History Main / SuddenlyObviousFakery

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': "The Springfield Files" has Homer see a man engulfed in green light that he assumes to be an alien, and eventually manages to convince the town to come to the same location another Friday night. Lisa and Smithers reveal the alien to be Mr. Burns after getting special treatments every Friday and glowing green from the power plant's radiation. At this point, his green glow becomes much fainter so that it doesn't engulf his entire body and makes it clear that he is just Mr. Burns, and the flashback showing him getting his treatments follows suit.

* Exaggerated in one episode of ''WesternAnimation/DaveTheBarbarian'' where Chuckles created an evil clockwork duplicate of Dave that looks identical to the original and Fang and Uncle Ozwidge are too dumb to figure out which is the fake even though the imposter acts extremely out of character. They ask Candy which one is the fake and she points out that the fake has a giant and incredibly obvious windup key in its back and is surprised that they didn't noticed it before. The windup key and the clicking sounds that it makes only become visible and audible to the audience after she points it out. Additionally, before this is revealed the fake Dave is seen sneaking with his back against a wall which should not have been possible if the key was there the whole time.

A RuleOfPerception-based {{Retcon}} in which something the characters are fooled by that should obviously be fake from its physical appearance alone isn't obvious to the audience, because it is portrayed it as the way the characters perceive until its true nature is revealed. For example, rather than have a PaperThinDisguise be obvious to the audience but not the characters the whole way through, said disguise is foolproof to both parties until the characters find out they've been tricked, at which point it inexplicably changes its appearance so that it looks appropiately shoddy.

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* In ''VideoGame/{{Octodad}}'', Chef Fujimoto dresses up a mannequin with a T-shirt, fruit, and meat to [[spoiler:trick Octodad into thinking it's his wife]]. The mannequin looks like a person until the moment he touches it.

* Film/JamesBond has at least two cases in the cold open, ''Film/FromRussiaWithLove'' (after Red Grant strangles "Bond" and it's revealed to be a SPECTRE training montage, the corpse turns out to have a [[LatexPerfection James Bond mask]]) and ''Film/{{Thunderball}}'' (after Bond punches the widow, who had been played by a woman that far, she becomes a man in drag - the supposedly deceased husband).

* ''Anime/GravestoneOfDaisukeJigen'': The BigBad of the film successfully manages to assassinate his mark, Jigen, with a well-placed sniper shot to the head at the end of Part 1. [[spoiler:In Part 2, however, the bullet is revealed in a flashback to have barely missed Jigen's head, giving him the opportunity to fake his death by detonating a small device filled with blood placed on his forehead. Here, he lifts up his CoolHat up to reveal the device, but prior to the reveal he does no such thing, at least from the assassin's point of view.]]

* ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'': In "Red Starved", Finn starts searching for a red object for Marceline to suck the color out of, and his search leads him to a creature with a large ruby. Finn requests the ruby, which the creature insists is an emerald before giving it to him. Once Finn returns to Marceline and Jake, Jake also tells Finn that the ruby is an emerald. After Jake explains that Finn must be a little colorblind, the "ruby" changes to green to indicate that it is indeed an emerald.

* Late in its lifespan, a patch to ''VideoGame/CrusaderKings2'' added an event where it was possible for a character to be revealed to have been a bear the entire time (in a reference to the Sir Bearington 4chan greentext story), with the character portrait changing from looking perfectly human to just being a polar bear wearing clothes. The flavour text for one of the variants of the event even makes it clear that before the "reveal", they hadn't even been trying to disguise their behaviour as being anything but that of a bear (eg, eating inhuman quantities of food and then going off to sleep, and apparently large quantities of honey going missing around them).