Don’t get me started on the anti-Semitic motifs in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.
It also explains why it is that Blofeld (who encountered Bond face-to-face in the movie You Only Live Twice ) inexplicably can’t recognize Bond in his Clark Kent-level disguise as Sir Edmund Hillary.
Of course, Bond and Blofeld were both played by completely different actors in each film, and looked completely different, so…
…heyyyyy!
What if it’s ALSO true that “Blofeld” is the Code Name given to whoever is current leader of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
There’s precedent for the idea. In Fleming’s novels the SPECTRE number designations aren’t permanent, but shift. Unlike in the films, “SPECTRE Number 1” might be the leader one day, but someone further down the chain of command at a later time.
The point of the Wold-Newton family is that there’s nothing “natural” about the mutation - it has an extraterrestrial cause - this is no different than many superhero origins.
Also, “superior” there also covers a lot of villains (like Moriarty and Fu Manchu) , which IMO make it less of an advert for genetic superiority.
I like the theory that The Jetsons and the Flintstones both take place at the same time-- a future in which the privileged few live in luxury in the sky, and the unlucky rest of the population eke out a living in primitive stone-age conditions on the ground. Either because of some post-apocalyptic scenario, or because the destruction of the middle-class has progressed to that point.
Although, the existence of dinosaurs in The Flintstones kind of throws off that theory. Maybe Jurassic Park can be added to that universe as well 
My favorite Star Trek theory is that transporters are “suicide machines”. The person who beams down isn’t you; just somebody who thinks they’re you.
Yeah, I don’t like the typical ‘it was all a dream’ because it almost always just makes the story worse. “Oh, so the story wasn’t real on it’s own terms, and anything could happen, no matter how illogical, and it all went away at the end” doesn’t improve anything. If Law and Order is just some kid’s dream, how does deciding that the show doesn’t need to have any real cause and effect and characters could just completely change personality tomorrow make it more enjoyable to watch?
There are a few rare cases where it improves the story, but in those cases it’s generally treating a single weird episode of a show or an odd book as ‘just a dream’ or ‘the narrator misremembered’, not divorcing the whole series from cause and effect. In the other thread I posted my ‘it’s just a story’ interpretation (I’m not sure exactly where the line is between ‘fan theory’ and ‘interpretation’) of one that I think improves it:
The Babylon 5 prequel movie In The Beginning has the main characters for the show deeply involved in pre-show events. Yet in the main series they don’t seem to know about a lot of what happened and most of them don’t know each other, in spite of having been in life-or-death situations together before, and none of them ever comment on the weird coincidence that they all happened to be involved in a series of unrelated events together. However, the framing device for the movie is that Londo is telling what happened as a story to a kid. My ‘fan theory’ (or maybe just ‘obvious interpretation’) of that is that Londo is telling the story of the major events completely accurately, but is inserting people who he knows and interacted with instead of historical figures he knows nothing about to make the story more interesting for the child.
Speaking of dreams, Kansas is the imaginary dream world, Oz is Dorothy’s actual reality.
Not sure if this counts, but Goodnight Moon is the last random firings of the synapses of a dying child.
Well, there have been cartoons where the Jetsons and the Flintstones met.
They also encountered each other in the comic book The Flintstones at the 1964 World’s Fair.
Well, superheroes can have their own unfortunate implications if you think about them too hard (see Watchmen, for example). But either way, the Wold-Newton family feels different to me, somehow. Maybe it’s seeing that sort of mutation in characters that aren’t explicitly in the superhero genre. Maybe it’s taking characters who were, historically, portrayed as human beings and retroactively making them superhuman. But for whatever reason, it rubs me the wrong way.
Maybe it’s this: if they’re ordinary human beings, people like Sherlock Holmes or Allan Quatermain or Sam Spade are something that we can aspire to. Sure, maybe they’re all pretty unrealistic and maybe we can never hope to be that good, but we could at least emulate those heroes. Wold Newton says, no, you can’t emulate them. You can’t ever hope to achieve the great things that your heroes have, because you didn’t get the meteor enhancement that they did.
I know that, as a guy who enjoys comic book superheroes, it may not make a lot of sense for me to feel like that. But that’s how I feel.
That’s my point.
I see that as a nice splash of cold water in the face of people not getting the difference between real life and fiction, myself. The whole point of the WN family is that even the “human” heroes of stories are not realistic. It’s a form of iconoclasm, really.
I didn’t read the wikipedia link, but clearly what must have happened is that the time machine failed and the Jetsons ended up on the ground, only thinking they had traveled in time. Similar to how Charlton Heston’s character in ‘Planet of the Apes’ thoguht he was on another planet, but it was Earth the whole time. “You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
I view it differently - they do live at the same time, in different conditions, but it’s not a “Morlocks and Eloi” situation. The “modern stone-age families” are the equivalents of luddites, or Amish. They eschew all modern conveniences like the foodarackacycle and flying cars, and they think they are primitive, but they are just fooling themselves.
I mean, the stone age people have radio, TV, movies, telephones, and other electric devices, and also cars that obviously don’t work by foot power no matter how much they want you to believe that. The Flintsones live in a microprocessor world. Things like phones and TV have tiny electronics hidden, so it looks like you are talking into a conch shell attached to a stone phone, but it is actually a highly sophisiticated cell phone.
It’s a life choice for the “Stone Age” people. And they practice willful suspension of disbelief.
The are like the cars in Cars. They are playing roles that they don’t fully understand. The Jetsons/Flinstones era is like 10000 years in the future. They know as much about the 20th century or the actual stone age as Futurama knows about the year 2000.
Maybe they really don’t know. Maybe the Sky people are holding the Stone people in a high-tech, humane, planet-wide prison camp after some ancient rebellion. All their needs are looked after, but they are kept utterly ignorant of their past and of any scientific knowledge so they don’t rise up again. The dinosaurs, of course, are their genetically-engineered cyborgs caretakers/wardens.
Maybe the ground-dwellers are future liberals trying to reduce their energy usage and carbon footprint while still living a relatively comfortable lifestyle, and the sky-dwellers are future conservatives using up what’s left of the Earth’s resources and pumping carbon into the atmosphere like there’s no tomorrow.
IIRC, the Tommy Westphall theory began as a satirical illustration of how ridiculous things can get if one demands extreme continuity consistency like comic book uberfans were being in the 1990s. I personally don’t even think that the ending shot really indicates the whole show was imaginary, but the basic idea that every easter egg, shoutout, reference to other works constitutes a shared universe is stupid on its face. No, not every continuity error or anachronistic prop means the entire point of a narrative work should be ignored in favor of, essentially, a conspiracy theory on a creator’s secret message.
The Bond assumed identity works because it’s logical to the point of being obvious, but it also doesn’t detract from any of the stories. It explanatory on a franchise level, but in any given, single movie it’s irrelevant.
One that I’ve grown to loathe is the “Pixar Theory” that all of the studio’s movies are out-of-order parts of the long story of how machines replaced humans. At first it was a silly idea that was fun to think about, and looked almost right if you took your glasses off. But that soon became zealots angrily insisting that everything in every movie HAD to fit because it was Pixar’s true narrative intent. To the point where some would get angry at the directors for saying it’s not an actual thing.
You can see this by noting that if you follow that logic, the real world is an imaginary literary/TV/movie construct, as are real world people and real world events, as they’ve all been mentioned in fictional serieses at some point. The idea that Michael Bloomberg playing himself on Law and Order indicates that the real world must be in a shared universe with a whole chain of other shows, including just being the dream of a kid, is just absurd. But that’s where the argument leads, and there’s not really a good stopping point.
I still need an explanation for how Colonel Klink fits into the Batman universe.
Klink appears in a window cameo. Batman and Robin know who he is. Klink is not dressed in uniform. Apparently Klink still has Hogan prisoner and his presence in Gotham City is considered at least suspect.
My theory is that WWII did end in that continuity, but the USA found Hogan useful in fighting the Cold War. So Hogan became a jewel thief, Klink was allowed to capture Hogan after a series of robberies and was catapulted to fame. He’s installed as the warden of a prison in a Switzerland type country, adjacent to the Iron Curtain. The prison focuses on international criminals. Hogan works out of the prison to defeat Communism and to keep an eye on the other international criminals.
Klink also appeared on Laugh-In - in character - but that was real world. I don’t think we’re supposed to think that is real.
Unlike all the other shows and movies, that are…?
Reminds me of all those contrived comic book stories of the 60s, like “Mrs. Lois Kent meets Super-Jimmy Olsen”. Occasionally there’d be a banner across the cover: “NOT an Imaginary Story!”
Even as a grade schooler, I remember thinking “But… they’re all imaginary, aren’t they?”
Actually, Disney confirmed the Pixar Theory as fact.
I tried posting a link to a couple of different articles about it, but for some reason they, or my phone, aren’t cooperating/working right