Lots of works are based on earlier works.
Sometimes a story is not only based on it, but really requires you to know the earlier story to fully appreciate it, or even appreciate it at all. A Sleeping Beauty story where the princess turns out to be a vampire, for instance, is missing something if you don't realize that it's "Sleeping Beauty".
That is a Twice-Told Tale.
When the recognition of the original story is crucial, writers can work with only the most iconic stories for this. Usually public domain works for obvious reasons.
The Perspective Flip and External Retcon are subtropes. Fractured Fairy Tale may be, if it is fracturing a specific Fairy Tale rather than combining many fairy tales' characters, plots, and tropes. Many are parodies or satires, but it is not required. A twice told tale may or may not involve Grimmification, but rarely Disneyfication, since it requires knowledge of the original tale. Demythification may involve a twice-told tale if a mostly historical account is revealed to be the source of the legend. Related to Adaptational Protagonist.
This generally includes Fanfics. Fanfic writers like to say that those other works on the example are critically acclaimed fanfics, too. Some fanfic authors recommend trying to avert this, actually, and make the story as clear as possible to the uninitiated.
Fusion Fic is a type of fanfic that Twice-Told Tale is a critical element of, since recreating an existing story with the characters of another story is intrinsic to the concept.
The trope's name comes from William Shakespeare's King John:
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
Compare and contrast Whole-Plot Reference. Compare Historical Fiction which might expect knowledge about real events going into it.
Examples
- Princess Tutu requires familiarity with dozens of fairy tales (and some classical music knowledge doesn't hurt, either).
- Monster is, among other things, a very elaborate retelling of Revelation 13.
- Shin Shirayuki Densetsu Prétear is Snow White as a Magical Girl Warrior.
- No prizes for guessing which fairy tale is the basis for Thumbelina: A Magical Story. It's about a bratty girl named Maya who gets trapped within her mother's dream after reading the "Thumbelina" storybook the friendly neighborhood witch had loaned her as part of a gambit to get Maya to become a better person. The friendly swallow and the frogs who try to force her to marry their son are familiar enough. The nightmare-controlling evil sorceress who wants to keep Maya trapped inside the dream world forever and who turns out to be helping give Maya her Secret Test of Character though, not so much.
- The movie Jack and the Beanstalk (1974) ("Jack and the Beanstalk") does have the basic plot of the original...and it also throws in Jack's dog as a faithful sidekick, a bunch of mice which happen to be transformed royalty, a hypnotized princess, a cloud kingdom at the top of the beanstalk, and the giant's mother is an evil witch who plans to marry her giant-son to the hypnotized princess, turn them into mice, and rule the cloud kingdom herself.
- Samurai 7 is a retelling of Seven Samurai (made with permission of the Akira Kurosawa estate) with mecha.
- PandoraHearts makes a LOT more sense when the reader has a pretty good knowledge of Alice in Wonderland.
- Just about all Ludwig Revolution stories are Bloodier and Gorier, Darker and Edgier and much funnier versions of popular fairytales given a twist ending.
- Dragon Ball is based loosely off Journey to the West. The similarities are lost throughout Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, and Dragon Ball Super, however.
- Ulysses 31 is a retelling of The Odyssey in space.
- The graphic novel BB Wolf and the Three LPs tells a perspective-flipped version of "The Three Little Pigs" set in a talking-animal version of The Roaring '20s where pigs are the privileged race making a fat living while wolves are downtrodden victims of racism. BB Wolf is a farmer and blues musician who goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against three pig brothers responsible for the loss of his farm and the deaths of his family.
- Fables for many famous fairy tales, folk tales, and myths.
- Gargoyles: Clan Building: The first two issues are a retelling of "The Journey", the only episode of the show's third season, The Goliath Chronicles, that Greg Weisman wrote.
- Star Wars: Tag & Bink: The titular duo are basically the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Star Wars, bumbling their way from Jedi Academy to the Death Star to the Death Star again as they accidentally cause some of the most significant moments in the series. Sadly, it's not canonical.
- Mutts: One strip features Earl and Mooch together in the title role of "Goldilocks"'s main character.
- A Bright Flash's big twist is that it is a retelling of Godzilla (1954) from the titular monster's POV.
- Farce of the Three Kingdoms is a retelling of Romance of the Three Kingdoms that doesn't change a single concrete event in the book, only the interpretation and the characters' motivations. Liu Bei is a cowardly, incompetent, emotionally unstable con man, and Cao Cao is the Designated Villain, but he's actually a Well-Intentioned Extremist in whose hands the country is (usually) far better off. It's all Played for Laughs.
- Many of the details in My Perfect World, Shattered will not make sense unless you've played Sonic the Hedgehog, for which it serves as a Perspective Flip of.
- The Wind Done Gone: The book portrays Scarlett as a spoiled, self-centered brat by retelling her story through the eyes of a newly invented character: a slave who is her illegitimate half-sister. Though it should be noted that the original book also went to lengths to portray Scarlett as a spoiled, self-centered brat, and part of the point of her character arc is by the time she shapes up no one is willing to listen.
- Gnomeo & Juliet is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet.
- Hoodwinked! offers a "Rashomon"-Style reinterpretation of the Little Red Riding Hood story, where a number of the jokes would rather bypass anyone who didn't know the original.
- Rolf Kauka's Once Upon a Time is a retelling of "Mother Holle".
- Ever After is a retelling of "Cinderella" minus the magic in Renaissance France.
- Ella Cinders is a looser retelling of "Cinderella" set in the modern day, with Ella and her wicked stepmother and mean stepsisters—but Prince Charming is the local ice man, and the fancy ball is in fact a beauty contest to win a Hollywood movie contract.
- Troy is a secular version of The Iliad.
- The 13th Warrior, like the novel it is based upon, combines Ahmad ibn Fadlan's travelogue amongst the Vikings with a reworking of Beowulf in which all the monsters are replaced by a tribe of Neanderthals.
- Strange Brew is a retelling of Hamlet.
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? on Ulysses/The Odyssey. Very loosely and, when it was first written, apparently unintentionally.
- The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) comes across as a retelling of Albert Camus' L'Étranger.
- The Big Gay Musical offers a complete reinterpretation of The Bible, in which it was written by Eve out of spite because God replaced her and Adam in Eden with two gay men.
- A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is a futuristic version of Pinocchio, complete with Blue Fairy.
- Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010) is much less coherent if you don't have a passing familiarity with the books.
- Magical Legend of the Leprechauns is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet.
- Blue Jasmine is inspired by A Streetcar Named Desire, with Jasmine standing in for Blanche, Ginger for Stella, Chili for Stanley, and Dwight for Mitch. While not exact enough to be a direct setting update, the general course of the plot and themes match.
- Maleficent is a version of Sleeping Beauty seen through the eyes of the evil fairy, and purports to be a Perspective Flip of the Disney animated movie, but there are enough differences to declare it an outright Alternate Continuity.
- Ophelia is a retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia's perspective, although it also makes a number of changes to the plot and it generally makes more sense if the viewer is already familiar with the play's story; the opening scene actually features Ophelia's infamous drowning while she narrates that this story has been told many times and she wants to tell it from her own viewpoint.
- Warm Bodies is a loose retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with half of the characters replaced by zombies and a considerably lower deathcount.
- Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone episode "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?," John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), and Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight all feature a small group of people Snowed-In at a single location dealing with the fact that someone is not what they appear. Almost everyone dies in all three stories, and the first two both feature aliens as the infiltrators.
- Little Otik is an adaptation of "the eponymous fairy tale".
- Robin McKinley has written several retellings of classic fairytales — most notably two different versions of "Beauty and the Beast", Beauty and Rose Daughter. Her retellings also include Deerskin (a version of "Donkeyskin"), The Outlaws of Sherwood, Spindle's End, and The Door in the Hedge, a collection of short stories including "The Golden Hind", "The Frog Prince", and "The Twelve Dancing Princesses".
- Ulysses on the The Odyssey
- Tanith Lee's "Red As Blood" on "Snow White".
- And every other chapter as well, on a different story, to include Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. (The book is subtitled "Tales from the Sisters Grimmer.")
- Gregory Maguire loves this trope:
- Wicked and the rest of The Wicked Years, on Land of Oz.
- Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister retells "Cinderella", shifting the focus to one of the stepsisters.
- Mirror, Mirror (2003) recasts "Snow White" in the Renaissance, with Lucrecia Borgia as the Wicked Queen.
- Lavinia on The Aeneid.
- A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth Bunce, based off "Rumpelstiltskin".
- Ophelia by Lisa Klein, based on Hamlet.
- Anne Rice wrote a bondage-themed version of "Sleeping Beauty".
- The Twist Ending of Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" can be difficult to decipher if you're not rather familiar with the Sherlock Holmes canon.
- Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" is a retelling of "Snow White" from the perspective of the queen; Snow-White herself is some kind of vampiric monstrosity, and the queen is a benevolent ruler who's only doing what's best for the kingdom. It would be an effective horror story without the original, but would still most likely lose a lot of its punch, due to the way it sets up the original story as a piece of propaganda invented by evil usurpers.
- Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series challenged modern authors to re-write fairy tales from a new perspective. Jane Yolen's Briar Rose entwines the Sleeping Beauty story with the Holocaust. Windling's also edited, often with Ellen Datlow, several short story collections of fairy tale rewrites.
- Fantastic Alice is a collection of short stories based on Alice in Wonderland, most of which would be pointless if you don't know the references.
- Wide Sargasso Sea, on Jane Eyre.
- Andrzej Sapkowski, a Polish fantasy writer, wrote a short story about Alice in Wonderland, but from the perspective of... the Cheshire Cat. And Lewis Carroll. The story was called "Golden Afternoon".
- Frank Beddor's The Looking-Glass Wars series is another one based on Alice in Wonderland, which not only draws a lot from the books themselves, but also from the real people behind them (Alice Liddell is "revealed" to have actually been Princess Alyss of Wonderland, exiled to the real world after her aunt Redd staged a coup and slaughtered her family.)
- Several works written by Gail Carson Levine, such as Ella Enchanted for "Cinderella" and Fairest for "Snow White".
- Orson Scott Card did this to himself. His book Ender's Shadow followed a rather tertiary character in Ender's Game, as he accidentally becomes just as important as Ender all while keeping it hidden from aforementioned protagonist. Also a bit of a Poorly Disguised Pilot, since it spawned an entire secondary series detailing the geo-political events on Earth while Ender was in FTL transit beginning his exile.
- Nicholas Meyer's The Canary Trainer on The Phantom of the Opera.
- Nicholas Meyer also wrote The Seven Per Cent Solution, a retelling of The Final Problem, Arthur Conan Doyle's first attempt at a last Sherlock Holmes story. In Meyer's novel, Moriarty was only a criminal mastermind in Holmes' drugged imaginings. Watson conned Holmes into following Moriarty to Vienna, where he met Sigmund Freud, who helped cure him of his cocaine addiction. Instead of dying at Reichenbach Falls, Holmes chose to take a leave of absence, leaving Watson to write out whatever ending he wanted and have it published in the Strand.
- The Witchs Boy by Michael Gruber plays off many, many, many fairy tales, some of which are less known and thus make the book slightly confusing.
- Many Discworld novels. The Lancre Witches books are mostly examples of this story type: Wyrd Sisters riffs on Macbeth, except that the witches are the Macbeth Captain Ersatz's enemies; Witches Abroad is about the witches' quest to stop "Ember" Ella from marrying the prince; and Maskerade follows Andrew Lloyd Weber's The Phantom of the Opera with some added twists and metacommentary on opera. Lords and Ladies takes a much looser approach to A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Carpe Jugulum draws on Hammer Horror movies and vampire literature in general. Outside of the Witches, Night Watch mirrors Les Misérables, notably switching the evil/good dynamic of the book, and Eric plays with the tale of Faust.
- Paradise Lost is the fall of mankind told as a classical epic.
- Seven Ancient Wonders and its sequels by Matthew Reilly require the exact same suspension of disbelief as Indiana Jones, being realistic action adventure for most of the story until the supernatural comes in at the end. In addition, most if not all characters and locations can be matched to those in The Lord of the Rings, including the Great Pyramid standing in for Mount Doom.
- John Gardner's novel Grendel is a deconstruction of Beowulf told from the monster's point of view. In this version, Grendel is a sympathetic antihero who explores a number of philosophical topics through his battle against the Danes.
- Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead is a twofer Twice Told Tale, combining Ahmad ibn Fadlan's travelogue amongst the Vikings with a reworking of Beowulf, replacing all the monsters with a tribe of Neanderthals.
- You can quite easily read Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms books without knowing a thing about, respectively, English folklore, the standard Grimm/Anderson fairy tales, and a touch of Russian folklore; Greek and English mythology; Russian folklore and the Arabian Nights; and Russian folklore and those Grimm/Anderson fairy tales. It does, however make a lot more sense if you have that background information, especially when it comes to one-off background mentions of "Stuff the Tradition likes to make happen".
- The Black Swan is more interesting if you know the plot of Swan Lake (and since Swan Lake has no fixed ending, you don't know how this adaptation is going to end).
- Her Elemental Masters novels are loosely based on the plots of known fairy tales, but usually with a twist that distinguishes them from the source material.
- The Known Space story Juggler of Worlds loses a lot unless you've read a lot of older Known Space short stories, particularly "The Soft Weapon" and the Beowulf Shaeffer stories. Much of the book is retelling parts of those stories from the perspective of Sigmund Ausfaller or Nessus the Puppeteer, and trying to read it without knowing those stories is rather hard. On the other hand, Destroyer of Worlds does a pretty good job of introducing the Pak to anyone that didn't read Protector or the later Ringworld books, making it a lot smoother to read.
- There is a German children's book which reverses the Grimm folktale "The Frog King" (a.k.a. "The Frog Prince" in English). Instead of a princess losing a ball in the well, the handsome and green king of frogs loses his ball on dry land, and a very ugly human girl retrieves it in exchange for a marriage promise. He immediately swims away as soon as she gives the ball back, but the girl follows him into his underwater kingdom, and the king's father demands that he honour his promise. He pretends to be leading her to his quarters and drowns her, at which point she transforms into a beautiful frog princess, and explains that she was kidnapped as a tadpole and transformed into a human (but such an ugly one that no human man would marry her). The frog king marries her and they live happily. (There seems to be no frog analogue to True Heinrich, though.)
- Poul Anderson's Goat Song retells the tale of Orpheus as science fiction. Indeed, the narrator, hunting through ancient myths, finds his own story — and we aren't told what it is, because it's obvious.
- The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is a perspective flip and deconstruction of The Odyssey. It's told from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus's wife, and the twelve maids who were hanged at the end of the poem.
- Josepha Sherman's The Shining Falcon retells "The Feather of Finist the Falcon".
- Adele Geras's novels Troy (it has nothing to do with the movie) and Ithaka are a subversion in that she retells The Iliad and The Odyssey through the eyes of servants, so they have a more domestic feel, but still cover the major events of both stories. Characters still believe in the gods, who still play a role, but no one except for the readers remembers meeting them after they have an encounter with one of them, except for one servant girl in the first novel.
- Helen Fielding's seminal chick-lit novel Bridget Jones' Diary has shades of this, as the backstory of the title character's two suitors recreates the feud between Darcy and Wickham from Pride and Prejudice. Also applies to The Film of the Book.
- Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas, a novel in which fanatical Alexandre Dumas enthusiasts play an important part, intertwines elements of numerous Dumas novels, making its intended audience the kind of Dumas geek that is depicted in the book.
- The Once Upon A Time series is set up for this, having various retellings of fairytales.
- In The Quest For Saint Aquin, the priest is beaten and left for dead. A couple of characters see him and pass by despite the obvious clues that they are Catholic. A Jew helps him, causing the priest to comment on the parable of the Good Samaritan. (The Jew calmly assures him that he is not a Samaritan.)
- Dexter Palmer's Steampunk novel The Dream of Perpetual Motion. Luckily, familiarity with The Tempest isn't really necessary to enjoy it.
- The Mists of Avalon are a retelling of Autherian legend from the point of view of the women, including those are generally portrayed as the villains such as Morgain and Nimue.
- David Foster Wallace's Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko is a re-telling of the myth of Narcissus. And in-universe, Another Pioneer.
- The Red Tent by Anita Diamant is a retelling and continuation of the story of Dinah in The Old Testament. While it is possible to enjoy the story without knowing the Biblical version, it makes more sense if you do.
- The works of Alex Flynn - Beastly, A Kiss in Time, and Cloaked - are respectively retellings of "Beauty and the Beast", "Sleeping Beauty", and a variety of fairytales including "The Frog Prince", "The Valiant Little Tailor", and "The Cobbler And The Elves". Some characters in the stories are more Genre Savvy about this than others.
- Bewitching, told from the point of view of Beastly's witch, covers "Hansel and Gretel", "The Princess and the Pea", "The Little Mermaid", and "Cinderella".
- The True Story of The Three Little Pigs. The wolf tells us what really happened.
- Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin is a retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the point of view of one of Jekyll's servants.
- In Patricia A. McKillip's "Out of the Woods", the heroine plays a minor role in Sleeping Beauty and spots both Merlin and Nimue, and the Lady of Shalott, from Arthurian Legend.
- John Moore's The Unhandsome Prince, in addition to being very loosely based on The Frog Prince, includes encounters with a hair-obsessed woman living in a tower, named Rapunzel, and a dwarf with a magic spinning spell named Rumpelstiltskin.
- John Steinbeck's East of Eden retells Cain and Abel — several times.
- In Patricia C. Wrede's "Cruel Sisters", the middle sister recounts the true story of the "Twa Sisters" Child Ballad; aware of the ballad, she opens it with discussing how often it says there were only two sisters, and then goes on to recount the other distortions. Starting with the observation that the younger one would spitefully lie to get the older one in trouble.
- Patricia C. Wrede's "Stronger Than Time" recounts a Sleeping Beauty where the spell had gone wrong, and the prince supposed to rescue her had died.
- Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child retells the fairy tale of the same name. It includes excerpts at the beginning of chapters, owing to its obscurity.
- C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces retells the myth of Cupid And Psyche from the viewpoint of Psyche's jealous older sister.
- Two Roald Dahl poetry collections, Revolting Rhymes and Rhyme Stew, feature many twice-told versions of fairy tales that steer the stories in naughtier directions. The former has a pistol-packing Little Red Riding Hood and a telling of "Snow White" in which the magic mirror helps Snow and the dwarfs win at the racetrack, and the latter has Ali Baba using the phrase "Open Sesame!" to peep in on what the rich and powerful do behind closed hotel doors.
- A Tale of... retold the Disney Princess films, giving the stories Perspective Flips to villainous/antagonistic characters and positing they take place in a shared universe.
- Warm Bodies is a loose retelling of Romeo and Juliet, taking place after a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Honor Harrington was, for much of the early series, the French Revolutionary Wars in space, with the stand-in for Lord Nelson being a young woman. Around eight or nine books in, the Napoleon analogue is abruptly killed, and things spin off from there.
- Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
- Time Lord Fairy Tales consists mostly of specific European fairy and folktales rejiggered to take place in the Whoniverse: "Cinderella and the Magic Box" has the Eleventh Doctor in the fairy godmother role and the heroine going to the ball is part of his plan to defeat an evil vampire court, while the Green Knight faced by Sir Gawain is an Ice Warrior. Several stories double down on this trope by turning out to be retelling both a fairy tale and a televised Doctor Who story — "The Gingerbread Trap" is a combination of "Hansel and Gretel" and "School Reunion", and "Jack and the Wormhole" combines "Jack and the Beanstalk" with "The Horns of Nimon".
- The Third Doctor story in the Twelve Doctors of Christmas anthology, "The Christmas Inversion", is an alternate perspective on the television episode "The Christmas Invasion", and thus makes much more sense if the reader has already seen it.
- The Hagenheim series by Melanie Dickerson is a retelling of fairy tales in a medieval setting without any magic.
- Ursula Vernon:
- "Bluebeard's Wife" is a Bluebeard retelling in which the familiar story goes off the rails after Bluebeard marries a young woman who grew up in a large and inquisitive family and understands the value of private space, so when her husband tells her there's one room in the house she must never enter, she never does.
- Boar And Apples is a Snow White retelling with a family of talking boars instead of dwarfs, and also things don't go the usual way regarding the prince at the end.
- Bryony and Roses is a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" where the Beauty-equivalent is a keen gardener, the evil-fairy-equivalent is a rose dryad who's just as trapped by the curse as the Beast is, and the Beast chooses not to become human again at the end.
- "The Dryad's Shoes" is a retelling of Cinderella in which the Cinderella-equivalent is quite happy in her garden and not at all interested in marrying the prince, but is unable to persuade the fairy-godmother-equivalent of this. She ends up trading the dryad's gifts to a servant at the palace in exchange for a chance to learn about the palace gardens, and the servant girl marries the prince and lives happily ever after.
- The Hamster Princess series begins with a version of Sleeping Beauty where the princess's parents keep their daughter and tell her about the curse when she's old enough to understand — and she decides that, if she's cursed to suffer a terrible fate at the age of twelve, that means nothing will happen to her before then, and goes off adventuring. Along the way she encounters versions of other familiar fairy tales.
- "Let Pass the Horses Black" is a Tam Lin retelling in which Janet is a domestic abuse survivor, which means she has experience taking pain unflinchingly that stands her in good stead in the Elf Queen's trials. Specifically, she suffered abuse at the hands of the Tam Lin character—it turns out at the end that she's only rescuing him as a necessary step toward achieving her real desire.
- The Raven And The Reindeer is a retelling of The Snow Queen where, among other changes, Gerda ends up falling in love with the bandit girl who helps her along the way and realizing that Kay was a bit of a self-centered jerk even before the Snow Queen got to him. (She rescues him anyway, but more to save his parents worrying than anything else.)
- The Seventh Bride is a Bluebeard retelling where each of Bluebeard's wives is given a different test and instead of just killing them when they fail, they forfeit something: one her life, but one her eyesight, another her youth, and so on. Which means that when the seventh bride arrives in the house of her new husband, his former wives are all still around — although some are more helpful than others...
- Sapphos Leap is a riff on The Odyssey, told from a Gender Flip perspective.
- Mermaid (2011) for "The Little Mermaid."
- The Mermaid's Daughter is about a descendant of the Little Mermaid.
- * Just Ella follows "Cinderella" after her engagement to the prince, with things not as charming as thought to be.
- Patrick Ness' novel And The Ocean Was Our Sky retells Moby-Dick from the whale's perspective.
- Piers Anthony's novel Hasan is a, well, novel-length rewriting of the tale Hassan of Basra, from The 1,001 Nights.
- Tin Man, of the Oz series. Most everyone in America knows about the first book, but the miniseries makes a lot more sense if you've read other entries of the Famous Forty and supplemented with Wicked.
- Alice (2009), of Alice in Wonderland.
- Geppetto was a Made-for-TV Movie retelling of Disney's Pinocchio, told from the point of view of the toymaker who became the "father" of the living puppet. It features songs from the animated film and new Stephen Schwartz-penned numbers, and was adapted for the stage as My Son Pinocchio.
- Once Upon a Time posits that every fairy tale in history was inspired by real events taking place in a parallel universe, sometimes with rather significant differences.
- The OA strongly resembles Han's Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid", which turns out to be justified in the saddest way.
- Jim Henson's The Storyteller was a show where the eponymous storyteller told more obscure -and darker- European fairy tales. Russian folktale "The Soldier And Death" was adapted in the fifth episode, changing some details and expanding some scenes like the card game with the demons.
- Black Sails is a prequel to Treasure Island. It follows Captain Flint of the Walrus, who is a posthumous character in the book, and also features John Silver and Billy Bones as young men. The plot of the show concerns how Flint acquired the treasure trove of Spanish gold that eventually got hidden on the eponymous island.
- The whole concept of the answer song revolves around this. One example is Charlie Ryan's "Hot Rod Lincoln", which details the road race from Arkie Shibley's "Hot Rod Race" from the perspective of the unlikely victor.
- The Odyssey homage: "Home at Last" by Steely Dan.
- The Mechanisms' songs are almost all based on stories from legend or mythology, and occasionally history or classic literature. In addition to a multitude of individual songs and short tales, they have three albums that each tell a different story:
- Once Upon a Time (In Space) is a space opera with fairytale (and nursery rhyme) characters that draws a lot of plot elements from Star Wars.
- Ulysses Dies at Dawn is a cyberpunk noir story that draws its characters from Greek mythology.
- High Noon Over Camelot is a Space Western retelling of the King Arthur legends set on a space station.
- The Bifrost Incident is a Space Opera and Cosmic Horror retelling of Ragnarok, set on a Cool Train.
- The music video of Prayer by Disturbed is based on the Book of Job.
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on Hamlet
- Again, Wicked on The Wizard of Oz.
- And really, Wicked the musical on Wicked the novel.
- Honk! on The Ugly Duckling.
- Into the Woods relies on the fact that the audience knows the fairy tales that compose it: Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood. For anyone who doesn't know these, the show will be massively confusing.
- Jasper in Deadland requires the audience be familiar with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice along with The Divine Comedy, as characters from both have vital roles in the story and are treated as if they need little introduction.
- Lin-Manuel Miranda has stated that John Adam's absence from Hamilton is due to the fact that he assumed everyone would compare him to his portrayal in 1776, and so he says to imagine the Adams of that show whenever the president is mentioned. Given that Hamilton is orders of magnitude more popular than 1776 ever was, especially among non-theatre fans, it's unlikely that this was effective.
- Mischief Theatre makes comedic fictional plays that always go horribly wrong. Most of their productions use original stories, but Peter Pan Goes Wrong, A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, and The Nativity Goes Wrong adapt existing stories. These adaptations are rather light on detail, as much of the runtime is taken up by the comedic mishaps, which is the main focus, and these stories are well known enough that most viewers can just fill in the gaps. There are also some jokes that expect you to know how things are supposed to happen, like Dennis (as the innkeeper) initially telling Mary and Joseph they can stay at his inn.
- Westeros: An American Musical: The play is its own blend of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones elements, but also clearly expects the audience to be familiar with at least one of the official versions of the story it's telling. Plot elements can get anything from proper exposition to Adaptation Explanation Extrication, depending on the whims of the narrator and characters. The fact that the plot is being retold with parodies of Hamilton songs is also best appreciated if the originals were listened to beforehand.
- American McGee's Alice.
- Emily Short's Interactive Fiction games Bronze (for "Beauty and the Beast"), Glass (for "Cinderella"), Alabaster (for "Snow White"), and Indigo (for Rapunzel). The first two games have elements of Grimmification; the third one goes all-out on it.
- In order to get the Pegasus Boots in The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Link must interact with a Sleepyhead shoemaker who gets covert help from several Minish who help him finish his shoes. It's basically a retelling of The Elves and the Cobbler.
- Portal 2 is essentially a very creative retelling of the myth of Prometheus. You can read an in-depth explanation of this here, but it contains spoilers, so beware.
- Cinders is, surprise, surprise, a retelling of "Cinderella". It makes a point of having an active, strong-willed female protagonist instead of a passive one and presents a more cynical world than the original story. Just how Grimmified the story becomes, though, is up to you.
- Most of Squeaker's parables in Fleuret Blanc are retellings of classic fairy tales, reframed around a Central Theme of materialism. Perspective Flips are sometimes involved.
- Minotaur Hotel: This is a Visual Novel about the Minotaur from myth, but instead of a monster to be feared, he is a Gentle Giant looking for the betterment of humanity. Although the game does its best to explain the necessary mythology to make sense of the story, the game is best told with some prior knowledge of various mythologies, as it's that knowledge of the various myths that give the extra context to the story.
- HIKEBACK: is a retelling-slash-Deconstruction of the Aesop 'The Scorpion and The Frog'.
- A Study in Steampunk is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in a Gaslamp Fantasy universe (it does have Humongous Mecha and steam power, but actual magic is a large plot point), with a Watson expy as the player character.
- "The Cat on the Dovrefjell" retells Norwegian tale "The Cat on the Dovrefell", changing some details such like the traveller's sex and relation to Halvor.
- Concerned on Half-Life 2: Loveable Butt-Monkey Gordon Frohman bumbles through City 17, inadvertently setting up many of the game's events and setpieces before and after Dr. Freeman's arrival.
- In fact, a lot of video game based webcomics turn out like this, such as Bob and George. In addition to the actual retellings of the games, there's offhand mentions of, for example, "That time Bass ransacked the lab" (Mega Man 7).
- Erstwhile retells many lesser-known fairy tales written by The Brothers Grimm like "All-Kinds-OF-Fur", "Brother and Sister", "King Thrushbeard", "Maid Maleen", "Mother Holle", "Snow-White and Rose-Red", "The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes", "The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids" and "Iron Hans".
- Marya Morevna is an adaptation of Russian tale "The Death of Koschei the Deathless", delving more deeply into Queen Marya's character, background and motivations.
- Namesake is a good deal clearer with knowledge of some of the stories it deals with, including the Oz books, Alice in Wonderland, and others.
- The whole Campaign Comic genre relies on this.
- The Order of the Stick compilation book Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tails introduced "StickTales", a segment retelling a few classic stories recast with the OOTS characters. Those were "Elan and the Beanstalk", "Little Red Riding Hoodlum", "Goldenleaf", and "Greenhilt: Prince of Denmark". This continued later with the standalone Kickstarter story "Haleo & Julelan". The in-universe Framing Device for these is that members of the Order of the Stick tell each other stories starring fictional versions of themselves. And then criticize each other's stories, like complaining that Denmark, England and France are unrealistic country names.
- Dracula Quer Um Namorado: A Rom Com retelling of Bram Stroker's Dracula. After having a prophetic dream of himself living an idyllic life with a man in the countryside, Dracula decides to seek a boyfriend to add to his wives, finding Jonathan Harker in the process.
- One blog author adds the tag "Twice Told Tale" whenever one of her posts contains one of these. Currently we have one on Achilles' choice of going off to battle and dying or of being forgotten, and one incomplete on "Snow White" from the mirror's perspective.
- Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] Abridged: As the name suggests, it's an Abridged Series based on Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works]. The series is riddled with in-jokes and references to all three routes of Fate/stay night, it's direct prequel Fate/Zero, and the Fate Series as a whole, and is clearly written under the assumption that the viewer is already familiar with all of those works. Thus, for anyone unfamiliar with the franchise about half jokes wouldn't make any sense or would be missed altogether. As an example, the first episode alone makes numerous jokes related to Archer's true identity, a major reveal from later in the story, but makes no attempt to explain who he is.
- The plot twist of Truth in Journalism is horrifyingly obvious if you're even a casual fan of Spider-Man; it's basically a Spider-Man story arc from the villain's POV. Contrastly, if you don't know much about the series, Eddie turning into a pitch-black, brain-eating monster will come off like a total Gainax Ending. Also, The Stinger only really works if you're familiar with Daredevil and his Rogues Gallery.
- The Tom and Jerry Direct-to-Video Film Series films, Tom and Jerry and the Wizard of Oz (2011) and Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (2017), is this to the original movies. (The properties are owned by Warner Bros.) Fully appreciating it requires familiarity with both the films and the classic Tom and Jerry shorts, as well as other MGM cartoon characters like Droopy who have minor roles.