…got me thinking, Sherlock Holmes, along with his sidekick Watson, may be the most rebooted, reimagined, recreated fictional characters ever. Both verbatim, and in thinly disguised analogues like ‘House, M.D.’ and the 1998 movie ‘Zero Effect’.
I could not think of any other fictional characters or universe that’s had so many iterations of it created. I’m thinking of actual characters, such as my Sherlock Holmes example, or settings / universes such as the ‘Lord of the Rings’ universe in which there have been various characters appearing within the existing universe. Not so much general mythic plotlines such as 'The Hero’s Journey" which might be argued to be the most-used general plotline in history.
If you look at faithful dramatizations, adaptations, parodies, etc., etc., etc. I’d have to think Dickens’s A Christmas Carol should be in the conversation.
This is an interesting choice. I remember as a kid every sitcom seemed like it had to have some sort of takeoff on ‘A Christmas Carol’ every time the season came around.
But I’m not sure if it fits my OP qualification since I asked for repeated characters or setting, not general plotline. There have been many verbatim recreations of the story though, so maybe it does qualify.
These are very likely in the running for some point in the future, but I’d guess that Sherlock Holmes has them beat for now, just out of sheer longevity.
Lately they’ve been re-imagining Bram Stoker’s Dracula a lot.
It’s not just the multiple versions of Nosferatu. There’s been The Last Voyage of the Demeter. And PBS/Granada in 2006 came out with an interesting version in which the much-neglected Arthur Holmwood is a pivotal character (he’s diagnosed with syphilis before his wedding to Lucy Westenra, and his efforts to eliminate the disease involve black magic and propels the plot to bring Dracula to England). Or the Netflix/BBC version from 2020 written by Steve Moffat and Mark Gatiss that goes WAY outside the scope of the original novel, with Dracula finally landing in England 123 years after he left Transylvania.
In addition, Dracula was a superhero in Dell comics back in the 1960s (so were Frankenstein and the Werewolf – it was a weird time).
Marvel comics stuck closer to the Stoker version of that character in their Tomb of Dracula series, but they had to expand his features – they had comics to sell.
What amazes me is the variety of depictions of Dracula’s castle. It could be a crumbling, virtually abandoned ruin, as in the 1931 Universal films and the PBS 2006 version, or it could be a grand old, but maintained castle as in most versions. Or it might be a very nice and well-kept home as in the 1958 Hammer film. In the Dan Curtis/Jack Palance 1974 TV version his “castle” looks like a neat, trim suburban home. There’s no dust inside, and it doesn’t appear to be made of stone at all.
the familiar Johnny Weissmuller version definitely isn’t Burroughs’ vision (although he approved it). His Tarzan is a rootless white guy inexplicably dropped into Africa and raised by apes. No Lord Greystoke stuff here. The first silent movie tried to be faithful to the book. So did the Disney animated version, but the two are completely different.
Other Tarzans have been varying mixes of the two.
The 1966 Mike Henry movie Tarzan and the Valley of Gold re-imagines Tarzan as a James Bond-ish hero who dresses in suits when not in his jungle loincloth (and wears it much better than Weissmuller’s Tarzan in Tarzan’s New York Adventure) and flies first class.
Well, I was working off the idea that the thread title says “or characters,” and those characters are readily identifiable and much reimagined over the years.
But then again, Dickens himself wrote just the one book, so fair enough if you don’t feel it meets the ask in the OP.
Yes, I did include characters that are thinly disguised alternates, like House and Wilson on ‘House M.D.’ for Sherlock Holmes and Watson. So sure, ‘A Christmas Carol’ could be in the running. Anyway, it’s not as if this is really something that can be easily quantified to the point we’ll have a definitive answer.
I’m not sure if he counts as fictional (more mythological perhaps), but Robin Hood must have had many, many portrayals, not just on film or TV but on media predating that i.e. theatre?
I should post this on ‘Obvious things about a creative work that you only just realised’ (my excuse is I have only just finished watching the thing from start to finish, for the first time).