"The original substitute Sonic! Accept no substitutes!"note
The Evil Knockoff is what happens when the Big Bad decides that he could finally beat that frustratingly tenacious hero if only he had... his own, personal, mindlessly loyal copy of the hero! This is based on the theory that there's something about the hero personally that makes them unbeatable. (Big Bads do tend to obsess about this stuff.)
For a character to be an Evil Knockoff, it must be a copy created at least partly for the purpose of defeating The Hero in combat, on the principle of fighting fire with fire.
In the least justified cases, the Big Bad produces an obviously mechanical copy with superficial visual resemblance to The Hero but little functional similarity; for example, a robot "copy" of a human ninja could rely on hidden machine guns and rocket launchers. This prompts the question of just what talismanic property of the hero's appearance is actually getting copied into "Mecha-Hero." The reason why is some absurd and never clearly articulated theory that "nothing can be as strong as the hero but the hero- or something that kinda looks like him!"
In more justified cases, the Big Bad knows strength when he sees it, and so makes sure the copy shares some basic capabilities or power source with the hero, or is an actual clone. If The Hero is already mechanical or otherwise manufactured (i.e. an engineered Super-Soldier), the copy will usually be based on that hero's original blueprints or other stolen underlying technology, be reasonably close in appearance and capabilities, and fight in a nearly identical fashion, resulting in a battle of wits and spirit instead of the more usual Aesop that copies are never as good as the original.
Some villains don't stop with just one Evil Knockoff, and Send in the Clones to produce a small army of Evil Knockoffs. Thanks to Conservation of Ninjutsu, these clones are usually not quite as good as the original, but make up for that via sheer numbers.
Often a form of Mirror Character and Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb. Sister Trope to Evil Twin (an evil identical twin), Evil Counterpart (an evil character with similar abilities and/or history who took another path), Evil Doppelgänger (an evil Alternate Self or evil clone), and Criminal Doppelgänger (an evil Identical Stranger). Related to Mirror Boss (where a video game features a boss fight against an opponent with abilities similar to the player's) and Sixth Ranger Traitor (where a new recruit for the hero team turns out to be an enemy). Often, whole teams being cloned results in The Psycho Rangers. If the knockoff turns out to be the manifestation of the hero's inherent evil side, it's an Enemy Without. Contrast Psycho Prototype, where the hero is the Morally Superior Copy. This may backfire on the bad guy if he Copied the Morals, Too, and the knockoff winds up inheriting the good guy's morality/heroic tendencies.
When a work features a pastiche of a character from another (unrelated) work who is essentially a meaner or more evil version of the character they're imitating, then they're a Corrupted Character Copy (who is intended as a twisted parody of the character they're an analogue for rather than an in-universe clone or duplicate).
Example subpages
Other examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Afro-Droid from Afro Samurai was directly copied from all of Afro's skills, moves, and knowledge, but by virtue of being a robot, was faster and stronger. Afro could only beat him by using moves that surprised himself and Ninja-Ninja, his companion and possible sub-conscience. After the initial defeat, Afro-Droid came back with some new abilities hidden under the skin-like covering of his body: lasers, missiles, machine guns, flight, and an incredibly phallic and lampshaded front-mounted BFG.
- Astro Boy has an inordinately high number of them. The first was an unstable copy created by a one-off enemy known as the Bronze Republic to prevent him from retrieving a spaceship component they stole. Then there's the 1980s version of Atlas (and the 2003 version to a lesser extent, but oddly enough not the original). Honorable mention goes to Astroboy Mk. II, who never actually met the real one & isn't evil so much as a Jerkass.
- Bakugan: New Vestroia: The Mechanical Bakugan as their name implies are artificial constructs created by Professor Clay using data collected from the Bakugan abducted from New Vestroia. While considerably powerful, they're seen by the Resistance as abominations of nature and by Gus as a sign that the Vexos have become lazy as brawlers and ignore the potential that living Bakugan possess. Special mention goes to Darkus Hades, who is a mechanical copy of Hydranoid with abilities that are (admittedly effective) imitations of the latter's. Hydranoid is none too pleased when he hears about it, enough that he wants to and becomes the one to personally destroy his copy when they eventually face off against each other.
- In Battle Angel Alita, Tiphares/Zalem eventually creates the AR/GR series, exact copies of Alita's cybernetic body complete with robotic chips for brains and her Panzer Kunst fighting style. Most of them get killed off (AR-2 was beheaded by Alita herself, but nearly killed her in the process. AR-10 was killed by Fury in a Taking You with Me, and Sechs killed all but two) but three of them go on to get their own character development, becoming their own individuals. One of them, Sechs (formerly AR-6), became a man and Alita's Spear Counterpart.
- The Corpse Corps from Blood+ are clones of the Schiff. Well, clones of Moses, at least. Interesting in that the schiff themselves are vampire "knockoffs" who've become a Phlebotinum Rebel Secret Project Refugee Family.
- The Brave Express Might Gaine has an episode where one of the villains decides to create a copy of Gaine, and succeeds in producing Black Gaine, who's exactly like Gaine with only some cosmetic differences. "Exactly" including his mind. Unfortunately he ends up being Too Cool to Live.
- One episode of the original Bubblegum Crisis OVA had Boomers dressed up like the Knight Sabers. Very powerful Boomers whose true forms take up at least 50% more volume than their disguises. (Standard fare for Boomers; at least they're consistent.)
- In Claymore it is revealed that Youma and Claymrores are the Organizations attempts at recreating weapons equal to the power of the Descendants of Dragons called the Asarakam.
- In the 2001 Cyborg 009, Albert Heinrich/Cyborg 004 faces off against a robotic doppleganger. Having been manufactured after the cyborgs escaped, it's significantly stronger than him, resulting in a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown until he finally does something the robot doesn't expect: save a bird's nest rather than try and avoid its attacks.
- Inverted and played straight simultaneously in Day Break Illusion. The Elemental Tarot cards were created from their Daemonia twins, which unfortunately allows the Daemonia card to manifest an evil copy of the Elemental card's current user. The evil cards can only be destroyed by their good version making a Heroic Sacrifice.
- In Demonbane, Doctor West created a knockoff copy of Demonbane, with all its magic... except Lemuria Impact.
- Dr. Slump: Obotchaman is a humanoid robot based on Arale's design that was build by the main villain Dr. Mashirito to destroy Arale. It fails because Obotchaman ends up being too well mannered and polite to be evil and falls in love with Arale.
- Dragon Ball:
- Dragon Ball Z: In a broad sense: Dr. Gero creates the Androids (actually more like cyborgs) after he observes that armies of Mooks are of very little use against Goku and resolves to create a single fighter of immense personal power rather than mass-produced military machinery. The culmination of his research is Cell, so named because he uses cells stolen from Goku and the other protagonists (and the previous arc's antagonist) to mimic their abilities.
- Dragon Ball GT has Hell Fighter 17, the machine mutant clone used to brainwash and fuse with the original Android 17. Trouble is, the scientists that made this happen should've known they couldn't trust each other or the resulting Super Android 17 not to pull a double cross.
- In Dragon Ball Super, it's eventually theorized that Black Goku is a twisted clone of Goku created by Zamasu using the Super Dragon Balls, in order to both have a powerful ally and to spite Goku for, in his mind, humiliating him in their sparring match. The truth turns out to be worse: he's actually an alternate Zamasu who used his wish to switch bodies with an alternate Goku, then killed him.
- EDENS ZERO: After Ziggy came back from the dead declaring humans to be his enemies, he reveals the Four Dark Stars, a quartet of robots meant to counteract and surpass his Four Shining Stars for his crusade. The final arc of the series reveals the appearance Four Dark Stars were based on four male human corpses found on the dying Earth, and Ziggy originally made them to be a replacement father for a baby Shiki as he didn't know which one was his birth father. However, Void, the malicious AI of the Edens One and the true culprit behind Ziggy's dark resurrection, reprogrammed the Dark Stars into its loyal servants and enemies of humanities. Essentially, the Dark Stars are the Evil Counterparts to both the Shining Stars and the humans that gave their lives trying to save Earth.
- Amiba from Fist of the North Star, the second Hokuto Shinken pretender in the story, never actually trained in the style, but instead uses a variation he developed through pressure point experiments, which he dubs the "Amiba-style Hokuto Shinken". Needless to say, Kenshiro was not impressed.
- The second season of Future Card Buddyfight introduced the Inverse Omni Lords, which were created when Yamigedo absorbed power from the original Omni Lords. They generally have different stats and modified abilities from the originals and their color schemes are altered to include copious amounts of purple and/or Red and Black and Evil All Over. They were first foreshadowed in an arc that involved Time Travel and later, an entire Filler arc was dedicated to defeating them while Yamigedo itself powered up.
- One of the monsters of the week in GaoGaiGar absorbs a bunch of spare parts and becomes an evil version of the title mecha. The battle ends with dueling Hell and Heavens.
- In FINAL, a Brainwashed and Crazy clone of Mamoru uses a copy of GaoGaiGar to fight Guy in the improved GaoFighGar. Ends similarly to the above, but it's a massive Tear Jerker instead.
- Getter Robo Armageddon (The Last Day Of The World) had Dr. Saotome unleash a horde of mass-produced copies of Getter Robo G, from the second season of the original series.
- Not only that, Saotome and two other villains actually pilot a much more powerful Getter G near the end of the series and duel the heroes in a roughly evenly-matched battle.
- In Great Mazinger, the Mikene are able to replicate and mass produce Great Mazinger itself and turned them loose on their foe. They usually show up in various Super Robot Wars installments when the original Great storyline is used.
- Done quite a few times in the Gundam franchise:
- In Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO, there's the GM Camouf, a Zaku modified to resemble a GM. The suit was designed to be used for a False Flag Operation and was modified so that it could fool the naked eye just enough. Including their own team.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, there's the Bawoo fielded by Neo-Zeon. According to external sources, the suit is designed from the various Zeta Project MS, especially as the Bawoo doesn't have the usual curves the usual Zeon suits use. It can also transform into its own flight form, but separates into two parts instead of converting into a flight-capable form.
- ∀ Gundam has a strange reversal: according to external sources, it was actually the Turn A that was reverse-engineered from the Turn X, in an attempt to copy its technology. The people who created the Turn A were terrified of the Turn X ever being used against them and wanted something that could put up a decent fight against it... making the Turn A a "Good Knockoff" of the Turn X. The two machines are shown to be dead even in combat capabilities, to the point that the series ends with them locked in an eternal stalemate, neither able to overpower the other.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam AGE, the Vagan are able to capture the AGE-3 Orbital and use what they learn to create their own Gundam, the Gundam Legilis
- In Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE, Alus' One-Eyes Army are comprised of knockoffs of other Gunpla, all but a handful already used in villainy, such as the Devil Army and the Windams. The only two that fit this trope would be the Alus Earthree and the Fake Nu Gundams.
- Guyver has Guyver II, who should have beaten the hero.. and would have had his control metal not been shattered from the outset. In fact, it's so unrealistic that Sho beat him so early that the most recent anime changed it around, making Guyver II the "boss" for the Cronos Japan opening arc. (This was, by the way, done with Yoshiki Takaya's appoval.)
- There's also the female Guyver II from the Guyver: Out of Control OVA. She's the final opponent Sho faced and she pretty well beats the shit out of Sho from nearly start to finish. Only the Control Metal picking then and there to go haywire from extended use saved him from being either killed or enslaved by Kronos.
- In Hellsing, all of Millennium's vampires are cheap knockoffs of Alucard. The only members of Millennium who aren't knockoffs, the Captain and Schrodinger, also end up being the only members of Millennium who have ever defeated Alucard.
- Mazinger Z: In an episode Dr. Hell created a robotical doble of Kouji and sent it to the Photon Atomic Power Research Institute to wreak havoc and kill the heroes stealthily.
- Iron Kaiser to Mazinkaiser SKL, being said to be directly based on Mazinkaiser's design and having almost identical set of attacks.
- In the manga version of My-Otome, Big Bad Sergay summons villainous clones of the HiME to fight against the Otome in his bid to Take Over the World. Their powers are equal to those of the originals, but their personalities are nearly polar opposites.
- In Naruto: Shippuden, Team Guy has to defeat copies of themselves in order to break a seal on a cave entrance. They are exact copies of the strengths and techniques of each team member. In true Team Guy style, the copies are defeated because the originals become stronger than they were when they started the fight, by sheer willpower.
- In Nekketsu Saikyo Gosaurer, the Kikaika Empire brought forth Dark King Gosaurer
, made to deal with King Gosaurer, and its individual components are much stronger than King Gosaurer's. Also Would Hurt a Child because the damages it can do to King Gosaurer can hurt the classmates inside it! Also, unlike King Gosaurer, it only has one pilot. It nearly won had Eldoran not save the kids in time.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion:
- The MP-Evas are mass produced copies of the Evas. These copies are superior to the protagonists' units. They have infinite sources of power, flight and copies of the Artifact of Doom. Their opponent is Unit 02, armed with battery power, a combat knife, and a really angry German. Asuka fights formidably and hurts, maims and kills most of them. Unfortunately they get reactivated and ultimately she loses. Horribly.
- However, all these copies are still inferior to Eva-01, the Super Prototype equipped with an even better "infinite" energy source, the Original Lance of Longinus, superior Flight Capability, and a person born to Pilot Eva. Of course, he doesn't even fight at all after having yet ANOTHER Mental Breakdown upon seeing Asuka and Eva-02's remains, so he spends the remainder of the series (or the remainder of the movie if you are watching End Of Evangelion) experiencing another Heroic BSoD.
- To some extent, Unit-03/Bardiel is this to Unit-01 after becoming infected with the angel. Visually, 03 looks very similar to 01, but with a maroon colour scheme. 03 even breaks the wiring holding its jaws closed in a similar manner to when 01 becomes berserk.
- Pretty Cure:
- In the Yes! Pretty Cure 5 movie, Big Bad Shadow creates mirror copies of the girls for the purpose of destroying them. Four of the five are killed by their own Good Counterpart while the last dies in a Heroic Sacrifice.
- HeartCatch Pretty Cure! has Dark Pretty Cure, who seeks to kill Cure Moonlight exclusively to take her place, as she was created using Moonlight's DNA. This really messed her up when she found out from her own creator/"father", and she ends up dying at the end by Cure Moonlight's hand.
- Done again near the end of Smile PreCure! when Joker creates the Bad End Precure. This time, however, none of the five are spared.
- Pulled off again in HappinessCharge Pretty Cure! when Phantom tears off a part of Cure Lovely's shadow and wears it, becoming Cure UnLovely.
- The Dark Bring "Decalogue" from Rave Master is an Evil Knockoff of Haru's Ten Commandments sword, with ten forms that match the forms of Haru's sword except for the last one.
- The Dark Bring Pool creates these; it seals away (then drowns) anyone stupid enough to dive into its ominous purple water while producing a darker copy. The Hero Haru and Plue were victims of such power, but fortunately they were able to break free and stop their evil copies just in time to save Elie.
- An episode of Ronin Warriors features Red Torrent; an evil, poisonous version of the original Torrent armor.
- Barasuishou in Rozen Maiden was specifically created to defeat the real Rozen Maidens by Enju, the jealous apprentice of the maker of the original dolls. He eventually succeeds. Well, sort of.
- In the Sailor Moon anime, Zoisite transforms into a copy of Sailor Moon to lure out Tuxedo Mask. His copy of Sailor Moon had the white and red replaced with purple. In the videogame Sailor Moon: Another Story, the Opposito are all evil doppelgängers of the Sailor Senshi.
- Speed Racer X: Team Exelion built the Albatross, a car based upon the schematics of the Mach 5.
- Zigzagged in Superior. Early on in the story, Sheila creates a clone named Copy to cover for her while she travels with Exa. Sheila ends up undergoing a gradual Heel–Face Turn and Copy turns out to be even more evil than Sheila used to be. Then Copy makes their own clone named Shadow, who also undergoes a Heel–Face Turn. Then it turns out that Sheila herself was a clone of the original Demon Queen, who is more Ax-Crazy than the other three put together, making the full pattern evil->good->evil->good.
- Towards the end of the first series of Vandread, the Harvesters produced copies of the Vandreads; after the first set of copies were destroyed, the mass-produced later versions didn't seem much of a threat in the Second Stage. The Evil Knockoff of the Cool Ship Nirvana in the Second Stage, however, unexpectedly turned out to be a Transforming Mecha that was in fact stronger than the original. (The copy of it shown at the final battle though was much weaker, though)
- The Cloneblades from Witchblade (2006) are an odd case, being clones of an artifact instead of a character.
- Casual variant, as both Cloneblades and Excons/iWeapons are fruits of research which began when Dohji Industries and NSWF were allies and ended before they came to blows (i.e. catastrophe), so neither is created specifically for battle with each other or original. Also, Cloneblades are more imitation than copy, never showing any signs of being [semi]sentient/self-willed (unlike Witchblade). NSWF checked whether would-be wielder is physically and mentally ready for Cloneblades, but measured compatibility for Witchblade.
- There is also the Ultimateblade, which is claimed to be equal to the Witchblade in power if not stronger and is capable of being wielded by a man. However, it’s pointed out to have the downside of draining the user's energy significantly faster than what a Cloneblade does. And despite being strong enough to put Masane on the ropes throughout their whole fight, it gets done in by the Witchblade's Super Mode.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL: The Over-One-Hundred Numbers (101-107) are artificial Number monsters created by Don Thousand for the Seven Barian Emperors to use, highlighted by their more mechanical-looking appearances. Unlike Numbers 1-100, Astral is unable to absorb them due to them not being fragments of his memories.
Art
- Creepazoids: Secret Santa from series 38 is an evil clone of the real deal.
Asian Animation
- BoBoiBoy
- In the middle of the original series 3rd season, Adu Du builds BoBoiBot, a robotic replica of the titular hero, who proves himself to be a more capable superhero than BoBoiBoy. After BoBoiBoy admits defeat, Adu Du uses BoBoiBot to extort the civilians, forcing BoBoiBoy to find a new way to defeat his knockoff.
- In BoBoiBoy Galaxy, the episode "Copy and Paste" has the criminal Gijimo use the power spheras Copybot and Pastebot to produce pirated robotic copies of BoBoiBoy to attack him and his crew. The clones are mediocre in quality but make up for that with their sheer numbers, so the heroes finally aim their attacks to their production source as well, putting them and the criminal out of commission.
- In episode 27 of Happy Friends, a monster creates an evil clone of Happy S. that's barely distinguishable from the real one due to having a very slightly darker color scheme. An Impostor-Exposing Test backfires and convinces the rest of the Supermen and Doctor H. that the knockoff is the real Happy S., much to the actual Happy S.'s dismay.
Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering:
- Cards like Clone, Vesuvan Doppleganger, and The Mimeoplasm let you create this, though (because of rules regarding "legendary", or unique, cards), doing it to one of those caused both to die up until 2014, which tweaked it so that the only restriction on legendary creatures is that the same player can't control two copies of the same one. Also, the Scars of Mirrodin block went out of its way to make Phyrexian versions of old cards.
- Sakashima the Imposter is a (somewhat clunky) workaround to the Legend Rule, though he has the ability to impersonate multiple creatures (sequentially), and so is arguably not an example.
Comic Books
- 2000 AD:
- Nemesis the Warlock: Torquemada has a chamaeleonic alien creature which he names the Mimesis impersonate Nemesis and go on a rampage on Termight to turn the earthlings against Nemesis.
- XTNCT: Father creates a group of clones to fight the dinosaurs who have turned against him. This backfires when they just team up with their counterparts to take down Father together.
- Judge Dredd: There are a few of these: Judda,and the zombie Dredd created by The Mutant.
- Rogue Trooper: The regened version of Gunnar brainwashed to kill Rogue.
- The Avengers: Ultron frequently tried making evil knockoffs (of sorts) to limited success. Both the Vision and Jocasta's thought patterns were based off those of The Avengers, Wonder Man and The Wasp respectively, but both also quickly turned against him and would go on the become Avengers themselves, making them more-or-less good knockoffs of already good characters. Similarly, Alkhema was created with the thought patterns of Mockingbird and was arguably a successful Evil Knockoff as she was genuinely evil but ended up betraying him anyway. Even later on, Ultron planned to replace all organic life with evil knockoffs after he killed them all (he failed, of course).
- It is also revealed that Ultron himself is a Evil Knockoff of his creator, Hank Pym, who used his own thought patterns in Ultron's programming process.
- And again, in The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) #520, Hydra reveals four Avengers knockoffs, using special gear to simulate their powers: The Hammer, with his electricity-manipulating hammer, as a counterpart of Thor; Karl, a man in powered armor styled after Iron Man (who refuses to call himself by his assigned codename, Tactical Force); The Militant, basically a terrorist version of Captain America; and Bowman, a counterpart to the (then-deceased) Hawkeye.
- The Boys: Taken to a deliberately absurd extreme. Black Noir is the Homelander's identical clone, designed and tasked to kill him should the need arise. Never being called on to fulfill his one purpose eventually drives Noir insane, and he begins putting on Homelander’s outfit and photographing himself doing utterly horrific acts to frame Homelander and finally get the kill order. This fails, but Homelander believing he’s committed atrocities that he can’t remember ends up pushing him over the edge anyways into homicidal mania. Noir finally gets the go-ahead, and after finally killing Homelander simply walks out and lets the military and Butcher finish him off.
- Deadpool: In Deadpool (2012), during The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly arc, North Korea attempted to create its own knock-off version of the X-Men. North Korean versions of Wolverine, Storm, Banshee, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Sunfire were created by infusing prisoners with Deadpool's Healing Factor.
- The Flash:
- Issue 134 of The Flash (1987) had one panel depict the original Flash Jay Garrick battling a Golden Age Reverse-Flash, who differed from his traditional Evil Counterpart the Rival by being a robot and wearing a golden helmet with red wings as well as a yellow shirt with a red lightning bolt insignia, similar to the red-on-yellow costume worn by Barry Allen's Reverse-Flash Professor Zoom.
- Inertia, who was created to be the evil Thawne family member when Bart Allen (Impulse I/Kid Flash II) refused his heritage as a Thawne.
- Green Lantern: The Black Lanterns in Blackest Night are evil (and in the cases of dead villains, eviler) knockoffs of the dead people chosen by the Black Lantern rings. The rings reanimate the corpses and simulate any powers and weapons they had in life and a twisted version of their original personalities specifically meant to provoke a strong emotional response from people, enabling the Black Lanterns to rip out their emotion filled hearts.
- Groo the Wanderer: Played straight in a hilarious manner in one story. The antagonist is a sorcerer who can conjure up any thing or being he can imagine (though they are very temporary). When facing Groo, he declares "The only thing that can defeat Groo... is Groo!" and conjures up an exact copy. Who directly proceeds to cutting of the sorcerer's head by accident and then disappearing.
- The Infinity War: Big Bad Magus creates an army of demonic versions of the Marvel heroes to distract and kill them. Most of them die by the end of the series, but two live on — Hellspawn, Daredevil's Evil Knockoff (who dies a little later during the Daredevil storyline Fall From Grace) and the Spider-Doppelganger, Spider-Man's Evil Knockoff who has a habit of not staying dead.
- Iron Man: The Titanium Man was a KGB agent who had a suit of armor modeled specifically on Iron Man's specs (although inferior Soviet resources meant that the resulting armor ended up being more than eight feet tall). The Iron Monger was a later villain to do the same thing.
- Justice League of America: In issues 3 and 5 of Justice League of America (2013), The JLA fights robot doubles of, not themselves, but the Justice League built by Professor Ivo.
- Legion of Super-Heroes:
- In the storyline The Great Darkness Saga, the servants of Darkseid are duplicates of Lydea Mallor (ancestor of Legion member Shadow Lass), Superman, a Guardian of the Universe, and Darkseid's sons Orion and Kalibak.
- In the Postboot version of the same storyline, the same Big Bad has cloned minions of his son Orion, fellow New God Big Barda, and, Firestorm.
- Madballs: Dr. Viktor Frankenbeans, the main villain of the comic book published by defunct Marvel Comics subsidiary Star Comics, occasionally tried to defeat the Madballs by deliberately creating Madballs of his own. Such efforts resulted in creating a trio of animate bowling balls called the Badballs, the second series Madballs, the Super Madballs, and a female Madball named Madbelle. The second series Madballs and the Super Madballs, however, ended up turning against Frankenbeans and siding with the original Madballs.
- Manhunter: The award-winning "Manhunter (1973)" arc (the Paul Kirk version that ran in early 1970's Detective Comics) had clones of Paul as the Council's security forces. A variant in that Paul was initially head of security and they were created to help him, but after he found out what the Council was up to, they did wind up on opposite sides.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- The various comic versions of Sonic the Hedgehog usually feature Metal Sonic at some point, including a robot duplicate of Scourge, Sonic's Mirror Universe counterpart was also created.
- The original Robotnik created a series of robots called Auto-Automations, life-like robots that can fool virtually anyone. Tails fell in love with the Fiona Fox version while one of King Acorn allowed Robotnik to frame Sonic for Sally's apparent death and take over Knothole.
- Sonic the Comic:
- The comic renamed the Metal Sonic "Metallix" to be more distinctive, and explained his different appearance in Sonic CD versus Sonic and Knuckles as being due to there being a whole army of them, the Brotherhood of Metallix. Naturally, what with A.I. Is a Crapshoot, they ended up going rogue, usurping Robotnik and even attempting to erase him from history, they also created their own Evil Knockoffs of Porker and the Omni-Viewer creating the Porker Metallix and Pirate Omni-Viewer.
- After the failure of the Sonic Metallix Robotnik created the Metallix Mark 3 which was modelled after Knuckles unlike the Brotherhood of Metallix the Metallix Mark 3 was loyal.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): Surge the Tenrec and Kitsunami the Fennec are a pair of cyborgs created by Dr. Starline to replace Sonic and Tails in his own bid to control the world. Once they discovered the Awful Truth behind their inception, however, they started going rogue immediately. Even then, they continue to menace Sonic and Tails. This is both Deconstructed and Played for Drama as the process that turned them into Evil Knockoffs has left them both as severely broken individuals: Even though Surge knows that her hatred of Sonic is not only irrational but outright the cornerstone of Dr. Starline's brainwashing of her, she can no longer regard herself as a being that exists independent of Sonic. And Kit, on his part, was conditioned to be Surge's Satellite Character, to such extent that he has become an Extreme Doormat to whom Surge is, despite all the abuse she heaps on him, a Living Emotional Crutch.
Surge: (after Starline calls her past "irrelevant") It's is not "irrelevant"! I need context! If I have no past, all I have is this! And "this" is nothing! I'm nobody! I-I-I'm just a knockoff! Everything that I want — that I think I want — is a lie!
Surge: (during a later confrontation with Sonic) I don't want your pity or your friendship! I want you gone!
Sonic: But why?! Starline's not here to make you do anything! Freedom is right there, waiting for you! Just take it!
Surge: (with a sad, resigned smile) ...I can't.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- Spider-Man:
- The infamous Clone Saga featured several of these. This was taken to its limits in one issue, where it ended with dozens of Spider-Man clones attacking our heroes.
- In one Spidey Super Stories issue, Doctor Doom creates a villainous copy of Spider-Man called Web-Man, who was identical to Spider-Man aside from the colors of his costume being inverted. While he has the same abilities and powers as Spider-Man, he's a Dumb Muscle compared to the intelligent titular hero.
- Street Fighter (Malibu Comics): This was M. Bison's evil plan.
- Strikeforce: Morituri: After the humans develop a process to create super-powered warriors, the alien Horde soon develop Super-Hordians, genetically mutated warriors with augmented abilities specifically for the purpose of defeating the Morituri.
- Superlópez: The main enemy of the Supergroup created an entire group of robotic clones meant to Kill and Replace the heroes.
- Supergirl:
- In Supergirl (1972) #9 "Her Brother's Keeper", a mad scientist called Dr. Forte grows a male clone of Supergirl, instructing "Superlad" to rob banks for him.
- In Supergirl (1982) #10 "Radiation-Fever!", Supergirl is captured by Professor Drake, a geneticist working for the evil organization The Circle, who creates six mini-replicants to fight Supergirl with.
- Bizarrogirl: The titular Supergirl's backwards duplicate was... morally-inversed rather evil, due to her utterly alien thinking processes.
- Power Girl (2009) has Divine, Power Girl's own evil clone created by the villain Maxwell Lord.
- Superman:
- Bizarro, possibly the most well known example in the whole comic book gendre. Originally intended as an "imperfect copy" of Superman, he's actually a subversion. He's capable of being just as heroic as the actual Superman, but his mind is so warped (Depending on the Writer, he either thinks in opposites or has the mind of a child) he tends to cause massive destruction unwillingly, unwittingly and by accident. In most stories, the process for his creation is discovered by accident, later on improved or stolen by Lex Luthor and it is intended to kill Supes, who for his part, has never considered Biz evil so much as tragicly misguided. This is across all incarnations, from the confused frienemy clone to the backwards denizen of Bizarro World.
- In Earth 2 there's Brutaal, who was believed to be a brainwashed Clark, but it is revealed to be actually an improved version of Bizarro, created by Darkseid.
- All-Star Superman: Bizarro himself has his own "imperfect duplicate" in Zibarro, a perfect pallet swap of Superman and the next simil to the real deal in every sense, this of course just in some continuities.
- Superboy was originally intended to be this for Superman, it didn't work. He also has Match, though when he's not changing his appearance with his additional powers, he looks like a pallet swapped Kon-El instead of properly passing as him. In contrast with both other examples, he is a full-fledged evil character that looks like Conner.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW): Slash (A frequently reused Evil Counterpart humanoid turtle across multiple continuities) was a mutant specifically created by StockGen to hunt down the Turtles.
- Thor: The 95th issue of Journey into Mystery had a scientist named Professor Zaxton use an invention of his to create an evil clone of Thor. The story ends with Zaxton getting himself killed when he tries to reach for his machine, only to fall to his doom while the contraption is destroyed, but not before leaving behind a benevolent clone of Zaxton who proceeds to take the deceased scientist's place.
- Thunderworld #1:
- Sivana attempts to steal the power of Shazam by...creating a technological version of the Rock of Eternity that is twice the size of the original.
- And then he creates his own version of the Marvel Family using his children.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- Ultimate X-Men (2001): The Weapon X program looked for a mutant with a similar Healing Factor to Wolverine's after Wolvie went AWOL in hopes of recreating the adamantium-bonding process, and found Sabretooth.note Lampshaded by Wolverine:
Wolverine: Four claws? Well, that'll keep people from seeing you as a made-in-Hong-Kong version of me.
- Ultimate Galactus Trilogy: The Red Guardian is a deranged Russian attempt at creating a rip-off of Captain America. He even has a shield made of human remains.
- Ultimate X-Men (2001): The Weapon X program looked for a mutant with a similar Healing Factor to Wolverine's after Wolvie went AWOL in hopes of recreating the adamantium-bonding process, and found Sabretooth.note Lampshaded by Wolverine:
- Wonder Woman:
- Vol. 1: The Duke of Deception creates his own version of Wonder Woman out of ectoplasm and her string of petty crimes are all blamed on the real one.
- Vol. 3: The villain Devastation is a woman molded from clay and given life and powers by Cronus and the Titans, as Cronus' answer to Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter and Hestia doing the same to form Wonder Woman.
- In Absolute Wonder Woman #14, the cosmic Balance Between Good and Evil creates an Entropy and Chaos Magic duplicate of Wonder Woman that spreads a Hate Plague wherever it goes to counteract her nature as a Hope Bringer. Diana lacked the ability to destroy it herself so she prays to Gaia for Divine Intervention. Gaia initially refuses, but Diana convinces her that Balance Is Not Good because their world itself is evil and corrupted, so the knockoff gets Dragged Off to Hell.
- X-Men (2024) introduced the "Inexplicable X-Men", a Super Supremacist team of artificial mutants created by Cassandra Nova to counter Cyclops' team. Their Gravity Master leader Schwarzschild ends up defecting to the real X-Men in Age of Revelation's Bad Future and is seemingly killed by the original Beast for this in the present.
- Zombo: Not so much evil as unfriendly and impolite, but Obmoz was created as a more powerful version of Zombo that would do as The Government commanded.
Comic Strips
- Modesty Blaise: The Russians use plastic surgery and extensive training to create a duplicate of Modesty in "The Double Agent".
Fan Works
- Ask The New Hope's Peak has Nine, a clone of Nagisa with the abilities of Izuru Kamukura, created by Maverick.
- Avengers of the Multi-verse: In the Season 1 finale, Clash of Titans, the Cabal reveal their ultimate plan to destroy the Avengers involves this. Albedo creates an evil duplicate of Octus called Novex which, combined with Shego and Baron acting in Ilana and Lance's roles, is able to create a version of Titan called Goliath.
- Bleach: Ultimate Alien: Szayel manages to create Hollowified versions of Four Arms, Diamondhead, and Swampfire after obtaining DNA samples of these aliens via several incidents throughout Ben's time in Las Noches named Huecos Bracos, Diamante De La Muerte, and Fuego Podrida respectively. He gains Tetramand DNA from an arm Grimmjow ripped off, Petrosapien crystals from the fight between Ben and Barragan in the Oasis, and Methanosian DNA from arms sliced off by Aizen in the aftermath of the aforementioned fight. However, the creation of the Hollowfied aliens is currently unexplained.
- Examples from the Calvinverse:
- Retro and Rupert produce an evil Calvin in Retro Chill in order to ruin the real one's reputation, which would weaken the Earth's defenses and allow them to Take Over the World.
- The monotone clones from the two-part Calvin & Hobbes: The Series episode "Electronic Invasion".
- In The Pez Dispenser and The Reign Of Terror, the duplicate creates a robotic knockoff of Socrates with Wolverine Claws.
- Cinders and Ashes: the Chronicles of Kamen Rider Dante plays with this trope. While Kamen Rider Dante was made first, then followed by his evil knockoff Malacoda, Malacoda's Malefik Driver came before Dante's Volcannik Driver. It's even lampshaded by Malacoda himself. Ironically, Malacoda is played straight, as his human form is an evil knockoff of Souta, to the point where some characters even refer to him as such, much to his chagrin.
- In Digimon Adventure 02: The Story We Never Told, while BlackWarGreymon is obvious, there are other examples:
- At one point Arukenimon lures the Digidestined into a trap by creating a Spire-born duplicate of Zudomon that they assume is Gomamon under the control of a Dark Spiral.
- During the invasion of the real world, a group of Deadmon combine into a duplicate of WereGarurumon
- After Oikawa temporarily takes control of Veemon, Hawkmon and Armadillomon, he is able to create copies of them even after the Digidestined have taken their partners back, although these copies cannot assume the Ultimate forms of the originals.
- In Gods and Monsters, Armitage's evil copy is her stolen body, animated by a mindless soldier program.
- In Hellsister Trilogy, Mordru procures a Supergirl evil duplicate to destroy the original Kara and the Legion of Super-Heroes.
- Here Comes the New Boss: Abattoir serves as this to the Butcher. The Noelle clones which escaped after she was cured included a clone of Taylor with the Butcher's transference power. The clones killed each other to unite their powers into a new Butcher entity they called Abattoir, with their minds focused on killing everything in the world.
- Magical Warrior Princess Gaz: Attempted by the camera-based Monster of the Week, which takes a negative photocopy of Gaz as the Magical Girl heroine Twinklefizz Stardust in order to use it to make an evil version of her called Duststar Fizztwinkle that he can control and send against her. However, since Gaz is not as good and sweet as everyone thinks Twinklefizz is but is actually an Enfant Terrible forced into a girly role she hates, this means that Duststar is the sweet one, much to the monster's confusion and Gaz's extreme annoyance.
- In Perfection Is Overrated, the Big Bad, The Usurper, is trying to take over the world with the help of the SUEs, but they repeatedly lose against the Himes. In response, for his last stand against the heroes, he deploys the final two SUEs as references to the Copy Cat Sue archetype- Makoto Kagami, who can take the form of any canon character and chooses Mai, and Suzuka Harushiro who wields Haruka's power from the manga. Natsuki tells him he's a hypocrite for thinking the SUEs are superior when he's using ones who imitate the Himes' powers, and Makoto and Suzuka fall at the hands of the Himes.
- In the Pony POV Series:
- Umbra Breeze, one half of the Big Bad Duumvirate of the Rumors arc, has a love of this. First, he creates a monstrous hound called Moon Howler as a twisted mockery of Blank Wolf/Blanky. On top of that, he sends three Shadows of Existence turned into these of the Crusaders themselves. One of his trump cards is an eviler knockoff of the Nightmares, and Nightmare Moon in particular, in the form of the Nightmare Forces. This even applies to his final form: while fighting Applejack, who's transformed into an Alicorn after fusing with Dark World Nightmare Mirror, he turns into a twisted mockery of an Alicorn with traits of AJ herself. Justified, as he's really Nyarlathotrot, the God of Corruption, so this trope is kind of his thing.
- The Sirens' pendants are revealed to be this of the Elements of Chaos. They tried to get the originals which were forged into the Alicorn Amulet then corrupted by being used to seal away the power of Witch Queen Lilith, but it rejected them. So they brainwashed a bunch of mages to created artificial knock offs of them.
- The Big Bad of Read The Fine Print creates this version of Doppelganger to be this. The twist here being it wasn't supposed to be Lara, but a knockoff of Nero. Amanda only decided to let the clone keep its 'kill Lara' objective because she thought the end result would be the same.
- As an intentional bit of ironic punishment, Fire Agate in Rose Redemption AU had commissioned a vein of Rose Quartz in the likeness of Pink Diamond's disguised form with the intent of leading them to Earth and destroying it. It is through one of these quartzes that Rose was able to regain a body.
- The Butcher from Undocumented Features is a very convincing and effective doppelganger of Gryphon, and kicks off the "Exile" plot.
- In Voice of the Condor: When Ambrosius' men steal the Golden Condor's hard drive, Ambrosius hooks it up to a mechanical computer in his orichalcum factory and forces the Condor's AI, Cibola to build him a variety of orichalcum devices. One of these is a copy of the Condor known as the "Dark Condor" for the Black Suns Malinche customizes it to use.
- Vow of Nudity: In one story, when the party is attacked by murderous illusions appearing as figures from their past, Spectra's simply looks like herself, only as a fully clothed powerful college-trained wizard who enjoyed the love and support of a happy upbringing that didn't hurt her and hold her back at every turn.
- Yognapped has Xephos, the clone made from Lewis's blood. He's a sadistic Blood Knight who, on his very first outing, reduces the population of Minecraftia by the thousands and pushes the world into an After the End state.
Films — Animated
- Justice League: Gods and Monsters: The film's main antagonists are a trio of robots designed after the Justice League, to frame them for the murder of everyone involved in Project Fair Play. Leaving no survivors or witnesses helps make it look like the League's handiwork. They also prove capable of matching the originals in a fight.
Films — Live-Action
- Ant-Man has Yellowjacket, which is the result of Darren Cross taking the Ant-Man suit and weaponizing it with two pairs of mechanic limbs (two are flight boosters, fitting the wasp name, while the others are laser cannons).
- The Deadites in Army of Darkness are led by an evil knockoff of Ash who’s created when a tiny version of Ash climbs into his mouth and then sprouts out of his shoulder.
- De Nomolos' evil plot in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey involved a pair of robot Bill and Teds assassinating and then replacing the originals. This also counts as an Inversion after Bill asks "How do you defeat a pair of evil robot usses?" You build a pair of good robot "usses"! (Hilariously, these do not look human at all.)
- Black Lightning (2009): Kuptsov's resources are enough to quickly make another flying car that can run for only a few minutes, but enough to duel with the Black Lightning.
- Before the heroes confront Nicola in Bunraku, they each have to face off against an evil counterpart.
- Godzilla:
- Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974), which was created by the Simians.
- Inverted in the Heisei continuity's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993) and the Millenium continuity's Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002) and Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003), where Godzilla is the antagonist (kind of) and Mechagodzilla is built by the humans to defeat him.
- In King Kong Escapes, the Mad Scientist Dr. Who creates the robotic Mechani-Kong. Mechani-Kong actually predates the more well-known Mechagodzilla by about seven years and was its primary inspiration.
- Iron Man Films: All of the major villains Iron Man fought in the first two movies have been knockoffs of Tony Stark's own designs. The Iron Monger was directly based off the Mk I, the "Hammeroids" were designed to compete, and Whiplash designed his tech to beat Stark at his own game.
- Slightly different in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The Big Bad only gathers the League so he can get samples of their powers, create multiple Evil Knockoffs, and sell them to the highest bidder - "an army of Hydes, invisible spies, vampire assassins" - together with Nemo's supertechnology.
- Logan features its most dangerous antagonist in the form of X-24, a perfect clone of Logan, but without a mind or personality of his own beyond rage, which Rice and Pierce use as The Brute.
- An early example is the 1920's film Metropolis. In the film, slaves which toil to keep a city running find hope in the form of a woman called Maria, who leads them in rebellion. To counter this, the leaders of the city above create a robotic copy of Maria to take her place.
- In Sinbad of the Seven Seas, Jaffar conjures up an evil doppelganger of Sinbad to fight him in a Mirror Match as a last resort.
- Superman (2025): Ultraman is designed by Lex Luthor to be his personal version of the titular hero. It turns out Ultraman really is a Superman clone that Luthor created by a hair. It's also revealed that he barely has a mind of his own and is completely controlled by Luthor.
- Superman IV: The Quest for Peace: Lex Luthor uses a stolen lock of Superman's hair to create Nuclear Man, a solar-powered knockoff of Superman.
- Stinger is a red copy of Bumblebee in Transformers: Age of Extinction, made by Kinetic Solutions Incorporated (KSI) as an attempt at producing military-controlled Autobots. Unsurprisingly, he sides with Galvatron. KSI's marketing claims that he is "Inspired by Bumblebee, but better in every way!", which incenses the real Bumblebee. Galvatron was an attempt to copy Optimus Prime, but due to Galvatron being possessed by Megatron KSI could only mimic Optimus' vehicle mode.
Gamebooks
- Lone Wolf:
- In book 19 of the series, Lone Wolf faces an Evil Knockoff of himself called Wolf's Bane.
- A similar predicament happens to Grey Star in Book 3 of World of Lone Wolf.
- In the backstory, the sun dragon Nyxator created the Lorestones, beautiful crystals filled with the power and wisdom of the god Kai. The demon Agarash the Damned, Naar's greatest champion of evil, slew Nyxator and crafted the Doomstones in mockery of the Lorestones.
Literature
- In DoubleShot, the criminal organization The Union decides to take revenge on James Bond by turning one of their people into an exact copy of him through plastic surgery, and frame him for various crimes.
- In book eight of the H.I.V.E. Series, it turns out that the Furans have their own personal Otto Malpanse, named Zero. Except Zero has even finer control over electricity, allowing him to control others' minds. The copy comes dangerously close to winning out, defeated by a The Power of Friendship moment between Otto and HIVEmind. The clone mind rapes poor Laura so badly that the next time she sees Otto, she's terrified nearly out of her mind, and Nero gives her the option to go home.
- Journey to the West: A doppelganger of Sun Wukong was the Villain of the Week once, though rather than fighting, Sun had to find somebody who could tell them apart — and not even the gods could differentiate them.
- Lord Marksman and Carnwenharn: In this timeline, Tigre's antagonist is apparently the other King Of Magic Bullet. Said villain also revived Sasha, the strongest vanadis, back from the dead.
- The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings has a variant example — Morgoth makes evil knockoffs of entire races, the Orcs from the Elves, the Trolls from the Ents, the Balrogs and dragons from the Maia, and presumably the Ringwraith's flying steeds from the Eagles. This is part of the limitations of his power: "The Dark Lord cannot make, he can only mock".
- In The Lost Metal, Wax and Wayne encounter a pair who were specifically trained to fight them. They are given the protagonists' abilities, and even more, using hemalurgy, and even have them mimic their personalities. They are eventually defeated by having Wax fight Wayne's counterpart and vice versa.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe, specifically The Thrawn Trilogy, has Luuke Skywalker, an evil clone of Luke made from the hand he lost at Cloud City and wielding the same lightsaber. He was indeed mindless, and designed that way, as an extension of his master's will. Also, one of the main villains of this arc also proved to be a clone of a character we'd meet much later in a novel set during the prequel series, although he was very, very like the original. Zahn originally wanted to make this character a clone of Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Executive Meddling torpedoed it.
- Mark Vorkosigan of the Vorkosigan Saga is a subversion.
- In Woken Furies, Takeshi Kovac's personality from when he was a young sociopathic thug is sleeved into a new body and sent after his older Anti-Hero self. According to the law you can only have one personality walking around at the same time, so he doesn't have any choice but to kill his other self or face Real Death.
Live-Action TV
- In an episode of The A-Team, a villainous landowner hires some thugs to pretend to be the A-Team to terrorize his enemies, with a fake Hannibal, fake B.A., and fake Face. It ends as well for him as you might imagine.
- In Beetleborgs the Shadowborg was an evil Beetleborg reverse-engineered from the Blue Stinger Borg's armor specifically created to destroy the heroes. The good guys had to create a good knockoff of Shadowborg, the White Blaster Beetleborg, to even the odds. Because of the rules governing the magic that created White Blaster, when Shadowborg was eventually defeated White Blaster's power vanished as well.
- Princess Ardala created several copies of the eponymous hero in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. One of them was to be sent to Earth to act as a spy; the others... were to be kept by Ardala for her own private purposes.
- Doctor Who:
- The Daleks construct an android version of the Doctor in "The Chase".
- Parodied cleverly (with the help from a bit of Tomato Surprise) in the Short Trips and Sidesteps story "The Android Maker of Calderon IV", in which an android builder creates a completely perfect android duplicate of the Third Doctor as his life's work, as part of an incredibly convoluted villainous plot to get revenge on the Doctor and Sarah Jane. Then the real Doctor shows up with Sarah, but he's regenerated into the Fourth Doctor since then, making the robot useless.
- Get Smart: KAOS created Gropo the robot to destroy Hymie (who was created by KAOS in the first place, but changed sides).
- One episode of the classic Hawaii Five-O featured a criminal who put together a team of lookalikes of the Five-0 squad in order to con a businessman out of a large chunk of cash. The episode was also notable for showing what a Mission: Impossible-type operation would look like from the other side.
- In the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode "If I Had a Hammer...," Hephaestus brings a statue of Hercules to life. He has all of the strength and looks of Hercules, but none of the brains. Subverted in that he's not really evil, but rather childish and easily manipulated by Discord, who was using him to frame the real Hercules for murder.
- Subverted in Juukou B-Fighter, the Metal Heroes series which was where the original footage of Beetleborgs came from, by the original version of Shadowborg, Shadow/Black Beet. Originally created to defeat the B-Fighters by his master, he eventually starts to question his own existence and his loyalty starts to waver. Then, it is revealed that he is an actual clone of Takuya/Blue Beet and eventually becomes obsessed with beating Takuya in order to prove his own existence and in order to gain immortality as he is dying due to being a short-lived clone who was only created to serve his purpose in defeating the B Fighters. He eventually ditches his master to fight for himself.
- Kreel creates two copies of Will in The Legend of William Tell. One dresses up in a cloak and kills people to sully his name, and later pretends to be his long lost brother. The other kidnaps Vara and nearly kills the team before Will manages to straighten things out.
- The Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation episode "Mutant Reflections" had Dr. Quease create evil clones of the Turtles.
- In Primeval, Helen Cutter creates a clone of Nick Cutter in order to infiltrate the ARC. The real Nick almost gets his evil clone twin to turn, telling him he has free will. He fails. The clone however, whispers "Save yourself!" just as he sets off the bomb intended to destroy the ARC
- In Super Space Sheriff Gavan Infinity, Death Gavan has his own counterparts to the titular hero's armor, Gavarion Trigger, Gavarion Blade and Cosmo Gavarion. All of these were originally the equipment he once used as the heroic Gavan Destiny, but heavily modified to channel negative Emorgy instead of the heroic Gavans' positive one.
- In the VR Troopers episode "Kaitlin Through the Looking Glass," Grimlord makes an evil duplicate of Kaitlin. The dupe eventually does a Heel–Face Turn, helps the heroes stop Grimlord, and then agrees to be reabsorbed into Kaitlin (it must be done or both will vanish.) The reabsorption process goes wonky though, giving Kaitlin the permanent extra superpower to split off Kaitlin Two at will.
Myth & Religion
- The Bible states that the devil is only capable of making pale imitations of God's work. This is why the number of the Beast is printed on humans, why there is an "evil" Trinity of the Beast, the False Prophet and the Antichrist, and why Conquest from the four horsemen of the apocalypse bears a slight resemblance to Jesus' real appearance later in Book of Revelation.
Professional Wrestling
- The infamous fake Diesel and fake Razor Ramon that Jim Ross used to enact revenge or something against Vince McMahon Jr, in what was really a transparent attempt to sue WCW for "using" the originals on Nitro.
- In an attempt to cash in on The Colony, Wink Vavasseur created Colony Xtreme Force in Chikara.
Tabletop Games
- In Monsterpocalypse, the monsters from the faction Ubercorp International are robot duplicates of monsters from other factions.
- Near the end of the Paranoia adventure "Send in the Clones", the PCs discover that their adversary Teela O'Malley has been cloned multiple times. They end up facing an entire army of Teelas.
Theme Parks
- In Shrek 4D at Universal Studios, Lord Farquaad's ghost brings a stone statue of Dragon to life and has it attack the protagonists.
Toys
- Kid Fury from SuperThings. He was a creation of the villains, made as an attempt to replace Kid Kazoom, the newest, and most powerful hero, of Kaboom City. He's made up of evil red Kazoom energy, to contrast Kid Kazoom’s heroic blue, and has it drilled into his head that he should be the city's most-regarded SuperThing, purely because he’s stronger.
Visual Novels
- In The Eden of Grisaia Yuuji gets his own artificially aged clone as a rival to fight at the end. The fight takes a really long time because Yuuji is badly injured but has more experience.
Web Animation
- The Amazing Digital Circus: "Untitled": For the softball game scenario, Caine provides "evil" versions of the main cast (save for Gangle) and Orbsman to serve as the opposing team. Ragatha's double is a cackling hammy villain, Pomni's is a sulky thug, and Kingler's is an angry coach named Dictatorler, while the doubles of the sulky Zooble and Jerkass Jax are a cheerful loony and a passive doormat.
- Flipnote Warrior: The Anti-Sakuga Mome fights becomes more humanoid and then uses his own version of Flipnote to cancel Ugo's magic.
Webcomics
- Parodied in Adventurers!. Khrima creates robot duplicates of all the heroes, and plans to kidnap the heroes and replace them with their doubles to fool each other, only to be informed of the holes in this plan: the duplicates only vaguely resemble the people they're replacing; he built a double of Evil Killer Death Spybot 5000, who is already a robot and already on their side; if all the adventurers are replaced by robots then when the trap is sprung the robots will be turning on each other; and, if they're kidnapped, then of course there's no need to trick them anyway.
- Akuma's Comics: Doc Robot makes 4T, a Yellow Devil knock-off of Bass. Ultimately 4T proves inferior to the original due to his lack of experience, and is defeated by acid rain.
- DICE: The Cube That Changes Everything: In the confrontation X spawns duplicates of Dongtae, Mio and Eunju against them plus Taebin, with the only visible difference being brighter eye colors, and in Mio's case, having her original appearance.
- In It Sucks to Be Weegie!, Luigi ends up running into the one guy that might possibly suck more than he does; Waluigi. Hilarity ensues.
- MS Paint Masterpieces had Copy Mega Man, made by Dr. Wily to stop Mega Man and pre-loaded with all of the Robot Masters weapons. A logical move on Wily's part since Mega Man is, y'know, a robot he helped build. And honestly, it would have actually killed Mega Man if it weren't for outside intervention.
- In Rusty and Co., the hipster vampire sets out to do this to Cube, by drawing out his evil side, and gets Madeline. (Would have worked between if she had more evil to draw out.)
- In Sluggy Freelance, Santa Clause creates Mecha-Easter Bunny to defeat Bun-bun. The only way he could be more evil than Bun-bun is to destroy Tokyo, which he does before he even appears on-panel.
- Sonic the Comic – Online! has the new Metallix built by Grimer called "Neo Metallix" it is based on Metal Sonic's Neo Metal Sonic form.
- In Sonichu, Robotnik and Giovanni make two Evil Knockoffs of Sonichu - Black Sonichu (later renamed "Blake") and Metal Sonichu. Metal Sonichu is defeated in his first appearance and Blake is an annoyance to Sonichu and the Chaotic Combo until his hidden away Heel–Face Turn after getting a girlfriend.
- The concept is parodied in this Zebra Girl comic.
Web Original
- Atop the Fourth Wall has the mysterious Mechakara, who resembles Linkara with a robotic hand. His origins and motives are unknown and mostly he's just lurked in the background chuckling in a sinister fashion and occasionally making subtle attempts on Linkara's life and re-killing the original Spoony. Linkara apparently doesn't even know he exists. Later videos show that they finally met face to face and that Mechakara is an Alternate Universe version of Pollo the Robot Buddy. He's only using the Linkara guise (which could very well be his universe's Linkara's skin) so that he can steal the Magic Gun, an Empathic Weapon.
- As related to the above, The Spoony Experiment has implemented this recently. At the end of Spoony's Final Fantasy VIII review, he is attacked by Squall, who was hired by Dr. Insano, ALL of whom are played by Noah Antwiler. At the end of this encounter, both Squall and Spoony are killed, and Linkara takes to reanimating Spoony through cloning. This Clone is now the main character of the Spoony Experiment. The Evil Knockoff comes in when a short while later, a Black Lantern ring falls into Linkara's hotel room while he's at the Chicago Comic Convention, and reanimates the soul of the Original Spoony One. This Black Lantern version fights Linkara briefly, is defeated, and joins Linkara in a single review. He is then promptly murdered by Mechakara and brought back as a Black Lantern again. Then, in the Final Fantasy X review, before the review truly begins, the Original Spoony bursts in on Clone Spoony, explaining that he came back to life as Spoony the White, and came to kill the clone to get his show back. Upon finding out that Clone Spoony was going to review Final Fantasy X, however, Spoony the White shot himself with the gun intended to kill the Clone. He then promptly returns as a Black Lantern Spoony, again. Given the convolution of this plot, it's hard to say if he's really the original, an Evil Knockoff, or if this is reversed from the get go.
Western Animation
- Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: In "Ace Off", the villain of the episode use Ace's hair to create an evil clone of him to kidnap a dog and pin the blame on the real Ace.
- The idea is lampooned in an episode of Action League NOW!, in which The Flesh is impersonated by RoboFlesh, who is indistinguishable from The Flesh aside from metal bolts covering his entire body. No one notices the bolts, and the evil mayor almost wins.
- In The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, the antagonist group MAVO managed to raid the Trio's home while they were out, successfully stealing the blueprints to the heroes' airship. The result? The much more evil looking and combat ready Eclipse.
- In one episode of Aladdin: The Series, a chaos elemental learns that Aladdin has never lost. Not liking the predictability of a hero always winning, he makes a Bad Aladdin to fight him, complete with Bad Genie. Luckily, Good Aladdin figures out that Bad Aladdin wouldn't have freed his genie, so stealing the lamp works.
- Inverted in Archie's Weird Mysteries when a group of aliens kidnap Reggie Mantle and make a robot clone of him for espionage. The alien's Bumbling Sidekick quite literally asks Reggie to describe himself and, thanks to the teen's raging ego, he in effect describes a Mary Sue version of him who is the perfect friend and the perfect person in every way (save for the time bomb in him, but he has no control over that). So much so when they are engaged in a niceness contest to determine which one is the clone, Reggie manages to win by whispering to the copy "if you were really the nicest, you'd let me win." The clone then punches him in the face to throw the contest, the aliens leave with the clone, and the time bomb goes off.
- In Ben 10: Omniverse, the Nemetrix is a knockoff of the Omnitrix created by Dr. Psychobos, Azmuth's Unknown Rival, using incomplete blueprints of the prototype Omnitrix provided by Malware. The Nemetrix can transform its bearer into non-sapient alien beings that are the predators of Ben's aliens. Khyber's pet wears the Nemetrix since sapient minds can't handle transforming into savage non-sapient creatures.
- And that's to say nothing of the twenty-something other knockoff Omnitrices that pop up throughout the series, despite the fact that two or more Omnitrices meeting in-universe have a high chance of disrupting the very fabric of reality itself if they stay in close contact for too long. Interestingly, Ben actually uses one of the evil knockoff Omnitrices for an entire series after his original was destroyed in the finale of Ben 10: Alien Force. Granted, said evil knockoff had the added bonus of giving his forms a Super Mode, at the cost of key features like DNA repair.
- The 2016 reboot alters Kevin's backstory so that he built the Antitrix, an Omnitrix that gives him all the same initial aliens as Ben's but more powerful because they're also hybridized with unspecified species. He got idea from a dream where its blueprints were projected into his mind by Vilgax, who here was Azmuth's treacherous former assistant (combining the roles of two of his assistants from the original series run), in a long scheme to eventually seize it for himself.
- The episode of Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot in which the Legion Ex Machina reproduces Big Guy from his original blueprints — which is a plot point, since Big Guy's final design differed from those blueprints in some very important ways — the blueprint-secret weapon different from the finalized secret weapon.
- There's also an episode where Donovan manufactured a line of Rusty-clone toys. In a subversion, they were perfectly docile. Then the Legion Ex Machina got a hold on one of the clones, and used it to control all of the clones. So, Big Guy and Rusty had to deal with an entire army of Evil Knockoffs.
- The title characters of Biker Mice from Mars occasionally dealt with evil copies of themselves.
- In "Verminator", Vinnie's attempt to manipulate Dr. Karbunkle into making a replacement robot arm for Modo (who recently got his old one damaged because of a Life-or-Limb Decision) ends up inadvertently inspiring Dr. Karbunkle and Lawrence Limburger to create a robot duplicate of Vinnie known as the Verminator who is powered by Vinnie's brainwaves. To make things even more difficult for Modo and Throttle, Karbunkle made it so that any damage dealt to the Verminator would also affect Vinnie.
- In "So Life Like", after failing to kill the Biker Mice by using Karbunkle's latest invention to bring comic strip and cartoon villains to life, Limburger gets the idea to instead create evil copies of the Biker Mice from drawings made by his goon Greasepit.
- "Cycle Centaurs" had Dr. Karbunkle use DNA samples of the Biker Mice as well as scrapings from their bikes to create the Cycletaurs, who curiously didn't look anything like the Biker Mice, but were a trio of humanoid rodents on motorcycles just the same.
- Evil Emperor Zurg decides to make a team of evil, cloned rangers in an episode of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. Trouble is, he takes them from their cloning vats a bit early and ends up with a team of evil kid versions of team Lightyear. At the end of the episode, Zurg tries again, but waits too long and gets a team of senior citizens.
- The Captain Planet and the Planeteers two-part episode "Mission to Save Earth" had Dr. Blight create polluting duplicates of the Planeteers' elemental rings, with Deforestation being the polluting equivalent of Earth, Super Radiation being the polluting equivalent of Fire, Smog being the polluting equivalent of Wind, Toxics being the polluting equivalent of Water, and Hate being the polluting equivalent of Heart. Arming herself and her fellow Eco-Villains Looten Plunder, Duke Nukem, Sly Sludge, and Verminous Skumm with the rings, they eventually use them to create an evil copy of Captain Planet called Captain Pollution.
- The Challenge of the GoBots episode "Doppelganger" had Cy-Kill attempt to brainwash the Guardians using fully robotic duplicates of some of their members.
- The Cow and Chicken episode "Bad Chicken" had the Red Guy (under the identity of the Copy Fairy) create an evil doppelgänger of Chicken. The Chicken copy is Deliberately Monochrome, has a flat body and an echo-y voice.
- Vlad tried several times to clone Danny Phantom, including creating a younger Distaff Counterpart. The thing is, he succeeded in creating the perfect clone. All he needed was that one mid-morph DNA sample to finalize it.
- The Dark Lord Chuckles the Silly Piggy created a mechanical duplicate of Dave called Mecha-Dave in an episode of Dave the Barbarian.
- In the DC Animated Universe, Cadmus created a clone of Supergirl named Galatea. She wasn't very nice.
- Like in the comic books, the DCAU version of Bizarro was created as a genetic clone of Superman gone awry.
- In the finale of the Cadmus story arc, the Brainiac/Luthor hybrid generates robotic Evil Knockoffs of the Justice League. Or alternatively you could argue they're technically regular knockoffs of Alternate Universe Evil Twins, the Justice Lords. The Flash didn't have a Justice Lord counterpart, as their Start of Darkness was their Flash's death; his robot had the appearance of Reverse-Flash, his Evil Counterpart in the comics.
- In one of Doug's Quailman stories, Dr. Rubbersuit captures Quailman and splits him into his good and evil halves, planning to use the latter as a henchman. The evil Quailman escapes and proceeds to wreak havoc.
- The Fairly OddParents!: In the TV movie "Fairy Idol", Norm creates a clone of Timmy under the pretense that the clone can spend time with Cosmo and Wanda while the real one can have the day to himself. This turns out to be step #1 of Norm's Evil Plan, which involves making the clone act like a complete Jerkass to Cosmo and Wanda until they can't take it anymore and quit their jobs. Becomes a Chekhov's Gunman upon the fairies quitting however, as once Jorgan comes to wipe Timmy's memory, he wipes the memories of the clone instead.
- In the Fangbone! episode "The Brothers Of Battle", Drool creates evil copies of Fangbone and Bill (Toothbreaker and Borb, respectively) to defeat Fangbone and Bill and steal his toe. They ultimately decide to betray him and use the toe themselves.
- Subverted in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Sick of being outwitted by Mac & Bloo, Mac's Big Brother Bully Terrence resolves to create his own Bloo to help him terrorize them, and produces the Dumb Muscle Red. To his frustration, Red ends up being a Minion with an F in Evil and the episode ends with him turning on Terrence in a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal.
- The Futurama episode "I Dated a Robot" had an army of evil Lucy Liubots.
- In Gargoyles, Xanatos decides first to build a small army of cheap robotic copies of Goliath, then a suit of Powered Armor for himself that resembles Goliath's appearance, then has ordinary humans gene-spliced into knockoffs, and then just out-and-out clones him. None of these schemes work, and the clone plan backfires so spectacularly that he never tries again.
- Though it's worth noting that having the red exo suit does allow Xanatos to almost hold his own against Goliath and other non-humans. Additionally, Thailog and Xanatos together probably could best the Manhattan Clan. Pity Thailog hates both his dads.
- Part of the problem is that Xanatos' knockoffs have a nasty habit of turning good. Of the four gene-spliced humans, only one remains evil throughout the entire series. Of the six clones, only two choose to be evil.
- Hanna-Barbera loved this trope. Snooper and Blabber and Secret Squirrel both had an episode with a mad scientist creating robot clones of the lead protagonist (Snooper and Secret Squirrel, respectively) to commit crimes. Other shows had some kind of bad guy disguise as the protagonist, including Yogi Bear, Breezly and Sneezly, Ricochet Rabbit, Squiddly Diddly, Scooby-Doo, Hong Kong Phooey, Richie Rich, Don Coyote and a few others.
- Warner Bros. even took it far to the entire Mystery Inc. gang in the What's New, Scooby-Doo? Valentine's Day Episode, where the gang is framed by perfect lookalike doubles (all with glowing red eyes for kidnapping teenagers at Lover's Lane. It turns out it was all set up by NYSNC's J.C. Chasez disguised in a rubber Scooby-Doo mask and perfect body suit, with four Hollywood extras resembling the real-life voice actors of the Mystery Inc. members disguised as the humans.
- Dr. Claw once created an army of Inspector Gadget clones. Another episode had a M.A.D. Agent create a crude robotic duplicate of Gadget to frame him for crimes (complete with functional gadgets and a Robo-Speak Don Adams voice). The spinoff series Gadget Boy & Heather also had one episode where Spydra created a copy of Gadget Boy named Bad Gadget Boy. Even Gadget and the Gadgetinis was not immune to this trope, having an evil clone of Gadget in one episode and a disguised M.A.D. Agent in another.
- And now the 2015 CGI series has Talon create an evil clone of Penny. This franchise really loves this trope.
- In Iron Man: The Animated Series, the two-part episode "Iron Man to the Second Power" had M.O.D.O.K. create a robotic duplicate of Iron Man in a plan to frame the hero for plaguing the world with the Dark water virus.
- The J-Team from Jackie Chan Adventures had an identical team of evil knockoffs, until they did a Heel–Face Turn at the end of the episode.
- Kim Possible once had Drakken create a small army of feral Kim "clones." This plan failed, spectacularly, but at least he learned an important lesson: "No clones."
- In the old The Legend of Zelda (1989) episode "The Doppelganger", Ganon creates an Evil Knockoff of Zelda (complete with "evil"-color outfit). It has a couple of tells: it can't make the Triforce float, it casts no reflection, and its kisses were "colder than [Link] expected". Also, being a magic monster, it was destroyed by the energy blast from Link's sword (which had been previously shown to just sting actual people).
- The Masters of the Universe character "Faker" is an evil palette-swap of He-Man himself, with blue skin, red hair and orange armor. Depending on which version of canon you accept, he's either a malformed clone (the comic book), or a magical creation of Skeletor (the animated series).
- Miraculous Ladybug:
- It seems the heroes will always deal with an evil Ladybug once per season:
- First, there's Antibug who, as her name implies, is an evil counterpart of Ladybug. She wields a Killer Yo-Yo like Ladybug and has similar powers, though in contrast to Ladybug's Lucky Charm, which gives her a seemingly innocuous item that can nonetheless be used to save the day, her Anti Charm simply summons a honkin' great sword.
- In season 2, the villain Sandboy had the power to bring people's worst fears to life. Chat Noir's worst fear was an evil Ladybug that tried to kill him. Like Antibug above, she also summoned a similar gigantic sword with her Lucky Charm.
- Season 3 features Mayura creating a Sentimonster that's an almost exact replica of Ladybug in order to fight the heroes. After defeating her, the real Ladybug realizes that the sentimonster is as sentient as a human being and may not be really evil, and hands her the amokized item, giving her free will. Moved by this act and proving that she wasn't evil, "Sentibug" then joins the heroes. Unfortunately, Mayura kills her when she undoes the amokization.
- The villain Copycat is a perfect duplicate of Cat Noir, and even possesses his Cataclysm ability.
- Volpina is a villain Hawk Moth based on his knowledge of the Fox Miraculous, and wields the same powers of illusion. Interestingly, though, a real heroic user of the Fox Miraculous wouldn't be introduced until the following season.
- It seems the heroes will always deal with an evil Ladybug once per season:
- One episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has Queen Chrysalis create clones of the Mane Six from hunks of wood and photos of their cutie marks, creating copies with washed-out colors, messy manes, a few wrong details, and some serious attitude problems. Ironically the Mane Six never even becomes aware of them: the knockoffs' entire motive is simply getting free of Chrysalis and becoming too powerful to ever be ordered around again, their few minor run-ins with the real things are written off by them as simple bad moods, and the six of them get killed by the Tree of Harmony when they decide to attack it. After this Queen Chrysalis, whose sanity was already slipping when she created the evil copies, continues to carry around what's left of the Twilight clone for company.
- In an episode of The New Adventures of He-Man, Skeletor creates a clone of He-Man called “He-Slave”. He mimics He-Man’s familiar chant but changes the words to “By the Power of Skeletor, I have the Power!”.
- The New Adventures of Superman: Toyman constructs an evil Superman robot to frame Superman in "The Two Faces of Superman". This way, he has a "toy" with Super-Strength and if anyone gets blamed, it will be the original.
- Ninjago has a filler episode in the second season, in which Lord Garmadon creates a set of evil copies of the four original ninja. They can only be identified from their good counterparts by their red glowing eyes, which they hide using cool sunglasses.
- Sendokai Champions has Kazkrad and his team, who are evil versions of the Senkuns.
- In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Cheer Up, Candace", Doofenshmirtz created robotic duplicates of Perry the Platypus to fight fire with fire.
- In Postman Pat: The Movie based on eponymous television series Edwin Carbunkle creates robot replica of Postman Pat called the "Patbot 3000", along with another robot replica of Jess called the "Jessbot" as well. And somehow nobody realized that the "Pat" going around Greendale is in fact a robot. Despite it being obviously robotic.
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
- The Rowdyruff Boys were created by Mojo Jojo to be evil copies of the Powerpuff Girls with a twist: being boys (made from "snips and snails and puppy-dog tails"), and naturally, being more violent.
- A more literal example is the Powerpuff Girls Xtreme brand created by Professor Utonium's college roommate Dick Hardly in "Knock It Off". While the Xtreme girls have the same intention as the actual ones in fighting crime and otherwise weren't meant to endanger the public, Dick designed them to cash in on the girls' success. Although the first batch of Xtreme girls Dick made was quite effective, the brand eventually failed because he constantly degraded their quality to the point of being useless. When the knockoffs witness the Professor literally hugging the girls back to life in the middle of Dick's attempt to kill them, they move on to destroy their creator, in one of the few permament deaths in the series, as protest for Dick not showing them any love.
- The Real Ghostbusters actually managed to create their own evil knockoffs in "Citizen Ghost." Or, more accurately, Peter created them when he forgot to burn the old flightsuits, which were still covered in Stay-Puft's entrails; a flaw in the new Containment Unit further energized the suits.
- Aku does this to Jack in one episode of Samurai Jack. In this case, the clone is a physical manifestation of Jack's rage. After fighting to a standstill, the real Jack wins by refusing to fight and letting go of his rage which makes the clone vanish.
Aku: Is there no fighting style that can defeat his ?! ... Yeeees... No fighting style can defeat his!
- A She-Ra: Princess of Power episode featured a creature that, on the Horde's orders, copied She-Ra's strength and abilities but, fortunately, also copied her personality.
- In Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM). Robotnik had kidnapped Sally and replaced her with a robot double that was so convincing, it fooled almost everybody. Tails was the only one who realized something was off, and Sonic only began to catch as on as well after Tails had warned him. In the end, Sonic was able to trick Robotnik by switching Sally out with the very same robot.
- In one "Teen Force" short on Space Stars, Uglor created an evil duplicate of Elektra.
- Teen Titans (2003):
- After memorizing Cyborg's blueprints, Brother Blood not only made a whole bunch of evil Cyborgs, but went so far as to copy the designs onto himself, turning himself into an Evil Knockoff. With Cyborg's powers added on to his own original ones, "CyBlood" was nearly invincible. His defeat came because he was convinced Cyborg's ability to resist his mind control was somewhere in his tech, rather than his sheer determination.
- When fighting Trigon in the season 2 finale, he makes copies of Cyborg, Starfire, and Beast Boy that have all of their powers and abilities, but are monochrome with red eyes. They are defeated when the group decide to switch opponents with Cyborg beating Beast Boy's clone, Starfire beating Cyborg's, and Beast Boy taking down Starfire's.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
- Metalhead in the 1987 cartoon series was created by Krang as a robotic double to counter the Turtles, though being given the personality of all four turtles made it chaotic and unpredictable. Donatello was able to reprogram it to their side, though it only showed up once more as a housecleaner that he had to shut down soon after.
- Similarly the Punk Frogs were an attempt by Shredder to replicate the success Splinter had with the Turtles, right down to making them after his favorite historical conquerors. He not only managed to miss the whole "family dynamic" the Turtles have but didn't even bother to train the Frogs in combat, instead relying on advanced weaponry. This, combined with the Punks' own laid back personalities, resulted in them pulling a Heel–Face Turn pretty quickly and becoming so-so allies of the Turtles.
- Though unintentional, a release of mutagen by The Shredder in the 1987 series did result in creating a giant mutant turtle called Tokka.
- The Transformers franchise has several examples of the evil Doppelgänger concept;
- The idea first appeared as a remote-controlled (by Megatron) duplicate of Optimus Prime in The Transformers episode "A Prime Problem", while the more modern "evil black repaint" incarnation started in Beast Wars II with Black Lio Convoy.
- Nemesis Prime also appears in Transformers: Armada (eventually proves to be part of or a projection by Sideways), and one Japan-only comic series (he goes on to make a Heel–Face Turn and become an Anti-Hero, partnered with Transformers: Energon Arcee.) Also, Transformers: Robots in Disguise has Scourge. Sadly, the name "Nemesis Prime" wouldn't be coined until Transformers: Armada a year later, so the only evil television Optimus Prime repaint to be a character in his own right winds up named after a G1 Decepticon he doesn't much resemble instead of the cooler name that later iterations of the concept would carry. (IDW Nemesis Prime isn't an example, though. A previous Autobot leader named Nova Prime took on the name went he went evil. Nova's not created from or in the likeness of Optimus.)
- Nemesis Breaker in Transformers: Cybertron is based on Leobreaker, created from his dark thoughts by a Unicron-empowered Megatron. As Leobreaker can combine with Optimus, Nemesis Breaker can combine with Megatron. The Transformation Sequence even has everything change in the opposite order from Leobreaker's transformation.
- Megatron did this a bunch with Dinobot in Beast Wars. Once he created an all-organic clone of Dinobot's raptor form, once he made a pack of unstable cyber-raptors, and finally he just out-and-out made Dinobot 2 from a blank stasis pod, a fragment of Rampage's spark, and samples from the original. However, the last clone does make a Heel–Face Turn at the end, when the original Dinobot's memories come back after Rampage's death.
- In the final battle of Beast Wars sequel series Beast Machines, Megatron took this idea to the next level; requiring a new body for himself after he was reduced to a Spark stuck in a random diagnostic drone, but lacking the time to create a completely new form, he instead created a duplicate of Optimus's old Optimal Optimus body. This body lacked the gorilla beast mode of the original and had Megatron's own face on it, but it was still a devastatingly powerful foe for Optimus, while Megatron enjoyed the irony of defeating his enemy with Optimus's most powerful form.
- Transformers: Prime:
- Silas' efforts over the series researching the Transformers culminated in the creation of Nemesis Prime, a remote-controlled version of Optimus Prime.
- After Optimus recovered the Star Saber in, Megatron took drastic steps to create his own Dark Star Saber to counter it. The Dark Star Saber shattered the original. The reforged Star Saber fares much better.
- Zak Storm: Skullivar commissions the construction of "The Eel" after his first personal encounter with Zack, which is pretty much a dark version of the Chaos. Skullivar later makes one to the Eyes, the Eye of Netherwhere.