Same with me until I (1) heard about it, and then (2) saw a fair number of episodes in strip syndication.
Shared universe with other franchises
- Thread starter Laura Cynthia Chambers
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And they claim humans don't use money...why moonlight as a subspace telemarketer?
Does it count when the Enterprise shows up in other franchises? BSG, Airplane! etc
While "The Enterprise is a beautiful lady and we love her," I think it's a bit of a stretch to count it as a character.
(When was it in BSG?)
True, yet TSFS felt like a character death.
In Ron Moore's BSG, the Enterprise shows up in the background on a few occasions as part of the 'Rag Tag Fugitive Fleet'.
What about the Millennium Falcon being part of the Fleet the battles the Borg Cube during the opening of 'First Contact'?
Or the Colonial Vipers strafing McCoy on the cover of the TOS novel The Romulan Way, or the Galactica appearing upside-down on the cover of the first original TNG novel, Ghost Ship.
Of course, in the original Galactica, the fleet's agro ships were stock footage of the ships from Silent Running. And the Galactica also appeared upside-down as the ship in in the B-movie Space Mutiny, immortalized on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
I saw it on rerun once at college. It was spectacular. Lol
In the last episode of the sitcom Webster (1983-1989), "Webtrek" March 10, 1989 Webster was transported about the Enterprise D and met Lt. Worf. Or maybe he just dreamed that.
Dale
Dale was an acquaintance of Guinan's who adopted her pit bull Luna, in 2024, after she closed up her bar at 10 Forward Avenue. (PIC: "Watcher")memory-alpha.fandom.com
Okay, so this character is apparently shared between Star Trek and multiple other shows. Aside from real historical figures, is "Dale" the first real individual character who crosses over between Trek and many other non-Trek franchises? That is, the first person who's supposed to really exist in serious shows, as opposed to being a fictional character in the world of the show, or appearing in a dream or vision of a non-Trek character in a non-Trek show, or a silly spoof.
Gary Seven doesn't count for the purpose of my question - Assignment: Earth never made it past the attempted pilot, it was always supposed to be part of Trek's continuity if it had become its own show.
A hypothetical example would be if, say, in an episode of a cop show, Spock the character (not an actor or cosplayer pretending to be him) beamed away before the cops could catch him, and it was played straight, not for laughs.
The title you chose was "Shared Universes with Other Franchises".
So the question is: what does it take to make two different shows and their franchises part of a shared universe?
And obviously different people might have different ideas on what is sufficient to put different franchises into the same shared fictional universe. And in fact I can find examples of different people listing different shows and franchises as sharing a universe with a specific show and franchise.
You may have read about the Tommy Westphail Universe theory. It claims a) many crossovers, etc. make many other tv shows happen in the same universe as St. Elsewhere (1982-1988) and b) since the last episode of St. Elsewhere implied that the autistic boy Tommy Westphail had imagined the events of St. Elsewhere, he had also imagined the events of all the other shows.
This is also sometimes called the John Munch Universe theory because that character was a regular or guest character in many different tv series, tying them together.
Here is a link to a website about the Tommy Westphail Universe theory.
https://thetommywestphall.wordpress.com/
And the latest update said that in 2015 there were 409 shows in the Tommy Westphail universe. Including various Star Trek series.
The list i this side:http://poobala.com/crossoverlist.html has over a hundred shows in what it calls group 2, including St. Elsewhere. That is clearly a smaller group than the Tommy Westphail universe due to different standards of deciding which shows share a universe.
It's Group 10 includes 6 Star Trek series and 12 others.
And this https://fictionalcrossover.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek is a different list of crossovers between Star Trek and other works of fiction.
most of those don't count, as the are references to the fictional show in universe, but at least one fits this thread:
Team Knight Rider has an episode featuring the character of Jackson Roykirk, later creator of Nomad.
And I think that is the major connection used by the Poobla http://poobala.com/crossoverlist.html site to link Team Knight Rider and shows connected to it to Star Trek.
And of course if the novel Ishmael is included in someone's personal Star Trek canon it becomes not merely a 256-page elephant in the room but more like a 256-ton whale jumping on your 56-ton ship, the USS Star Trek.
[And yes, an actual small wooden ship listed among those sunk by whales was in some versions sunk by the whale leaping out of the sea and onto the deck.]
One) the Warner Brothers western tv universe or the Maverick tv universe. Warner brothers made a lot of tv shows, including westerns, in the 1950s.
One of the most famous of them was Maverick (1957-1962) set mostly in the 1870s as far as I can tell. Spin offs included the tv movies The New Maverick (1978), the series Young Maverick (1979), and the tv series Bret Maverick (1981).
The Maverick episode "Hadley's Hunter's" (Sept. 25, 1960) had many crossovers.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0644455/
So the Warner Bros. or Maverick tv universe includes not only Maverick (1957-1962), The New Maverick (1978), Young Maverick (1979), and Bret Maverick (1981), but also Cheyenne (1955-1963), Sugarfoot (1957-1961), Colt .45 (1957-1960), Bronco (1958-1962), and Lawman (1958-1962).
i know that Cheyenne Bodie roamed the west from job to job, while the lawmen in Lawman worked in Laramie, Wyoming.
Two) The Gambler tv universe.
The Gambler series is a series of five tv movies.
The fourth is The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1991) .
So The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1991) .seems to exist in a shared fictional universe with the other four Gambler tv movies, plus, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-1961), Cheyenne (1955-1963), Maverick (1957-1962), Have Gun - Will Travel (1957-1963), Bat Masterson (1958-1961),The Rifleman (1958-1963), Rawhide (1959-1965), The Westerner (1960), and Kung Fu (1972-1975), and maybe also The Virginian (1961-1971).
And there are two character links, Bart Maverick and Cheyenne Bodie, between the Warner Bros. or Maverick tv universe and The Gambler tv universe.
Three) the Ishmael universe.
Barbara Hambly's novel Ishmael (1985) features time travel to Seattle, Washington in the time of the tv series Here Come the Brides (1968-1970). It is revealed that Spock's mother's full name is Amanda stemple Grayson, implying she may be descended from Aaron Stemple of Seattle.
So Ishmael not only links Star Trek with Here Come the Brides (1968-1970), but science fiction productions, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979), and Doctor Who (1963-1989), and also a bunch of western tv shows.
Western tv shows like Gunsmoke (1955-1975), Maverick (1957-1962), Have Gun - Will Travel (1957-1963), The Rifleman (1958-1963), Rawhide (1959-1965), and Bonanza (1959-1973) with its tv movie sequels and its Australian filmed prequel series Ponderosa (2001-2002), and the western novel Jubilee Trail. And some of those tv shows link Star Trek with both the Warner Bros. or Maverick tv universe and the Gambler tv universe.
Or Ishmael (1985) does link Star Trek to those other programs if you want it to.
My family watched Here Come the Brides When I was a kid. My dad would tease my younger sister by calling her "Biddy". (There was a resemblance). And speaking of resemblances, I thought Bridget Hanley (Candy) looked like Grace Lee Whitney (Rand). Maybe it was the big hair. I guess my headcanon makes Candy Pruitt an ancestor of Janice Rand 
Likewise, Munch from the “Dick Wolf-iverse” showed up in an episode of The X-Files — but in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street (I think), Munch referred to The X-Files as a TV show people were going home to watch.
We briefly spot Serenity on Caprica, too.
Back in '66, you had characters on Batman watching The Green Hornet on TV and characters on The Green Hornet watching Batman on TV -- and then later the Green Hornet and Kato showed up as real people on Batman (first as a window cameo where Batman & Robin acknowledged them as fellow heroes, later as featured guests in a story where B&R believed their public reputation as criminals).
Similarly, Futurama is a work of fiction in The Simpsons' universe, and The Simpsons is a work of fiction in Futurama's universe. Although I know they did a crossover episode, on The Simpsons, I think.
IIRC, an early FF issue features the Hulk as a comic book character.
So I guess these all fall into the category of “Look, just don’t at this too closely / You should really just relax…”
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