bit.
  • Lampshaded in A Cock And Bull Story, an adaptation of the novel Tristram Shandy. Steve Coogan, who plays Shandy in the film-within-a-film, breaks the fourth wall in his role as narrator to explain that a particular scene is a flashback to his childhood in which he'll be playing the role of his own father.
  • In C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, Larry Peterson plays several generations of affluent Confederate heroes.
  • A flashback in Beerfest reveals that Todd Wolfhouse looks identical to his great-grandfather Baron Ludwig von Wolfhousen (same actor). Later on, they have Todd stand near a portrait of Ludwig to show the family resemblance.
  • In the musical film Cover Girl, Rita Hayworth plays her character's grandmother in a flashback.
  • In the 1955 Daddy-Long-Legs, Jervis Pendleton III has his identity revealed by the portraits of his father and grandfather.
  • The Devil's Advocate: The Devil's true form as a Fallen Angel has the exact same face as his male offspring. Justified, since he is a divine being and his son a Nephilim.
  • The title character of the silent film Don Q: Son of Zorro was played by Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who had previously starred in the silent film The Mark of Zorro.
  • In Dont Give Up The Ship, Jerry Lewis plays not only the protagonist John Paul Steckler VII but, in vignettes, John Paul Steckler I and John Paul Steckler IV.
  • Dracula A.D. 1972 has this going on with the Van Helsings, both played by Peter Cushing. The unnamed lackey of Dracula in 1872 is played by Christopher Neame, who also plays 20th-century Dracula-cultist Johnny Alucard, although their relationship is not spelled out.
  • Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine has Dr. Goldfoot (played by Vincent Price), show off portraits of his ancestors, roles played by Price in other movies.
  • In Fierce Creatures, Kevin Kline plays "most powerful man in the world" Rod McCain and his ne'er-do-well son Vince McCain, vice-president of his father's company, Octopus Inc.
  • The ancestor that Forrest Gump was named after (KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest) is also played by Tom Hanks; Lieutenant Dan's ancestors are all played by Gary Sinise. Same goes for all of Bubba's maternal ancestors from the mid-19th century to his mother. However, it's likely that all of the scenes these ancestors appear in show just how Forrest imagines them, not how they really looked like.
  • Robert Donat plays the 18th Century Scottish lad, Murdoch Glourie, and his descendant, Donald Glourie in The Ghost Goes West.
  • GI Joe The Rise Of Cobra:
    • Averted, but not through design. Irish actor David Murray was originally cast to play Destro but could not take the role due to problems with his visa. He only had time to play the McCullen ancestor from the beginning of the film before his visa expired. Christopher Eccleston ended up playing the role of the modern McCullen/Destro, and while he and Murray look somewhat similar, they at least aren't clones of each other.
    • Played Straight with Sergeant Stone, according to Brendan Frasier, he's a descendant of Rick O'Connell.
  • Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning follows the 19th-century ancestors of the two main characters from the other films in the series. As per this trope, they're played by the same actresses as their present-day counterparts, in addition, they also have the exact same names.
  • In Return to Halloweentown, Sara Paxton plays both Marnie Piper and an ancestor, Splendora Cromwell.
  • Sonny Chiba as various generations of "Hattori HanzĂ´" in Hattori HanzĂ´: Kage no Gundan on Japanese TV, and in the film Kill Bill, Vol. 1.
  • The Haunted Palace, Roger Corman's 1963 adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, not only cast Vincent Price as Charles Ward and his warlock ancestor Joseph Curwen, but also used the same actors to play both the men who'd burned Curwen at the stake and their descendants whom he returned from the grave to take revenge upon.
  • In Headless Horseman, Sgt. Mosby Rusk is identical to his descendant Pa Rusk. Possibly justified as the Rusk family is drawing from a very limited gene pool.
  • In Hellraiser: Bloodline, the maker of the Lament Configuration and two of his descendants are played by the same actor. They're at least four generations apart each.
  • The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug has a Downplayed example: Bard and his ancestor Girion are both played by Luke Evans, but unless you know it already, you won't recognize him as Girion under heavy prosthetics and make-up.
  • Horse Girl: Sarah looks very similar to her grandmother, which she often comments on and becomes more and more obsessed with. Eventually, she becomes convinced that she is first a clone and later a time traveling version of her grandmother. At the end of the movie, she does her clothes and makeup to exactly resemble a photo she has of her grandmother.
  • In The Hound of the Baskervilles (1983), Sir Hugo Baskerville, the cause of the curse upon the Baskerville family, is almost identical to his descendant Jack Stapleton. While the resemblance is commented on in the novel, here they are played by the same actor (Nicholas Clay).
  • I Married a Witch: Five generations of Wooley males over 270 years are all played by Fredric March.
  • In Just Visiting, Christina Applegate plays both Jean Reno's fiancee and her present-day descendant.
    • The same is true in the original French film (with the same lead actors) Les Visiteurs.
    • This also serves to prove to him that he will find a way to get back to his own time and prevent his fiancee's/her father's death (depending on the version).
  • King Ralph: Given a tour of Buckingham Palace, Sir Cedric shows Ralph a painting of his unfortunate grandfather, who looks a lot like his grandson in the painting.
    Cedric: That's the Duke of Warren, your unfortunate grandfather. You have his chin.
  • Knowing has Lucinda in the opening scenes (set in 1959) and Abby, her granddaughter from fifty years later, played by the same actress.
  • Letters to Juliet ends with a Lorenzo looking identical to the one remembered so must be that one's grandfather.
  • Let's Make Love with Marilyn Monroe begins with narrated drawings about a rich man's family, many who resemble Yves Montand, who plays that rich man.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Monte Carlo or Bust features Terry-Thomas as Sir Cuthbert Ware-Armitage, the son of Terry-Thomas's character in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Sir Percy Ware-Armitage. Eric Sykes reprises the role of his Beleaguered Assistant, but doesn't seem to be the son of the original (although it would be entirely in keeping for the role of henchman to the Ware-Armitages to be a hereditary position, they have different names).
  • Jason tries to get away with this in Mystery Team, hoping a fake mustache will convince the principal that he's his father.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. In Alice's dream of how Amanda Krueger was raped, one of the 100 maniacs looks exactly like pre-death Freddy Krueger, and is played by Robert Englund as well. Before Alice is assaulted by the maniacs, a shot briefly lingers on his face, hinting that this is, in fact, Freddy's biological father. It's also hinted that this is actually Freddy himself in disguise, although why he would take on the guise of his father is unclear.
  • In Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes Roddy McDowell plays Caesar, the son of Cornelius—who was played by McDowell in Planet of the Apes (1968) and Escape from the Planet of the Apes. (McDowell was Other Darrin'ed in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.)
  • According to Word of God, Matthayus in The Scorpion King is not the Scorpion King of The Mummy Returns. Instead, the evil Scorpion King is Matthayus's identical descendant, both being played by The Rock. Originally, it was supposed to be him, but the creators felt that the ending of The Scorpion King was too hopeful to explain Matthayus suddenly turning evil.
  • She (1935 version): Randolph Scott plays Leo Vincey, the hero, and John Vincey, his ancient ancestor who he may be a reincarnation of.
  • She (1965 version): John Richardson plays Leo Vincey, the hero, and Kallikrates, his ancient Greek ancestor who he may be a reincarnation of.
  • Fredric March again in Smilin' Through, in which he plays the unbalanced Jeremy Wayne as well as Jeremy's far more sensible son Kenneth.
  • In The Son of the Sheik Rudolph Valentino plays both Sheik Ahmed and his grown son, Ahmed the younger.
  • Sunshine does a triple whammy, with three generations of sons from a Hungarian family each being played by Ralph Fiennes with varying amounts of facial hair.
  • In Stargate: Continuum, Cameron Mitchell winds up interacting with his suspiciously familiar-looking grandfather. To the makeup department's credit, at least the grandfather was wearing some latex appliances so the two characters didn't look identical. Not only do they interact, but the photo in Mitchell's locker in the new reality also shows that the two were good friends. Wonder how many people commented that they look like brothers.
  • Michael Dorn cameos in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country as Worf's grandfather, a defense attorney who, despite being stuck in the middle of a blatant Kangaroo Court, still makes a valiant effort to give his clients (Kirk and Bones) something approaching a fair trial. It's worth noting that the designers attempted a partial subversion by making the grandfather's Klingon forehead ridges less pronounced than Worf's and his hair thinner, which more realistically account for changes in the family gene pool over two generations. Worf and his brother, Kurn (played by Tony Todd), share the same ridges.
  • In St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold, David Tennant plays the present day Sir Piers Pomfrey and his ancestor Lord Pomfrey, and Rupert Everett plays Miss Fritton and her ancestors Archibald Fritton and Fortnum Fritton.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III features April O'Neil traveling back to samurai times and finding a fellow prisoner who she beleives to be Casey Jones' ancestor. A rat then comes along who April then jokes is Splinter's ancestor.
  • The Terminator films fall into this trope; in the original movie, all of the T-800 model Terminators looked (and even smelled) like different people, in order to infiltrate human bunkers (and get past sentry-dogs); but in the sequels, somehow all of the T-800 Terminators look like Arnold — despite that this defeats the entire premise of organic cyborg-Terminators, since the humans would only need to watch out for anyone who looks like Arnold. (The original movie even showed this; the T-800 Terminator shown in the original flashback-scene was played by bodybuilder Franco Columbu). The best way to explain this is that all T-800s are the same basic endoskeleton, while the model numbers (Arnold's Terminator identifies himself as model 101) refer to the external appearance. So, all 101s resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger, while 102s resemble someone else. This explains Franco Columbu, who has the same basic endo-skeleton but is essentially a different sub-model. This is explicitly described at the beginning of the novelization for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where future John Connors looks for the right model of T-800 to send into the past.
  • That Lady in Ermine, Countess Angelina and her ancestor, Francesca.
  • InThe Three Facesof Eve, Eve in the flashback to her childhood is played by the same actress who plays Eve's daughter.
  • Three Brothers: The same actor who plays Rocco also plays Rocco's father Donato in the flashback.
  • Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision: Two of Chan's ancestors (1881 Soiled Dove Rose and her granddaughter, 1929 restaurant hostess Frances) are played by the same actress.
  • In Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, the 19th-century ancestor of Burt Gummer is played by Michael Gross, the same actor who plays Burt.
  • In Truth or Dare, the same actress who plays Inez's granddaughter portrays the young Inez in the flashbacks.
  • In Ultraman Tiga Gaiden: Revival of the Ancient Giant, the protagonist Tsubasa Madoka enters a wormhole leading him several millenia into the past, where he encountered a Hunter of Monsters named Mahoroba who looks exactly like his older sister, Hikari. It turns out Mahoroba actually belongs to the Madoka bloodline, and could very well be Tsubasa's and Hikari's ancestor - Tsubasa even shows Mahoroba his locket containing a snapshot of him and his sister, and audiences could tell Hikari and Mahoroba are both portrayed by the same actress.
  • The Filipino action-comedy film The Unkabogable Praybeyt Benjamin has the titular Benjamin's ancestors—who came from a long line of warriors and solidiers—look identical to Benjamin himself, all of whom were played by Vice Ganda.
  • The tour guide at the end of Up Pompeii is also played by Frankie Howerd, to imply that Lurcio survived the destruction of Pompeii. Lurkalot and Lurk are presumably also identical ancestors of Lurcio's.
  • The Basque film Vacas ("Cows") follows two families of cowherds from 1875 to 1936. Main actor Carmelo GĂłmez plays the grandfather, father, and son of the Irigibel family; Kandido Uranga plays Carmelo Mendiluze and his son Juan, and Karra Elejalde plays their neighbor Ilegorri and his son, Lucas (with both appearing together in the 1936 segment).
  • Vamps: Goody pretends she's her past self's daughter when old flame Danny (who knew her in the '60s) sees her again. Later, her female descendant (who Alicia Silverstone also plays) looks very much like her too, only with a different hair color/hairstyle.
  • Vox Lux: Thanks to both being played by the same actress, Celeste's teenage daughter Albertine has the exact same appearance as Celeste herself as a teenager.
  • Who's Harry Crumb? features the titular character (played by John Candy) coming from a long line of great detectives (which he himself isn't). When we're shown their portraits at the agency, they all look like Harry with slight clothing/hair differences (yes, including the size).
  • Catherine and her daughter Cathy from the 1992 Wuthering Heights film look absolutely identical, except that Catherine is a brunette while Cathy is a blonde. Which is weird, because in the book Cathy looks nothing like her mother except for her eyes.
  • Young Frankenstein Frederick looks an awful lot like the portrait of his Grandfather Victor.

    Literature 
  • Apparently, The 39 Clues' Hope Cahill is nearly identical to her ancestor, Madeleine Cahill—who lived several hundred years before Hope.
  • The Ashkevron family in the Heralds of Valdemar series. A character even comments that "The Ashkevron family look tends to breed true, and when it doesn't the poor thing generally runs off to Haven." On one occasion a young woman of that family shows up at the capital and identifies an aunt she had never even met with "You must be Savil, you have the nose."
  • In A Brother's Price Jerin resembles his grandfather enough to prove that they're related. Apparently, that's where Jerin gets his good looks from.
  • In the Aubrey-Maturin series, Sam Panda, Jack Aubrey's illegitimate black son, is described as "the spit, the counterpart, the image of Jack Aubrey with some twenty years and several stone taken off, done in shining ebony," although their noses are mentioned as being different. It's enough so that everyone immediately realizes who he is.
  • In The Babysitters Club, one of the later books has Claudia thinking she might be adopted due to some flimsy circumstantial evidence. When she finally talks to her parents about it, they assure her that she's not - and as proof, they show her old photographs of her beloved grandmother Mimi, who looked exactly like Claudia when she was young.
  • Caraval has an identical granddaughter. Tella is described as having a round face with honey-blonde hair. This is exactly how their grandmother is said to have looked when she was young.
  • Gregory McDonald's Carioca, Fletch plays with this by having the protagonist in Brazil, where he uncannily resembles a light-skinned Brazilian who was murdered decades before. All except Fletch believe he is the reincarnation, including the murderer, who tries again. Fletch even dreams of characters of Brazilian mythology he had not known about.
  • The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids has a non-human example with Li'l Thymon, the young Adorable Abomination, who looks just like a kid version of his uncle Lord Thymon (except green instead of blue).
  • Justified Trope via Applied Phlebotinum: In H. P. Lovecraft's short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the eponymous character notices his uncanny resemblance to the portraits of his sorcerous ancestor, Joseph Curwen, who apparently cast a spell that ensured one of his descendants would look like him, inherit his knowledge, and be compelled to attempt to resurrect him. Shorty after Curwen has been resurrected by Ward, the sorcerer kills the young man, and proceeds to masquerade as him.
  • In The Changing Land, the resurrected priestess Semirama helps the protagonist because he happens to be the spitting image of his ancestor, who was her lover.
  • Justified in the Coldfire Trilogy: after selling his soul for undead immortality, the Hunter dropped in on his family every so often, killing all of them except the one who looked most like him. (Vanity being one of his defining character traits.) Fast-forward nine hundred years or and you have descendants who still look exactly like him. Possibly helped along by the fact that the ambient wild magic is more than capable of warping genetics.
  • In the fifth Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, we meet Greg's second cousin once removed who looked exactly like Greg when he was the latter's age.
  • Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
    • The Past Doctor Adventures novel The Eleventh Tiger teases the idea that Ian Chesterton has crossed his own timestream as the amnesiac Major Chesterton, before revealing the Major is actually Ian's Identical Great-Great-Grandfather.
    • And in the Eighth Doctor Adventures book The Taint, Fitz's great-grandfather's Obliviously Evil twin is recognizably similar to Fitz himself: same long nose, straggly hair, and thin face and build. Fitz keeps finding him "infuriatingly familiar", quite possibly because he's looking at an older (but not that much, for some reason) version of the same face he shaves (or not) every morning. Also, unsettlingly, he has moments of acting like a Psychopathic Manchild version of Fitz.
    • The Doctor Who Novelisations version of The Massacre says that Anne Chaplet and her presumed descendent Dodo looked "identical". This is not the case in the TV version, although the actresses do look very similar.
  • Exaggerated in Noel B. Gerson's Double Vision. Not only do Ron and his 18th-century ancestor Sir Ronald Bentley look startlingly similar, right down to identical birthmarks, but Ron's wife Candace resembles Sir Ronald's mistress Candace Pemberton and Ron's childhood girlfriend Millie St. John resembles Sir Ronald's wife Millicent.
  • In the Dune saga, where Miles Teg is noted for his resemblance to his millennia-dead ancestor Duke Leto Atreides I. The character himself has noted that he has found looking at portraits of Leto I to be like looking into a mirror. Being a servant of the Bene Gesserit, Miles' resemblance was deliberately bred in.
  • In the Discworld book Eric, by Terry Pratchett, Rincewind (and his demonology hacker companion) travels back to a fantasy counterpart of the Trojan War, where he meets a sensibly devious adventurer named Lavaeolus. He does not realize the relationship until later but notes that Lavaeolus looks very handsome. It is implied that Lav is an ancestor of Rincewind's (and in Dog Latin it is revealed that Lavaeolus means "rinser of winds"). Unfortunately, the illustrations don't reflect this.
  • Subverted in Everything Is Illuminated, in which every time the statue of the ancestor needs a touch-up, it is made to look like the current male heir.
  • Used as the basis of Robert Sheckley's story "Double Indemnity": a man time-travels to the past to find his ancestor, since said ancestor looks almost exactly like him, which would allow him to pose as the man's time-travel mishap-born clone (for sake of an insurance scam). Apparently, the man's criteria for choosing the right ancestor was simply "someone who would not be missed", and the only reason he rejects several candidates is that they happen to have acquired differences (missing an arm, covered with pox) — implying that every single one of his ancestors is identical.
  • G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories:
    • In "The Doom of the Darnaways", Chesterton subverts the trope: Father Brown concludes that the painting of the ancestor was a fraud, being a painting of the heir so that he would appear to have such a resemblance to the ancestor.
    • In "The Worst Crime in the World", Sir John Musgrave and his son Captain James Musgrave share a family resemblance strong enough that the son can kill his father and impersonate him by shaving his beard and wearing a wig.
  • In the Forgotten Realms Sembia novels, there are two characters named Shamur Karn, great-aunt and great-neice, who look so similar that when the elder Shamur, aged 27, was sent forward in time fifty years to when the younger one had died at around the same age, the family decided to just have her take her great-niece's place. Nobody noticed, including her fiance (although it was an Arranged Marriage).
  • Speculated about in Gilded Latten Bones, when a suspect's sketch is recognized to be identical to a man forty years dead. Subverted, as it turns out to be the original man, who'd been Faking the Dead and using age-reversal magic.
  • In the Harry Potter saga, where Harry is noted for his resemblance to his father but with his mother's eyes. Later subverted when we get a detailed picture of what James Potter actually looked like at Harry's age; the resemblance is strong enough that they could be mistaken for one another at a distance or from behind, but stood side by side it would be fairly obvious which was which even without the eye-color difference.
    • Albus Potter turns out to be the spitting image of Harry, green eyes and all.
  • In The Heroes of Olympus Leo is the spitting image of his great grandfather Sammy, Hazel Levesque's best friend and crush in the 1940s
  • In The History of the Galaxy series, John Mitchell St. Ivo looks almost exactly like his great-grandfather Erlik St. Ivo, the founder of Galactic Cybersystems thanks to several generations of inbreeding starting with Erlik himself, who married his cousin Liza in order to maintain the secrecy of the company (whose headquarters and automated production lines were located on a remote, uninhabited world). Erlik and Liza had a son and a daughter, whose DNA they modified so they weren't genetically related, allowing the children to continue the line. Apparently, the fact that they still had the same parents and were raised as brother and sister didn't create any issues. This continued until the birth of AndrĂ© St. Ivo, whose intelligence was far below normal. Realizing a fresh "infusion" of blood was necessary to keep the family (and the business) going, AndrĂ©'s parents didn't have a second child, forcing him to look for a bride on other worlds. AndrĂ© ended up marrying Theia Mitchell, who wound up effectively running Galactic Cybersystems and gave birth to two healthy sons: Aramant (who looked exactly like AndrĂ©) and John. AndrĂ©, jealous of Theia, has her shot and then her almost-dead body turned into a bio-doll for his pleasure. Meanwhile, Aramant is groomed as AndrĂ©'s successor, while John grows up in an Idle Rich lifestyle. One day, Aramant finds out the truth about his mother, who was kept in stasis while AndrĂ© wasn't using her body and tries to wake her. Thanks to his resemblance to his father, he is killed by Theia who manages to break her mental conditioning who doesn't know how much time has passed. John ends up mortally wounded by AndrĂ©'s robots and has his mind copied onto an android, who was modeled on Erlik St. Ivo. Given that John looks like Erlik, this turns out to be a happy coincidence.
  • In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Jack Stapleton looks exactly like his ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, except without "the broad plumed hat, the curling love-locks, [and] the white lace collar."
  • The title character of Indigo mistakes Veness for Fenran at first glance. And then falls for him on his own virtues. Meaning, that he dies.
  • Ishtar, The Heroine of the Kadingir saga, is an exact copy of her grandmother Nirgal, which every character she comes across makes sure to point out.
  • In Robert E. Howard's "Kings of the Night", Bran Mak Morn looks so much like his ancestor Brule that Kull takes him for him. Despite a few intervening millennia.
  • In the Liaden Universe, when Miri Robertson goes to the home of her long lost family, a portrait of her grandmother Miri Tiazan reveals that she's a dead ringer for the original. It actually takes her a moment to realize that it isn't a mirror.
  • In one of the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, it's mentioned that the Longbeard dwarves will sometimes produce an heir who resembles their original ancestor Durin so much that they not only name him Durin but believe that he is the same Durin, returned to them. Up to Durin VII are recorded as Kings of Durin's Folk, it's unclear if this practice is maintained outside of the direct line of succession.
    • Arwen is said to be extremely similar to her great-great-grandmother, Luthien Tinuviel. Overlaps with Generation Xerox as both women choose to relinquish their immortality for love of a mortal man.
  • In The Lost Prince, the Lost Prince's present-day descendant bears a striking resemblance to the surviving portrait of his distinguished ancestor considering the number of intervening generations. Many Samavians choose to take this as a sign that the Lost Prince has been reincarnated to return in person, which makes as much sense as any other explanation.
  • The protagonist in The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans realizes that there will be problems when he starts not dying, so he writes a will, heads off for adventure, "dies," and returns as the "relative named in the will."
  • In Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Jacob looks much like his grandfather Abraham did at his age. They are not identical, but Miss Peregrine remarks on the similarities, and it's enough to make Emma's crush on Jacob at least a little creepy.
  • The line of Berethnet queens in The Priory of the Orange Tree stretches back centuries, but one character walking the portrait gallery says that the thirty-six queens from the first to the latest could all be sisters from their looks. This, coupled with the fact that the queens always give birth to one child and that child is always a girl, reinforces the belief that line is blessed by Galian the Saint (although others whisper that it hints of sorcery). It is actually because they are descended from Kalyba the enchantress, who used Cleolind's guise to marry Galian.
  • In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, the Thorpes describe Catherine as the image of her brother, whom they know. Catherine, on the other hand, expects Henry and Eleanor's mother's portrait to look very like one or the other of them, from reading novels in which a portrait looks as much like the child as the mother, and finds it not very close at all.
  • Beatrice Löwenström in Ă–verenskommelser by Simona Ahrnstedt had obviously inherited both her appearance and her personality from her paternal grandmother. The resemblance is mentioned no less than four times.
  • Lampshaded in The Pendragon Adventure. A young minor character that Bobby Pendragon and friends meet in 1937 is still alive in the present. In order to explain why they haven't aged at all, Bobby's friend Gunny tells him that they're the grandsons of the people he met in 1937.
  • In The Pillars of the Earth, Jack looks enough like his own father to be mistaken for his father's ghost when he inadvertently visits his father's old home town.
  • Septimus Heap: Physik: Jenna is often confused with her distant ancestor Esmeralda.
  • In The Stone Prince, Demnor is this to his great-uncle, causing his grandfather and mother to distrust him because they consider the uncle to have been weak.
  • In The Vampire Chronicles, Jessica Reeves is said to bear a striking resemblance to her distant ancestress Maharet, despite them being six thousand years apart.
  • In Welkin Weasels, Sylver's descendants all bear his lightning-bolt birthmark. Mawk and Scirf's descendants Maudlin and Scruff apparently fall under this trope as well, as Monty is able to instantly guess exactly which members of the outlaw band were their ancestors.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The same production company was at the helm of a number of Period Piece series that have been coming out of mainland China: in one, the child actor who played a young Kangxi reappears near the end to play his grandson (who later became the emperor Qianlong); the actor who plays old Kangxi in another drama later appeared in a different series as old Qianlong.

  • Done in The New Addams Family in the episode which recounts how the Addams fortune was made. Also, John Astin (the original Gomez) played Grandpa Addams.
  • The Keonig brothers in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. were already all played by Patton Oswalt, and the three who worked for S.H.I.E.L.D. were uncanny in their resemblance to each other. So of course when the main characters went back to 1931 and met their grandfather Ernest Keonig, he too was played by Oswalt.
  • In the Distant Finale of 'Allo 'Allo!, Gordon Kaye not only played Rene under aging makeup, but also his son. Gets even funnier when we learn the son was a Doorstep Baby, and it's not entirely clear (at least to Rene's wife) why his mother chose to leave him on their doorstep in particular...
  • Andromeda (a.k.a. "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda"): The Nietzscheans as a race are descendants of humans from Earth, but their founder took his followers (about 8000 individuals, so not a particularly large group) into space, and later reduced their genetic variety by stripping out genes he considered "useless", such as predispositions for obesity, diabetes, haemophilia and various cancers. One of the core tenets of early Nietzschean philosophy was using eugenics (planned breeding) and genetic manipulation to create the "perfect ubermensch" (hence the name). Given that the original gene pool was so small, that Nietzscheans breed for a rather small number of traits, that Nietzcheans at the time of the series number in the trillions, and that there are only so many viable ways for genes to recombine, it is rare, but in no way unheard of, for Nietzscheans not obviously related to be born with identical genetic codes. The Nietzscheans call it "Genetic Reincarnation", and a particular plot revolves around the genetic reincarnation of the progenitor of their race. In-series, Genetic Reincarnation appears twice: Steve Bacic plays the Nietzschean Gaheris Rhade and his identical-looking direct descendant, Telemachus Rhade, who lives 300 years later, and the reincarnation of the progenitor Drago Museveni does show up at one point and is, in fact, Tyr's son. We only see him as a child, but he is dark-skinned compared to the original Drago Museveni, played by Lochlyn Munro.
  • Both played straight and averted in the Blackadder shows.
    • Every series featured Rowan Atkinson as the various generations of Edmund Blackadder and Tony Robinson as his servant Baldrick. However, other actors, in particular Tim McInnery, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Miranda Richardson appeared in regular or guest roles in three or four of the series, but playing characters who were not necessarily related and sometimes had very different personalities.
    • For example, McInnery played Lord Percy in the first two series but left because he considered the "Upper-Class Twit" character too limited - he reappeared in a guest role in the third series as an apparent Upper-Class Twit, but actually it's just an act, and returned as a regular in the fourth series with a completely different personality, while Hugh Laurie took over the Upper-Class Twit role in the third and fourth series.
    • Melchett on the other hand is played by Stephen Fry in various incarnations which include being one of the only sane men in the second season to being an incompetent general in the fourth whose greatest strategy is to have his troops climb out of the trenches and walk very slowly toward the enemy. Then in Blackadder: Back and Forth his modern incarnation is fairly sane but we also see him as a crazy Roman general.
    • In fact, in Blackadder: Back and Forth Blackadder even says that the time machine appears to be following their DNA through time.
    • Lampshaded in the finale of the third series, when Blackadder and MacAdder are both played by Rowan Atkinson. Several characters note this. They also make it plain that they are played by the same actor, as they keep just missing each other.
    • Also in one episode of season three, Vincent Hanna (a BBC reporter known for doing election coverage) actually guest starred as his own ancestor—who is reporting on the election through an open window to a crowd outside as one would on television.
  • In Black Hole High, Principal Durst has an identical great-grandmother who was headmistress of the future Blake Holsey High at the time it opened. Big Bad Avenir, chairman of the school's board of directors claims to be the great-grandson of identical Avenir who financed the school's construction, though it's all but stated outright that Avenir, being a time traveler, is actually the same man.
  • On Bloodline, the Rayburns are amazed by how much Nolan looks like his father Danny. This may be because the same actor (Owen Teague) plays Young Danny in flashbacks.
  • The Brady Bunch:
    • In one episode, Florence Henderson and Robert Reed did dual roles as Mike and Carol, plus Mike's stodgy grandfather and Carol's hip grandmother.
    • In a borderline case, Florence Henderson had a cameo as Carol's mother in The Movie.
    • Another borderline case: Jan once found a picture of her great-aunt when the great-aunt was Jan's age, and it looked just like Jan (Eve Plumb in the Identical Great-Niece role). Jan wanted to meet the great-aunt to see what she (Jan) would look like when she grew up. The great-aunt was played by Imogene Cocoa. Jan was somewhat less than plussed.
  • Lampshaded and subverted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Buffy and the gang realize that a portrait of Mayor Wilkins' ancestor is really a portrait of Mayor Wilkins himself:
    Willow: Wow. Like father, like son.
    Oz: How about 'like exact same guy, like exact same guy'?
  • The Castle episode "The Blue Butterfly" features a suspect who looks just like an old picture of his grandfather.
  • The original three sisters in Charmed trace their ancestry back to their past lives—their great-grandmother and her two cousins. Piper's boyfriend Dan and future husband Leo also have past lives in that period, Dan's being the sisters' great-grandfather. Charmed explains the resemblance as "souls recognizing each other" implying that they may in fact have actually looked very different. (No such explanation was provided when the sisters time-traveled to the 1970s and happened to meet the father of one of the show's recurring characters, who was identical to his future adult son except for the obligatory afro.) Later in the series, the fourth sister Paige discovered she had a medieval past life and possible ancestor.
    • The sisters once found an old video in which their mother looked exactly like Phoebe. Their mother would later appear on the show played by a different actress. Paige apparently has an uncanny resemblance to her great-aunt who was never seen.
    • When Leo goes to a WWII veteran's reunion (he had fought and died in the war during his mortal life), he poses as his own fictional grandson to his former comrades.
  • In El Chavo del ocho:
    • Señor Barriga and his son Ă‘oño are both played by Edgar Vivar.
    • Doña Florinda and her niece La Popis are both played by Florinda Meza.
    • La Chilindrina and her great-grandmother Doña Nieves are both played by Maria Antonieta de las Nieves.
    • Quico and his father Federrico are both played by Carlos Villagrán. Unlike the other pairs, Federrico only appears in a flashback.
  • In the Japanese tokusatsu series Chousei Kantai Sazer-X, a flashback scene depicts the main character's grandfather as a young man. In flashback, the younger version of grandpa is played by the same actor who plays the main character.
  • The German series Der Clown featured a self-parodic Time Travel Episode where the hero meets his helicopter pilot's ancestor, and ends up with the series trademark highway chase scene in a Bamboo Technology helicopter.
  • On CSI, Greg starts dating a woman who is avenging the death of her grandparents. The grandmother was murdered by mobsters when they found out about her affair with her grandfather, who was framed and executed. It's even lampshaded by the cast.
  • In Cybill, Cybill is hypnotized into viewing one of her past lives; the mystic says something like "Spirits tend to run in packs, so you can expect to see people you recognize." Thus justifying the medieval-era flashback in which everyone is played by the series' regulars.
  • On an episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart here interviewed the descendants of two of his correspondents, in alternate futures, to see which party's dire predictions would turn out correct.
  • Used repeatedly in Dark Shadows, where every generation of the Collins family looked exactly like every other generation of the Collins family. This extended to non-Collins characters as well, even to the point of people unrelated to the Collins family being Collins family members in past incarnations, while Collinses appear as unrelated past people. This also applied to alternate timelines and past alternate timelines. The practice was continued when the show was remade in The '90s.
  • On Days of Our Lives, it was revealed that EJ DiMera looked identical to his grandfather Santo, while Samantha Brady looked identical to her grandfather's sister, Colleen. This became widely known to the show's characters after a collection of letters between Santo and Colleen was discovered. Oddly, after a letter was uncovered stating that EJ was not really Stefano's son, nobody seemed to recall the fact that EJ looks identical to Stefano's father. (That letter was eventually found to be a forgery, and Stefano really is EJ's father.)
  • Doctor Who/Torchwood:
    • Doctor Who companion Victoria Waterfield was said to be almost identical to her mother, although we only ever see a painting of her mother.
    • The franchise hangs a lampshade on a You Look Familiar by explaining that Torchwood's Gwen Cooper (played by Eve Myles) is a distant relative of the Gwyneth (also played by Eve Myles) who appeared on Doctor Who in "The Unquiet Dead". The Doctor adds some timey-wimey explanation for why they look identical (the Doctor mentions the term "spatial-genetic multiplicity", which sounds a little like a Techno Babble way of saying "there's only so many ways human eyes, lips, noses, etc., can take shape, and sooner or later, they'll all recombine in the exact same configuration again, especially for people who have the same genetics in the first place."). The Doylist explanation for why she appears again is that Russell T. Davies was enamoured with her performance. Word of God, however, is that Gwen and Gwyneth aren't necessarily related.
      Russell T Davies: It's not familial as we understand it. There's no blood tie. Spatial genetic multiplicity means an echo and repetition of physical traits across a time rift.
    • The series hangs another lampshade on You Look Familiar when companion Martha Jones (played by Freema Agyeman) mentions her cousin (also played by Agyeman), who died in "Army of Ghosts".
    • Jessica Hynes played Joan Redfern in "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" and her great-granddaughter Verity Newman in "The End of Time".
    • Prior to being cast as the Twelfth Doctor, Peter Capaldi played Lobus Caecilius in "The Fires of Pompeii" and John Frobisher in Torchwood: Children of Earth. Multiple writers have hinted Frobisher is Caecilius' distant descendant; the Doctor's side of things is another trope entirely.
    • In "A Christmas Carol", Kazran Sardick is played by Michael Gambon, as is his bullying father Eliot Sardick when the Doctor travels back to Kazran's childhood. In the same episode Bailey Pepper plays Abigail's nephew Benjamin in the past and Benjamin's unnamed son in the present.
    • In "Listen", the Doctor and Clara encounter a stranded time traveller named Orson Pink, who looks identical to Clara's Love Interest Danny Pink and even has Danny's childhood toy passed down through the generations. The episode appears to imply that Orson is Danny and Clara's descendant, although given that both Danny and Clara die childless, Word of God later clarified that Orson is a lateral descendant, and the toy was given to that side of the family by Clara.
  • The Eternal Love: Yi Huai looks exactly like his grandfather Yi Feng, with the exception of Yi Feng having Mystical White Hair.
  • Played with in Everybody Loves Raymond when, in a flashback to Ray's childhood, Frank and Marie (Ray's parents) are played by Ray Romano and Patricia Heaton (i.e. the actors who play Ray and his wife Debra).
  • A possible, though admittedly questionable, example comes in the form of a detective on Tim Minear's series Drive and Joss Whedon's series Firefly. On both series, there was a fugitive-pursuing character played by Richard Brooks. Both characters are named Jubal Early. This potentially counts as a case of identical ancestry, as Drive is set hundreds of years before Firefly, and because the shows are implied to take place in the same general 'verse. (A joke from a Drive script that didn't make it into production was that Amy Acker's character, Kathryn, had a cousin from Texas.)
    • This is more likely because Nathan Fillion starred on both shows, and is a descendant of the real-life Jubal Early, a general of the Confederacy who fled to Canada after the American Civil War.
  • In First Of The Summer Wine, the teenage Clegg's father is played by Peter Sallis, who plays Clegg himself in Last of the Summer Wine.
  • Early in the Full House episode "You Pet It, You Bought It", Danny shows a portrait of his grandfather, who looks just like Danny.
  • On The Golden Girls, one flashback showed a younger Sophia also played by Estelle Getty, but without the additions to make her look older. Her mother is played by Bea Arthur, who plays Sophia's daughter, Dorothy, in similar additions.
  • The Goodies have identical ancestors in the episode "Alternative Roots", and identical descendants in the episodes "2001 and a Bit" and "The End".
  • Good Luck Charlie: Played for Laughs; The whole episode "The Bob Duncan Experience" has PJ (Jason Dolley) being afraid he'll grow older being overweight and bald, looking exactly like his father, Bob (Eric Allan Kramer), when Bob shows him an old picture of him from when he was in a high school rock and metal band with his old friends, and he emphasizes how he was identical to PJ as a young teenager. Flashbacks are even shown with the younger Bob looking exactly identical to PJ as a teenager.
  • Goodnight Sweetheart includes occasional appearances of Reg's Present Day identical grandson, who's followed him into the police force. The episode where Gary travels to the Victorian era, rather than World War II, introduces Reg's identical grandfather as a Bow Street Runner, as well as an identical ancestor of Yvonne.
  • Good Omens has Newton Pulsifer, played by Jack Whitehall, and a flashback to Newton's ancestor Witchfinder Major Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer, also played by Whitehall with 1600s garb and an old-fashioned accent.
  • On Green Acres, whenever Oliver or Lisa tell stories about their ancestors, they always look like Oliver and Lisa. And an identical ancestor of Mr. Haney always tries to sell them stuff.
  • Subverted at least once in Highlander: The Series, with immortal Duncan MacLeod pretending to be his own son/grandson when he meets an old acquaintance. He seldom lies about it, but when people assume that is why he looks like the person they remember, he doesn't correct them.
  • In the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981), the characters of Lunkwill and Fook, who activate Deep Thought, and Loonquawl and Phouchg, who receive the Answer seven and a half million years later, are both played by Anthony Carrick and Timothy Davies respectively.
  • Horrible Histories has an Economy Cast and often depicts English monarchs who were related, so this happens. Matthew Baynton plays almost every one of the Stuart kings; he's most frequently cast as Charles II, but has also played Charles I and James I. Martha Howe-Douglas, as the only woman who's a regular cast member, has also done her fair share of playing multiple members of the same family, for example Elizabeth I, Mary I, and their cousin Mary Queen of Scots.
  • How to Get Away with Murder ends with a Flash Forward to the distant future, where Christopher Castillo is played by the same actor who portrayed his father Wes Gibbins.
  • In an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a photograph reveals that Dennis' grandfather looked exactly like him when he was young. Oh, and he was also a Nazi SS officer in World War II.
  • On JAG, Harmon Rabb, Jr. is identical to the late Harmon Rabb, Sr. (both are played by David James Elliot).
  • A plot point in Jekyll is that Dr. Jackman looks identical to the real Dr. Jekyll (allegedly a real historical figure) and must, therefore, be related. Thankfully, it's justified somewhat by the fact that Jackman is a 'perfect throwback'.
  • The Movie of Kamen Rider Hibiki has this trope with the three main Riders and the main character, Asumu Adachi. They also work in an Identical Stranger, as the Sengoku-era Touki looks just like the modern Zanki, which the modern characters lampshade.
  • The finale of Kamen Rider Kiva showed Wataru's son Masao, played by Kohei Takeda (the same actor as Wataru's father Otoya).
  • Also played with in The King of Queens, where in a childhood flashback of Arthur (Jerry Stiller), his father is played by the actor's real life son, Ben Stiller.
  • Kung Fu: The Legend Continues was built entirely around this trope, as David Carradine played Kwai Chang Caine, contemporary-era Identical Grandson of Kwai Chang Caine, the hero of Carradine's Western series, Kung Fu (1972). In one Time Travel arc, they trade places for a while when the past Caine is hurt such that only modern medicine can help him.
  • In Legends of Tomorrow, the Legends encounter Sir Henry Stein, a thespian from the late 19th century, who also happens to be a follower of Mallus. He looks identical to Martin Stein, except for a mustache, and is stated by Gideon to be Martin's great-great grandfather.
  • Also played with on Leverage, where Hardison paints a portrait of "Harland Leverage III" founder of Leverage Consulting and Associates to make their "firm" to seem more legitimate. He looks like Nathan aged fifty years…
  • Lois & Clark:
    • In one of the Time Travel episodes, a recurring villain called Tempus attempts to travel back in time to Smallville when Kal-El's rocket lands in order to kill him as a baby, but first overshoots by about a century, and ends up in the Wild West, where the town marshal and the saloon keeper are identical to Jonathan and Martha Kent, and are explicitly stated to be the Kent family's ancestors
    • There was also a similar episode that dealt with reincarnation, therefore several characters in the past are identical to people Lois and Clark have met in the present, but these characters are not blood relatives, but look the same as they are past incarnations of the present characters, e.g. one of Lois' previous incarnations has the Kents' previous incarnations as biological parents.
  • Lucifer:
    • Cain returns to the bar where he frequently worked out of as a detective in 1958 when a copycat killer turns up in 2018, searching for inspiration, and instinctively calls the bartendress by name before remembering that it can't be the same person as she would've aged quite a bit since then. (He doesn't, because he's that Cain.) Turns out that she's the granddaughter of the woman he knew, and furthermore, his partner in 1958 is the grandfather.
    • In the season 5 episode "It Never Ends Well For The Chicken" we learn that Maze looks exactly like her mother Lilith did before she gave up her immortality and grew old. Both characters are played by Lesley-Ann Brandt. Lucifer's narration lampshades the resemblance between the two of them.
  • MacGyver's identical ancestor (played by Richard Dean Anderson) shows up in one of the last episodes of MacGyver (1985).
  • A Christmas Episode of Malcolm in the Middle has a photo of Francis' grandfather as a young man, and he looks exactly like Francis. Except that he has humongous eyebrows, which Francis hope isn't genetic.
  • In the Miami Vice episode "Heroes of the Revolution," Gina and her mother Elena are both played by Saundra Santiago.
  • In the finale of Mighty Med, this is revealed to be the reason for Hapax the Elder's and Alan's resemblance.
  • Mick tries to pull this on Beth in the second episode of Moonlight, when she finds a picture of him from decades before, claiming it's his father. By the end of the episode, though, she knows the truth—he's a vampire.
    • She starts to suspect something when she meets a retired cop (who is now blind), whom Mick still occasionally visits. When she asks him about the late Mick "Sr.", the cop is confused, as the Mick he knows is alive and well and never had children.
  • In the Murder, She Wrote Made-for-TV Movie The Last Free Man, Angela Lansbury played both Jessica Fletcher and her Civil War ancestor, Sarah McCulloch.
  • Murdoch Mysteries
    • In the episode "Republic of Murdoch", Jacob Doyle is the identical grandfather of Jake Doyle from Republic of Doyle. And in the Republic of Doyle episode "If the Shoe Fits", Bill Murdoch is the identical grandson of…
    • In the Christmas Episode "A Merry Murdoch Christmas", a Flash Back to Inspector Brackenreid's childhood sees Thomas Grieg play Brakenreid's father under huge muttonchop whiskers.
  • Played with on The Nanny when Fran Drescher plays a younger version of her character's mother, Sylvia, and the actor who plays Maxwell plays a younger version of his father.
  • The Odd Couple:
    • In one episode, Felix (Tony Randall) reflects on how he's always been fussy. A flashback shows his grandfather (also played by Tony Randall) telling him "There are two things no one likes—a dirty old man and a clean young boy".
    • Another episode had Felix relate a story a relative told him about how his and Oscar's fathers met during Prohibition. Tony Randall and Jack Klugman played their characters' fathers.
  • Our Miss Brooks: In "The Dream", Miss Brooks' daughter Cleo Boynton is her mirror-image. Similarly, Osgood Conklin Junior looks just like his father.
  • The Outer Limits (1995): In "Last Supper", Frank is initially convinced that Laura must be Jade's daughter, since they look exactly alike. It turns out that she is Jade though.
  • In the final episode of Only Fools and Horses, "Sleepless in Peckham", we see a picture of Freddie "the Frog" Robdal, previously hinted to be Rodney's real father, and he's played by Nicholas Lyndhurst with a moustache. (Even Del, who believes his mum to be a saint, can't ignore the resemblance.) Lyndhurst reprises the role in the Prequel series Rock & Chips.
  • Loretta of Outrageous Fortune looks exactly like her grandmother Rita in her younger days.
  • This was used over and over again on Passions, where several characters were depicted as reincarnations of family members from generations past, and the same actors portrayed the characters from these past lives. In particular, Sheridan, Luis, and Antonio were revealed to have lived out many past lives together, as were Miguel and Charity. In one case, the Pilgrim-era Prudence Standish was originally depicted as a past life of protagonist Charity Standish; however, after Charity was written out of the show and her rival Kay completed a Heel–Face Turn, Prudence was later depicted as a past life of Kay and switched to being played by the other actress.
  • In Penny Dreadful, Patti Lupone played Vanessa's Really 700 Years Old witch mentor Joan Clayton, aka "the Cutwife", in the second season. In the third season she returned as Vanessa's therapist Dr. Florence Seward, who was said to have been descended from the Clayton family.
  • The Power Rangers franchise has been very fond of this one. The episode "Wild West Rangers" showed that five of the main characters (and at least one minor character) had identical ancestors in The Wild West (despite the implication that several of the characters were first-generation Americans). "The Return of the Green Ranger" featured two identical ancestors and an Evil Twin in the colonial period (of the same town). Condsidering the amount of magic that was thrown around in the first 3 seasons (as well as the cause of them traveling back), it could be said that A Wizard Did It.
    • During Power Rangers Time Force, Jason Faunt played both red ranger Wes Collins and Alex, who was both his descendant and his professional predecessor a thousand years in the future.
    • The Time Force analogy dovetails nicely with its Super Sentai original version.
    • In Lightspeed Rescue, as a young woman, Kesey's grandmother looked just like her.
  • On The Pretender, Miss Parker and her late mother, Catherine, looked very similar (both were played by the same actress, Andrea Parker), to the point where any time she met someone who knew her mother, one of the first things they say is how much she looks like her.
  • Subverted in Primeval season 3 episode 6. The episode starts with a scene of what appears to be 1940's versions of the characters, dressed appropriately, playing a record, etc. They're the normal cast, who had to flee to a disused lodge that had old clothes and other things in it.
  • In the Quantum Leap episode "The Leap Between the States", Sam is able to jump back into his great-grandfather's lifetime, which is only possible because he's genetically identical to his great-grandfather.
  • In Red Dwarf one of Lister's twin sons, Bexley, apparently looks enough like Lister that Rimmer mistook Bexley for him in a future echo. It's unknown if Bexley's twin brother Jim looks like him as well. And then there's the case of Lister's other son…himself. Despite having (an alternate version of) Kochanski as his mother his son gets all his looks from his father.
  • In Riverdale, "The Midnight Club" shows the main actors playing younger versions of her parents in their 1991-92 school year in high school.
  • A perfect inversion is done on a clip show of Roseanne where John Goodman plays a grown up version of son DJ.
    • It also featured a flashback in which DJ's actor plays a child version of Roseanne—his mom…
  • In the Sanctuary episode "Normandy", Helen Magnus recalls her part in the D-Day invasion during World War II. During their mission in Carentan, France, they are aided by American troops, headed by Captain Jack Zimmerman, who looks exactly like Will Zimmerman, Helen's second-in-command, and is played by the same actor. While Captain Zimmerman is killed at the end of the episode, it is implied that he is Will's grandfather. Interestingly, Helen makes no mention of this to Will, even though this could be one of the reasons she chose him to join the Sanctuary (i.e. his grandfather saved her life at the cost of his own).
  • The Sandman: Jenna Coleman plays both Johanna Constantine in "Dream a Little Dream of Me" and her 19th-century ancestor, Lady Johanna, in a flashback in "The Sound of Her Wings". The makers of the series deliberately used this trope so that when Lady Johanna showed up audiences would know immediately who she was, to the point of Gender Flipping the modern-day Constantine (who's a man named John in the original comic) so they could cast one actress in both parts.
  • The archetypal identical grandson appeared on the 1960s sitcom The Second Hundred Years, where Monte Markham played both a 33-year-old man named Ken Carpenter and his grandfather Luke, who had improbably been pulled out of suspended animation after 67 years in a glacial crevasse into which he'd fallen while prospecting at the age of (ta-dum) 33. The joke was first, that effectively 33-year-old Luke had a 67-year-old son, Ken's father; and second, that while Luke and Ken looked identical, they had completely different personalities, Ken being uptight and Luke loose and colorful.
  • Sesame Street:
    • On one episode, in a flashback, Gordon's father recalls how when he was young he was a singer who greatly resembled his grandson, Miles, despite the fact that Miles is ADOPTED.
    • In the Christmas Special Once Upon a Sesame Street Christmas, Elmo's dad tells him a story about his great-great-grandmonster (also named Elmo) arriving in a 19th century Sesame Street full of familiar Muppets in period clothing. It's even Lampshaded when Elmo realizes how implausible it is and catches on that his Dad is making the story up.
  • The episode, "How The Station Got Its Name" from Shining Time Station features the children and Mr. Conductor traveling back in time and meeting the grandparents of the people who run the station in their present. Unsurprisingly, the station's former staff are played by the same actors who play their grandchildren, and thus all look identical to said grandchildren. Even the Jukebox Band's grandparents look identical, though they work in a pedal piano instead of a jukebox.
  • On an episode of Simon & Simon involving an inheritance and Simon family history, we meet several generations of Simon brothers, played by the same actors playing the title heroes.
  • Smallville:
    • In the Flashback episode "Relic", we see Clark's real father, Jor-El, and Lana's great aunt, Louise McCallum, both played by Lana and Clark's actors. (Lionel Luthor's father and Jonathan Kent's father also appeared, but surprisingly Lachlan Luthor was played by John Mann instead of John Glover and Hiram Kent was played by Dean Wray instead of John Schneider.) Especially interesting because of the Retcon when Jor-El comes to Smallville (in the 9th season) and he is acted by Julian Sands… who looks nothing like Tom Welling… to the point of having different hair colors.
    • Also in the episode "Spell", it's revealed in flashback that Lana looks exactly like another one of her ancestors: the seventeen century witch Countess Margaret Isobel Thoureax.
  • In RTÉ's Gag Dub Soupy Norman, Esther's grandmother is identical to her, and is also named Esther. This is because they use footage of Esther with a sepia tint (Rule of Funny).
  • Occurred at least six times in different incarnations of Star Trek.
    • In the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Colonel Worf, grandfather of Lieutenant Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation, is played by Michael Dorn with a different forehead design.
      • A Star Trek novel specifically states that Worf was named after his grandfather, who was killed onboard a transport that collided with a Cardassian freighter (the sheer improbability of two ships accidentally colliding in orbit indicates sabotage). So yes, Worf's grandfather didn't die a warrior's death but was merely collateral damage.
    • The movie Star Trek Generations includes a portrait of one of Jean-Luc Picard's ancestors, who fought at Trafalgar. He looks exactly like Patrick Stewart.
    • In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "11:59," Captain Janeway's 20th century ancestor Shannon O'Donnell, later Shannon Janeway, is played by Kate Mulgrew. What's hilarious is that Seven of Nine is puzzled by Janeway's interest in O'Donnell's life, pointing out that after so many generations Janeway only has a fraction of her DNA. Hah!
      • Even more hilarious since humans share something like 99% of the same DNA, which means that Janeway's "fraction" of O'Donnell's DNA is much bigger than 7 seems to think.
    • A three-part story in Star Trek: Enterprise featured Dr Arik Soong, played by Brent Spiner, who had played Dr. Noonien Soong (and all the androids Noonien modelled on himself, including Commander Data as well as Data's Evil Twin Lore and undeveloped twin B4.) in Star Trek: The Next Generation. This has lead to some Fanwanky theories about Arik Soong actually being the same person as Noonien Soong, thanks to a rejuvenating planet Arik was in the neighborhood of once.
      • The source of said fankwankery seems to be a throwaway line by Arik Soong at the end of his three-episode arc, about giving up on genetic engineering (which in his time is illegal) in favor of creating androids. The writers no doubt intended for the implication to be that he would be unable to complete the designs in his own lifetime, and that his descendant later finished his work.
      • Other theories postulate that given Arik's expertise in genetic engineering, Noonien and all the generations between them were straight up clones.
    • The Enterprise story "Carbon Creek" features T'Pol's great-grandmother T'Mir, also played by Jolene Blalock. T'Mir's story is told by T'Pol and may or may not be true, but as to whether T'Pol really had a great-grandmother named T'Mir who really did look like T'Pol... well, that's another story. The episode ends with T'Pol taking out a purse from a box, which looks identical to the one her great-grandmother supposedly had on Earth. Vulcan women don't generally carry purses.
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation—an alternate timeline Tasha Yar and her half-Romulan daughter, Sela, are both played by Denise Crosby. Oddly enough, her sister Ishara Yar is not.
    • Also from the Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone", Claire Raymond, who was woken up from cryogenic stasis after 370 years, finds that she has a great-great-great-great-great-grandson… who looks identical to her husband Donald.
    • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Operation: Annihilate!", Kirk finds the body of his recently deceased brother — also played by William Shatner. It wasn't very visible in the original release, which is probably why they figured it would be workable, but it's incredibly apparent in the remastered version of the episode.
    • The two-part finale of Star Trek: Picard Season 1 introduces Noonien Soong's son Altan, also played by Brent Spiner. Season 2 adds Adam Soong in 2024, who is last seen taking a file entitled "Project Khan", seemingly setting up Arik Soong's association with the Augments in Enterprise. His daughter Kore is played by Isa Briones, who previously played Data's synthetic daughters. Picard also meets the apparently human Tallinn (Orla Brady) who appears identical to his Romulan love interest Laris. Picard suggests that Tallinn is an ancestor, which is supported when she reveals herself to be a Romulan.
    • And finally, the season 3 finale for Picard gives us a voiceover cameo from Anton Chekov, the son of Pavel, who had ascended to the office of President of the Federation, voiced by Walter Koenig. This one has double meaning, since in-universe it makes perfect sense that Pavel, fanboy of all things Russian, would name his son after the Russian playwright that coined Chekhov's Gun, but in the real world is a fitting tribute to the late Anton Yelchin, who had portrayed Pavel in the alternate timeline films.
  • St. Elsewhere: In "Time Heals, Part 2", Ed Flanders plays Donald Westphall's father Thomas Westphall in Flashbacks to 1935.
  • Super Sentai:
    • In Choudenshi Bioman, a flashback shows the five Bioman's respective ancestors played by the same actors.
    • Gosei Sentai Dairanger plays the more literal version of this trope in its final episode; the five Dairangers' actors play their grandchildren, the new Dairangers, and themselves in old age makeup 50 years into the future.
    • An interesting case occurs in Ninja Sentai Kakuranger where we see the five Kakurangers' ancestors from 500 years in the past. Only Tsuruhime (Satomi Hirose) is played her actress, while the boys' ancestors are played by older actors.
    • Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger episode 18 reveals that Banban Akaza / Deka Red (Ryuji Sainei) had an identical ancestor Bannoshin Akaza who taught the ways of the samurai to an alien 140 years prior. Funnily enough, the concept of a samurai encountering an alien was adapted into Power Rangers S.P.D., with Ryuji Sainei appearing through stock footage.
    • In Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger, it turns out that Daigo Kiryu / Kyoryu Red / (Ryo Ryusei) had an identical ancestor (Moshinosuke Iwaizumi) in the Sengoku period some 500 years prior, and that Sixth Ranger Fish out of Temporal Water Utsusemimaru served under before his Lord was killed in action. V-Cinema movie, "100 Years After", this trope is played literally with the new Kyoryugers. Well, technically it's "Identical Great-Grandson/Daughter" (or Great Great Nephew, in Nobuta's case).
  • In Time Trax, Darien Lambert's paramour from the future, Elissa Chang-Knox, is identical to her police grandmother in the present, Annie Knox. Annie helps Lambert for a few episodes.
  • Elena Gilbert of The Vampire Diaries looks identical to Katherine Pierce. This is unexplained until Elena finds out that she was adopted, and that her birth mother is a direct descendant of Katherine. Furthermore it's eventually revealed that the reason they look identical after many generations is because they're both "Petrova dopplegangers", indicating that there's a mystical reason for the doubling.
  • The Hayes Cooper stories in Walker, Texas Ranger (some of the counterparts aren't even directly related), Justified Trope by the fact that the stories come from a diary, while the picture is just part of Cordell Walker's imagination.
  • Wednesday: Both Wednesday Addams and her 1600s ancestor Goody Addams are played by Jenna Ortega. The key differences between the two are that Goody has a slight accent and white hair as opposed to Wednesday’s black.
  • Weird Science: In "The Legend of Red Brick Wallace", Gary's great-great-grandfather Red Brick Wallace looks exactly like his father Al. In the same episode, Wyatt and Chett's ancestor Sheriff Donnelly looks exactly like Chett, only with a moustache.
  • Vinnie Terranova's dad in Wiseguy (in an episode based around his father's diary). But they gave him a moustache.
  • Lyle Waggoner as "Steve Trevor" (1940s) and his son "Steve Trevor" (1970s) in Wonder Woman. After disappearing from Patriarch World after World War II ended, Diana meets Steve Trevor Jr. at the first episode of the second season, "The Return of Wonder Woman", a Setting Update in 1977. She first is very confused by thinking he hasn’t aged, but given she is an immortal Amazon warrior, Queen Hippolyta explains to her the concept of "sons".
  • The Xena: Warrior Princess episode "The Xena Scrolls" deserves special mention for not only featuring Identical Great-whatever-Grandchildren of all the main characters in the 1930s, but going on to claim Joxer's descendent, "Jacques Ser", is actually the grandfather of actor Ted Raimi!
    • Gabrielle's daughter Hope looks identical to her. Is there a trope for evil identical daughter?
  • Appeared on The X-Files when the actor who played the young CSM in a flashback episode was later cast as Agent Spender, CSM's son.
  • In 1985, British actress Jenny Seagrove portrayed the young Emma Harte in the mini-series adaptation of Barbara Cartland's iconic novel "A Woman of Substance". Just two years later, she played Emma's granddaughter Paula in the mini-series adaptation of the first sequel, "Hold the Dream".
  • Who's the Boss?: A flashback to Tony's childhood had his late grandfather Mateo also played by Tony Danza. Tony once found his parents' wedding photo in which his mother is Tony Danza in a wedding dress. Tony thinks he looks like his dad.

    Music 
  • Gloryhammer's hero Angus McFife from the first album, played by singer Thomas Winkler, is succeeded in the next two albums by his descendant Angus McFife XIII, played by Thomas Winkler. Then the trope seems to be averted with Angus McFife V in "Fly Away" when Winkler is replaced as both singer and McFife by Sozos Michael. But then Michael also appears as Angus McFife I in the video for "The Holy Flaming Hammer of Unholy Cosmic Frost" (before continuing as Angus McFife II for the rest of the album), meaning the first Angus has been performed by both Winkler and Michael, and the other Anguses all appear looking like either one or the other, so maybe story-wise, they all look the same after all.

    Print Media 
  • A 1989 issue of Radio Times commemorated the bicentennial of The French Revolution with an 'Allo 'Allo! story about an ancestor of Rene who was involved in the revolution as reluctantly as Rene himself was involved in La RĂ©sistance. This was illustrated with caricatures of Rene's actor, Gordon Kaye, in period costume.

    Pro Wrestling 

    Theatre 
  • In Allegiance, the modern-day version of the protagonist (who appears only in the first and last scenes) is played by the same actor who plays the protagonist's grandfather during the rest of the show (which is a flashback to the 1940s).
  • Reversed, but essentially the same: In a (frequently cut) scene from the final act of Angels in America, Prior meets the spirit of Louis' grandmother Sarah, whose funeral was one of the first scenes in the show. Kushner specifically states in the published script that Sarah is to be played by the actor who plays Louis, though obviously in some kind of costume and makeup.
  • The action of Arcadia is set in both the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. When the play is staged, the same actor is used to play Augustus, a character from the nineteenth century, and Gus, from the twentieth. It's not explicitly stated that the latter is directly descended from the former, but they are certainly related. (There is also a possibility that they are intended to actually be the same character.)
  • In the original stage version of Auntie Mame the actor who plays young Patrick Dennis for the first half of the show reappears as adult Patrick's son in the final scene.
  • The play Coram Boy has two actors playing one character, Alexander Ashbrooke—one is a girl who plays him as a young man, and in the first act it switches in a brilliant piece of staging to being a man that plays him. The actress who played Alexander as a young man returns in the second act as his son, Aaron.
  • In Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the young version of Hermione is played by the same actor as her daughter Rose. Scorpius even mistakes her for Rose.
  • In the 1960 telecast of Peter Pan (1954), in the epilogue, Wendy's daughter Jane is played by the same actress who played the child Wendy through most of the production, while the adult Wendy is played by a Time Shifted Actress. Averted in the revival that was telecast in 2000, however, where the same young adult actress plays Wendy both as a child and as a woman, just with a more mature hairstyle and Glasses of Aging in the epilogue, while Jane is played by a separate actress.
  • Most productions of Show Boat which don't outright cut the Eleven O'Clock Number will have it performed by the same actress playing Magnolia in the person of her daughter Kim. (Kim also appears earlier as a child, and in the final tableau as an extra turned away from the audience.)
  • Sunday in the Park with George has a double whammy: the actors who play painter Georges Seurat and his fictional mistress Dot in Act I play Georges and Dot's daughter Marie (in old lady makeup) and Marie's grandson George in Act II. The rest of the cast plays new roles, too, but that's more a matter of economy.
  • The adult narrator in the Framing Device of The Ocean at the End of the Lane is played by the same actor as his father in the flashback.

    Video Games 
  • Female kangaroo villagers in the Animal Crossing games all have little joeys who peek out from inside their pouches. The joeys are not only identical to their mothers but also share all of their mothers' facial expressions.
  • Assassin's Creed:
    • In both Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed II, AltaĂŻr and Ezio look exactly like the protagonist Desmond Miles. All three of them even have a perfectly identical scar on their mouth. It's justified in that the interface with which Desmond sees their memories, the Animus, is patching his face partially over theirs, for familiarity.
    • This trope has become less pronounced as the series has gone on. In Revelations, Desmond looks little like Ezio, AltaĂŻr or AltaĂŻr's children. By Assassin's Creed III the similarities have almost entirely disappeared: there's a certain family resemblance but neither Connor nor Haytham Kenway look like Desmond. Edward Kenway from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag doesn't resemble Desmond in any way.
  • In Beyond Skyrim it is possible to meet Harald Burdsson, a descendant of Captain Burd from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and he rather resembles his famous ancestor.
  • Captain Price in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare looks exactly like Captain Price of World War II-era Call of Duty 1 and 2, right down to the righteous mustache and badass attitude, though he is less polite.
    • A developer for Infinity Ward, Sami Onur, gave some Word of God on the matter. He said that the Modern Warfare Price is intended to be the grandson of the World War II Captain Price. There have been a few rather sneaky references to the actual character's origin, however (for instance, one of the final Modern Warfare 2 cutscenes makes it clear that Price still has the Call of Duty 1-specific dedicated pistol slot, containing the same incorrect-for-his-country M1911).
  • The Belmonts from the earlier Castlevania games, namely Simon, Christopher, and Trevor, strongly resembled each other, but this can be justified since the original games were for 8-bit platforms like the NES, MSX, and Game Boy, which weren't exactly known for their graphical prowess. Richter Belmont from the PC Engine's Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, was the first Belmont to actually look different from his predecessors and every Belmont afterward (whether it was from a sequel or prequel) followed suit.
  • An early plot point in the game Chrono Trigger is the fact that Marle, a princess from 1000 A.D., looks exactly like her ancestor Queen Leene from 600 A.D. When Marle travels back in time she is mistaken for Leene and takes her place as queen, leading to a Grandfather Paradox.
  • In Day of the Tentacle, you travel into the future and meet people who look suspiciously like Nurse Edna, Doctor Fred, and Weird Ed, but they call themselves "Nurse Zedna," "Doctor Zed" and "Weird Zed." They're the descendants of the original Maniac Mansion characters. Additionally, traveling to the past results in encounters with Red Edison, Dr. Fred Edison's identical ancestor (wearing a powdered wig, of course).
  • In Tecmo's Deception, you eventually hear word of a Legendary Brave who shares the same name as your own character, who was among those who sealed away the Devil in the past. You're eventually given the task of killing him and subsequently find out that he is your ancestor; whether you go through with it affects the ending.
  • This trope factors into a side quest in Dragon Age: Inquisition. The Inquisitor can accept a request to find evidence that Fairbanks, the local King of the Homeless, is really of noble birth. One of the pieces of evidence to be collected is a portrait of his grandfather, of whom Fairbanks is the spitting image.
  • In Drakengard 3, One and her twin brother bear a striking resemblance to Manah and Seere from the first game. This is because male One is their distant ancestor, according to supplementary material.
  • Ren Hojo from Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is related to Dr. Kunihiko Asou through a branch family and so bares a strong resemblance to him as well. Said resemblance causes the spirits who had met Dr. Asou while they were alive to mistake Ren as Dr. Asou, treating him with kindness instead of murderous hostility that he would have received otherwise. For example, Ouse Kurosawa never attacks Ren due to his resemblance to Dr. Asou, as she fell in love with Dr. Asou upon their initial encounter while they were alive.
  • Possible to pull off in the Revelation path of Fire Emblem Fates if Selena is married off to Subaki. Caeldori then looks like a dead ringer for her maternal grandmother Cordelia. She and her mother even get unique Supports regarding this trope that she doesn't get with any other potential mother.
    • Another example is Ophelia, who looks a lot like her paternal grandmother, Lissa. The resemblance is even greater should she have a blonde mother, and unlike with Caeldori, this can be done on either the Conquest or Revelation route.
    • In the Heirs of Fate DLC it's noted that Shigure looks like his very distant ancestor King Cadros of Valla.
  • Leisure Suit Larry's great-great-granduncle shows up in Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist: "Zircon" Jim Laffer. Not only does he look just like Larry, he has the same Casanova Wannabe personality and implied to be just as undesirable and unsuccessful in his pursuits.
  • In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, Matthew and Tyrell are the spitting images of their fathers, Isaac and Garet, as teenagers. Several other characters are also descended from the previous games' cast, but they're not quite as blatant as these two. Except Amiti, who despite dressing and acting completely differently is still mistaken for… someone in a mask… by an NPC in Tonfon Palace.
  • Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons:
    • This started as soon as Harvest Moon 64; you were the grandson of the original protagonist from the first game, Harvest Moon. The availiable bachelorettes look extremely similar to the original ones, minus Karen who only has her grandmother's blonde hair in her bangs.
    • The Japanese version of Harvest Moon DS has this trope happening with every single familiar character in the game, practically falling under Generation Xerox as well. Every character has the near-same personalities and backstories to those of their Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and Friends of Mineral Town ancestors, but don't have all the depressing, realistic backstories and plots that made their appearance in the games of A Wonderful Life so unique. They're happy-go-lucky, with little to no life problems. They also wear the same clothing and wedding clothing as their ancestors. (The bachelors and bachelorettes in A Wonderful Life and Another Wonderful Life don't wear wedding attire in-game but they have official art of the women in wedding dresses, which DS uses.) The only major difference? Their names, but even those tended to be blatant offshoots of the originals. This plot was almost completely dropped in the Western release, which attempted to treat hte games as connected by using the same names for everyone—but still had references to their ancestors, creating a Dub-Induced Plot Hole.
    • Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility combines this with the New Game Plus. Your child, regardless of who you married, can grow up to look exactly like you (or the opposite gender PC, depending on gender) and set off to start a farm on an island suspiciously identical to your own in every way, down to the inhabitants.
  • Final Fantasy XV's protagonist, Noctis Lucis Caelum, is the 114th in his family line, yet he bears a strong resemblance to Somnus Lucis Caelum, the first in his line, who lived over 2000 years ago.
  • Inazuma Eleven, the Endou family members who are related to soccer are looking the very similar: Daisuke, Mamoru, and Kanon.
  • The Guy from I Wanna Be the Guy looks almost the same as his son the Kid, except that he's four times as big, has a different facial expression and smokes a cigarette.
  • The King of Fighters:
    • Adelheid Bernstein (son of the evil Rugal Bernstein) is a younger Rugal minus the mustache.
    • Exaggerated Trope in KOF XIII: Saiki's near-identical appearance to Ash Crimson acts as foreshadowing that they have some sort of connection, before revealing that the latter is the former's descendent. This is despite Saiki being a time traveller who came into existence thousands of years ago.
  • This trope is key to solving a puzzle in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. In order to gain access to the services and records on the Liber Ark, the party needs to unlock the encryption lock on a Gospel which among other things, functions as an ID. The problem lies in the fact that it's genetically keyed to the owner's records make it impossible even for the local Genius Ditz to crack. As it turns out, Princess Kloe is descended from someone who had an account: Celeste D. Auslese. The ancestor in question had been dead for nearly twelve centuries. Interestingly, the computer claims that she bears a 72% match to Celeste herself.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link and Zelda appear again and again… only they're not quite the same Link nor Zelda. Only one Link has been confirmed to be the direct descendant of another note . However, it's implied in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and in The Wind Waker that the green-clad hero and noble lady of the royal line may be reincarnated again and again. Zelda II actually has Link set out on a quest by Princess Zelda to wake one of her predecessors, also named Princess Zelda, from a deep sleep.
    • Although similar, Link and Zelda don't exactly look identical in each game. For instance, though Zelda has been bright-blonde in most of the post-Ocarina games, her Twilight Princess look is dirty-blonde/brunette.
    • In Oracle of Ages, anyone who was actually surprised that Ralph is Queen Ambi's grandson clearly has never looked at the character art— they're both Significant Green Eyed Redheads with forked eyebrows and a penchant for the color blue. Gender, age, and clothing aside, the only visual difference between them is that Ambi has Tareme Eyes and Ralph has Tsurime Eyes.
    • Spirit Tracks has Linebeck III as a literal example, who looks exactly like his grandad from Phantom Hourglass. Zelda herself lacks the strong tan and Odango-esque hairstyle of her great-great-grandmother (though they do look the same when dressed up). Link looks the same, although we don't exactly know if he's actually related to Wind Waker Link. In fact, a lot of characters in Spirit Tracks bear resemblance to their potential ancestors from Phantom Hourglass and Wind Waker.
    • In The Wind Waker, Hyrule Castle has a portrait of Princess Zelda with her retainers. You might find that these pira—er, retainers look a bit familiar to Tetra's crew. Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule also has a suspiciously similar-looking ancestor by the name of Daltus in The Minish Cap (who himself has an identical ancestor named Gustaf).
    • Skyward Sword introduces two minor ones, both shopkeepers: the fortune-teller Sparrot, ancestor of Twilight Princess's Madame Fanadi, and yet another incarnation of Beedle. This is a somewhat interesting case, as the next appearances of these likenesses occur many hundreds of years after this game, meaning either their family lines managed to keep their heads down for all that time or that it's not just Link and Zelda who get reincarnated.
    • Breath of the Wild introduces us to Impa's granddaughter Paya, and while Impa in that game is a Miniature Senior Citizen so they don't look all that much alike, the prequel Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity shows that Paya is nearly the spitting image of Impa 100 years ago.
  • In Lenny Loosejocks In Space, Lenny is recruited for his world-saving mission by his distant future grandson, Leeroy Loosejocks. Despite being born over 1,000 years apart, Leeroy looks and sounds identical to Lenny, even down to wearing nothing but a pair of identical shorts.
  • In one of the more egregious examples of this trope, Lunar: Eternal Blue features a certain shopkeeper in Meribia named Ramus, who is a descendant of the original Ramus from Lunar: The Silver Star. The two of them look identical (right down to their girth), have the same name (it's apparently a family tradition now), run the exact same store (which looks almost completely unchanged from the first game) and even wear the exact same clothes and glasses. Did we mention that Eternal Blue is set over 1000 years after the events of the original game? A downplayed example would be Lemina, whom from the waist up looks like a Palette Swap of her ancestor Mia.
  • Used in the Metal Gear series with Big Boss and his three clone sons. Solid Snake and Liquid Snake in Metal Gear Solid are mirror images of each other, but with different skin tones and hairstyles, while Solidus Snake in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, who has the same face as Solid Snake, is said to resemble the elder Big Boss from the early Metal Gear games. In contrast, Naked Snake, the young Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, resembles the young Solid Snake from the MGS titles.
    • It is later averted though, in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. When Big Boss shows up in the epilogue, he looks very different from Old Snake, with a different voice actor. However, Old Snake is an imperfect clone of Big Boss, and his accelerated aging combined with FOXDIE, his facial damage in the Volta River fire and his physical ailments could have simply taken him biologically in a different direction.
    • Also, except for the latter's wheelchair, Otacon is the image of his father, Huey, complete with the same style of glasses.
  • A budgetary necessity in the original Myst; the three characters with speaking roles were all played by the game's directors, Rand and Robyn Miller. Rand played both Atrus and his villainous son, Achenar; for the latter, he took off his glasses, mussed up his hair and beard, changed costumes, and spoke in a higher-pitched borderline-Ax-Crazy voice (he gave Atrus a lower and more gravelly voice to increase the contrast).
  • Phantasy Star Zero manages to pull this one under the radar. Ogi and Nicolas both ask you if you're 200+ years old early in the game (which is outright preposterous unless you're a CAST). Later, you get a video from before the Great Blank that shows someone identical to you in the battle before the aforementioned catastrophe. The third instance crops up when you encounter Mother Trinity, who has a sudden realization just who you really are.
    • This trope is played straight as a Photon arrow if you're playing as a Human—you're a descendant of the guy (or gal) who started the rebellion against her.
    • If you're a Newman, she comes to the realization that she messed up big time—not only are you a clone of the one who united the Newmans against her but she cloned you herself!
  • PokĂ©mon Legends: Arceus features a vast array of characters that are dead ringers for present-day characters in the franchise and very heavily implied to be their ancestors; however, the only confirmed case is Kamado, who is stated to be Professor Rowan's ancestor in promotional material.
  • In Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, the resemblance between Katia and her grandmother, Sophia, is so strong that even the game's main antagonist confuses the two. Considering that he's mistaking Katia for his estranged lover and he's really her grandfather, it's no wonder the poor girl gets a little distressed before she finally gets a chance to explain.
  • Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse:
    • In the episode "The Tomb of Sammun-Mak," you play as their grandfathers, Sameth and Maximus.
    • Nicholas St. Kringle is implied to be the ancestor of Santa Claus.
  • Mai Shiranui, if Gen-An's ending in the first Samurai Shodown is to be believed.
  • Shadow of Destiny is made of this trope. In every era, there are people who resemble the citizens in the other eras. In fact, the main character even lampshades this once. The game ends up subverting it once, however, in the biggest plot twist of the game. A character you spend most of the game assuming is your ancestor (though he doesn't exactly resemble you) turns out to be ''you''.
  • Ricardo Chellini, the protagonist of Shiver: Poltergeist, notes a close resemblance between himself and the erstwhile (and similarly-named) heir of the Kangale family, Richard, whose Old, Dark House Ricardo has just inherited. The resident poltergeist doesn't seem to like Ricardo at all…
  • Dr. Eggman from the Sonic the Hedgehog series looks almost exactly like his grandfather, Gerald Robotnik (first introduced in Sonic Adventure 2). Eggman Nega, who claims to be Eggman's descendant from the future in Sonic Rivals also looks exactly like Eggman, except his mustache is gray and he wears newer clothes.
  • This serves to advance the plot in Super Mario RPG. When the group enters the sculptor's house in Nimbus Land they find a statue that looks just like resident Black Mage Mallow. The sculptor tells them it's a statue of King Nimbus as a kid. This makes everyone realize Mallow is the legitimate prince of Nimbus Land and that the one presented by Valentina is a fake.
  • In Sword of the Samurai none of your descendants are visible - until you die and one of them replaces you, at which point the new head of the family always looks completely identical to the previous one. This is mostly averted with the AI-controlled families, although the limited number of portraits means that once in a while this will happen to them as well.
  • Tales of Phantasia has three generations of this, due to the three time periods. Each time period has its own member of the Morrison family, all of whom use the same sprite with only the clothes being different (and that's just a color swap). In addition, two characters from a sidequest in the "past" section of the game have descendants who grow up to look just like the original characters.
  • Subversion: if Jimbo and Sully from Contra III: The Alien Wars looked way too much like Bill and Lance from the original arcade/NES Contra games, that's because they are Bill and Lance. In the Japanese continuity, the series always took place in the future, so there was never any need to change main characters, but in the original American continuity the earlier games were moved from the future to the present, forcing the name change for the main characters when the SNES installment kept the futuristic setting.
  • Twisted Wonderland:
    • Epel shares his easily recognizable curly lavender hair and blue eyes with his grandmother Marya. It's later revealed that a younger Marya essentially resembled Epel in a dress.
    • Sebek turns out to look very similar to his maternal grandfather Baur.
    • Silver versus his biological father, the Knight of the Dawn is even worse: the latter is just the former's sprite with different hairstyle and clothes. They don't even have different voice actors.
  • The Way of the Samurai games use this enable The Blacksmith Dojima to appear in every game (As they take place 20 to 300 years apart).
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country introduces Hugo, the emperor of Mor Ardain at the time. During the base game, which takes place five hundred years later, the empire of Mor Ardain is shown to be lead by Niall, who's essentially just a mirrored version of his ancestor with a different outfit on, with the two even sharing the same voice actors. Subverted however as Hugo dies before siring an heir, meaning that while they share a common ancestor, Niall is not his direct descendant, leaving this a case of Uncanny Family Resemblance.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed: Nikol appears all but identical to Shulk as he appeared during Xenoblade Chronicles 1. Even his clothes and skills are extremely similar, which lead to a lot of speculation and debate about his existence when he first appeared in the base game as a statue, with many convinced he was his ancestor.

    Visual Novels 
  • Choices: Stories You Play tends to reuse assets across books. One of the earliest examples is Zenobia and Olivia Nevrakis from The Crown & the Flame and The Royal Romance respectively. Many of the characters from the Interquel The Royal Masquerade resemble their ancestors in the former story and their descendants in the latter.
  • Kori, from Time Hollow, ends up in a relationship with the protagonist's uncle, after sending him back through time to save her from certain death. In the present day, after the credits, we meet a girl who looks exactly like Kori, implied to be her daughter.
  • The Great Ace Attorney, a Spin-Off series of the Ace Attorney franchise that's set in the beginning of the 20th century, has two cases of this.
  • In Umineko: When They Cry, Genji remarks that Battler looks a lot like Kinzo used to back when he was young. He is not wrong. This is taken further when Battler's hair turns white in Twilight of the Golden Witch and he cuts it short, taking the "damn-near" out of damn-near identical.

    Web Animation 
  • In Deadly Space Action!, Gregarion the Sea Barbarian is either an identical ancestor or an Identical Stranger to Lemarion the Space Barbarian.
  • Etra chan saw it!: Sometimes the parent and their child are portrayed by the same actor of their respective ages.
    • In this episode, Karin and her aunt (also Karin) are identical to each other. It also serves as a plot point as Hiiragi is creepily obsessed with his sister before going after Karin as well, for having an identical appearance to her aunt.
    • In one episode, Karin's sister is Yuri, their mother is also Yuri, and Yuri's twin daughters are also Yuri.
  • Vic and Vic Jr. (who was multiple generations removed) in Red vs. Blue use identical models and voice actors. This is played for laughs more than anything else. Later seasons strongly imply that not only was Vic Jr. actually just Vic being deceptive, but that Vic wasn't even human. Later confirmed that VIC is an AI created to oversee the simulation troopers. He was originally serious and businesslike, until Agent Florida (a.k.a. Captain Butch Flowers) accidentally knocked out his power cable, resulting in data corruption and personality changes.

    Webcomics 
  • In the sprite comic 194X, Kalinka and Ran strongly resemble their WWII-era ancestors. It's hard to decide whether the fact that Ran is a robot makes this better or worse.
  • In Dragon City, Erin and Beatrix look like blue and green versions of their father Sam (respectively, though Trixie turns out to actually be his granddaughter), and Jonas looks like a red version of their mother Rachel. Rachel and her sister Sarah look like their mother, too.
  • In The Dreamer, 21st—century Bea and 18th—century Bea look exactly the same.
  • In El Goonish Shive, we are told Nanase is the spitting image of her Aunt Noriko (who has not yet been properly seen).
  • In Endstone, Jon comments on how uncanny it is, the way his daughter resembles his mother.
  • In Erma when visiting the Youkai side of the family, everyone comments how the titular Erma is identical to her Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl mother, Emiko, when she was younger.
  • In Erstwhile, the princess is the image of her dead mother. This is Not A Good Thing.
  • Tarvek Sturmvarous in Girl Genius apparently looks so much like his father did at his age that the Time Abyss Big Bad initially thinks he is the same person.
  • In Gourmet Hound, Chef Palmier briefly mistakes Lucy for her grandmother Lynn.
  • Gunnerkrigg Court's Antimony and her mother. There's a very good reason for this.
  • Homestuck: Averted. All of the characters involved in an SBURB session have a parent or ancestor who resembles them, and troll culture (due to Bizarre Alien Reproduction making tracing lineage impossible) even has characters latch on to historical figures who share the most physical features, calling those "ancestors", but it's rare for them to be identical. Quite a feat, considering the limited art style. Interestingly, the one person who does subscribe to this trope is Dad: he looks like a less hairy version of his grandfather by adoption, Colonel Sassacre.
  • Irregular Webcomic!'s Ishmael's grandfather is identical to him. Same with the Mythbusters. Well, kinda. They're actually each other's grandfathers, thanks to abuse of the My Own Grandpa trope, and therefore their own great-great grandfathers. The grandfathers we see turn out to be unrelated to the Mythbusters at all.
  • In Jix, Lauren's daughter, Alice, in flashforwards look like a young version of Lauren.
  • Coney Dewclaw, the carnivorous rabbit in Kevin & Kell, looks exactly like her grandmother Dorothy Kindle did when she was Coney's age. Unfortunately for Coney, that includes her height, meaning she's the shortest of her peer group once they start hitting their growth spurts. When Coney does get a growth spurt, it's only in her ears, which causes them to flop over...which just makes the resemblance to Dorothy even more uncanny. The only obvious difference is that, while Coney is a blonde, Dorothy has been depicted in flashbacks as a brunette before her hair turned white.
    Coney: I wondered at what point I'd start to look like my grandmother...
  • In Narbonic, versions of Helen, Dave, and Mell appear each generation. Partly justified as the Helens are cloning themselves, which becomes a plot point during a Mental Time Travel arc when Dave mistakes Helen's mother for her daughter.
  • The Order of the Stick: Elan and Nale's father is depicted exactly like his sons, only with gray hair due to age, and brown hair in flashbacks (though it is hard to tell).
  • Ozy and Millie: Most of Ozy's adoptive ancestors that Llewellyn tells stories about appear highly similar to Llewellyn. Possibly justified in that Llewellyn may or may not be making them up.
  • The time travel storyline of PvP includes a presumed ancestor of Max Powers who looks and behaves just like him. Modern technology was invisible to medieval Max just as Skull was (until recently) invisible to modern Max.
  • Lampshaded in Questionable Content with Marten's dad, who strongly resembles him except for the hair, though that's in part due to Generic Cuteness. Upon meeting Mr. Reed, Dora exclaims "You're going to be so hot when you go gray!"
  • The protagonist of Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger is a distant descendant of the hero of Tales of the Questor and looks almost the same (even has the same white forelock). Though he does seem a little older and more experienced.
  • In the Walkyverse and Dumbing of Age, Joe's father Richard looks exactly like him with a beard. (In Shortpacked!, Joe grows a beard and Richard's goes grey.) Ethan's father in Dumbing of Age also looks exactly like him with a moustache. Most other characters have a strong resemblance to their parents, but aren't identical, since Willis's preferred method is Patchwork Kids.
  • In The Wretched Ones, the trope spans 3 generations as John, his father David, and their ancestor Nicholas all look strikingly similar (at least, David in his youth). This goes for Charlie and his father as well.

    Web Original 
  • Due to a narrow selection of male partners, the mother of Dee from Tales of MU is the spitting image of her great-great-grandmother, the family's current matriarch. Not one to waste an opportunity, the matriarch uses her descendant as assassin bait.

    Web Videos 
  • Subverted in Le Visiteur du Futur: Raph tries to prevent the ancestor of the Visitor from meeting the mother of his future child. After revealing that he is the Visitor posing as his ancestor, he tells Raph: "You thought my ancestor had the same face as me? That's completely dumb."
  • In "The Descendents of Pompeii," an official Doctor Who webcast, Maxine and her daughter Evie are played by Tracy Childs and Fransesca Fowler, who played Metella and Evelina in "The Fires of Pompeii". Their family also has a strong Generation Xerox element to it, with the same professions recurring.

    Western Animation 
  • The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3: Mario and Luigi's 13th-century ancestors look similar to their modern counterparts, except they wear... 16th-century armor?
  • This was used way back in the old Archie cartoons, which routinely showed the "ancestors" of the Archie gang in historical time periods for educational purposes.
  • One episode of Arthur had D.W. curious of her grandmother Thora's antique doll prompting a story on how she got it. In the flashback, Thora a spitting image of D.W. right down to the voice. Thora's three brothers also resemble Arthur to an extent. Also, Binkey's great grandfather looked exactly like him as a child.
  • Avenger Penguins:
    • "The Wild Wild Wild West" shows that the villains Caractacus P. Doom, Harry Slime, and the Stink Brothers all had identical ancestors in the Wild West.
    • "The 23rd Century" revolves around identical descendants of the Avenger Penguins, Doom, and Slime.
    • The episode "High Doom" has the Doc from Saskatoon tell the Avenger Penguins about the adventures of their Wild West ancestors, who look exactly like the Avenger Penguins. The Wild West ancestors of Doom, Slime, and the Stink Brothers also appear.
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold:
    • In the episode "Time Out For Vengeance!", all of Batman's spiritual ancestors and descendants (who may also be biologically related, but nothing's said either way) look and sound very similar to the series' main Batman.
    • Black Canary is shown to be exactly identical to her mother, the original Black Canary, with the only distinction being her mother wore a mask, where Dinah doesn't.
  • In a possible future of Ben 10, Ben's son looks just like a darker skinned present-day Ben (possibly implying a relationship with Kai). Kevin's son looks like a non-mutated version of present-day Kevin.
  • Big City Greens: The episode “Family Legacy” shows flashbacks of previous generations of the Green family, and their ancestors resemble the Greens of the modern day. Bixby resembles Cricket, Metrona resembles Tilly, and Jerome, Archibald, and Alice’s father all resemble Bill.
  • Captain Planet and the Planeteers:
    • A triple case in "Hog Tide". Don Porkaloin, Rex Rigger I, and Betty Blight all look the same as their respective grandchildren, save for small details, like Don's mustache.
    • In "Future Shock", Zarm recruits three Eco-Villains from the distant future to try and ensure that their future happens by having them go back in time and kill a girl before she could grow up to encourage others to be more eco-friendly. The villains are descended from and bore a strong resemblance to Dr. Blight, Looten Plunder, and Verminous Skumm. To even the odds, Gaia later recruits a future team of Planeteers from an alternate timeline, with the bearers of fire, wind, and heart resembling Wheeler, Linka and Ma-Ti and the bearers of earth and water resembling gender-flipped versions of Kwame and Gi. Humorously, Wheeler asks Linka if their resemblance to the future bearers of fire and wind are a sign that they'll be together, but Linka denies this.
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog: Eustace and his father look the same, except Eustace's father had a beard.
  • There was an arc in the old Inspector Gadget cartoon. Dr. Claw decides to get rid of Gadget by eliminating his ancestors via Time Travel. This goes for several episodes, including prehistoric times, Ancient Rome, and 19th Century Britain. In each, there is an almost-identical variant of Gadget, niece Penny, and their dog, Brain. The prehistoric version of Gadget even has a few Bamboo Technology gadgets!
  • Danny Phantom: Jack Fenton and his ancestor John Fenton Nightingale.
  • In an episode of Detentionaire, while reading Finnwich's Mannifestum, Jenny finds an image of a boy who looks similar to Lee, but with a different hairstyle. He turns out to be Lee's relative (either grandfather or great-grandfather) and a founder of MWF, who defected after learning of their benefactor's true motivations.
  • In the Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop episode "Medieval Dread", Dr. Zitbag is brought from the present day to medieval times by Moron the Magician so he can fight a dragon. While there, Zitbag encounters medieval ancestors of himself, Horrifido, Officer Deadbeat, the Exorsisters, Professor Sherman Vermin, and Fingers Malone.
  • In an episode of The Fairly OddParents!, 19th-century Dimmsdale is shown, with the ancestors of their inhabitants all looking like their descendants. The ancestor of Timmy Turner even has Cosmo and Wanda as his fairy godparents (given that they are immortal).
    • It's implied in another episode, which takes place during the 16th century in the town that will be known as Dimmsdale. One of the inhabitants is a man named Alden Bitterroot, who looks exactly like Timmy's fairy-obsessed teacher, Denzel Crocker, implying that he is an ancestor of him. Alden even shares Crocker's personality, mannerisms, and obsession with the supernatural, but instead of fairies, he is obsessed with witches.
    • An odd instance of this appears in the Breakin' Da Rules! PC game. One level has Timmy time-travel to the 1970s 1950s and have to avoid the younger-aged version of Vicky and Tootie's affectionate mother, Nicky. In-game dialogue from Timmy suggests that Nicky is supposed to resemble Tootie (which she, sure enough, does when she appears on the show)… but the graphics depict her as looking like De-aged Vicky from the "Switch Glitch" episode.
    • There's also Channel Chasers, which shows Tommy Turner, who looks like his father with black hair (cluing the audience to believe Trixie or Tootie is his mother). The later episode "Timmy Turnip" has Timmy Turner's grandfather who looks like an older version of him, but with bigger, lighter blue eyes.
    • Jorgen's grandmom Nana Boom Boom looks and sounds very much like him.
    • One of the Oh Yeah! Cartoons shorts featured Vicky Khan, Vicky's ancestor who babysat Ghengis Khan.
  • Used repeatedly in Family Guy episodes referencing Peter's ancestors, usually named Real Famous Person's Name Griffin, all of whom look and sound exactly like Peter.
    • Subverted in one notable exception where Peter discovers that one of his ancestors is actually black, though still looks and sound otherwise identical. In this flashback, Nate Griffin's (white) wife looks identical to Lois, even though Lois is actually descended from her sister.
    • In a later episode, it is revealed that Peter's biological father is actually a man named Mickey McFinnigan, who looks very similar to Peter. This also means that the identical-looking Griffin ancestors were not actually related to him at all. At least not officially, there's nothing preventing one of them from stopping by Ireland…
  • On Garfield and Friends, Some episodes are set in the past and usually feature cats that look and sound like Garfield with different coloring. It's implied they are his ancestors. In one episode Garfield flashes back to when his great uncle Buchanan was sent into space and he looks and sounds exactly like Garfield. Another episode features Jon's Italian ancestor, Tony Arbuckli.
  • Played straight in Goldie Gold and Action Jack episode, "Race Against Time", with Goldie Gold and her great-grandmother, Carlotta Gold. She even have gadgets that ride that reminds Travis of Goldie's 1980s vehicles.
  • In Surprise Party from Holly Hobbie and Friends, Holly Hobbie is said to be the spitting image of her grandmother, the original Holly Hobbie.
  • Hurricanes: Stavros Garkos IV, who sent a robot 100 years back in time to change the results of a bet where Stavros Garkos lost everything other than his soccer team, looks like Stavros Garkos. The whole plot was All Just a Dream and there's no evidence that Stavros Garkos IV will even exist.
  • In The Incredible Hulk (1982), the villain of the episode "When Monsters Meet" was a descendant of Quasimodo who, like his ancestor, was a misshapen hunchback.
  • An episode of Jackie Chan Adventures features a journal, written by Jackie's ancestor, which involved identical western ancestors of all the main characters. However, it was established that this was being visualized by Jade, and she was deliberately ignoring that the journal described the character she'd picked as her own counterpart as an adult. On the other hand, the cover of the book clearly showed the "Hong Kong Kid" was identical to Jackie.
  • In The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, Judy broods over losing her Stone Age boyfriend Iggy, moping, "A boy that fabulous comes along just once in a million years!" Cue the entrance of Iggy's Space Age descendant, who is a perfect replica of Judy's long-ago crush.
  • Subverted in an episode of Justice League where a character resembling Vandal Savage from a Time Travel episode taking place in World War II claims to be his descendant. It turns out they're the same person and he is immortal.
  • In the Kim Possible episode "Rewriting History," practically every main character on the show had a counterpart one hundred years ago with not only a similar appearance, but a similar name. According to Word of God, the episode was not a dream. Additionally, after they come out of the dream (and regardless of its actual status) Kim and Ron are confronted by a statue of someone who looks exactly like Ron from Ancient Rome and learns of his ancient nemesis and mysterious female ally who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dr. Drakken and Kim.
  • In King of the Hill, Hank looks identical to his mother while Peggy looked almost exactly like her mother—before the retcon, that is. Bobby looks somewhat similar to his grandfather Cotton, except short and chubby, although it is unknown where he got his blonde hair from; all of his relatives were shown to have brown hair in their youth.
    • In a flashback in the Halloween episode, young Hank looked just like Bobby.
    • There's also Jun-ichiro, Hank's Japanese half-brother, who looks exactly like Hank with a different haircut, despite having a different mother.
    • A couple of flashback episodes showed that Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer all resembled their dad as well. The case with Dale's father was eventually retconned, and later episodes gave him a radically different appearance and voice actor.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender: Zuko greatly resembles his paternal grandfather, Fire Lord Azulon. He also strongly resembles a teenage version of his father, Ozai.
  • The Legend of Korra:
    • General Iroh is not only voiced by the same actor who played his grandfather Zuko in the beloved original series, but he is named after his great-great-uncle. Appearance-wise, he's much like an adult Zuko. The only major difference between the two of them (minus the scar) is that Iroh has a bit wider of a jaw.
    • Katara is now well into old age and looks quite a lot like her own grandmother did.
    • Jinora, Aang's granddaughter, looks quite a lot like her grandfather did when he was young. The difference isn't as obvious due to Jinora being a girl with a full head of hair, but it's still there. It becomes extremely obvious at the end of season 3, as she shaves her head and receives the airbending master's tattoos. She looks nearly identical to Aang in the ending shot. The biggest difference is that they have different eye colors, but their faces are very similar.
    • Lin looks very similar to her grandmother, Poppy.
  • Kion from The Lion Guard is only a cub but seems to be this. He resembles his father strongly but resembles his grandfather, Mufasa, even more. He has a similar fur tone, the same stocky build, and the beginnings of a red mane like Mufasa's.
  • Littlest Pet Shop (2012) has Henrietta Twombly, the great-great-grandmother of Mrs. Twombly, who happened to have seven pets who looked like the day camp regulars; and the Biskit Brothers, ancestors of the Biskit Twins. There was also a sheriff who looked like Blythe.
  • A Looney Tunes shortnote  had an odd example; a scene from a Sylvester and Sylvester Jr. cartoon is shown, but we're told this is Sylvester as a kitten with his father. Similarly in The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries episode "A Mynah Problem".
  • In Loonatics Unleashed, all the future descendants of the Looney Tunes resemble their ancestors to some degree.
  • The Loud House:
    • Lincoln strongly resembles his maternal grandfather Albert, and his sister Lucy looks almost identical to their great-grandmother Harriet.
    • The whole Loud family's distant ancestors from Scotland in The Loud House Movie also bear a very stark resemblance to them.
  • In Metalocalypse, Murderface is literally identical to his grandmother, Stella, but with different hair color and facial hair.
  • Phineas and Ferb has their entire cast get into the act in "The Monster of Phineas-n-Ferbenstein".
    • Instead of having Candace trying to tell her mother what her brothers are up to, we've got Constance threatening to tell a mob the Phineas and Ferb analogues made a monster. Like Linda Flynn, the mob doesn't believe her until they see Constance having got turned into a monster.
    • Only confirmed ancestor was Ferb's look-alike. And this is probably just a kid's visualization of Grandpa's story, not really a flashback (Phineas and Candace disputing about proper picture style)
    • In the episode "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo", Candace (20 years older) has a daughter almost identical to her. And Candace herself grew up to be much like her mom. Sort of averted with her other kids—despite her future family clearly mirroring her current one (complaining older daughter, two serene younger sons), neither looks like their avuncular counterparts. On the other hand, Xavier's blond hair does bring to mind who his father might be…
  • Pirate's Passage features James Hawkins in the 1717 prologue and his descendant Jim in the main story in 1952.
  • In an episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998), Professor Utonium's 19th-century ancestor is shown, looking just like his descendant. He creates his own version of the Powerpuff Girls using steampunk technology.
  • Rupert made use of this trope twice.
    • "Rupert's Roman Adventure" had Rupert Bear and Bill Badger go back in time to when Nutwood was a village called Nutwoodium and was being visited by Julius Caesar. While there, they encounter identical ancestors of the Professor, Dr. Chimp, Podgy Pig, and Ottoline Otter.
    • "Rupert and Queen Bess" had Rupert and Ottoline go back to the time of William Shakespeare. People bearing at least some resemblance to Podgy Pig, Algy Pug, and Bill Badger who are most likely their ancestors from that time can be seen.
  • An old episode of Scooby-Doo once had Shaggy and Scooby exploring an old mansion belonging to Shaggy's family. In a hallway containing numerous family portraits, Shaggy mentions that all of the members in his family have the same nose shape (so he could say "noses run in the family"), but the actual pictures show that every member of the Rogers family looks exactly the same as Shaggy. Even the women.
  • Sheep in the Big City:
    • In the episode "Baa-ck in Time", General Specific and Private Public travel through time, at one point coming across a Conquistador ancestor of General Specific who's almost identical to him.
    • The episode "Baah-dern Times" has the cast becoming sick and the narrator deciding to keep the audience entertained with a silent film starring the grandfathers of Sheep and General Specific, who each bears a considerable resemblance to his respective grandson.
  • In The Simpsons Abe Simpson looks exactly like his son, but older and wrinkled. In flashback episodes, Abe and Homer look exactly alike. Marge and her mother also bear a strong resemblance.
    • The episode "The Color Yellow" has a weird variation on this — at first, the episode leads you to believe that the characters Hiram, Mabel, and Eliza Simpson (who look exactly like Homer, Marge, and Lisa, and who must be Homer's ancestors since their name is Simpson) are the identical ancestors of the present-day Simpsons. It turns out, though, that Mabel divorced Hiram and married escaped slave Virgil (who took Mabel's last name), which means that Homer and the kids have an ancestor who's identical to Marge. On the other hand, the trope is played straight with their son Abraham, who looks exactly like a slightly darker-complexioned Bart.
    • One episode showed that Grandpa served alongside identical ancestors of Barney Gumble, Principal Skinner, and Chief Wiggum. And three other guys. It's also implied their CO was one for Ned Flanders.
  • The Smurfs (1981): Notice that Gargamel's mother looks exactly like him. Also, in season 9 with the Smurfs traveling in time, they find several identical ancestors of both Gargamel and Azrael in Egypt, Rome, and Scotland, among others.
    • Also Hogatha and Johan hace identical ancestors. Johan's ancestor in Tsarist Russia is even called Ivan which is Russian for Johan.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • In Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic and Robotnik's ancestors look and act very similar to their modern day counterparts.
    • In Sonic Underground, the hedgehogs find the tomb of an Ancient Egyptian ancestor of theirs who looks (and acts) just like Sonic.
  • All SpongeBob SquarePants episodes that have shown prehistoric ancestors of SpongeBob, Squidward and Patrick have depicted them as being practically identical to the modern day versions but with loincloths, unibrows and sharp teeth. Oddly, Mr. Krabs' distant ancestors were far smaller than their modern equivalents. The episode "The Great Patty Caper" ends with the reveal that it was a story told by an old SpongeBob to his grandson, who looks exactly like him but with a bolo tie and a red baseball cap.
  • Two SWAT Kats episodes feature Queen Callista, Callie Briggs' lookalike medieval ancestor.
  • Occurs in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) with the second Turtle Titan and his grandfather, the Silver Sentry. Curiously enough, the characters started out with different voice actors—Silver Sentry was voiced by Terrence Archie, while Marc Diraison (Berserk's Guts) voiced Turtle Titan—until the seventh season, when Diraison took over the Silver Sentry role.
  • Time Warp Trio at one point has the three boys of the original trio meet three girls from the 22nd century who are their own great-granddaughters. Each girl has the same hair and skin color as her ancestor, and the boy with glasses has a great-granddaughter with glasses, but not only are these descendants of the opposite gender, each has a personality that is the opposite of her ancestors'.
  • The Venture Bros. has Jonas Venture Jr., who inherited his father's handsome rugged looks and intellect despite living inside his fraternal twin brother's torso as an absorbed fetus for over 40 years (which resulted in his undeveloped body). In contrast to Thaddeus, who is the antithesis of their father.
  • The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald has this happen in the fifth video "Have Time, Will Travel". When Ronald and friends go to prehistoric times, they encounter caveman versions of themselves. Later, when the gang goes to the Wild West, Hamburglar is mistaken by an angry mob for his great-great-grandfather Henry H. Burglar II, who looks just like Hamburglar, but with a mustache.
  • Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: "I Am Madam President" shows that Yadina strongly resembles her great-great grandmother.
  • In the X-Men: The Animated Series episode "Descent", the Victorian physician Dr. James Xavier looks like Professor X with a fringe of hair and (in 1888) a mustache.

    Real Life 
  • British statesman Austin Chamberlain heavily resembles his father the famous Joseph Chamberlain monocle and everything
  • A 20-year-old woman named Maggie Patterson noticed an old picture of her grandmother on her wedding day at age 20. She noticed how much they looked a like so she took a picture using the same facial expression and combined the two creating a mirror image
  • Jessica Alba posted an old picture of her grandmother that uncannily looks like her.
  • Orville Redenbacher started appearing in commercials with his real identical grandson shortly before his death. Now his grandson has his role.
  • Nick Tweed-Simmons looks a lot like his father Gene Simmons did at his age. Likewise his sister Sophie is a spitting image of their mother Shannon Tweed.
  • Musician Hank Williams III is said to have an amazing resemblance to his grandfather, the legendary Hank Williams. Minnie Pearl, an old friend of Hank Williams, remarked upon first meeting his grandson, "Lord, honey, you're a ghost."
  • New Orleans Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau had a daughter named Marie Laveau who was also a New Orleans Voodoo Queen who reportedly looked quite like her mother. Needless to say historical accounts and legends surrounding the two women often get mixed up.
  • Dirk Blocker also looked almost exactly like his father, Dan.
  • Alan Hale Sr. and Jr. looked a lot alike.
  • See if you can find an old picture of Cal Ripken, Senior. The resemblance is almost eerie.
  • Due to the tradition of always marrying their sisters, the Egyptian Pharaohs reportedly all looked almost identical. At least until those nasty recessive genes started making their heads look like American footballs.
  • Speaking of American football, compare Archie Manning in his playing days to the two of his sons that played the sport professionally (respectively Peyton and Eli). A quick Google search will also show a strong resemblance to his grandson Arch (son of Archie's oldest son Cooper), currently committed to start play for the Texas Longhorns in 2023.
  • In one documentary of Joni Mitchell, clips from interviews with her starting decades ago are mixed in with the images, and it's very clear how her voice changed from when she was young to the modern day. Then, at the end, Mitchell meets back up with her genetic daughter she had put up for adoption—and her daughter's voice sounds just like hers from when she was young. (They do look different, though.)
  • U.S. Presidents:
    James Roosevelt: Franklin is the one who came closest to being another FDR. He had father's looks, his speaking voice, his smile, his charm, his charisma.
  • Dhani Harrison looks exactly like his father, George Harrison, when he was younger.
    • In fact, all The Beatles' children look very much like their fathers.
      • In Julian Lennon's case, he even sounds like his father when singing. His half-brother Sean uncannily resembles their father in the 1970s with his long hair, beard and eyeglasses—which is really saying something given that Sean is also quite visibly half-Japanese (being John's son with Yoko Ono). When he made a splash with his own music in the 1980s, there was some momentary fan wishing that he could substitute for his father for the Beatles to reunite, but the alumni of that band shot that notion down instantly saying that was completely unfair to Julian.
      • Except Zak Starkey, who seems to take more after his mother.
    • Three of the Beatles (John, Paul and George) themselves resembled each of their fathers. It's unknown if Ringo did because no picture of his father is available to the public.
    • Giles Martin also bears an uncanny resemblance to his father, Beatles producer Sir George Martin.
  • There's the adage, "If you want to know what a woman will look like in a few decades, meet her mother." Generally, it's pretty accurate.
  • The British Royal Family may in fact be made of this trope. Behold! While that picture of Edward I being compared to Prince William is clearly an 18th—or 19th-century rendition (he lived in the 13th century), many of the other, more recent ancestral pictures on the page play it straight (particularly the photographs, though the painting of the young Queen Victoria compared to Princess Beatrice is essentially confirmed by other contemporaneous paintings and later photos of the Queen).
  • Compare Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now with his son Charlie Sheen in Platoon. Or his other son, Emilio Estevez, in recent years.
    • A commercial for Visa Check Card uses this trope directly.
    Clerk: (Looking at Charlie's ID) This doesn't look like you.
    Martin: It did when I came in here...
  • Kirk Douglas and Michael Douglas.
  • George Clooney looks an awful lot like his father, Nick Clooney, did in his youth, see here and here
  • Jerry Lawler and his son Brian, best known as Brian Christopher (his real given names) and Grandmaster Sexay, had such a strong family resemblance that no matter how much Jerry's promotions tried to hide their relationship when Brian started out in the business, Brian's parentage became one of the worst-kept secrets in pro wrestling history.
  • Aside from a lack of poodle-perm, Jeff Buckley was almost the spitting image of his dad, Tim.
  • Harrison Ford's son Ben resembles him so much they used him to fill in for his father for a few new shots in the Final Cut version of Blade Runner.
  • Angelina Jolie bears a strong resemblance to her mother, actress Marcheline Bertrand.
  • After over 3 centuries, Japanese figure skater Oda Nobunari retains a strong physical resemblance to his famous ancestor Oda Nobunaga. Though the resemblances sorta stop there…
  • Here's Ingrid Bergman and her daughter Isabella Rossellini. Except for the eye color, she's almost a carbon copy of her mom.
  • The descendants of J.M. James believe their ancestor was actually outlaw Jesse James, whom they claim faked his own death to avoid arrest. While their claim is considered highly dubious by historians, family member Jeremiah James bears a remarkable resemblance to photographs of Jesse James as a young man: so much so that, if the blood connection were true, he would qualify as an identical great-great-grandson.
  • Actress/musician Schuyler Fisk looks almost exactly like her mother Sissy Spacek.
  • Aside from being blonde, Brian Henson is a near-perfect replication of his father, Jim.
  • Late John Ritter and his son Jason.
  • Mark Hamill and his son Nathan
  • Bette Midler and her twenty-something daughter Sophie von Haselberg.
  • Colin Hanks is a lanky version of his father with a different haircut.
  • French king Louis Philippe I to Louis XIV. Not exactly a great-grandson but a great-nephew, Louis Philippe is a descendant of Louis XIV's brother, though he was also a descendant of Louis XIV himself through an illegitimate child.
    • Actually, he was descended four times from Louis XIV (through three different illegitimate children), as well as twice from Louis XIV's brother. More of his ancestors were from the Bourbon family than not, really.
  • Liza Minnelli looks and sounds very similar to her mother Judy Garland.
  • Dutch football expert Your Mulder looks like a blonder version of his father, Dutch football expert Jan Mulder.
  • Self-proclaimed Great Beast, ritual magician and mountebank Aleistar Crowley claimed to be the reincarnation of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) and of a previous French ritual magician, Eliphaz Levi. If you compare photos of Crowley to paintings of Borgia, there is an eerie likeness. although Crowley might have noticed the coincidence first, and played on it as bluff and boffo.
  • As she grew into old age, Queen Elizabeth II began to resemble her grandmother Queen Mary of Teck.
  • Compare Walt Disney to his nephew Roy E. Disney.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger's son Patrick looks exactly like him.
    • Even more so for Joseph, his son out of wedlock. Supposedly, while the mother told neither Arnold or his wife that he was the father, they both independently realised it, when the child grew to be the spitting image of Arnold.
  • Reese Witherspoon and her daughter Ava Phillipe.
  • Economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist David D Friedman heavily resembles his father, the Noble Prize winning economist Milton Friedman.
  • Cindy Crawford and her daughter Kaia.
  • While it's difficult to find photographs of them at the same age, frequent Ed Wood collaborator John "Bunny" Breckinridge bore a strong resemblance to his great-grandfather, former U.S. Vice-President John C. Breckinridge.
  • Frances Bean Cobain has declared that former Nirvana members are often unsettled by how much she looks like her late father Kurt. The Courtney Love heritage is pretty clear too, but the Kurt similarity is more pronounced.
  • Sean Pertwee, the son of the late Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee heavily resembles his father — an altered picture combining his face with his father's hair and costume shows just how close the resemblance is leading to fans suggesting he could possibly reprise his father's role as the Third Doctor in the revived series.
  • Priscilla Presley, daughter Lisa Marie Presley, and granddaughter Riley Keough. And it's clear Elvis Presley's genes are there.
  • In his youth, Charles-Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, Napoleon's pharmacist, looked nearly identical to his father… his biological father, that is. Given that the father in question was King Louis XV, people could not help but comment on this.
  • Jazmin Grace Grimaldi is one of two royal bastards of Albert II, Prince of Monaco. She has a strong resemblance to her paternal grandmother Grace Kelly.
  • Current King Felipe VI of Spain, once he started growing a beard, began to greatly resemble the first King of Spain (and his ancestor) Charles I of Spain (or Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, if you're living outside of the Hispanophone world).
  • North Korean propaganda very much likes to highlight the resemblance between the current leader, Kim Jong-Un, and his grandfather who founded the country, Kim Il-Sung.
  • Aside from hair length and colour, guitarist Zach Irons looks a lot like his dad, former Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam drummer Jack Irons (on the far right), did in his youth.
  • Maya Hawke can serve as this for both Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke.
  • Brad Server looks incredibly similar to his grandfather Curly Howard of The Three Stooges. It's particularly noticeable in the short "Hold That Lion" where Curly (who'd retired due to ill health) made a cameo. You'd honestly think Brad was a time traveler after seeing how much Curly looked like him here.
  • This photograph of Mississippi governor Anselm J. McLaurin looks uncannily like Robin Williams in period dress - because Robin was his great-great-grandson.
  • Christopher Reeve just looked identical to his great-grandfather Franklin D'Olier but with a different hairstyle. Seriously, go check it out for yourself at the link.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Identical Grandfather, Identical Grandchild, Identical Grandparent, Identical Granddaughter, Identical Ancestor, Identical Son

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Cornelius Timberlake

Cornelius Timberlake dreams of the success his great-great-grandson will have in the New World.

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