My daughter brought up Snow White & Cinderella.
I see someone else added Alice of course.
Have any of the movies made the title character Chinese, like he is in the original story?
He appears to be Chinese in The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, but it’s kind of hard to tell with the images all being silhouettes.
I doubt if Diyab or Galland really intended for Aladdin to be Chinese – the Chinese setting was simply to make it seem exotic to the supposed Arabian (and the European) audience, not as something to be taken seriously. Nothing in the rest of the story suggests that it actually takes place in China, including the names used. It seems to take place in some random Middle Eastern country.
One interesting thing about the story is that the magician who claims to be Aladdin’s uncle hails from Morocco. If Aladdin really did live in China, it meant that he traveled from Morocco across the known world to get to Aladdin and the lamp. When he threw Aladdin down iinto the Cave of Wonders, he stalked back to Morocco. Then when he learned that Aladdin had the lamp after all, he came back from Morocco. That meant that he traveled that distance three times. Ibn Battuta made a journey like that, but it took him about 15 years.
Well, yeah, but he was a magician. Who knows what ways he had of traveling long distances?
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Umm, I think the confession thread is down the hall…
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eta: I meant the “Confessions of someone who followed a band around the country instead of going to college” thread…
It’s a quote from Bride of Frankenstein and was meant to contrast the elegance of “Paradise Lost” with the deliberate crudeness of Karloff’s delivery. The point? Hell if I know!
Same with Al Bundy in Married With Children. He decided not to die since he didn’t want the people that made his life miserable to be happy.
The King Arthur universe - Arthur, Merlin, The Knights of the Table Round, Morgan la Fey, etc. - has spawned a kajillion movies and television programs. There’s been a good amount of branching off as well (e.g. Marion Zimmerman Bradley’s Mists of Avalon and it’s television adaptation).
I’m going to suggest Sun Wukong (the Monkey King). There are a metric tons of works mentioning him in various adaptations, just somewhat less common in the West. But it’s unspeakably common in the (translated) Chinese, Korean, and Japanese works I’ve read.
And it’s becoming increasingly common in media available in the West as well, including multiple more-or-less serious mini-series/TV adaptations and about 100 flavors of Dragonball of course. 
I’m trying to be more specific than the general categories of “Mythology”, such as the Greek or Chinese mythology upthread - just because I think it makes things more quantifiable.
Just as a minor nitpick — I’d quibble over Daryl Zero as being a straight riff on Sherlock Holmes. Yes, the plot loosely follows a Doyle story, and Zero plays the violin, but there’s also a lot of Nero Wolfe DNA in the narrative. Like Wolfe, Zero is an eccentric recluse who stays locked in his apartment, dispatching his assistant to do the legwork and interact with clients. For me, the enjoyment of the story is in the mashup between the two archetypes: what if Wolfe’s eccentricities and awkwardness were turned up to eleven, and then he’s forced to go out into the world and solve a mystery in person, Holmes style? (Disregarding the handful of Wolfe stories where he does, indeed, leave the apartment, and acquits himself generally well.)
I now return you to the thread in progress.
I’m thinking we cast a Tony Shalhoub type…
Sun Wukong is who I was thinking of. Who is Goku but a reimagining of the Monkey King?
Most people in this thread haven’t been mentioning video games, but Dracula and Sun Wukong are boosted by being in a lot of video games.
When I first read the legend of “Journey to the West” I was struck by a sense of deja vu. I had heard this story before. It was in an anime that was released in the US under the title Alakazam the Great in the early 1960s.
In the 80s, millions of American kids learned about the Monkey King from the TV movie Big Bird in China.
Interesting, thanks! It’s been a long time since I had seen the movie, so I was going on some pretty old memories. Also I had not yet read any Nero Wolfe when I saw the movie, though I’ve read some Wolfe since.
I’m not sure. Holmes has a huge head start of course, but Trek and Wars rose to prominence in the same era that fanfic exploded in quantity. Volume might well be enough to offset longevity.
One fictional “universe” that has been reimagined widely is our mythical Western. The deadly gunslinger, the heroic sheriff, the brassy tavern girl, the shy schoolmarm, the noble (or cruel) Native American, bank robbers, train robbers, stagecoach robbers vs. the invincible “shotgun” rider, etc. All of these characters and the adjectives have been jumbled and rearranged endlessly.
This covers a lot of them with a slight twist (probably NSFW):
And then, the angel died…
Romeo and Juliet, especially if you count the similar works that preceded Shakespeare by decades or centuries.