As a life long King fan, I'm looking forward to this.
Quote from: NapalmKev on 18 February, 2017, 06:57:28 AM
... I'm thinking this will go down the Penny Dreadful/Gotham route of taking various characters and plots and mashing them together.
Robert Altman's Short Cuts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Cuts_(film)) and
Clash Of The Titans are the earliest live action examples of this approach I can think of. They're more literal versions of what wearers of fancy pants call intertextuality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertextuality).
It's seeped into broader pop culture, probably due to the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Alan Moore's plundering of out-of-copyright properties with
The Lost Girls/The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
TV series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_crossovers) created new characters who shared a universe; Defenders Of The Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenders_of_the_Earth) acted as a clearing house for preexisting characters with a shared owner; but Bud Abbott (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6NIVn6_m1c) provides the first example (I can think of) where lapsed copyright mashed together characters from discreet works in a shared Univers(al).
The earliest literary examples are
The Torah and its sequels/soft reboots,
The New Testament and
The Qu'ran. They're sort of theological versions of
Watchmen, reimagining preexisting Charlton heroes, like Beelzebub (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beelzebub#Hebrew_Bible) and Mithras (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_comparative_mythology#Greco-Roman_mysteries), as more morally ambivalent characters interacting in a shared fictional universe. Like
Watchmen, the Creators no longer speak.