Oddball Doppelgänger

On the left, Homestar. On the right, Homsar.

At first, you'd think this character would be the long-lost twin of another character. But then you start to notice the differences. This character just seems off.

It could be due to having a completely opposite personality (not usually an Evil Twin, as that is its own trope). It could be due to exaggerating the original character's foibles. This character may even appear to be an Off-Model or otherwise deformed version of the original.

Regardless, this character is like a funhouse reflection of the original - strange and distorted in possibly unimaginable ways, but still clearly patterned after the original.

Can overlap with Evil Knockoff and Evil Twin (which don't have to be oddball) and Send in the Clones (when multiple characters are introduced to cash in on the popularity of the original, some of which can be Oddball Doppelgangers). These can also be a result of Clone Degeneration. Can lead to Other Me Annoys Me. For the original German word, see Doppelgänger.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Delicious in Dungeon: In one chapter, the Touden party is attacked by a shapeshifter, a monster that uses the party's perceptions and memories of each other to create illusory duplicates of them in the hopes of pulling a Kill and Replace. Being created from perceptions and memories rather than objective appearance, some of the duplicates are extremely easy to identify. Laios's in particular are all obviously fakes: one of them is gigantic and Gonk (Marcille's first impression of him was shock that he didn't look more like his sister Falin), one of them is more obsessed with eating monsters than normal (Chilchuck thinks he's crazy), and the third has a more feminine appearance (all humans look effeminate to Senshi, a rugged and muscular dwarf).
• Anytime Oolong or Puar from Dragon Ball try to transform into another character the result is usually this.
• Doublecheeseburgirl from Nichijou looks exactly like Yuuko Aioi, right down to her clothes, except that she has a depressed-looking and unusually detailed face. She also speaks with a heavy "hick" accent and frequently does a strange and apparently famous squatting dance to cheer up kids.
• Ditto from Pokémon: The Series can transform into other Pokémon and usually isn't distinguishable from the real thing. However, Duplica's first Ditto can't change its face. While this is treated as odd in the anime and non-existent in the main series video games (outside of the Pokedex noting that Ditto will get details wrong if they try to go off memory), spin-offs and toys will use this trait. The second one she gets qualifies after a fashion: being a smaller Ditto (and thus labeled "Mini-Dit"), it can only turn into miniature versions of other Pokémon, although otherwise its transformations are perfect.
• Kanchome from Zatch Bell! can transform into replicas of other characters, but they're far from perfect. One had a nose that would make Cyrano De Bergerac feel normal and another has a forehead as big as his torso. Luckily for him, the people he had to fool were idiots.
• One Piece:
  • Nami is able to use her Clima-Tact technique Mirage Tempo to create 4 other copies of herself. However each copy looks nothing like her (one is tall, one is fat, one is buff, and one is of her younger self). The trick is the one that looks just like her isn't actually her as the Mirage Tempo is able to disguise her as one of the copies.
  • Duval happens to looks exactly like Sanji...'s horribly drawn wanted poster. The fact that a coincidence like this could happen astounds some of the main characters. Thankfully for both parties, Sanji kicks Duval pretty, and afterwards looks very handsome and nothing like Sanji, save for the blonde hair and swirly eyebrow.

Comic Books

• Bizarro was originally this to Superman, but he's since been used as a full Evil Knockoff more often.
• Bizarrogirl is Supergirl's Bizarro counterpart. She looks like Kara Zor-El... except for her cracked, chalk-white skin and her downright loony, backwards behavior.
• In Superman/Batman Annual #1, a crazy Earth-3 version of Deathstroke appears—who is strongly implied to be Marvel Comics' Deadpool.
• Taken to extremes in the Laff-A-Lympics story "The Ends of the Earth." The Yogi Yahooeys are kidnapped and sent overseas while a gang of hard-boiled imposters (a bulldog says he's Huckleberry Hound) during their grudge match with the Rottens.
• The Summer issue of the Four Seasons arc of The Muppet Show Comic Book (which was published by Marvel Comics as a miniseries titled simply The Muppets after Boom! Studios lost the license) featured Fozzie Bear agreeing to perform at the Whatnot Theater, where he meets bizarre counterparts to himself and the other Muppets. Examples include a carrot version of Animal (presumably named Vegetable) who is obsessed with spoons rather than drums, a feline version of Miss Piggy named Miss Tiggy and patriotic American Sam the Eagle's equivalent being a British dog who wears a Union Jack vest and chides Animal's counterpart for not speaking the Queen's English.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) introduces two for Sonic the Hedgehog and Miles "Tails" Prower — while designed to be Evil Knockoffs, they barely resemble their original counterparts, instead duplicating their powers in parallel ways while embodying the negative aspects of their personalities.
  • Surge is a tenrec (lesser hedgehog) who can generate lightning through her metal piercings, acting as the speed of light to Sonic's speed of sound. Personality-wise, she takes Sonic's attitude and ramps it up to the point of being a Blood Knight, aggressive and eager to fight regardless of circumstance.
  • Kitsunami, a.k.a. Kit, is a fennec fox with a backpack that lets him generate prehensile tails made of water, evoking the mythical kitsune that Tails was also inspired by. Personality-wise, he ramps up Tails' hero worship and shyness to the point of being a Shrinking Violet, rarely ever speaking out of fear of being reprimanded by Surge, yet placing her safety above his own.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has the recurring antagonist Slash, an Evil Counterpart (Though usually more of an Anti-Hero or simply misguided) humanoid turtle across multiple continuities. The original toyline gave him a twisted appearance with a jagged bandana, twisted and jagged versions of the Turtles' trademark weapons, and a sinister, spike-toothed grin, along with a spiked shell. While his appearance has varied across continuities, he still tends to look more brutish and twisted compared to the main four.

Film

• Us: An unusually horrifying example. The doppelgängers (known in the movie as The Tethered) of the Wilson family all look subtly off in various ways, and share some sort of psychic link with their counterparts that forces them to mimic their movement and actions. They also can't speak, the only exception being Red, the leader and doppelgänger to main character Adelaide. This is because Red is the REAL Adelaide, having been replaced by her copy as a child and trapped underground with the Tethered. It's also revealed that large parts of the U.S population, if not ALL of them, have Tethered doppelgängers, who are breaking free and killing and replacing their counterparts.

Live-Action TV

• The Drake & Josh episode "Drew and Jerry" has the boys befriending the titular knockoffs.
• How I Met Your Mother has "Stripper Lily", who speaks with an Eastern European accent, and "Mexican Wrestler Ted", who is exactly what it sounds like. The other characters had doppelgangers as well, but not particularly oddball ones.
  • Barney could actually be considered the oddball doppelganger to his counter-part: a renowned, straight laced, consummately professional, fertility specialist.
• Played with in an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine comes across a "bizarro" version of her gang of guy friends: one member who is strangely like Jerry, one strangely like George, and one strangely like Kramer (as well as a mailman strangely like Newman). The twist, however, is that these counterparts, though definitely reminiscent of the originals, are actually more "normal" than the regular gang.
• Wellington Paranormal: "Cop Circles" is rife with them thanks to the plant aliens imitating everything.

Puppet Shows

• In Fraggle Rock, Boober's "fun side," Sidebottom, menaces the Fraggles during a shared dream sequence.

Roleplay

• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Edward's superpower allows him to create Tulpas, clones of himself with a particular trait emphasised. If the trait in question comes from another character, then the resultant Tulpa will look like a mix between them and Edward; for example, one of his first Tulpas was a responsible one modeled after Ciro, which had Ciro's hair and facial features but Edward's height and white skin.

Video Games

• Antonball Deluxe: Anton and Annie have Danton and Nina, who use the opposite end of the color wheel for their outfits (green/purple/blue vs. Anton and Annie's green/red). Danton has a long, droopy mustache against Anton's full beard, while Nina has a pointy nose and short hair compared to Annie's small nose and bob cut. Anton has additional playable doppelgangers, such as Antari, who looks like the kind of off-model interpretation one would find on Atari port box art, and Paul, who looks like a stiffer, blockier version of him with less wild hair.
• Crash Bandicoot: Fake Crash looks like Crash aside from his comically enlarged eyebrows and teeth. He was originally created for a Japanese commercial for Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, then was added to Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped as an Easter Egg. All that is known about him is that he is unallied with either Crash or Cortex and may be a failed attempt by Cortex to make an evil clone of Crash. In Crash Bandicoot 2: N-Tranced he was actually part of the story, as the titular villain accidentally kidnaps him thinking he is the real Crash and brainwashes him.
• Double Dragon Neon has the Big Bad Skullmageddon clone Billy and Jimmy to make hulking, dimwitted minions named Bimmy and Jammy, which resemble Billy and Jimmy's appearance stretched over Abobo's frame.
• Zote from Hollow Knight looks very much like the protagonist, save for his grumpy-looking face (shaped like a trapezoid) and his mismatched horns. Personality-wise, he's a total Miles Gloriosus with Small Name, Big Ego whose loud-mouthed and utterly false claims of heroism serve as a Foil to the Knight, who never says a word but is a true hero through and through.
• Katamari Damacy: Whenever a new group of cosmic cousins is introduced, at least one is dressed in the same green as the Dashing Prince, but has something about them that looks quite off:
  • Royal Cousin Johnson has a much longer head than most of his peers, flipped onto its side so that it extends out in front of him much like the barrel of a gun.
  • Second Cousin Odeon shifts everything upwards — instead of a antenna with a red ball on top of his head, he's got a long yellow neck and a red ball for a face, while his arms are on the side of what would normally be their head.
  • Second Cousin Slip looks exactly like the Dashing Prince, save for the fact that he's completely flattened.
  • Rookie Kenta has the body of a centaur, but is otherwise a dead ringer for the Prince.
  • Half-Cousin Pu wears all green rather than green with purple tights like the rest of the Prince's doppelgangers, and has fresh young leaves growing out around the base of her antennae.
  • Distant Cousin Dangle has an incredibly long head and arms to match hanging off the side, much like fellow doppelganger Odeon. The latter are so long that he walks on his hands rather than his feet while the rest of his body dangles beneath him.
• In Kirby's Dream Land 3, Kirby can encounter doppelgangers called Batamon that always appear beyond the level's boundaries save for one that appears in a secret exit in Cloudy Park 3. Though you can kill them with some ranged attacks, doing so serves no purpose and their presence is never truly explained.
• OMORI: One of the characters that can be encountered in Black Space 2 is Omoli, a monochrome Sprout Mole that shares Omori's hair style and color scheme. It is constantly hungry and asks for money, and when given $20, blips out of existence.
• Pico: Piconjo, the grotesque Anti-Hero of his own side of the Portal, has three well-known designs that make him an oddball of Pico. Each one retains Pico's Monochromatic Eyes and spiky orange hair, but how they differ from him varies:
  • His original appearance was a simple stick figure, contrasting the primitive shapes composing Tom Fulp's original design for Pico.
  • Piconjo interprets himself as a hulking Frazetta Man that has grey skin and wears little more than a loincloth, opposing the more reasonably-proportioned designs commonly given to Pico.
  • His Newgrounds Rumble design by Mindchamber is tall, lanky, noseless, and has an Undeathly Pallor, which exaggerates elements of Mindchamber's skinnier redesign for Pico. His eyes are exaggerated into Blank White Eyes, and he's also given a purple t-shirt to contrast Pico's long-sleeved green shirt. Initially, Piconjo declared this version (dubbed "Buttchamber") an oddball to himself — specifically as one to either the stick figure or Hunk interpritations.
• Pizza Tower:
  • Gustavo is a portly pizza chef like Peppino, but he's rounder, shorter, and has beady eyes compared to Peppino's large cartoony eyes. This references the pair's Wario and Mario influence, who were similarly oddballs to each other.
  • Fake Peppino appears as the boss of World 4. He looks almost like Peppino, save his taller height, his habit of nearly melting, and the flesh-colored balls he constantly emits. His attacks are twisted versions of Peppino's and he curiously shifts into a frog-like form to jump around. He's even fought in a pizzeria that looks like Peppino's own, but with all the text on the walls changed to gibberish.
  • The Peppino Clones in the WAR stage are seemingly identical to the real deal, but they can make distorted manic expressions, croak and use tongue attacks like frogs, suggesting a connection with the also frog-like Fake Peppino.
• In Pokémon: Magikarp Jump, using a backwards fishing rod might catch a Ditto transformed into Magikarp, distinguishable by having Ditto's beady eyes and derpy smile.
• Prayer of the Faithless: In Purgatory, monsters are encountered that are named the titles of the non-main protagonists, "Forsaken Ambassador", "Mask of Solidarity", "Hopeless Vagrant", and "Protector & Doomsayer", that look similar to their namesakes, in silhouette:
  • "Forsaken Ambassador" is like Amalie in that their faces are asymmetrical due to one eye being different, and wield rapiers.
  • "Mask of Solidarity" is like Luke because they use a presumably Magic Staff.
  • "Hopeless Vagrant" looks like Trill because they both use claws as melee weapons.
  • "Protector & Doomsayer" look like Reyson and Serra because they fight as a group, along with having their unique hairstyles.
• In Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, Chelmey and Barton have Future London counterparts Shmelmey and Shmarton.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Tails Doll from Sonic R. Unlike the other Team Sonic robots, he resembles a badly put together doll and floats about in a limp lifeless manner as if he's being dragged around by the weird gem stuck in his head.
  • The Sonic Doppelganger from Sonic Generations. A grey, transparent doppelganger to Sonic. He's raced against in the bonus missions.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Wario and Waluigi (though more so in their earlier appearances) are this to Mario and Luigi. Wario is an exaggeration of Mario's features, with a fat body, stubby legs and zigzagging mustache. Originally a villain in his first appearances, he has since become more of a greedy rival. Likewise Waluigi is an exaggeration of Luigi's features: extremely tall and lanky with a smooth mustache. He was an Unknown Rival to Luigi in his first appearance and easily angered by this but nowadays plays the role of the black sheep oddball who loves to cheat at sports.
  • In his original appearance in Wrecking Crew, Foreman Spike wore overalls like the Mario Bros. but contrasted their softer features with his long nose, hardhat, pointy sunglasses, and bushy beard. His character designer Hiroji Kiyotake would go on to design Wario.
  • In Super Mario Maker, Mario has the character Weird Mario, a unsettlingly stretched out version of Mario as he appeared in Super Mario Bros. While he originates as a form Mario can take upon eating the Weird Mushroom, he also appears on his own: he answers the Warp Door in a variety of costumes if the player taps one enough times, and in Super Mario Maker 2's Course World mode, he comes out to point at the player if they lose the baseball minigame.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner has Homsar, who's stouter and pigeon-toed, and the unused character Homeschool Winner, who's lankier, hatless, and has an overbite. Strong Bad also has Senor Cardgage, who looks like an older and wrinklier version of him with a pot belly (as well as several others, which takes up more than half of the webshow's cast).

Webcomics

• Didi is this to Gogo Bomango in Bomango. Didi literally just budded off of Gogo's side, because Gogo got bored one day and decided to asexually reproduce. Her bubbly and intellectual personality is nearly the opposite of Gogo's violent and temperamental one. Interestingly, although they started out looking identical (first diverging when Didi cut her hair short), their physiques have drifted till they don't even look much alike any more, with Didi being noticeably shorter and more svelte, while Gogo now has the muscles of a weightlifter.
• Brawl in the Family introduces Mario-like Eario (much like Wario's name involved flipping the "M" in Mario's name into a "W", Eario's name has it rotated into an "E"). He's a simpleminded janitor who always cleans up after Mario's various Goomba-stomping, brick-smashing adventures. He's also Waluigi's father.
• Girl Genius: Othar Tryggvasen (Gentleman Adventurer) runs into Gil and Tarvek and announces that he has at last found young Wulfenbach and his degenerate clone, to Tarvek's outrage.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Since Golly and Jolly are both biological clones of Molly (not true "doppelgangers"), and were raised in very different environments than she was, it makes sense that their personalities are very different from hers (and from each other's), even if they do share a lot of traits with her.
• Whomp!: When Ronnie is out sick his role in the comic is taken by "Runnie's Replace," a barely coherent Humanoid Abomination.

Web Videos

• Macro from Echo Chamber. Subverted when it's revealed that he is not a clone at all, but Micro's long lost twin brother. And the reason for his odd and childish behaviour is that he was on a ton of medication for a disease in his legs.

Western Animation

• In Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Grounder was originally supposed to be Scratch's duplicate. However, Scratch pulled an extra lever on the robot maker (which, as Robotnik emphasized, wasn't supposed to be pulled!) during the construction.
  Robotnik: There! Your exact twin!
  Scratch: Twin? Am I that ugly?
• The Copycats from The Amazing World of Gumball are just basically the Watterson family, but with slight alterations to make them look different. Of course, this is a Justified Trope — they are parodies of a real life Gumball bootleg called Miracle Star.
• The ChalkZone episode "The Doofi" introduced Doofus Rudy and Doofus Penny, unflattering caricatures of Rudy Tabootie and Penny Sanchez drawn on the chalkboard by the bully Reggie Bullnerd who came to life in ChalkZone after Mr. Wilter erased them. They were essentially grotesque and dim-witted versions of the real Rudy and Penny.
  • There was also the episode "Madcap Snap" where children from all over start drawing Snap, creating tons of Snap clones in Chalkzone. All of the clones (Snips) are drawn off-model, so none look completely like the original.
• In Dex Hamilton: Alien Entomologist, when it's revealed that Jenny Ten was the tenth of a series of genetically engineered clones, we meet her "sister," Jenny Eight. Our Jenny wants nothing to do with Eight because she feels (quite understandably) that Eight threatens her sense of individuality. By story's end, though, we realize that their personalities are actually quite different, and the two reconcile.
• A very much politically incorrect version of this appears in Drawn Together: one episode featured Clara's mentally disabled cousin Bleh, with a beautiful body like hers but drooling and disheveled. Captain Hero bets with Spanky that he could bed her, and at the end of the episode he does. However, after that Bleh gets on a bus full of disabled versions of the other housemates (including Hero and Spanky), and it's shown that she made a bet with them that she could bed Hero.
• Gravity Falls:
  • "Double Dipper" is about Dipper using a photocopier that acts like a cloning machine on himself. Just about all of his copies are virtually the same as him, save for the hat symbol. But at one point, the copier gets a paper jam, resulting in the deformed and unintelligible Paper Jam Dipper.
  • Inverted by a pair of Recurring Extras that look like a lot like Dipper and Mabel (who Word of God called Shmipper and Smabble): from what we've seen of them, they're painfully wholesome and normal compared to the Pines Twins.
• In Hey Arnold!, Arnold has a country cousin Arnie, who is generally "weird". Later in the series, an episode shows there is a whole group of cuckoolandian counterparts to every other character in the series. Well, maybe.
• In Invader Zim, when Gaz suffers from a curse that makes everything she eats taste like pig, her father “creates” a new version of Gaz for his wing called “Pig Girl”, who ends up being extremely popular to kids and adults alike, but acts the opposite to the former. Gaz is not impressed.
• The Johnny Bravo episode "Double Vision" is about Johnny mistakenly following a woman home because she looks like a younger and more attractive version of his mother Bunny.
• Bunny from The Powerpuff Girls (1998), the girls' ill-fated attempted at making a new sister. Same dress design, has a B name, and like the others has her own design color... but is also mentally handicapped and is very physically deformed.
  • In the later episode "Knock it Off", the Professor's old roommate Dick Hardly steals the professor's formula for creating the girls and begins to mass-produce his own off-brand version, the Powerpuff Girl z X-Treme. The early batches bear only slight cosmetic differences to the original, though they break quite easily; later, after he steps up production, the girls grow increasingly deformed and zombielike. They eventually turn on Hardly due to his never showing them any love, ultimately destroying both him and themselves.
• One episode of Recess sees the kids go to another school to play kickball. It quickly becomes apparent to Gus that the school they are visiting is one of these with every character from the show having a clone that varies in ethnicity and/or gender. The other kids refuse to believe him until they are introduced to their counterparts on the opposing team. Regalli (Spinelli but blonde), Vance (Vince but white), Greta Grobler (Gretchen but Ambiguously Brown), Russ Rimple (Gus but black), Mickey (Mikey but Asian), and finally C.J. Rottweiler (T.J. but a girl and redhead). Gretchen even refers to them as their doppelgangers. At the end when the kids have declared a tie, the clone kids invite the main characters to play on their playground named "Old Crusty" and T.J. says that they call theirs "Old Rusty".
• Scooby-Doo had Scooby-Dum◊, the dimwitted cousin to the eponymous character.
• The Secret Saturdays gives us the Monday family, the Saturdays' evil alternate reality clones. Each of them is identical to their good counterpart save some small detail (such as Zak's counterpart having the colors of his hair inverted and Fiskerton's having horns).
• The Simpsons
  • In "The Day the Violence Died", Bart and Lisa try to solve a problem and are beaten to it by two other kids named Lester and Eliza, who resemble their early incarnations from The Tracey Ullman Show.
  • In "Lemon of Troy", we see a number of Shelbyville residents looking like mirror-universe versions of Springfielders.
  • In "Midnight Rx", Ned Flanders meets a knockoff of himself while in Canada. The two hit it off well until the Canadian offers him some "reef-a-rino".
    Ned: They warned me Satan would be attractive.
  • In "Lisa the Vegetarian", Homer notices Flanders hosting a family reunion in his backyard, and is introduced to Lord Thistlewick-Flanders, Flanders' aristocratic British cousin. He looks just like the rest of his family, but doesn't share their Verbal Tic.
    Thistlewick-Flanders: [to Homer] Charmed. [Ned nudges him in the side; Thistlewick-Flanders rolls his eyes in exasperation] Ehrm, "a-googeli... doodeli".
  • In "Bart the Fink", Bart and Lisa are looking for Krusty the Klown and show the Sea Captain a half-inflated balloon with Krusty's face on it. The Sea Captain identifies it as Handsome Pete, a diminutive man who dances and plays the concertina for nickels, and just so happens to have a head like an Off-Model Krusty.
• In an episode of South Park, the local Mad Scientist's son creates an Off-Model clone of Stan. It's got an oversized head, one arm is elongated, and about all it can say is "Bachamp, bachamp" or variations thereof. It breaks free and ends up destroying most of the town in a rampage, with Stan getting blamed despite the clone obviously not being him.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Frankendoodle", SpongeBob finds a "magic pencil" (a live-action pencil an artist in a boat dropped overboard) and discovers that anything he draws with it comes to life. He draws a crude-looking copy of himself to help prank Squidward, but the copy, dubbed DoodleBob, turns out to be violent and mean-spirited, and eventually tries a Kill and Replace on him. It also can't talk for some reason, except one line near the end, and only speaks in weird gibberish.
• T.U.F.F. Puppy: The episode "While the Cat's Away" reveals that Keswick has created not-too-bright clones of Dudley Puppy and Kitty Katswell known as Bark Bark and Meow Meow, who have wonky eyes in addition to Meow Meow's fur being darker than Kitty's and both being prone to randomly firing lasers from their bodies.

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