A formulation primarily used to pitch a show or to quickly sum up the impression a show gives by expressing it as the sum of two separate, unrelated shows. The most famous variation is "
"Die Hard" on an X", where X is a different location, means of mass transportation, or
IN SPACE!, and so on.
It's very common in music writing — both reviews and press releases usually describe an artist as "Artist X meets Artist Y". Similarly, a work of literature may be reviewed as being the fusion of the styles of two authors; a common variation is to say that a novel is "as if X had written Y".
See also
Mix and Match, but this differs from it in that, conceptually,
Mix and Match works on the genre level (
Space Opera +
The Western =
Wagon Train to the Stars), while X Meets Y works on the show/character level. Should more works/characters be added into the mix (e.g. X + Y + Z...) and it starts specifically using mathematical symbols to define the work/character as parts of others, it becomes
Troperithmetic.
Compare
Recycled In SPACE,
Crossover,
This Is Your Premise on Drugs. See also
Dueling Works. Frequent enough with weapons to qualify for a separate trope: see
Military Mashup Machine. It can also result in a type of
Tropes That Will Never Happen.
To get a few pitch ideas for free see our
Pitch Generator
.
Examples
