At the end of Watchmen, when Dr, Manhattan says he thinks he’ll create some life?
This is where Smurfs come from.
Maybe Blue Man Group, too.
And when he was in a grumpy mood, he created the Blue Meanies.
And Nightcrawler, and Mystique, and those Avatar natives?
Arthur Dent was literally spelling out that, given how “42” is the answer to life and the universe, and everything, the question is What Do You Get If You Multiply Six By Nine In A Restaurant, only he ran out of Scrabble tiles partway through.
Still, pairing that question with that answer (a) implies Bistromathics, and (b) is exactly the sort of thing that could occur to a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth.
All of the humanoid animals in the “BoJack Horseman” universe are descended from regular animals. Some sort of evolutionary event (Nuclear Holocaust? Alien Invasion? Cosmic Rays? I have no idea.) occurred in the past, allowing all species to interbreed and eventually spreading human characteristics to all animals.
My evidence for this theory? Horseshoes.
BoJack has horseshoe art on his bedroom wall. Diane and Princess Carolyn both use a horseshoe icon to identify his calls on their phones. The show’s logo even has a horseshoe in place of the letter C.
But BoJack - along with every other horse ever shown on the series - has human hands and feet. There is no need for horseshoes to exist at all in this world… Except perhaps as a reminder of a distant past.
Innnnnnnnnnnteresting.
In one of the later books Adams pretty much states that the question and the answer couldn’t exsist in the same universe without destroying the universe so the 6x9 thing was a false clue (or joke).
For all Scifi shows that involve exploring space – All the Star Treks, Doctor Who, The Orville, etc. – alien worlds are not Earth-sized planets. They are actually city blocks with a population of a few hundred at most.
- All the aliens have the same fashion sense, culture, language, and religion. They wear uniforms for clothing. They all wear the same kind of jewelry on the same body locations.
- The protagonists usually only deal with one government system that rules the entire planet. There might be one or two other governments, a rival tribe, or a secessionist movement, but seldom anything more than that.
- Any sort of cultural icon is referred to as being from the planet, not from a country on that planet. Ex: Vulcan Neck Pinch, Tholian Punctuality, Klingon Gagh…
- The aliens have a particular quirk or eccentricity that’s common to all of them.
Another show/movie that I think actually takes place in a tabletop role-playing game universe:
Disney’s animated series, TaleSpin, takes place in the universe of the After the Bomb RPG.
After the Bomb was originally a supplement for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, so by the transitive property, TaleSpin is the future of the TMNT universe.
Well, if you’ve done six impossible things this morning — not merely impossible, but clearly insane — then why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
That said: the line from Prak is that, in such a case, the Question and Answer would cancel each other out, taking the Universe with them and replacing it with something else; and it’s possible that this has already happened.
And the line from Slartibartfast is that, on a waiter’s check pad, reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that anything is possible within certain parameters.
And the idea was so stark and crazy that phrases like “Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks” had to be invented, and monks started singing chants to the effect that the Universe was a figment of its own imagination; and Arthur, upon crossing vast interstellar distances via Bistromathic Drive — which made the Heart of Gold seem like an electric pram, accomplishing more impressive effects without all that dangerous mucking about with Infinite Improbability Factors — found it seemed that he was one of the thoughts of the Universe and the Universe was a thought of his.
And the Bistromathic Drive revealed to him that mind and Universe were one, and that perception and reality were one; same chapter where Prak says his line, as it happens.
Otherwise known as a Planet of Hats.
It makes more sense for the James Bond films DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER to take place right after YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE and then ON HER MAJESTIES SECRET SERVICE takes place after. It doesn’t make sense for Blofeld to try to cause a nuclear war, then have some half-brained plot to brainwash super models to distribute anthrax against the world’s food supply, then go back to a death laser in space. I feel OHMSS Blofeld is much more desperate which is why he’s trying to both inherit a Nobility title and get a pardon for his past crimes using his anthrax scheme, since at this point he’s lost most of his resources building super weapons. Plus OHMSS ends with Blofeld in a neck brace, and the last time you see Blofeld in the original continuity is in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY and he has a neck brace. Also doesn’t hurt that Connery Bond in DAF doesn’t really seem to care about Tracey Bonds death, while once Moore takes over most of his films have one scene where Moore Bond acts distraught over memories of Tracey.
Plus, DAF opens in with Bond still in Japan.
The Babylon 5 prequel movie In The Beginning has the main characters for the show deeply involved in pre-show events. Yet in the main series they don’t seem to know about a lot of what happened and most of them don’t know each other, in spite of having been in life-or-death situations together before, and none of them ever comment on the weird coincidence that they all happened to be involved in a series of unrelated events together. However, the framing device for the movie is that Londo is telling what happened as a story to a kid. My ‘fan theory’ (or maybe just ‘obvious interpretation’) of that is that Londo is telling the story of the major events completely accurately, but is inserting people who he knows and interacted with instead of historical figures he knows nothing about to make the story more interesting for the child.
Yeah, I don’t think this is a wild reading of the show - the main cast aren’t exactly wearing white, and the fact that they never say what is actually bad about the Alliance is kind of worrying. Also browncoats-brownshirts (which you even mixed up!) seems a little too on-the-nose to be a coincidence. I hadn’t noticed the lack of Chinese people in spite of frequent Chinese language, but that is another interesting piece of the world.
In Futurama, Zapp Brannigan was once a highly competent officer, courageous and dedicated. He rose to the top of the service through many acts of heroism and brilliant tactics. But then the killbots attacked the Octillion system. In order to save the system he had to sacrifice the lives of thousands of his own troops. It was literally the only way to save millions of lives. He did what needed to be done, and it worked. But the horror of it broke his mind, and turned him into the dangerous idiot we know.
See Planet of Hats: Planet of Hats - TV Tropes
Or Post #90…
Good work. Now tie him in as Captain/Admiral Mike Slattery on The Last Ship and you’ll have a trifecta!
In the MCU, the super-soldier serum that made Steve Rogers into Captain America left Johann Schmidt’s head looking like a weird red skull; and Bruce Banner, despite having more than half-a-dozen doctorates, (a) thought he’d managed to duplicate Erskine’s success but (b) only wound up turning himself into a monstrous green hulk, sure as Emil Blonsky wound up becoming some kind of abomination.
Well, maybe the prototype used on Schmidt just needed a little more work, and maybe Erskine eventually got it right but Banner got it wrong. But we also get a more poetic explanation. “The serum amplifies everything that is inside, so good becomes great; bad becomes worse. This is why you were chosen.”
So it could be that the serum was pretty much the same every time; it’s just that a compassionate boy scout gets to look like a handsome Olympian, and folks with psychological problems come out looking kind of messed up.
But there’s also another other option. The night before Skinny Steve is going to get the serum, Erskine pours him a drink and prepares to toast their bold undertaking and, at the last moment, goes wide-eyed and snatches the drink back, saying, wait, you can’t have any fluids the night before the procedure.
And, well, maybe that’s all it ever was: maybe Schmidt knocked back some wine the night before, and maybe Banner was more of a schnapps guy, and maybe Blonsky goes in for whiskey drinks, and — uh, no; there’s nothing else to it.
This actually was an in-canon explanation for the variation in effects of gamma exposure in the comics (it may have been retconned by now).
Repressed Bruce Banner with all sorts of unresolved childhood trauma transforms into a rage monster; psychotic Emil Blonsky who just wants to beat the Hulk turns into an even more monstrous rage monster; mousy wallflower Jennifer Walters transforms into a bombastic athletic bombshell; nerdy wimp Leonard Sampson turns into a he-man. (I think in-canon it’s also been suggested that those last two started off fairly well-adjusted, so they got fairly normal enhanced forms).