Magic Pants / Live-Action TV

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• Averted in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "Boom". Shockley turns out to be an Inhuman with the power to explode and then reform himself. His clothes don't survive the explosion, leaving him naked whenever he reforms. He uses this to make lewd comments to Daisy when she's forcibly blowing up.
• Very present in the Animorphs TV series. In the books, clothing had to be nearly skin-tight to morph with you.
• Averted in Being Human. Poor George gets no Magic Pants when he transforms into a werewolf.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Played straight in the Season 6 episode "Villains": when Willow kills Warren, she rips his skin from his body, but leaves his pants on.
  • Averted in the Season 2 episode "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered": Buffy loses her clothes when she is turned into a rat, leading to an embarrassing moment when the spell wears off and she turns back again. Not that she was wearing pants to start with.
  • Also averted with Oz. He is very much naked after a full moon night, even though his werewolf form isn't even that much bigger than his human form.
  • In the Season 3 episode "Beauty and the Beasts" Angel somehow gains pants after coming back from the a hell dimension nude, despite having regressed to an animalistic state and living in the wilderness.
  • When Giles gets transformed into a demon by Edward Rayne in the season 4 episode "A New Man", he destroys the clothes he wears - but his pants unexplicitly stay on.
• Zig-Zagged in Charmed (1998):
  • Piper is wholly naked after she transforms back to human form after being a Wendigo. Same goes for Phoebe after she changes from mermaid back to human.
  • Inverted with Miley the mermaid — her clothes don't rip when she changes back, they just disappear, nor do they return when she regains human form.
  • On the other hand, Prue is wearing the same clothes when she turns back from a being a dog to human. Same for all three sisters are also wearing clothes after they change back from being beasts during a blue moon.
• Doctor Who:
  • Most of the Doctors have spent at least the first few minutes after regeneration in their predecessors' costumes.^note The exceptions are Two, whose clothes regenerated with him; Eight, who regenerated nude due to his predecessor being declared dead and slabbed in the morgue; Nine, who was introduced after already having regenerated and changed clothes; and Fourteen, who is basically "Ten again", so the regeneration somehow "remembered" his style, but also because Jodie Whittaker's clothes would clearly have been too small for David Tennant. These men, and now one woman, have varied noticeably in height and build, but aside from slight bagginess and the occasional frayed sleeve, everything has more or less fit, no overly-long or short trouser legs or uncomfortable shoes in sight.
    • In the New Series, it's especially noticeable with the Twelve to Thirteen switch. The previous New Series Doctors, Nine, Ten, Eleven and Twelve, were all tall and thin, with relatively slight differences in height and build. Thirteen, on the other hand, is half a foot shorter than Twelve and, although there's a Running Gag in her first episode about her having a hard time finding things in Twelve's too-big coat, Twelve's trousers and boots seem to fit perfectly despite the fact that they should logically be uncomfortably large for her to wear.
  • "The Unicorn and the Wasp": The Vespiform, a species of giant alien wasps, are capable of shapeshifting into human form. They can apparently transform clothing when they do so, not needing it in wasp form.
• Gen V: Jordan's clothes also change with them when they switch sexes.
• In H₂O: Just Add Water and Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure, during the shift from human to merfolk form not only do clothes disappear until they become human again but any hair decorations and hair spray also disappear, leaving the transformee's hair untied. This seems to work both ways, as when Emma dyed her hair red in mermaid form, it reverts to her natural blonde color when she is human. Only moon rings are shown to carry over during the transformation, likely due to their magical nature.
• Present in Season 3 of Heroes: when Sylar is zapped multiple times by Elle, his shirt burns off him but his trousers appear completely undamaged.
  • Also in Season 1, when Nathan flies at a supersonic speed, his pants magically stay intact.
• Present in every episode of Manimal where Dr. Jonathan Chase (a.k.a. Manimal) transforms into a panther, hawk, dolphin, cat, or whatever animal-du-jour. In the pilot he transforms to a panther while wearing a tux, and the tux is nowhere to be seen. Upon retransformation to a human he is still wearing the same tux. This is repeated throughout. Sometime we even see the clothes he wears being torn up by the transformation.
• Partially averted in Moon Knight (2022): Marc and Steven's Moon Knight and Mr. Knight suits are explicitly magical; aside from forming out of nothing, the Moon Knight suit is shown having no damage even after Marc is repeatedly impaled by sharp lances, implied that it essentially has the same Healing Factor that he does. However, it appears that his regular clothing doesn't disappear when he manifests the suit, and instead remains under it, because after said impalement, Marc is seen complaining about his ruined jacket.
• Somewhat enhanced in Power Rangers and other Tokusatsu series, where if a character covered in filth transforms, they'll be squeaky clean when they de-morph. Apparently the Morphing Grid does sheets, too.
• Averted in The Secret World of Alex Mack; Alex's first attempt at morphing into silver goo winds up with Alex naked and hiding behind a washing machine. The second time, she manages to morph her clothes with her (initially only this particular set of clothes; later anything she wears or holds).
• Mostly averted in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — the shapeshifter Odo forms clothes out of his own substance, but seems to have a Magic Combadge. The Expanded Universe either implies that he'd usually put the badge on the inside of whatever he turned into (since he didn't need to actually make organs and so on). Which doesn't explain where it goes when he turns into things like puddles of water.
  • Also played straight in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tuvix". An alien plant gets mixed up in the transporter beam and merges Neelix and Tuvok into one new being, even merging Tuvok's uniform and Neelix's Talaxian clothes into a Starfleet uniform made of Talaxian-patterned fabric. Later when the procedure is reversed, Tuvix is separated back into Tuvok and Neelix, each of whom somehow have their own copy of Tuvix's uniform.
    • Justified in the fact that the clothes Tuvix had been wearing when he was split apart was not the merged Starfleet-Talaxian outfit but instead a regular Starfleet uniform. At the very least, the Magic Pants are consistent.
  • There's also the fact that the transporters are technically matter replicators and the split only work on Tuvix because they were marking half of his DNA to be filtered into his components. It's consistent for his clothes to be duplicated.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Rascals", Picard, Ensign Ro, Keiko, and Guinan are in a transporter accident that beams them onto the Enterprise as 12-year-old children while their clothes all shrink to fit their child bodies perfectly. In the end, they show Picard turned back into an adult with the transporter and again, his clothes grow with him.
• On Teen Wolf the twin Alpha werewolves Aiden and Ethan can do a Fusion Dance to merge into a giant Super-Alpha. For some reason they feel the need to strip all the clothes off of their upper bodies before merging. But their pants and shoes merge when they do.
• In the Halloween episode of That's So Raven, when Raven and Chelsea are turned into cows, their clothes disappear, likely because the producers couldn't fit it on the large bodies of the two heifers.
• Averted in The Thundermans episode "The Amazing Rat Race". Max and Phoebe turn Billy into a rat but his clothes do not change with him. It isn't shown when they turn him back, but it can be assumed all of his siblings were there.
• Titans (2018). Averted with Gar Logan (aka Beast Boy) who has to strip off to avoid shredding his clothes, then stash them where they can be recovered later. This greatly annoys his teammates the first time he demonstrates his powers, as they have to hang around waiting while he runs off behind cover to disrobe.
  Kory: If this wasn't a drill we'd all be dead by now.
  Gar: Yeah, but it'll be worth it. I promise.
  Kory: Heard that before.
• Averted in True Blood when Sam the shape-shifter changes back into human, he has to find things to cover up with and get people to bring him clothes.
• Invoked in The Vampire Diaries where Tyler removes most of his clothing in preparation for his transformation into a werewolf, but keeps his pants on in case "it's like the Hulk". It's not.
• Played straight and lampshaded in What We Do in the Shadows (2019). The vampiric main cast can transform into bats and back without their clothing being affected. When newly turned Jenna asks where their clothes go when they're in bat form, the other vampires are all flummoxed, clearly having never thought about it before, and advise her not to worry about it.
• Averted in Woof! — very much so — Eric Banks/Rex Thomas lost his clothes every transformation.
• Played with on The Young Ones when Neil loses his temper and transforms into The Incredible Hippie, complete with sleeve-splitting shots and his pants bursting open only from the knees down. Then it turns out to be a fantasy-sequence in which he only imagined he'd transformed... except his clothes are still torn.

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