Coincidental shared universes

[Yora]

Sometimes you see two completely unrelated works and realize they could be actually taking place in the same universe, either in different times or different places.
I was wondering which ones you came up with or heard of.

A quite popular one is the movie Event Horizon being the origin story for Warhammer 40k. I'm not very familiar with Warhammer 40k, but that hellish subspace dimension the ship in event Horizon seems to have remarkable similarities with a hellish subspace dimension in Warhammer 40k.

If I remember this one correctly, people have mentioned that Dark Sun could be the distant future of Dragonlance, but I'm not too familiar with the backstory of Dark Sun and barely know anything about Dragonlance.

One of my personal favorites is that the reoccuring Mitchell and Webb sketch The Quiz Broadcast (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN0ixdOsrY0) is taking place in the Fallout universe. :smallbiggrin:

Another one that occured to me is that all of the world Zamonia from the novels by Walter Moers could be a prime world in Planescape. There isn't much direct overlap and no mention of portals or specific planescape creatures, but especially The City of Dreaming books shares the feel and style very closely. A young dragon writer who travels to a large city where bounty hunters kill each others in the endless catacombs of the city for ancient books, who meets a giant intelligent carterpillar/grub who is both a famous expert on old books and keeps bees as a hobby. And the whole city is nhabited by all kinds of monsters, with trolls are mob enforcers and police, and so on.

[Kindablue]

The one about every TV show ever being a day dream in the mind of that kid from St. Elsewhere is probably the most famous. The Venture Brothers, Doctor Horrible, and The Tick all being in the same world is a little too easy.

[Hiro Protagonest]

Battlestar Galactica + anything set in a universe with Earth. :smalltongue:

[Grinner]

If I remember this one correctly, people have mentioned that Dark Sun could be the distant future of Dragonlance, but I'm not too familiar with the backstory of Dark Sun and barely know anything about Dragonlance.

If magic in Dragonlance comes from the sun, then I'd say it's highly likely. They were both made by TSR after all.

[LaZodiac]

Battlestar Galactica + anything set in a universe with Earth. :smalltongue:

It was Earth all along! I'm not sure how valid an idea it is, but a mixture of Battlestar and Planet of the Apes would be nifty.

Also, I don't 100% know the Darksun Dragonlance connection, but the basics of it if I recall is that, since the gods up and left Dragonlance, no divine magic. Problem: the gods also power normal magic. Therefor, in an effort to fix this, people tap into Defilement, and thus magic the lands until they become the horrific murderdesert that is Darksun.

[VeisuItaTyhjyys]

The movie Thor and real life. It is, in fact, a documentary about one of Natalie Portman's summer internships from her time at Harvard, during which she fell head-over-heels for an initially arrogant, but kind-hearted Norse deity/alien cast down to Earth, only to have him tragically torn away. All proceeds from the film fund the reconstruction of Bifrost to reunite these literally star-crossed lovers.

[Yora]

Well, anything that is supposed to be in the real world and the real world is a bit too obvious. That applies to almost everything ever written, performed, or filmed.

[Kitten Champion]

I liked to think Blade Runner and Alien take place at different points in same timeline. I like the idea of the evolution of the Replicant concept in particularly.

[Pink]

Firefly and Alien/Prometheus. The Weyland-Yutani Corp is apart of both.

[Acanous]

Battlestar Galactica and LEXX.

XD

[darkblade]

Power Rangers: In Space uses the coordinates of Gallifrey as an asteroid belt. Written a little shout out and friendly jab but it was written in '98 between the classic series and the new one. The time during which the Time War would have destroyed Gallifrey.

One really obscure one, Todd and the Book of Pure Evil and Republic of Doyle both feature a character named Brody played by Dan Petronijevic. Now the Brody in Todd is a possibly demonic immortal who wants to end the world with the titular book and the one in Doyle displayed no such paranormal traits or apocalyptic desires but since Todd got canceled I'm going to take what I can get.

[Excession]

Firefly and Alien/Prometheus. The Weyland-Yutani Corp is apart of both.

Does Predator count as coincidental still, or is Alien vs. Predator too canon now? That all started with them raiding the props department for trophies in Predator 2 right?

[SiuiS]

Power Rangers: In Space uses the coordinates of Gallifrey as an asteroid belt. Written a little shout out and friendly jab but it was written in '98 between the classic series and the new one. The time during which the Time War would have destroyed Gallifrey.

One really obscure one, Todd and the Book of Pure Evil and Republic of Doyle both feature a character named Brody played by Dan Petronijevic. Now the Brody in Todd is a possibly demonic immortal who wants to end the world with the titular book and the one in Doyle displayed no such paranormal traits or apocalyptic desires but since Todd got canceled I'm going to take what I can get.

That's actually pretty darn awesome.

[Cespenar]

Starcraft and Alien?

Fallout as a precursor to WH40K?

[Waker]

The chemicals which transformed some pet turtles into ninja crime fighters were found in the same canister that blinded a kid and gave him the super senses he needed in order to become a superhero/lawyer.

[Shadow of the Sun]

Firefly is the inevitable future to Quentin Tarantino's shared multiverse.

[MLai]

Does Predator count as coincidental still, or is Alien vs. Predator too canon now? That all started with them raiding the props department for trophies in Predator 2 right?
I believe AvP was happening in comics before Predator 2 happened. Because I remember feeling not surprised but vindicated, when I saw the alien skull on the predator ship.

[Eldan]

Starcraft and Alien?

Fallout as a precursor to WH40K?

I've actually seen a pretty interesting case made for Fallout and X-Com, starting with "same aliens".

[Cespenar]

I've actually seen a pretty interesting case made for Fallout and X-Com, starting with "same aliens".

Same aliens? I can't think of any, off the top of my head. Like, at all.

[Bastian Weaver]

The little grey men, I suppose. Not limited to X-Com and Fallout, too.

[Jan Mattys]

The little grey men, I suppose. Not limited to X-Com and Fallout, too.

Even though, let's be honest, Mothership Zeta was the weakest of the DLCs for Fallout 3...

I am a big fan of the WH40K/EventHorizon one the OP mentioned. Given or taken a few details, it fits surprisingly well.

[Eldan]

And, of course, Doctor Who can crossover with just about anything. Especially if you go to the Grand Unifying Wild Mass Guess page and look up "X is a Timelord".

[TheEmerged]

"Cars" is the far future of "Wall-E" (http://www.geekosystem.com/headcanon-cars-walle/).

[Dr.Epic]

The one about every TV show ever being a day dream in the mind of that kid from St. Elsewhere is probably the most famous. The Venture Brothers, Doctor Horrible, and The Tick all being in the same world is a little too easy.

:smallconfused:

Who? Is he a Marvel or DC character or something, 'cause I've never heard of him before?
I will never get tired of making this joke!

[Weezer]

:smallconfused:

Who? Is he a Marvel or DC character or something, 'cause I've never heard of him before?
I will never get tired of making this joke!

It was a comedic miniseries written by Josh Whedon during the writers strike. It's about Doctor Horrible (Neal Patrick Harris), a struggling villain whose main goals are admittance to the Evil League of Evil and acknowledgement of his existance by the woman he loves, Penny (Felicia Day). Opposing him is the self-righteous, destructive and arrogant hero, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). It's really funny and available to watch on netflix.

Sigh, way to trap me with your white text.

[Yora]

Didn't he look something like this?

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/745/epicst.png

[LaZodiac]

It was a comedic miniseries written by Josh Whedon during the writers strike. It's about Doctor Horrible (Neal Patrick Harris), a struggling villain whose main goals are admittance to the Evil League of Evil and acknowledgement of his existance by the woman he loves, Penny (Felicia Day). Opposing him is the self-righteous, destructive and arrogant hero, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). It's really funny and available to watch on netflix.

You should read that white text, yo.

Hmm, does anyone know any other universes that are connected like this? Because I'm actually really interested in stuff like this.

[Weezer]

You should read that white text, yo.


Yeah, just saw it. And remembered that Dr. Epic's avatar is Dr. Horrible himself. :smallsigh:

[Grinner]

Rumor has it that the game series Halo and Marathon are connected, but seeing as I never played any of the Marathon games, I can't confirm that.

[Kato]

Well, thank you guys for THAT little diversion. Now I had to spent 45 minutes again to watch the Sing-a-long-Blog for the 100th time :smalltongue: (Nah, I was going to anyway)


I kind of like the idea that all the Whedon shows are somehow connected... of course that means that Felicia Day after being a Slayer in training went to die and later come back to fight in a post-apocalyptic world with Wash's great, great, great, great... grandfather or something. But I can live with that.

[Zaydos]

If I remember this one correctly, people have mentioned that Dark Sun could be the distant future of Dragonlance, but I'm not too familiar with the backstory of Dark Sun and barely know anything about Dragonlance.

I would say this one doesn't make sense. Dark Sun established facts about how arcane magic was developed in the setting (crazy mutant from pre-human super race) and how it functioned. Magic in Dragonlance doesn't have the same life source based power, at least not in the original trilogy or box set.

That said, I can see it as an AU because Raistlin is similar to the inventor of arcane magic.


The chemicals which transformed some pet turtles into ninja crime fighters were found in the same canister that blinded a kid and gave him the super senses he needed in order to become a superhero/lawyer.

That was intentional at least on one side, TMNT started out as a parody of gritty comics, especially Frank Miller's Daredevil run.

[Senator Cybus]

Firefly and Alien/Prometheus. The Weyland-Yutani Corp is apart of both.

I think that Weyland-Yutani gets a shout-out in Angel, too, during a Wolfram & Hart promotional video. And now I'm picturing Angel fighting a Predator, so I thank you for the awesome. :smallsmile:

I like the widely-held fan theory that Exalted is the ancient past of the World of Darkness (at least, the OWoD, dunno about the new stuff) - with vampires being the descendants of the Abyssal Exalted, Lunars becoming werewolves and so on.

[Prime32]

Rumor has it that the game series Halo and Marathon are connected, but seeing as I never played any of the Marathon games, I can't confirm that.There's a lot of terminology overlap; in particular AIs seem to work the same way (the term "rampancy" came from Marathon IIRC).

[Hawriel]

Blade Runner, all novels by William Gibson, Robocop.


Actually I always got the feeling that Gibsons three series, Neromancer, Virtual Light, and Pattern Recognition where in the same time line.

[Yora]

Dominion Tank Police, Appleseed, and Ghost in the Shell also seem to take place in the same Universe, as the main characters all tend to favor Seburo guns. But that's not really a coincidence when they are made by the same writer.

[Narkis]

I would say this one doesn't make sense. Dark Sun established facts about how arcane magic was developed in the setting (crazy mutant from pre-human super race) and how it functioned. Magic in Dragonlance doesn't have the same life source based power, at least not in the original trilogy or box set.

That said, I can see it as an AU because Raistlin is similar to the inventor of arcane magic.

It easily could be (sort of) true when Dark Sun was created. IIRC, Dragonlance had just (or was about to) be rebooted for a different gaming system, and the latest novel, Dragons of Summer something, had the gods abandon the world for good, taking arcane magic with them. No Black-robed wizard would remain eventually, leaving just two moons visible to the average man. Wizards searched for alternate sources of magic, while all souls coalesced at a barrier around the plane, in what could be the proto-Gray. And there was also a race of immortal, absurdly beautiful humanoids, who appeared in a short story about an in-universe rumour that Raistlin had a daughter with one of them, and who could be the original Pyreen.

This interpretation, however, requires that you consider a myth everything published in Dark Sun about the distand past of Athas, and ignore everything Dragonlance-related published after that point, as the gods return eventually.

[Silverbit]

I always had this theory that Conan the Barbarian (the short stories), and Lord of the Rings were in the Lovecraftverse. Conan and LOTR both have weird monsters that wouldn't look out of place in Lovecraft (most non-humans Conan fights; Ungoliant, Shelob and the things under Khazad-Dûm). It helps that Howard knew Lovecraft, and I think Tolkein read the stories. It also amuses me to imagine Conan and Gandalf vs a shoggoth.

...

That needs to be a movie.

[Eldan]

Howard didn't just read Lovecraft's stories. They knew each other well, they exchanged a lot of correspondance and used a lot of each other's ideas. Sometimes the same names and entities, even.

[Man on Fire]

Lord of the ring and Chronolicles of Narnia. In the former it's estabilished, in sirmaillion mostly, that creator of the world lives on distant continent far west, where elves sail to. In the latter Aslan says that his father i.e. God, lives on a distant continent far east. o it's not imposible to imagine that this is the same continent, with Narnia on it's west side and Middle Earth on it's east side.

It is possible that Doctor Who and Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy have some sort of connection, Doctor once mentioned meetign Arthur Dent.

Almost any version of King Arthur story can be easily estabilished as a part of DC Universe, even if it's contradicting with the versions seen in any of their comics. that's because Demon Knights comic series estabilished that merlin attempted to create Camelot several times, over the course of thousands of years. The earliest one had Arthur as a tribal chief.

Some things like Chronolicles of Amber and Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion multiverse can be easily connected - they're based around multiverse constructed from fight between forces of order and Chaos. Another one to simply add to Amber multiverse is Narnia - Aslan and Tash could simply be aspects of Unicorn of Order and Snake of Chaos, especially that Tash's powers seems to work similiar to what unleashing full-power of Lorgus (the main power of chaos and representation of Snake) on order-controlled plane does (complete annihilation).


Hmm, does anyone know any other universes that are connected like this? Because I'm actually really interested in stuff like this.

Oh dear, there are loads of connections between the worlds, it would be pretty hard to try to map them down. I might bite it later through.

For starters one interestign example - Marvel Comics had published comics based on Conan the Barbarian, Elric Saga (in crossover with Conan no less) Transformers, Salomon Kane, G.I.Joe, Godzilla, toy line ROM The Spaceknight and few robot anime (Combattler V, Voltes V and few others). All these comics were set in Marvel Universe and, while company lost the license to them, they never removed them from the verse. Considering some of these have estabilished multiverses (Elric, Transformers), that means those are part of Marvel Multiverse now.

[Kosmopolite]

It is possible that Doctor Who and Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy have some sort of connection, Doctor once mentioned meetign Arthur Dent.

Doctor who and Camelot too (Battlefield). Also other mythologies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doctor_Who_historical_characters#List_of_m ythological_characters) including Horus and Satan.

He's also met and refuted Sherlock Holmes a couple of times.

[Dr.Epic]

Didn't he look something like this?

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/745/epicst.png

That's the sexiest avatar I've seen since Kyoshi.:smallwink:

[Eldan]

I went on a wikipedia trip after The 13th warrior was mentioned in the Conan the Barbarian thread. And since we just had Lovecraft, I should mention this.

The 13th Warrior is based on a book by Michael Chrichton called Eaters of the Dead. It's a retelling of the Beowful story, framed as a travellogue by a really existing Arab ambassador to the Bulgars who met Wikings. Wikipedia mentions that in the "bibliography" of Ibn Fadlan's travellogue is Abdul Alḥaẓred's Necronomicon.

Which means that Beowulf is set in the Lovecraft Mythos. :smalltongue:

[JoshL]

The one about every TV show ever being a day dream in the mind of that kid from St. Elsewhere is probably the most famous. The Venture Brothers, Doctor Horrible, and The Tick all being in the same world is a little too easy.

And more or less confirmed. I can't remember if it was Whedon or Edlund that mentioned in an interview that the Tick and Dr. Horrible were in the same world. I think it was mentioned a couple times. Also, Edlund created the characters of Moist and Bad Horse. Apparently, when he was on Angel, Edlund tried to get them to use Bad Horse at almost every story pitch meeting. Which could have put the Tick and Buffy in the same universe....

[Slylizard]

Lord of the ring and Chronolicles of Narnia. In the former it's estabilished, in sirmaillion mostly, that creator of the world lives on distant continent far west, where elves sail to. In the latter Aslan says that his father i.e. God, lives on a distant continent far east. o it's not imposible to imagine that this is the same continent, with Narnia on it's west side and Middle Earth on it's east side.


I think that's highly likely. If I remember correctly both Tolkien and Lewis (and Charles Williams) were members of a small writing club during their Oxford days called the Inklings (http://www.mythsoc.org/inklings/) where they'd compare and critique each others work.

[WalkingTarget]

Lord of the ring and Chronolicles of Narnia. In the former it's estabilished, in sirmaillion mostly, that creator of the world lives on distant continent far west, where elves sail to. In the latter Aslan says that his father i.e. God, lives on a distant continent far east. o it's not imposible to imagine that this is the same continent, with Narnia on it's west side and Middle Earth on it's east side.

Problem: in Tolkien's writing the omnipotent creator deity exists "outside" of the world. The "gods" that live in the West are the Valar - they fill a similar narrative role as, say, the Greek pantheon, but they are explicitly caretakers of the world, not creators.

Beyond that, stories of lands in the mythical West exist in British legend well before Tolkien. He's riffing on that theme. Lewis did borrow the name "Numinor" in one of his books for a similar concept, though.