Same Actor/Character in Different Continuities

[diankra]

Then there's Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin in Police Squad! and the Naked Gun movies. The movies aren't really in the same continuity as the show; indeed, the first movie's script consisted largely of recycled gags from the show, so it's kind of a semi-remake.

On that argument...you could say the same about The Avengers - several scripts from the first three seasons were recycled for the Rigg/Thorson years, in some cases without changing the names of the guest characters/victims. (This also happened on Dixon of Dock Green, with even less effort to disguise the remake - but in an era of live TV they were effectively repeats a season later, IYSWIM).

Related question: Law and Order UK has receylce scripts from the US versions... does that mean it's in a different continuity, as the samecase happened twice, with different cops and lawyers involved?

 

[Christopher]

Similarly, four episodes of the 1988 revival of Mission: Impossible were remakes of episodes from the original series. This is because the show was created during the '88 writers' strike and was intended to consist entirely of remakes, with an all-new cast playing the original roles. But when they decided to bring back Peter Graves as Jim Phelps, they changed it to a sequel and changed the other character names, and once the strike ended they switched from remakes to original scripts, so only four remakes were done.

Does that make the '88 revival a different continuity despite Graves' presence? Well, the original M:I didn't really have much continuity in the first place. There were multiple episodes where the agents showed their faces on widely seen television broadcasts, and yet they were still able to go unrecognized in later assignments. There was a first-season episode where Dan Briggs sustained a serious bullet wound to the right chest, and he was completely fine in the next episode. And so on. Not to mention that there's no way Eastern Europe could possibly have held as many different fake countries as we saw over the course of the series, or that the US could possibly have had so many mob bosses in control of unrelated nationwide crime syndicates. Like many shows back then, M:I was essentially an anthology that just happened to use the same characters every week. Back then, "continuity" just meant making sure that the costumes and props matched from one shot to the next.

And you could say much the same about Law and Order. Really, does it make any sense that every single case prosecuted by Jack McCoy and his pretty female assistant in a given year was investigated by the exact same pair of detectives from the exact same precinct? Isn't there any crime happening anywhere else in New York City? And given the length of time the various investigations and trials are purported to take, I doubt you could fit two dozen of them into a single year even if the characters are working on overlapping cases. So I often think that L&O is best thought of as an anthology of unconnected stories that just happen to use the same characters but don't actually constitute a cohesive reality. (Maybe each one takes place in an alternate timeline of the quantum multiverse.)

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Related question: Law and Order UK has receylce scripts from the US versions... does that mean it's in a different continuity, as the samecase happened twice, with different cops and lawyers involved?

AFAIK, no, the US and UK versions share a continuity. In fact I believe there's a crossover in the works.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Nice conversations going on here. Some tangents away from my original idea but interesting ones. So that is great.

Of course many shows are inconsistent to themselves. Yet are viewed as single continuity. Ignoring the rougher edges were all the pieces of the puzzle don't always fit smoothly.

Question for everyone - Does an actor ever define continuity for you?

Much nitpicking has been made about the true timeline divergence point in the new Star Trek film. Imagine a similar film but without Leonard Nimoy as Spock. With the changes just speculations by the characters. The writers themselves have admitted that his prescience was required for this story to work.

I think that Superman/Batman : Public Enemies could almost be viewed as an alternate sequel to S:TAS versus Justice League. A world where Lex was not removed from Lexcorp and became an outright supervillain. Instead pursuing a run for the Presidency. Thats not criticism of JLU by the way. Which I vastly prefer. Just with Tim Daley's voicing Superman and characters mostly consistent with those on the series.

 

[Christopher]

^How do you explain Power Girl in that paradigm, though? The JLU equivalent, Galatea, was pretty solidly a villainess. And then there's the Hawkman question.

Besides, the Public Enemies Luthor is much less... well, less smart and dignified than the DCAU Luthor. I just can't see DCAU Lex sinking to that level even with steroid abuse being involved.


Does an actor ever define continuity for me? Only if there are no real discontinuities between the different works.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

One that hasn't been mentioned here was the cast of Dark Shadows having the same roles in Dark Shadows and the movie House of Dark Shadows.

 

[Christopher]

^That was mentioned in the thread this spun off from.

 

[Dick Whitman]

^How do you explain Power Girl in that paradigm, though? The JLU equivalent, Galatea, was pretty solidly a villainess. And then there's the Hawkman question.

Besides, the Public Enemies Luthor is much less... well, less smart and dignified than the DCAU Luthor. I just can't see DCAU Lex sinking to that level even with steroid abuse being involved.

All good points. I guess it did not work much as a standalone movie. Just seeing it as a kind of, sort of strained sequel gives it a tad more weight.

Dirk Durock as Swamp Thing

Films Swamp Thing and and its sequel Return of Swamp Thing and the later rebooted USA network tv series.

 

[Greg Cox]

One that hasn't been mentioned here was the cast of Dark Shadows having the same roles in Dark Shadows and the movie House of Dark Shadows.

Not to mention the sequel, NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Here is a really obscure one.

In the pilot episode of Lois & Clark Mel Winkler was cast as an African American Inspector Henderson. Presumably he was originally intended as reoccuring regular on the show. Similar to how the character was on the George Reeves series. Proof of this is that Henderson was in the first 4 or 5 scripts of the show. But for whatever reason Winkler never returned to the show. But those later episodes feature unnamed, recast cast cops for each show. It was not until later in the season that Richard Belzer was brought in as Henderson.

Now later on Mel Winkler voiced in an episode of S:TAS a African American "Commissioner Henderson". Which similarly was dropped and never appeared again.

I wonder if this was just a huge coincidence that was even known by Andrea Romano who was the voice casting director on the show.

Thats to IMDB. Otherwise I would never have noticed it!

 

[Christopher]

^I've got one that's kind of the reverse of that (and similar to the Henry Darrow example I gave earlier). Jeremy Ratchford did the voice of Sean Cassidy/Banshee in the '90s animated X-Men series, then later played the same character in live action in the Generation X pilot movie.

The Hellboy Animated movies, which are not in continuity with the live-action Hellboy movies (they're closer to the comics), feature the same lead cast as the live-action movies, Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, and John Hurt. In fact, Jones did the voice of Abe in the animated films before he got to do the voice in the second live-action movie (since David Hyde-Pierce dubbed him in the first).

Booster Gold and his robot sidekick Skeets were played by Tom Everett Scott and Billy West in both Justice League Unlimited and Batman: The Brave and the Bold, despite those being wildly different continuities. And Corey Burton reprised his DCAU role of Brainiac in the incompatible continuity of the Legion of Super Heroes series.

David Warner, who played Jack the Ripper in Time After Time, appeared in the Showtime Outer Limits episode "Ripper" as an inspector who was possessed by the alien entity (no, not Redjac) responsible for the Ripper killings. Kind of a borderline case, since in the latter case he wasn't playing the Ripper, just one of its hosts. But it was surely intentional stunt casting.

Ed Metzger has made something of a career for himself playing Albert Einstein onstage and in various films and TV shows (including Watchmen).

 

[Dick Whitman]

Rene Auberjonois as Desaad

The last two seasons of Super Friends and later for "Twilight" on Justice League

Willie Garson played Lee Harvey Oswald on Quantum Leap and in the movie Ruby. Which is interesting because each shows a very different role for Oswald in the JFK assassination.

 

[Christopher]

^Oh yeah, I knew that one. I was just thinking about that a couple of weeks ago when rewatching the Apokolips episodes of Superman: TAS (in which Desaad was played by Robert Morse). I should've remembered it.

Michael Clarke Duncan played Wilson Fisk/Kingpin in the theatrical Daredevil movie and reprised the role in the MTV CG-animated Spider-Man series. Probably not the same continuity, though I'm not sure there's anything that definitively precludes it.

 

[Greg Cox]

Douglas Wilmer played Sherlock Holmes on British television in the 1960's, then later reprised the role in the Gene Wilder spoof, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother.

I suppose they could have been in the same continuity, but . . .

 

[Stevil2001]

Michael Sheard played Adolf Hitler in a number of different productions, including both Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and a Tomorrow People serial where Hitler is revealed to be a shapeshifting alien.

 

[Dick Whitman]

The first actor to play Dick Tracy had a very long history with the character.

Ralph Byrd played Tracy for Republic Pictures in 4 separate movie serials. Which was unheard of for serials to have that many sequels, let alone with the same actor.

Later RKO did a series of Dick Tracy features in which the part was recast. Distrubutors where so unhappy with the box offices returns of the first two films that Byrd was brought into play Tracy for the third and fourth films of the series.

Byrd again played Dick Tracy in one of the very earliest television series.

As an offshoot of this many western stars of that era either played fictional versions of themselves or a consistent persona in most of their film and tv series. Regardless of the time period of the various stories. I am thinking of the likes of Roy Rogers.

 

[Harvey]

Eddie Constantine played Lemmy Caution in a series of B-pictures in the 1950s and early 1960s. He also played the character in a science fiction setting (of sorts) in the film Alphaville directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Finally, in 1991, he played the character again in what wikipedia describes as an experimental film called, Allemagne 90 neuf zéro, though I haven't seen that one and can't comment as to whether it fits into either of the previous two continuities.

 

[Dick Whitman]

While this thread was certainly partially inspired by the Superman reboot thread, there was more to it.

Also to show that our current expectations of ironclad continuity for everything is relatively new. In the past fans would have been happy to see the same actor return to a popular role without caring about the continuity implications.

For example I suspect that many film goers viewed Never Say Never Again as a "Sean Connery James Bond Film" versus Octopussy which was seen as a "Roger Moore James Bond film". Because honestly was there really any stronger connection between, lets say Dr No and Octopussy than Dr No and Never Say Never Again ?

 

[Dick Whitman]

Alan Hale as Little John

He first played the role in 1922 opposite Douglas Fairbanks in the silent Robin Hood

Than in 1938 mostly famously with Erroll Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood

Finally in 1950, 28 years after first playing the role, he appeared in Rogues of Sherwood Forest. Where John Derek stars as the son of the original Robin. So it could be considered a quasi sequel to each of the previous films.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Michael Clarke Duncan played Wilson Fisk/Kingpin in the theatrical Daredevil movie and reprised the role in the MTV CG-animated Spider-Man series. Probably not the same continuity, though I'm not sure there's anything that definitively precludes it.

I was thinking about that one. Ironic that MCD could play Kingpin in a Spider-man tv series but that there are legal issues precluding him from doing so in a movie.