Okay, I’ll put a fellow Doper’s guess here, then:
Charlie Sheen?
Awww, He’s adorable but I have no clue who he is?
I see what you mean! He had the Rooney look from teenage on.
It would depend on the parent’s powers of observation and how much the kid changed growing up.
Some people are unrecognizable from decade to decade. In my family, many of us look very similar from babyhood to a fairly advanced age. My mom is 50 and except for the creases, slight loosening of the skin, and gray hair - she’s looked almost exactly the same since she was a year old. I’ve inherited this. And I’ve had people I have never met identify me as my mother’s daughter (even though I look more like my dad, IMO).
I think some people here did not read the entire OP.
I could easily believe that the parents would notice a resemblance between this adult “stranger” and their kid, but normal people are not going to conclude that the adult actually is the grown-up version of their kid who has traveled back in time. I have a coworker who’s 25-30 years older than me who I always think looks like an older version of one of my friends from college. The resemblance is strong enough that that I have occasionally wondered if they might be related. I’ve never wondered if she might be a time-traveling future version of my friend, though.
If the time traveler were trying to convince his parents that he was their grown-up son then the obvious physical resemblance would help, but the parents aren’t going to come up with that notion on their own unless they’re pretty wacky to begin with.
Nope!
Okay, let’s see clues:
The first kid was born in England and didn’t get really famous until he was in two major film franchises.
The second kid was huge in the 1990s. TV. Has a new series now.
(I’m not at home, so I cant give more clues/answers until I’m back in the office or my host will kill me.)
Orlando Bloom and… David Duchovney?
And I think some people didn’t read the entire thread. We covered that, got tired of it, and moved on to the more interesting part of the question.
Orlando Bloom
You Googled the same thing I Googled, you cheater!
But yes, and when you know who the one kid is supposed to be, it’s really obvious. Duchovney is less obvious, IMHO. If the first kid had disappeared and the parents were presented with Charlie Sheen with someone saying “We’ve found your long lost son!” I think they’d fall for it. I think having a preconceived notion would make recognition easier.
Negative. The first time I saw the kid I had a weird Duchovn- flash in my head, but thought it was silly since I couldn’t pick out any definite similar features. I was able to confirm my initially-abandoned theory by parsing your clue.
I was utterly certain that they were George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Too funny!
I had two very close friends in third grade. E and T. I met up with them again 20-odd years later in different contexts. T, I would have known anywhere, even in the face of impossible explanantions. E, I knew only by the way she moved (I had spent a lot of time on the sidelines watching her play soccer!) Otherwise, she looked completely different.
I am utterly unrecognizable as compared to my former self. Even after a long discussion, people kinda look at me funny like they are trying to reconcile the two looks.
My Father and I have passed each other in airports on a couple of occasions after a seperation of only a couple of years.
I did read the entire thread, as I normally do before posting, and I have just re-read it. It still looks the same to me – several people ignored the OP’s actual question and focused on the scenario he explicitly excluded.
If the OP is fine with that then great. But I think it’s rather obnoxious to ignore the question that was asked in favor of a question that quite plainly was not asked, even if you do find it “more interesting”.
I would say it depends.
Putin I would say looks the same.
We’ve got no evidence to suggest that Putin isn’t already a time traveling assassin from the future, so…
Reminds me more of Rory Culkin
I too gave up a newborn baby to adoption (Hi elbows!), and reunited with him when he was 26; I had seen my child only as a newborn. Over the years I always looked at boys/men who resembled me and my family and wondered if they could be my son. There was this one guy in particular at the grocery store that seemed to be around the same age as my child and I used to wonder if it was him.
As it turned out, when I finally saw my son in person, he really DID look a lot like what I expected, and in fact really really looked like the grocery store guy.
In that weird moment when I stepped off the jetway and scanned the crowd of people at the airport, I immediately picked him out of the crowd, but I had already seen a photo of him, so that doesn’t really count.
So anyway, maybe, but probably not.
That’s easy. Alfred E. Neuman.