Recently, I discovered the hard way that you can’t term-search “body swap” with the SafeSearch off. It was an enlightening experience, to be sure, but not necessarily in a good way, and it led me to think about all the movies where minds transporting to other bodies becomes the plot. ’18 Again’ gave us George Burns in the body of TV’s Ferris Bueller, while ‘Vice Versa’ swapped Judge Reinhold with Fred Savage, and ‘Like Father, Like Son’ gave us Kirk Cameron and Dudley Moore, which at least seems genetically plausible. Heck, ‘Freaky Friday’ itself has been made like FOUR times, and then there’s the edge case of ‘Face/Off’, leading us to today’s turnabout-is-fair-play query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) still loves the eight-way swap in the last season of Gilligan’s Island, allowing all the castaways to play one another’s mannerisms, asking: What’s your favorite example of the Freaky Friday flip in your favorite pop culture?
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“All of Me” with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin. It’s more of a “body sharing” than “swapping,” but I’m counting it because we get to have Steve Martin act like a dowager queen.
The Futurama episode where Amy and Farnsworth switch bodies only to figure out that the way the machine was made, once two people switch, they can never switch with each other again. The result is a crazy game of switcheroo trying to get people back into their original bodies.
One of the writers (who also has a PhD in mathematics) even had to create a theorem to figure out how to get everyone back in their original bodies: https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem