Christ! what makes you say that? 
(Cartoon God in Holy Grail is my fave.)
“I like Santa.”
Not too provocative, no.
But since Christ is, as far as we know, an actual historical figure who is usually not, intentionally at least, depicted as a fictional character, except in a few mostly satirical instances, such as 'Buddy Christ", I don’t think Christ would be a good fit.
At one point, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde had the most film versions, with straight versions, versions of the play, parodies, pastiches, “Mary Reilly” and so forth. I don’t know if that is still true, though, nor what you get when you add in all the Classic Comics versions, TV episodes, etc.
For being late to the game, the It’s a Wonderful Life idea of a world where you don’t exist has been done, redone, wrapped and rewrapped a lot. There’s even an episode of Beavis & Butthead, where Butthead sees the world without him, and it’s so much better.
Treasure Island?
Besides numerous “straight” adaptations, in the early 2000s we had Muppet Treasure Island (with many of the characters replaced by Muppets) and Disney’s Treasure Planet (which re-set the story in outer space, with interesting results).
Peter Pan
Again, a lot of the re-imaginings have been recent, with Spielberg’s Hook, Disney’s Return to Never Land and all their Tinkerbell features and Jake and the Neverland Pirates
And you could arguably include The Lost Boys with their vampire lost boys. And maybe even Alan Moore’s The Lost Girls and Andrew Weir’s Cheshire Crossing.
Those last two make me realize that you could also include the Alice in Wonderland franchise. Not only do the last two items above have her, but so does Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, along with countless TV and movie adaptations (including a TV movie where “wonderland/Looking glass” is all inside a television)
To the extent that there is such a thing as “Roman mythology”, it’s Greek mythology fanfiction. The Roman religion, prior to Greek influence, was animistic, and didn’t have what we would call “characters”.
The monster was named “Victor Frankenstein”. The creature he made was probably named “Adam Frankenstein”. The surname “Frankenstein” can apply equally well to either character.
Hmmmm.
Well, anyway, that makes me think of a real guy, as far as we know (maybe two guys, though, or even three), nicknamed “Jack the Ripper” who appears in tons of things a highly fictionalized, sometimes supernatural, sometimes misunderstood, sometimes in fairly straight retellings of his crimes, and sometimes is such imaginative retellings, only the nickname is common-- and sometimes he just hovers, while the story is about someone falsely accused of his crimes.
Does that count?
This makes me want to mention The Blackadder Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge (played by Rowan Atkinson) starts out as a magnanimous , outgoing character, but is convinced by the visit of the three spirits to become a withdrawn miser.
Victor never names the creature-- the creature calls himself a “new Adam,” or “Frankenstein’s Adam,” or something, after reading a lot of books he finds outside a house. One of them is Paradise Lost.
He’s actually quite the intellectual.
I suppose a person who was likely real at one point, but who is subsequently featured fictionally in multiple fictional treatments would apply. So Jack the Ripper, sure.
This however:
Not so much…? Since I said I’m looking for reiterated characters or the fictional universes they appear in, not so much basic plot elements that are recycled with new characters.
Yes, he’s definitely ahead of a lot of other people — Jane Seymour, for one.
The Frankenstein Monster, like Tarzan, is one of literature’s great Autodidacts.
Both taught themselves how to read just rom books. Tarzan, at least, had a child’s primer to instruct him. Frankenstein had to learn from complicated Enlightenment texts. Imagine having Paradise Lost as your first grade reader.
I love dead!
Not sure if that was a typo, but how about Death? As in, the anthropomorphic personification of Death.
That always bothered me as a weak plot point of Mary Shelley’s otherwise great novel. It seemed very hard to believe that a creature could teach itself to read that way. It’s like learning to drive in a drag racer.
Sure, the ol’ Grim Reaper. Very good candidate. Around since at least the time of the Black Death, and likely before that. Has been depicted many times and in many ways, from a figure of horror and loathing to a nice, Robert Redford- lookin’ pyschopomp just helping the dead to transition over.
Here’s another – I don’t think any two versions of Phantom of the Opera are alike. Virtually every version re-imagines the thing.
1.) Gaston Leroux’s original novel
2.) The 1925 (and 1929) Universal version, which is arguably closest to the novel, but which rewrote it for the screen. The 1929 version iis different from the 1925 version
3.) For that matter, there are several alternate takes for the film. It’s like one of those Mad magazine “make it yourself” stories. There are dozens of combinations.
4.) The 1943 Universal film completely reconceived the story. Instead of a tortured misshapen psychotic, Erik is a wounded musician who has been surreptitiously been funding Christine’s voice lessons
5.) The 1962 version follows the basic idea of the 1943 version, but gives the Phantom a hunchbacked sidekick
6.) The Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical returned the story to its roots. Mostly
7.) The Robert Englund movie, made to cash in on the popularity, made it into a slasher film.
8.) The TV movie with Burt Lancaster rewrote the story again
9.) The movie of the Webber musical added scenes to give the Phantom a completely different backstory.
All of these still had some basic elements, although often in different orders-- the masked Phantom, Christin getting lessons from him, the Phantom’s own vcomposed opera, Joseph Buquet’s getting hanged, the chandelier falling , the removal of the Phantom’s mask.
And then there are the sequels and parodies – Universal’s The Climax (which had its connection to The Phantom expunged), Frederick Forsyth’s The Phantom in Manhattan, the sequel musical Love Never Dies. The Paul Williams rock-opera version Phantom of the Paradise (which copied the “musician with a disfigured face” trope from the previous two movies), and lots of others.
Everyone knows the Lloyd Webber musical, but there was an earlier (1976) British musical version with lyrics by Ken Hill, set to the music of various classical composers. It ends with the Phantom, trapped by his pursuers, stabbing himself and dying in Christine’s arms.
Maury Yeston (music and lyrics) and Athur Kopit (book) wrote a version called simply Phantom in 1991. It’s never appeared on Broadway, but has been performed regionally. This one adds the backstory that the Phantom is the secret illegitimate son of the opera’s manager, who shoots him in the end to save him from being caught by the police.
And others, like Pan (2015), Wendy (2020), and Peter Pan & Wendy (2023).
And two Broadway musicals (the Moose Charlap version and the lesser-known Leonard Bernstein version), which opened within four years of each other in the 50s.
There are four films entitled The Thief of Bagdad, starting with Douglas Fairbanks’ 1925 version. I’m not sure you can call any of them true remakes of the others. I love the original. The 1942 version is a visual extravaganza that used its Technicolor for effect, but it ain’t the same story. Don’t believe the people who tell you that it’s a remake with the roles of the thief and the suitor separated – it’s a completely different story. Both had the same art director in William Cameron Menzies, but the only part that’s really duplicated is the “stealing the eye from the idol” scene.
The 1960 Italian version starring Steve Reeves actually seems to be trying to be something of a remake, but it isn’t really. And the 1978 made-for-tv version is Arabian Nights by way of Star Wars.
So are these four versions of the same story? Aside from the title and a few tropes, they’re completely different. But they’ve certainly been re-imagined.
Speaking of Arabian Nights, consider the story of Aladdin. That’s been done to death, and each version appears to be a re-imagining,
–The Adventures of Prince Ahmed – the oldest surviving full-length animated feature. It predates Disney’s Snow White. But it’s not full animation – it uses silhouettes, pretty imprressively. The story of Aladdin takes up quite a bit of it.
– 1001 Arabian Nights – UPA animated production with Mister Magoo as Aladdin’s uncle. (Dwayne Hickman – Dobie Gillis – voices Aladdin. Kathryn Grant – Bing Crosby’s Wife, who played an Arabian Nights princess the previous year in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad plays the princess. Herschel Bernardi – Charlie the Tuna – is the genie, and Hans Conreid is the Evil Vizier. I think Disney’s Aladdin stole from this one as much as from the 1942 Thief of Bagdad.)
–Wonders of Aladdin – starring Donald O’Connor as Aladdin, although he was getting a bit long in the tooth for the role by then.
– Disney’s Aladdin
… and lots of others. None of these tells the story as it’s written in , say Burton’s translation, in which Aladdin is an unworthy wastrel son with a widowed mother, but who learns better once he gets his hands on the lamp. Disney purportedly started out that way, but decided it was better to make him a street urchin.
For that matter, the original version as we have it isn’t exactly an ancient arabian story. It was essentially made up by Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab, who related it in 1709 to translator/reteller Antoine Galland, who wrote it up and published it in 1710 into the story that Burton translated into English.
The original stoiry uses Arabian stories tropes, but it’;s been demonstrated to include autobiographical details from Diyab. And Galland worked it into the framework of a European morality tale.
It’s a good story, but it bears the same relationship to the real Arabian Nights stories that Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries do to real Chinese mysteries.