Fanficing (is that a word now?) has been around at least since Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes. It became really big with Star Trek.
Yes, I admitted that a couple posts ago.
It’s probably worth pointing out that one of the traits of autism is impaired social development. To accept the Tommy Westphall hypothesis is to accept that all of the TV shows that you enjoy watching were written by a child with a poor understanding of human interaction.
Autistic kids are not silent geniuses, but they do more than count blinds. They have the same kinds of likes and dislikes as other people. I know lots of autistic people from the work I used to to.
One thing I do know is that autistic people sometimes have trouble distinguishing people’s faces (if you think back to when you were about three, and many adults looked alike, that’s how it is, more or less).
Anyway, here’s how I resolve it: Tommy likes the TV show St. Elsewhere because two characters look a lot like his father and his main caregiver, and he really can’t distinguish between them. His father once found a snowglobe with the St. Elsewhere hospital in it (it’s a famous show, so why not?) and bought it for Tommy, who sometimes relives episodes he’s seen, and occasionally projects himself into them when he looks at the snowglobe.
Yes, I know that’s not what the writers intended, but aside from screwing up all television forever, the writers know crap about autism, so I’m sticking with my version.
I can’t see the connection, but the list posted includes Buffy. An episode of Buffy raises the possibility that the whole show is going on inside Buffy’s head. So that means the kid from St Elsewhere is fantasizing about a girl fantasizing…
Thank god they don’t include cartoons. Cheers crossed over with the Simpsons, which in turn crossed over with Family Guy, Futurama, King of the Hill, Bob’s Burgers… The list just gets bigger.
I think in either that episode or an episode referencing it, they namedrop St. Elsewhere. As in “so you think this is like St. Elsewhere or something?” It shouldn’t really count, because St. Elsewhere is clearly a fictional show in their universe.
The connection is through Morley cigarettes, apparently.
Yeah, I don’t like product connections. Too easy to be a coincidence or even direct ripoff.
It might have been around, but was it cool?
Fanficing has been around since all of the interminable Romance of the Three Kingdoms spinoffs in 14th century China. Writing fanfics about that was, I’m fairly sure, the national sport.
People are people. We’re the same animal we were then, so we have similar enthusiasms (or obsessions depending on your viewpoint).
I was pleased to see that several others have already noted my major complaint with the overly-large Tommy Weatphall Universe: characters or things from other shows can appear inside a show that exists only in Tommy’s imagination simply because he is aware of them, and folded them into his fantasy. Many of these connections flow one-way.
For instance, on The Bob Newhart show there was a character named Eliot Carlin, played by actor Jack Riley. This character also appeared on St. Elsewhere, played by Jack Riley, as a patient in the psych ward.
It seems quite likely that Tommy had seen The Bob Newhart show, and just folded Eliot Carlin into his fantasy.
There is no evidence I am aware of that St. Elsewhere existed within the universe of the Bob Newhart Show, so it isn’t one of the shows that only exists in Tommy’s mind.
A rule I encountered when I first was learning about this that struck me as very sensible was that an appearance by a celebrity as himself on two or more shows does not constitute a connection between them.
For example, in 1993 Joe Namath appeared as himself on The John Larroquette Show and Married with Children, and in 1988 he appeared a himself on Kate and Allie. This does not show that those 3 shows all happened in the same universe, but merely that they each happened in a universe where, like ours, there was a famous football player named Joe Namath.
But, while they accept that Tommy might be including real-world things into his fantasy like Joe Namath or the show Jeopardy!, they discount the idea that he might be folding fictional things in as well; that some connections might not run both ways.
But my biggest complaints are that they have embraced some very spurious connections:
As I recall, the reason they say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files take place in the same universe is … Spike and Cigarette Smoking Man smoke the same fictional brand of cigarettes. The only reason we’re even discussing this is the word “fictional” in the previous sentence; if they both smoked Marlboros it would mean nothing under the Joe Namath rule. This connection is iffy, and then we add in that Tommy may have seen one show and folded Morley brand cigarettes into his fantasy. Or, more interestingly, one of these shows might be set in the universe Tommy Westphall actually lives in, and so Morleys are just a real brand he knows of and incorporated into his fantasy.
Even more tenuous is the connection between Star Trek and the Buffyverse: Yoyodyne Industries is listed as the shipbuilder for USS Excelsior, and is a client of Wolfram & Hart. Even given the distinctiveness of the name, 300 years of intervening time casts doubt on whether it is the same company, and we have plenty of examples today of people naming a real company after a fictional one, so perhaps both the Buffyverse and the Star Trek universe include the feature film The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai: Across The Eighth Dimension. The same company name, however unlikely a name it is, does not a solid connection make.
References to a “St. Elegius Hospital” are weak tea. While there is no such place in our world, we don’t know that there wasn’t a real one in the world where Tommy Westphall lived.
And the paging over a PA system of “Dr. Donald Westphall” is no proof of anything at all.