I watched a recent episode of the new “Hawaii Five-0” (which I love), and an interesting question occurred to me. McGarrett and Danno were discussing how they both loved the old cop show “CHiPs” when they were kids, and debating about which of them was more like Erik Estrada, as opposed to the other other, less masculine and less famous dude.
That got me to wondering: If this show takes place in a universe where “CHiPs” is a television show from the 1970s, does it also take place in a universe where “Hawaii Five-O” is a television show from the 1960s? And if so, why don’t they acknowledge the similarity between their “reality” and that old TV show? And if not, why is one show included in their reality, but another is not?
The new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes addressed this issue. Watson googles Sherlock’s name and from the results the audience gets to see that there was never a famous character called Sherlock Holmes in the show’s reality.
Less famously, I once played the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and the dude running the game explained that the setting was 1920’s America, except the writer H.P. Lovecraft never existed.
In conclusion, in situations where the audience is likely to be nerdy this topic is sometimes addressed, but with shows where most of the audience will either not give a fuck, or implicitly understand storytelling conventions, writers don’t bother.
I really hope the writers of Hawaii Five-0 did intend the reference to Chips to raise the question you asked, but I haven’t seen the show so I can’t speculate what kind of level they are working on.
Yes, thanks Jay. That is what I was clumsily suggesting when I said I hoped the writers intended to reference CHiPs. It sounds to me like they **were **addressing the issue and they assumed the audience would be intelligent enough to get it by extrapolating from the statement in the OP. Am I hoping too much of TV writers and audiences?
Wasn’t there a space shuttle and maybe something else named “Enterprise” because of the popularity of Star Trek? I’m thinking I heard this referred to in a Star Trek movie or something, but maybe it was in some fan novel, that the Star Trek ship was named after the NASA shuttle.
A lot of anime is based off the manga anthology Jump, and some anime have their characters read Jump. I guess it serves as an inside joke/advertising/we save the world but we’re just like you thing. Obviously one is not supposed to read too much into it (ha!) but does their Jump have blank pages in the middle, or is it just shorter, or is there some other hit series in existence in their world.
The space shuttle wasn’t named after Star Trek. Enterprise, like the names of all of the space shuttles, is a traditional ship name that goes back centuries.
I just did some Googling and I am wrong about this. The Enterprise space shuttle, which was just used for testing, was slated to have a different name but really was named after the Star Trek ship because of a write in campaign from thje public.
One unique example of this phenomenon that I can remember, was in Blair Witch 2 (which I and maybe five other people saw but was actually pretty good). In most sequels, the previous movie is treated like an earlier occurrence in real life. But in BW-2, the first *Blair Witch *is referred to as only a movie, and the main character is capitalizing on it by running a tour through the alleged location where it happened.
Even worse, in The Simpsons universe Futurama is a fictional work, and in the Futurama universe The Simpsons is a fictional work. The Groening Paradox? Note that Bender has shown up at least once in The Simpsons universe however.
In that same vein, on an early episode of Third Watch, one eager paramedic was snidely remarked upon as having watched too many episodes of ER. A few seasons later, they did a crossover with ER.
Al Harrington (Ben in the original series) is Mamo in the new series, so it doesn’t look like the old show exists in the new one’s reality.
I wonder if they could get Tom Selleck to guest as a retired P.I. who worked for a reclusive millionaire?
I remember a season or two ago there was an episode of NCIS where DiNozzo was constantly making references to old 70s-era police and detective TV shows. At the end when the bad guy gets caught:
Gibbs: Book 'em, Danno-zzo.
DiNozzo: Excellent Hawaii Five-O reference, boss.
Keep in mind this was before the Five-O reboot. Given CBS’ tendency the last several years to keep most of its procedurals in the same universe (original CSI - Without a Trace, CSI NY - Cold Case, etc), you’ve gotta wonder if they’ll do the same thing with the new Five-O. If they did, it’d almost be enough to make your head spin thinking about whether either Five-O is considered real or fictional.
In one of the Oceans movies (12, I think?), part of the plan revolves around the fact that Julia Roberts’s character looks very much like Julia Roberts. It was somewhat clever, but they carried such in-jokery a bit too far in those films.
On Friends, Joey and Chandler’s favorite movie was Die Hard. But when they met a guy who looked exactly like Bruce Willis, nobody ever said a thing about it. Weird.
In “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, there’s a scene where Decker is showing Ilia/V’ger around the ship. One of the lounges has a series of photos of previous ships named “Enterprise”, including the space shuttle.