Same Character but Different

Oh, this is that sitcom about the lawyer and his bum roommate, right?

A form of Character Derailment in which a character in a long running series gets Put on a Bus. Years later, the writers bring the character back, except... he isn't the same person anymore. He behaves differently, has different skills or interests - he's become a completely different person.

Writers could justify it by saying that character development took place offscreen, but it seems a little as if the writers have basically written a new character and slapped his traits onto someone who already existed in canon to make the introduction easier.

The inversion of Suspiciously Similar Substitute. See also Not as You Know Them and Characterization Marches On.

Examples of Same Character but Different include:

Comic Books

• Superboy-Prime in DC Comics was introduced during Crisis on Infinite Earths as an Ascended Fanboy from the real world (or what was closest to it) who became Superboy during the Crisis. He finally went to a better place with the original Superman and Lois. He was brought back much more recently... as an insane villain who's a Take That at the fans (complaining about continuity, saying the old days were better, and so forth, all it really did was prove how poorly the character was written).

Live Action TV

• Amy Madison, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the episode "Witch", she's a quiet young thing whose evil mother has taken over Amy's body. In episodes before she was Put In a Cage she was a witch who was no (or negligably) more evil than Willow (at the time), but when Amy is reintroduced a couple of seasons later, she's turned pretty much as bad as Mom.
  • Cue the surprisingly consistent Wild Mass Guessing about Mom repossessing Amy after the events of Graduation Day.
  • To be fair, she did kind of get stuck as a rat, for about three years. And then she comes back into the world much later, disoriented and unaware of all the time that passed during her (unintentionally self-inflicted) Baleful Polymorph state... plus the hinting that she'd started to at least partially abuse magic. It doesn't fully justify things, but in that light it makes her new characterisation at least a little easier to swallow.
• Clare Bates, in Eastenders. She was a regular character in the show as a young teenager back in the 1990s. She was sweet, a doting daughter, and all-round girl scout. Actress Gemma Bissix found fame in a brief stint on Holly Oaks playing a scheming bitch, so the EastEnders writers decided to bring her back as a similar character. Now, 15 years might have passed in between for Clare to turn evil, but it was still a bit disappointing that the writers had to basically turn her previous exit storyline, a happy ending, into a sad one.
• This is why long-term fans of General Hospital cringe whenever they hear a beloved character from the 1980's is coming back.
• Paul Robinson was one of the main characters in the golden age of Australian soap opera Neighbours back in the 80s. Then, he was greedy and ambitious, though he usually managed to do the right thing in the end. Cut to 20 years later, and a new batch of writers think that the show needs a villain. Well, who better than the soap's original bad boy Paul? Unfortunately, the new writers misremembered how bad Paul had been - his first act upon returning was to burn down the Lasitters hotel complex, murdering a minor character who got in his way. His evil behaviour continued for a while until the writers relented and wrote in a storyline where he had a brain tumour which had affected his personality. It didn't stick however and he was soon back to blackmailing, stealing, sabotaging building sites and generally wrecking lives, although he wasn't quite as bad as when he first came back.
• Power Rangers Dino Thunder brought back the original Sixth Ranger, Tommy Oliver, as the mentor to the new team. While his personality wasn't too far off from his original portrayal, we're supposed to accept that in the six or seven years since we last saw him he got a doctorate in paleontology and worked on some secret dinosaur-related research, and that he's now a high school teacher. Now we would probably accept it without question if it was Tommy's teammate Billy that did that, but when Tommy's excuse in the original series for arriving late to fights was being forgetful...
• Merlin Morgana goes from idealist Well-Intentioned Extremist driven to villainy to make things fair and because she takes everything emotionally to less emotional person, who rarely thinks to improve the things in Camelot once she has taken it over, out of stress.
• Doctor Who:
  • One of the main plot points. The titular character is played by a different actor every few seasons. While generally the same personality, each incarnation has slightly different quirks that make them unique.
  • The more keenly felt victim of this is the Master. As the Master can go for a long while without showing up, their level of evilness and what they want can vary wildly, even though, like the Doctor, eagle-eyed viewers can see similarities between the incarnations. The most radical Master though is probably Sacha Dawan's Spy Master. Likely partly influenced by the Unpleasable Fanbase's reaction to near-Heel Face Turn pulled by the last Master, Missy, the Spy Master is basically the Whoniverse's version of the Joker. Compared to previous Masters, he's a full-blown psychopath who is evil for evil's sake and genuinely seems to hate the Doctor. The only Master trait he really has is a Complexity Addiction.
• In Scrubs Danni Sullivan was introduced as a love interest for J.D. and during her initial appearances she was a fun, likable, sensitive girl whose only real flaw was that she wanted a serious relationship while J.D. was still interested in Elliot. After breaking up with J.D. she left the show only to return sometime later as a chain smoking, self absorbed, airhead party girl. The show Handwaved her totally different personality as being a result of her trying to be what she thought J.D. wanted in a girl.
• Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Picard. In Star Trek: Voyager, Seven spoke in a stilted manner, was blunt to a fault, had a very prim and minimalist appearance and was generally asocial. By the time of Picard, Seven speaks in a more naturalistic tone, has lost her catsuits and hair bun and is one of the most socially adept characters in the setting. Now granted it's been decades since Voyager, but consider that everyone else is, largely, as they were in the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Video Games

• Touhou has sort of a weird example. There was a unofficial Continuity Reboot between the fifth and the sixth games (there's some evidence the early games are still in continuity, but even more that they're not, and Word of God isn't helping). So, four characters from before the reboot have shown up in later games. They vary from sharing only the name and a few bits of character design to just having a noticeably different personality.
• The 3rd Birthday's Aya Brea is much more unstable, submissive, and frightened than Aya was in Parasite Eve, to the point of seeming helpless no matter how badass you are in the gameplay. This is because she's actually Eve, Aya herself is actually a total badass in a later cutscene.
• Phoenix Wright from the Ace Attorney was a promising lawyer and a really caring person on the first trilogy. And then came Apollo Justice, 7 years later, where Phoenix was now a hobo who played poker at the basement of a bar, having adopted a daughter months after the end of the last game. He is highly sarcastic and incredibly different from the cartoonish-happy-go-lucky guy from before, as he has gone through LOTS of crap that led to him being unjustly disbarred.. Although when you get to play as him, you learn that he still the same guy on the inside. Thankfully, he's more or less able to drop this in later games like Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice, after he's cleared and recovers his license.

Western Animation

• Cleveland Jr. from Family Guy was portrayed as a little, energetic kid and then was almost never seen anymore for the longest time... until The Cleveland Show when he reappeared transformed into a fat, slow-witted Chris Griffin Expy. "A Rodent Like This" reveals that this is because he's an imposter who pulled a Kill and Replace on Junior.
• Ben 10. Oh Ben 10. While the five year Time Skip between the original series and Ben 10: Alien Force allowed for some leeway, it really stood out when characters were changed due to differing writing staff. While the shows always tried their best to explain the changes, and they generally succeeded for most returning characters, only two characters, Doctor Animo and Grandpa Max, were considered to be consistent across the original continuity. The most keenly felt examples were:
  • Zombozo. In the original series, he was a horrifying emotion vampire who was also a great showman. In Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, he's just The Joker with a couple magician-based superpowers.
  • Kevin was an Enfant Terrible psychopath in the original series who largely worshipped chaos and battle. By the time of UAF, he's more of a morally grey con-man. It go so bad that by the time of Ultimate Alien, the characters were outright lampshading how different Kevin was. Season 1 of UA eventually explained that this change was due to all the energy Kevin absorbed as a lad driving him insane. After he managed to overcome the energy, he swore off absorbing it. That may not sound too bad but consider that the explanation came years after the Heel Face Turned Kevin was introduced. Though it was supposed to come earlier but Executive Meddling delayed the writers.
  • Charmcaster was a big case of this. In the original series she was a Dark Magical Girl. In AF, she'd lost all her humours and humanizing qualities and was straight-up evil. In UA, she was a Broken Bird. In Ben 10: Omniverse she was a Cloudcuckoolander.
  • But easily the most infamous case of this was Vilgax. In the original series, Vilgax was a unstoppable cyborg juggernaut who was largely The Stoic, some Deadpan Snarker moments aside. In the UAF era, Vilgax is a far more talkative and emotive figure, who has next to nothing in common with his OS self. It got so bad that some long-time fans opined, and continue to opine even years after Omniverse ended, that the UAF era Vilgax should have just been a different character altogether (the usual opinion being that they should have made UAF Vilgax the son of OS Vilgax). Though Omniverse did their best to bring Vilgax back in line with his OS self.
• Bumblebee in Robots in Disguise. Back in Transformers Prime, Bumblebee was generally a well-ordered professional and his Not So Above It All moments hinted that he was the Cybertronian equivalent of a pre-teen. In Robots in Disguise, 'Bee is much more of a Man Child, acting much more like Smokescreen or Rodimus, than his Prime self. It really stands out when Optimus, Bulkhead, Starscream and Soundwave are pretty much the same characters they were in Prime.