Universal Studios was the home to all the main monsters in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1943 they released Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, with Bela Lugosi as Frankenstein and Lon Chaney, Jr. in his favorite role as the Wolf Man.
Is this the first franchise cross-over in horror movies? In all movies?
I know radio stars from different shows had appeared together in a movie earlier, Love Their Neighbor with Fred Allen and Jack Benny playing themselves in 1940 to publicize their radio “feud.” That feels entirely different. And they certainly weren’t movie franchises either. If Boston Blackie had meet Charlie Chan, that would be a better example. But he didn’t. I can’t think of anyone who did.
I can’t think of a feature film, but what about shorts and serials? The Disney cartoon “Orphan’s Benefit,” released in '34, was the first time Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck appeared in a cartoon together. Mickey, of course, was well established at that point, and Donald had premiered in a solo short earlier that year.
Saw that movie recently. Lugosi as Frankenstein was almost comical. I can’t think of earlier cross-overs. You might be looking in the right place with the detective series, there were a lot of them. Maybe westerns, you might find a couple of cowboy heroes teaming up somewhere.
The idea makes so much sense that it’s hard to understand from a modern perspective how bizarre it must have seemed to people of that era. Rights were a major issue, but every studio must have had several b-series heroes that they could have linked up.
I can only think of one earlier example, from the comics:
The only reasonable explanation is that people thought differently then, assuming that it would demean the franchises to allow others in to compete with the main character. Universal was a low-rent studio, grinding out hour-long b-movie horror by the 1940s so they didn’t have much to lose. Neither did a dozen other minor studios, though, so that can’t be the only factor.
I’m not sure how you define “crossover”, but it’s interesting to observe that, although Disney is very protective about Mickey Mouse and other properties, often taking legal action to prevent their use outside Disney productions, in the early years of the 1930s Walt was willing to let Mickey appear in non-Disnet suff.
In 1934 he appeared – in animated form, interacting with human performers 'way pre-Roger Rabbitt, or Tom and Jerry in “Anchors Away” – in Hollywood Party with Jimmy Durante:
These are distinct from Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons featuring caricatures or rip-ofgfs of famous characters in cartoon form – it’s Mickey interacting with human actors, and done with Disney’s permission in each case. It’s definitely a “crossover” of properties between different studios.
Those are interesting. I’m really looking for name-in-the-title crossovers, though, not cameos. (Or pairings of actors like W. C. Fields and Mae West in My Little Chickadee.) Universal, which owned all the classic monsters, even did this with Abbott and Costello in a half-dozen films. The title and the posters all told audiences that two of their favorites would be paired, however unlikely that might be. These were franchise-level, a direct precursor of what we see today far more often.
Outside of Universal, I don’t see anything quite similar. I’d like to acknowledge their innovation, if there’s nothing really comparable earlier.
On a more serious note how about L. Frank Baum? He had his established characters like the Oz cast and the lesser-know Ix books. Then he decided to bring Santa Claus in as a character. The first time he did it was in 1904 in the short stories “How The Woggle-Bug And His Friends Visited Santa Claus” in which some of the Oz characters visited the North Pole and “A Kidnapped Santa Claus” in which some of the Ix villains abducted Santa Claus. Then he wrote the novel The Road to Oz in 1909, in which Santa Claus visited Oz.
I dont think this is quite what you are after but there was the Dead End Kids franchise. A franchise that paired the Kids with various welll known actors of the era.
I could be wrong about this but I remember reading somewhere that for a short time both the Disney cartoons and the Hal Roach shorts were distributed by MGM thereby making such intra-corporate synergy possible. However, this relationship did not last long due to Disney’s switching to RKO to do their theatrical distribution and MGM setting up their own cartoon studio.
I don’t think that quite counts as “cross-over,” pairing of stars – even stars with distinct comic personae – was pretty common, going back to Dorothy and Lillian Gish. “Cross-over” seems to me that it has to involve fictional characters, presumably with multiple films. I tried to do some research, but found nothing earlier than your example of Frankenstein and Wolf-man. (I didn’t spend a LOT of time researching, it was pretty casual.)
Right. The parallel was intended to be with “not cameos,” meaning that actors didn’t count as a cross-over, only characters did.
Satire, which has its own rules, has a fascinating example from 1936. Leo Bruce wrote A Case for Three Detectives, in which doppelgangers of Hercule Poirot, Father Brown, and Lord Peter Wimsey all are called in to solve the same murder. Each one gives a solution in the style that they are famous for, while the dim local constable - Sergeant Beef! - watches in wonder at their genius. At the end, of course, Beef knew whodunnit all along, giving a fourth solution that the famous three missed. A forgotten classic.
There’s always the infamous Betty Boop Meets Dracula edition of Hollywood on Parade from 1933, featuring Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Mae Questel, probably the most prominent sand famous of the Betty Boop voicers, doing a real-life performance as Betty Boop
A quick note about that short – although most sites credit Mae Questel as being the Betty Boop performer (and that is what I was always told), some sites and IMDb credit it to Bonnie Poe, who also voiced the cartoon Betty:
No, that’s the cool find. Interesting, though, that unlike Timely, Top-Notch didn’t bother mentioning the crossover on the covers. There’s a tiny word balloon on #7 having The Wizard say “Ready Shield!” - The Shield being another hero - but no hint otherwise. And issue #9 promotes The Black Hood to the cover, so apparently the crossover didn’t help The Wizard sell copies.
The first Justice Society of America story was published in 1940, as well, which brought together the most popular heroes from proto-DC publisher All-American Comics.
Also, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier, but HP Lovecraft and his pen-pals were swapping elder gods and unspeakable tomes with each other throughout the twenties and thirties.
Since we have branched out from movies to comics, I think I can safely mention the 1921 novel She and Allan, by H. Rider Haggard, which tied together the Allan Quatermain series and the Ayesha series.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page. There are links to Project Gutenberg’s files for both series.