Distinctive Appearances: Difference between revisions

The concept is very well known and applied in the professional level, and many examples of this can be quoted directly off the DVD special features.

 

* Have it all be [[Color Coded for Your Convenience]]. [[Power Rangers]] has survived on this for years, the Red Ranger is the leader. The Pink Ranger or Yellow Ranger is the chick. Not bad for a team costume that covers their face, huh?

* [[Clothes Make the Legend]]

* [[Dress-Coded for Your Convenience]]

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* This is probably one reason why the main character in a ''[[Gundam]]'' show always pilots a Gundam - to stand out from the crowd (and sell more model kits). Only 08th MS Team subverts this by giving Shiro the same MS as his comrades... until it's badly damaged and he gets a customized unit.

* It is hard, very hard to mistake one character for another in ''[[Tower of God]]''. It could be the fact that one of the main characters is a miniature version of Godzilla. Maybe because that Purple Jumpsuit only belongs to one person. Anyway, despite having very similar faces (except for Godzilla and the other [[Lizard Folk]]) character designs tend to so one-of-a-kind that most characters can be identified from afar. That even goes for all the background characters from season one.

** Only in the original anime, though. While he does wear it in the manga and Brotherhood, its appearances become much less frequent as the story goes on.

* Isumi of ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler]]'' doesn't wear the standard girl's uniform at their school. This is even lampshaded when Nagi invites her to come see the new kitten: she says she needs to go home first and change out of her school uniform and Nagi responds that she's wearing a kimono already. The Hakuou girl's uniform is already similar to a kimono, but Isumi says it's too breezy.

* ''[[Sailor Moon]]'' has the title character wearing her trademark [[Odango Hair]] with long [[Girlish Pigtails|twintails]], making her very distinct and recognizable throughout the whole Magical Girl genre.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* [[X-Men|Wolverine]] with his claws extended in the crouch stance.

* In early [[Superhero]] comics, colorful costumes and iconography where often the only way to tell heroes apart due to level of art (and quality of the color printing) produced at the time. This is why Batman and Superman were able to pass as each other when needed for the longest time.

* This trope can be difficult to pull off well in war comics. Every character generally must be a young male, wears the same uniform (usually including a helmet or other headgear), often necessarily of the same ethnic background, etc. Giving characters distinctive appearances without [[Artistic License Military|violating basic military realities]] presents a lot of challenges - particularly if the artist already has [[Only Six Faces]] tendencies. Joe Kubert's character designs for ''[[Sgt. Rock]]'''s Easy Company are a good example of an artist successfully giving soldiers Distinctive Appearances despite all those obstacles.

 

 

* Anyone who has tried to illustrate ''[[My Immortal]]'' has run into this problem. Everyone is deathly pale. Everyone has dyed their hair black. Everyone wears the same "goffic" clothes. All the distinctive aspects of any character's canon appearance (Harry's glasses, for example) are soundly eliminated.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* [[Indiana Jones]] and his [[Nice Hat]]. He walks into a room and you know it is him. You see his shadow and you know it is him, and just to be on the safe side he carries a whip on his belt in case of other hat-wearing characters. You can see him in a crowd and know which one he is on a bridge. So much so that the filmmakers eventually decided that his hat would only come off if there was a darn good reason. Note the footage of Harrison Ford jokingly offering to staple the hat to his head.

** Van Helsing of...''[[Van Helsing]]'' has a similar [[Nice Hat]] for similar reasons, as Stephen Sommers has said: makes it very easy to tell who he is, even in a long shot.

** The lightsaber colors were meant to be easily distinctive between Jedi and Sith. And in a literal vein, Luke's new lightsaber in ''Return of the Jedi'' was supposed to be blue, but with most of the Sarlacc pit battle being outside against the blue sky they changed it to green to stand out.

*** Also, apparently the reason [[Samuel L. Jackson]] wanted a purple lightsaber was so he could pick himself out in crowd shots.

* During production of ''[[The Incredibles]]'', an animator did outlines of each of the Parr's heads, to make sure each of them was distinct from the other. Brad Bird liked the sketch so much he had it made into a T-shirt.

* This was talked about on the DVD of ''[[Spider-Man]] 2'', where they said it was really fun to create Doctor Octopus because all you needed was his silhouette and you can tell it is him.

* In an aversion, the Transformers films have been criticized because the robot characters look too much alike, especially in fast-paced fight scenes. YMMV.

* In ''The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes'', Balding is a good head shorter and a good foot rounder than Murdoch. This makes a major plot point [[Fridge Logic|pretty perplexing.]]

 

 

* Subverted in the ''[[Knight and Rogue Series]]''. Fisk and Michael are both plain looking. So plain looking that people trying to catch them have an easier time trying to ask about their horses. However, Michael happens to have a scar on his face that, in the second book, is faked by a framer so that everyone will be on the lookout for that particular distinguishing feature.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* ''[[Scrubs]]'' had all the people in the hospital separated into colors: white lab coats or blue scrubs for medical doctors, green scrubs for surgeons, pink (or purple) scrubs for nurses and the maintenance crew wear black. Even then J.D. usually wears a different shade of blue than most of the other doctors (or at least Elliot, who is also a medical doctor). Dr. Cox and Dr. Kelso are generally the only main characters to regularly [[Dressed to Heal|wear labcoats]].

** You can also look at the ethnicity and general size of the characters. J.D. is very skinny and dark hair, Turk is black, Carla is Dominican, Dr. Cox has curly hair and is muscular, Elliot has [[Hair of Gold]], Dr. Kelso is short and heavy set, and The Janitor is tall and looming.

** In the episode where J.D., Turk and Carla all got scooters, they matched the colour-coding of their scrubs, in what might have been a mild [[Lampshade Hanging]].

* ''[[Star Trek]]'' did an iconic color coding of their uniforms, along with different insignias and patches that indicate which department they are with. TOS had Operations wear gold (actually a lime green, like Kirk's wraparound tunic, but the lighting on the standard uniform fabric made them look gold), Engineering and Security [[Red Shirt|wore red]] and Science and Medical wore blue (McCoy even had a short sleeve tunic to make it clear he was a doctor). Starting in TNG, the rank was designated by pips on their collar and the department colors changed: Operations wore Red, Engineering and Security wore Gold and Medical and Science wore blue as always (Dr. Crusher often had a blue lab coat).

* ''[[Green Wing]]'' does something very similar to Scrubs, at least to a certain extent, which obviously makes sense when they're both set in hospitals. Oddly, while all three wear green scrubs in the operating theatre, Mac will continue to wear his while Caroline and Guy change back into their white lab coats.

 

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* Valve deliberately invoked this when designing the characters in ''[[Team Fortress 2]]''. Every class has a [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_J0eGLzEI-8A/STxVcIj2jjI/AAAAAAAAADw/wr8UGwQmva0/s320/TF2ManicanBreakdown.jpg very distinct shape] which helps a lot to identify what's coming after you. This also use to make it easy to spot snipers by looking for the hat, until just about everyone gained customized hats that can throw this off.

* ''[[Mass Effect]] 2'' gives {{spoiler|geth party member}} Legion a massive hole through his chest, visible from almost all angles, so the player can distinguish him from his hostile cousins at a glance and avoid friendly fire incidents.

** Legion also has {{spoiler|a chunk of Shepard's N7 armor recovered from the wreckage of the original ''Normandy''}} welded to his chest.

* Every single Robot Master in the [[Mega Man (video game)|Mega Man]] series is designed with a distinct body, which helps a lot when you consider how they [[Only Six Faces|tend to have similar faces]]. Many can also be told apart by their silhouettes (much like the ''[[Touhou]]'' example above), if ''9'' and ''10'''s [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPScPaInWOI promo] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeIRUVPROOU videos] are any indication.

 

 

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

** It should be noted that the "law" of Prime design has been averted on three occasions: once, in Armada, where he was a long nosed cab and instead his grill formed his chest, and then later in his Alternators and Alternity incarnations, in which he was portrayed as having a chest formed from the front end of a truck and car, respectively.

* ''[[Gargoyles]]'' come in all shapes and sizes. None of the main crew have the same color scheme, same wing design, or even the same face. In fact, seeing that Angela had Goliath's coloring but Demona's appearance tipped Elisa off that she was Goliath's daughter.

* The original character design for ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' required the family to each have distinctive silhouettes (only Maggie and Lisa have the same hair). Most other characters could probably be recognised by their silhouette too.

* The ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'' creators used to work on ''[[The Simpsons]],'' so they designed the major characters based on the same concept. The title characters are the most obvious examples, especially Phineas, who has a triangular head.

 

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[[Category:Omnipresent Tropes]]

[[Category:Personal Appearance Tropes]]