Series / The Edison Twins

Series title card

Yes, every day is a different trial, and they pull through with a lot of style

Always getting out of trouble that they get in, life with the Edison Twins!

— Lyrics from the theme song to the show

The Edison Twins is a Canadian series produced by Nelvana, arguably their most successful live-action production.

This series features the adventures of Tom and Annie Edison (played by Andrew Sabiston and Marnie McPhail respectively), a pair of teenage scientific prodigy siblings who face a variety of challenges which they overcome with their expertise of science. Along the way, their younger brother, Paul, hangs around them and gets into a vast variety of trouble that his older siblings have to get him out of.

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The Edison Twins has the following tropes exhibited:

• And Knowing Is Half the Battle: Most episodes end with an animated sequence called "The Explanation," that illustrates the key scientific principle used in the main live-action story.
• Brother–Sister Team: Annie and Tom They also have a younger brother, Paul, but he's mostly comic relief.
• Edutainment: Kids have adventures with science.
• Free the Frogs: During the college season, the twins deal with an idealistic young man who cannot tolerate having rabbits being killed for their studies and releases them on the campus. The Twins protest that this is clearly impractical since the domesticated rabbits can't survive in the wild and they manage to round them up. The next day, the professor who was using these rabbits is told of the incident in class and the young man stands to calmly state his objection to using the rabbits. However, the professor unexpectedly reveals that he anticipated this and used it as an opening to begin his next lecture topic, "Ethics for Scientist," where the issue is fully discussed.
• Half-Identical Twins: Annie and Tom are fraternal twins, Annie is a redhead and Tom is blonde, and an episode deals with the difference with identical twins.
• MacGyvering: The Twins are able to create these things. One of the cleverest and simplest is when the Twins, Paul and a rival are lost in the wood: Tom has the bright idea that since he has an AM radio and knows where a AM radio station' transmitter is, he is able to angle his radio until the internal AM radio antenna is perfectly perpendicular to the station's broadcast signal. That results in the radio facing the direction where the signal is the loudest and strongest, thus providing the direction back to civilization.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: About half-and-half: by the end of the series, Annie and Tom have graduated to college, but Paul still hangs around with them as the goofy younger sibling.
• Pantomime Animal: Tom spends an episode trying to find a horse for a football game as a subplot for an episode's story and finally has to make do with a pantomime horse costume with a partner at the end.
• Science Hero: The Twins are scientific prodgies and any villain learns matching wits with them is a losing proposition.
• Teen Genius: Annie and Tom are teenagers and whizzes at science.
• Wendigo: In "Gone with the Windigo", after their campsite is ransacked, Annie insists on finishing the orienteering race and rallies the Weston team to a spirited finish, before accompanying Tom in a search for the Windigo monster. As night sets in, Tom and Annie follow the trail of the woodland marauder and Paul and Lance lose each other in the forest. Alone in the woods, Paul overcomes his fear and makes a startling discovery and Annie is saved from a poisonous snake by the mysterious Windigo.