Twin Switch / Western Animation

Western Animation examples of twins switching places.

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• A nasty example on Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. Jackie Subtract, a Diabolical Mastermind in the show's Rogues Gallery, had a twin named Aiden. Aiden was a harmless Gadgeteer Genius who wanted nothing to do with his brother's criminal life. Unfortunately, Jackie decides he's going to fake his death by killing his twin and stealing Aiden's identity.
• Particularly egregious on All Grown Up!, where Lil forces her brother to impersonate her for a date she doesn't want to keep. This happened quite often on Rugrats, where the only way anyone could tell the two apart was Lil's hairbow.
• In Arthur, preschool Trickster Twins Timmy and Tommy Tibble pull this in "My Fair Tommy." When their teacher Ms. Morgan gives them both time-outs, after Tommy has his time in the quiet corner, Timmy shouts "Look Behind You!" to Ms. Morgan and switches their colored scarves so Tommy has to take a time-out twice. Apparently, Timmy always makes Tommy do both time-outs because "you're better at it than me."
• In the Centurions episode "Return of Cassandra", Hot Witch Cassandra Cross' Evil Twin Lilith imprisons her sister and impersonates her as part of one of Doctor Terror's schemes. It's not a perfect impersonation — viewers who saw "That Old Black Magic" will immediately notice that "Cassandra" is acting a bit different and that her magic is red instead of blue.
• Dora the Explorer: Dora and Sabrina the Snow Princess pull this in the special "Dora Saves the Snow Princess".
• DuckTales (2017):
  • In "GlomTales!" Louie attempts to disguise himself as Huey in order to get past a guard robot after he has been grounded. It might have worked if Huey had not chosen that exact moment to call him.
  • Webby (who isn't actually the triplets' sister, but is treated as such for all intents and purposes) impersonates Dewey in "Escape from the ImpossiBin!" with such perfect accuracy that Huey didn't realize it was her until the actual Dewey shows up. She later follows this up in "The Last Adventure!" by taking the place of her clone June to find out about her origins. The ruse goes completely undiscovered until F.O.W.L. finds June tied up.
• On Ella the Elephant, the twins Ida and Ada do this as their Halloween costumes in "Frankie's Perfect Pumpkin."
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • In "Blondas Have More Fun", Wanda switches places with her twin sister Blonda to see what each other's life is like.
  • In "Fairy Idol" after Norm tricks Cosmo and Wanda into quitting their jobs by using an Evil Knockoff clone of Timmy, Jorgan arrives to erase Timmy's memory. Both Timmy and the clone head to the closet to hide, but Timmy pushes the clone out so his memory is erased instead, allowing the real Timmy to retain his memory of Cosmo and Wanda so he can go find them.
• The subject of a Freaky Stories story is a pair of Polar Opposite Twins who go to such extreme lengths with this that they essentially live their lives as one person, using their combined different interests and abilities to add up to one seemingly perfect person.
• Bender attempts this in one episode of Futurama. He falls in love with a fem-bot named Anglene, and later finds out that she was once married to Flexo, another robot nearly identical to himself. He suspects that Anglene is still secretly in love with Flexo, so he poses as Flexo and invites her out on a date. Bender (as Flexo) tries very hard to seduce her, and she finally comes around after believing that her ex has truly changed. Then Bender reveals himself, calling her a cheater (despite her loving Bender even through his disguise), and she winds up back together with the real Flexo.
• In Gravity Falls, after Stanley Pines accidentally pushed his brother Stanford into an interdimensional portal, he took Ford's identity for 30 years in order to repair the broken portal and bring his brother back. Stan got away with it since nobody in Gravity Falls, except his senile former assistant, knew Ford very well thanks to his reclusive lifestyle.
  • In the final episode, when Bill Cipher threatens to kill Dipper and Mabel unless Ford divulges the equation needed for Bill's forces to escape Gravity Falls, Stan suggests that he and Ford switch places in order to trick Bill and (possibly) get rid of the demon for good. It works, but at the cost of Stan's memories when they were erased to destroy Bill inside his mind.
• In the Looney Tunes short "Tortoise Beats Hare", Cecil Turtle and nine identical relatives pull this on Bugs Bunny "all through the picture".
• The Loud House:
  • In "Toads and Tiaras", Lola breaks her leg and arm right before a beauty pageant, and Lincoln coaches Lana to fill in for her (behind Lola's back) because the grand prize for winning that pageant is two free passes to Dairyland. Given that Lana and Lola are Polar Opposite Twins, this proves difficult.
  • In "Sister Act", Lana and Lola start pretending to be the other in instances where one twin wants to get out of something she wouldn't like but the other one enjoys (such as Lana not wanting to take a bath and Lola not wanting to climb a rope for gym class). They manage to pull it off for a few days until they switch places so Lola can get out of a doctor's appointment and Lana can get out of a dentist appointment, which backfires on both of them the next day; Lola gets sick with a bad case of the flu, preventing her from competing in a pageant, and Lana gets an abscessed tooth, preventing her from eating a massive sundae she won in a recycling contest. Had the twins gone to their respective appointments as themselves in the first place, the early warning signs of their respective ailments would've been caught and treated right away before they got worse. The twins are forced to confess what they did to their parents so their doctor and their dentist don't lose their medical licenses for negligence, which not only got them scolded for not being responsible, but they end up having to go to the appointments they tried to avoid in the first place so both their ailments can be treated.
  • In "Prize Fighter", Meryl (the secretary of Royal Woods Middle) replaces her twin Cheryl (the secretary of Royal Woods Elementary), who's busy judging for the Minnie McFiggle Award. As Meryl wears differently-scented cologne than Cheryl, Lola instantly sniffs out the thread.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Identical cousins Adrien Agreste and Félix Fantom.
  • As kids, they would prank their parents by switching places.
  • Félix impersonated Adrien a few times to try and steal the Miraculouses.
  • Their mothers are twins, making them genetically half-brothers.
• In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode, "A Tale of Two Twins", the boys invite Scooter to join them in a tricycle race, while the girls invite Skeeter to join them for a relaxing day at the spa. Scooter would much rather relax than race, and Skeeter would much rather race than relax, so they dress in each other's clothes and pretend to be each other to do each other's activity. However, their personalities compromise the situation. Scooter is an expert at mechanical engineering but is scared to jump over a puddle, let alone a canyon, while Skeeter is very athletic but doesn't know much about technology, and these come into play when the wheel of Scooter's tricycle breaks off and Skeeter doesn't know how to use the hairdresser that Scooter made.
• Droopy the dog has been known to do this a few times in his shorts.
  • This turned out to be the explanation for Droopy's Offscreen Teleportation in Northwest Hounded Police.
    Wolf: Say, I wonder if there could've been more than one of that guy...
    (pan to the hall outside the cell, where a small army of Droopies is standing)
    Droopies: What do you think, brother?
  • In "Droopy's Double Trouble", Droopy gets his super-strong twin brother Drippy to help him take care of the house while the master is away. Spike takes advantage of Droopy's generosity and invites himself in, but whenever Droopy leaves, Drippy just happens to enter the room and beats up the intruder. Droopy then re-enters just as Drippy leaves, and a confused Spike wonders why Droopy is nice one minute and beating him up the next.
• Polly Pocket and her cousin Pia pulled this in "Polly Pocket: 2 Cool at the Pocket Plaza".
• Four times the fun with the titular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the 2003 cartoon, where they all stood in for the same turtle while trying to teach a one-time character named Arnold how to be a ninja. The twist is that the character was actually a child-Casey Jones — his real first name is Arnold. Arnold Casey Jones.
  • Which doesn't work out as well as you'd think, since in the 2003 series each turtle had a unique skintone and facial features. Arnold even comments that there's something different about them each time.
• Both Donald and Douglas, and Bill and Ben from Thomas & Friends have impersonated each other at times.
  • Except Donald and Douglas only did it in their debut book. The TV adaptation of the story "The Missing Coach", in which this trope is a major plot point, was filmed, but Britt Allcroft ultimately cancelled the episode because younger audiences would find the plot "too complicated", and replaced it with "Thomas, Percy, and the Coal". Pictures of the episode have surfaced on the internet over the past decade.
• On Total Drama Pahkitew Island, two of them contestants, Amy and Sammy/"Samey", are a pair of identical twins. Amy is a Manipulative Bitch and a bully to Sammy, and eventually arranges for their team to vote her off. Sammy decides to strike back by tricking Amy into eating a poisonous fruit, giving her a rash that renders her unable to speak. When the elimination is announced, Sammy simply pretends to be Amy and Amy gets kicked off the island instead. Sammy is able to keep this up for a few more episodes with only her friend Jasmine (and apparently Scarlett) aware.
• The T.U.F.F. Puppy episode "A Tale of Two Kitties" has Kitty Katswell's villainous twin sister Katty try to impersonate her sister to steal a golden fishbowl by switching outfits while using black spray paint to hide the streak in her hair and white spray paint to give Kitty's hair a white streak. Her scheme is ultimately thwarted due to underestimating the extent of Dudley's loyalty to his partner (i.e. being willing to take the blame for stealing the fishbowl when Katty tricks him into holding it once the police show up rather than rat out "Kitty" for stealing it).

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