A formulation (also called a Three-Beat) 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 series.
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 series level.
The most famous variation found in action movies is "
Die Hard on an X", where X is a different setting (location, means of mass transportation,
in SPACE! etc).
It's not uncommon for detractors of the material in question to add something along the lines of "Except that it sucks" to the end.
Another variation is "the bastard child of X and Y", meaning a mash-up of two extremely different works of fiction whose result takes a turn in narrative genre/style that's entirely different than either of the parents. "Unholy fusion of X and Y" is another way of saying the same thing.
Its 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".
Should more works be added into the mix (e.g. X + Y + Z...) and it starts specifically using mathematical symbols to define the work as parts of others, it becomes
Troperithmetic.
Compare
Recycled In SPACE,
Crossover,
This Is Your Premise On Drugs. See also
Dueling Shows,
Dueling Movies.
Frequent enough with weapons to qualify for a separate trope: see
Military Mashup Machine.
To get a few pitch ideas for free see our
Pitch Generator
.
Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object is already taken.
Examples
