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Sometimes rather than just a brief reference or homage to some other work of fiction, a work will actually be a full-blown recreation of something else's story. This is usually done in sitcoms, and likely a spoof to at least some degree.
See also Homage, Fable Remake and Recycled IN SPACE! ... sometimes with the Serial Numbers Filed Off.
Compare Parody Episode, Whole Costume Reference (the clothing version). May be a Twice Told Tale.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Episode 18 of the Dirty Pair TV series is a straight-up remake of the Clint Eastwood movie The Gauntlet, with the girls filling in for Clint.
- One of the Lupin III TV series spent an episode remaking Murder By Death (with a different set of No Celebrities Were Harmed detectives, and set on a zeppelin for some damn reason).
- Speaking of Astro Boy, his origin story bears more than a few parallels to Pinocchio. Knowing Osamu Tezuka, this was almost definitely intentional. He's remade stories from Faust to Crime and Punishment to, yes, The Bible.
- An episode of Ghost in the Shell: 2nd Gig was a futuristic homage to Taxi Driver, and another was a homage to the sniper shootout at the end of Full Metal Jacket.
- Lampshaded by one of Section 9's junior members, who thinks that Saito is pulling one over on them: The story Saito tells over their poker game is entertaining, but there was "an old movie" with the same plot.
- "Battle Aboard the St. Anne", and "Pokemon Shipwreck" two episodes of a three-part arc on the Pokemon anime, were directly inspired by The Poseidon Adventure.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica bears many many resemblances to Goethe's Faust. Not to mention that a good number of the episodes take homage to The Little Mermaid. And we're not talking the Disney one, either.
- Urusei Yatsura episode 75 is based on Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None — the episode's title actually means "and then there were none", and it uses a different nursery rhyme ("Who Killed Cock Robin") in the same manner that the novel uses the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Indians".
Comics
- Gorsky and Butch do a brief Matrix parody in their first book. In the third one, they do a more extended parody: Butch makes a Face Heel Turn, joining the agents of Comix, in hope of achieveing his goals and finally ending the sensless plot so he can star in a 'real comic'. In the meantime Gorsky leads the resistance under the guise of Morfinius, atempting to destroy the Comix by making Jerry ( the heroes Butt Monkey sidekick) the main character.
- They also do Aliens at one point: the whole section of the comic is the movie but it turns out to be an illegal copy with borked subtitles: all sorts of whacky hijinks result from it, most importantly the aliens getting replaced with sheep because their name have been misspelled (makes sense in Polish) - the marines discover a nest with missing colonists hanging on the walls in oversized wool sweaters.
- The comic book version of PvP did a homage/parody of The Matrix called "The Comix".
- There's a Star Wars Expanded Universe comic featuring Luke's childhood friend Janek "Tank" Sunber, who'd joined the Empire, become a lieutenant, and ended up stationed on a planet of tribal aliens. The plot of that handful of comics is essentially Zulu, with Imperials desperately fighting wave after wave of aliens and being worn down.
- Judge Dredd did this quite a bit in the late 80s and 90s, with parodies of such things as The Wizard of Oz, Twin Peaks, Edward Scissorshands, and many more.
- The whole Hellfire Club section of the X-Men's The Dark Phoenix Saga is basically Chris Claremont's riff on the The Avengers episode "A Touch of Brimstone", in which Mrs Peel gets brainwashed into being the Hellfire Club's Queen of Sin by John Cleverly Cartney. Claremont even gives Mastermind the real name Jason Wyngarde, after Peter Wyngarde, who played Cartney, and Jason King, Wyngarde's most famous role.
- The story of Steve Rogers' return to the land of the living, Captain America: Reborn, is a extended reference to Slaughterhouse Five.
Fan Works
- Pretty Cure Perfume Preppy is a rather unlikely example, as every so often it parodies episodes from actual TV shows instead of the usual things. To list what the author referenced so far: The Backyardigans, The Powerpuff Girls, Code Lyoko (three times so far!), and even Power Rangers Dino Thunder. Make that of what you will.
- Brave New World is pretty much a Darker and Edgier retelling of Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door. But with Pokémon!
- The Fullmetal Alchemist fanfic "Who's Your Daddy?"
 is essentially a Whole Plot Reference to the movie Look Who's Talking, with a side order of Three Men And A Baby. One of Roy Mustang's one-night stands shows up with the infant son who resulted from their time together, hands him over, and disappears. He shoulders the task of fatherhood, relying on his devoted subordinate Riza Hawkeye to help him while he tries to find his son the perfect mother. Just about the time he realizes she's been there all along, the baby's real mother tries to take him back.
- There is an entire genre of Harry Potter fanfic, the "Harry is sent to Azkaban" genre, which varies between homage, this, and knockoff of The Count of Monte Cristo.
- The Yugioh The Abridged Series fanfic Decks Fall Everyone Dies is a recreation of Moulin Rouge!, altered to fit the Yu-Gi-Oh universe.
- The Best Night Ever is a My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fanfic that retells Groundhog Day using Prince Blueblood getting stuck in a loop of the events of the season one finale "The Best Night Ever".
Films — Live Action
- Avatar received much praise for it's visuals, but criticism for it's storyline being basically a retelling of, Dances With Wolves, A Man Called Horse, The Last Samurai, Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Pocahontas.
- The Breakfast Club has had a whole litany of these. They include:
- A whole episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation was dedicated to parodying the movie, ending in the "bad boy" and "basketcase" ending up together in the end, with the "pretty girl" and "jock" ending up together. Toby didn't end up with anyone, though... like Brian.
- Lizzie McGuire also did an entire episode based on that plot. Three kids (including Lizzie) where brought together because they were accused of starting a Food Fight.
- Victorious also has an entire episode taken from it.
- An episode of Dawson's Creek was a parody with several characters lampshading it.
- The movie My Own Private Idaho keeps dropping in and out of the plot of Shakespeare's Henry IV.
- Film example: Epic Movie was essentially
a parody of The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and a Shallow Parody of everything else they could put together.
- Similarly, most of the first Scary Movie follows closely the plot of Scream (with some scenes from the second and a slew of late 90s horror in-between) and the second is mostly based on The Haunting. (the others have the main plot being an amalgalm instead, with the third being a mix of The Ring and Signs, and the fourth mixes War of the Worlds, The Village, The Grudge and Saw)
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? is based off of Homer's The Odyssey. Although the entire plot is only loosely similar, there are certain parts that mirror the source material quite closely.
- Barb Wire is basically Casablanca with more boobage.
- Strange Brew puts the MacKenzie brothers in the role (sort of) of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a loose adaptation of Hamlet. The brewery is called Elsinore.
- The Cheap Detective combines the plots of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Casablanca.
- Now, rip-offs of Alien or Aliens are legion, but the movie Carnosaur 2 repeats the whole plot of Aliens almost scene by scene, with Spear Counterparts of Ripley and Newt, and dinosaurs instead of the Xenomorphs (with a Tyrannosaurus rex stand-in for the Alien Queen).
- Spiders is another one. It replaces the Xenomorphs with giant spiders, and eventually sets them loose in a city, allowing for giant monster sequences.
- Repo Men has been accused of being this to Repo! The Genetic Opera.
- Though the actual film is more like Blade Runner but with bionic organs replacing the replicants.
- More accurately, Repomen is a more faithful adaptation of the novel which The Genetic Opera was very loosely inspired by.
- The novel that Repomen claims to be based on came out after the Genetic Opera concept was created. The book came out the same year as Repo: The Genetic Opera, which had been originally a stage play before it was adapted to be a movie by the play's creator. This dates that concept well ahead of the book.
- The book was in release hell for years though (in fact, the film was in pre-production a few years before the book was published), possibly due to the dark premise. At this point, people should stop claiming one rips off the other as they are more or less totally different films.
- While Mel Brooks is fond of referencing/parodying films, classic and contemporary, in his works, Spaceballs is essentially It Happened One Night in space.
- Akira Kurosawa's done a couple of these. Throne of Blood was basically Macbeth in medieval Japan, and Ran could be considered King Lear in medieval Japan.
- Many teenage romantic comedies do this. To name a few, Clueless is Jane Austen's Emma, 10 Things I Hate About You is Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and She's the Man is Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
- Easy A is an aversion, since while it repeatedly references Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the plot is not the same at all.
- Although it isn't apparent at first, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is a combination of two G1 cartoon episode plots: the three-part episode "The Ultimate Doom", with the Decepticons attempting to transport Cybertron to Earth via space bridge and then enslave humans to restore it to its former glory; and the two-part episode "Megatron's Master Plan", where the Decepticons receive the help of several treacherous, sycophantic humans, also resulting at one point in the Autobots being exiled from Earth, and their chosen means of escape destroyed in transit by the machinations of the Decepticons, though the Autobots survive in both cases.
- The plot of Ip Man 2 heavily borrowed from that of Rocky IV. This includes: a rival-turned-friend killed in a fight against a foreign fighter, the main character trained to avenge his death, and the fact that the fighter in question was supposed to be an unbeatable juggernaut. Ip Man himself went as far as giving a speech promoting tolerance like Rocky did after he won the match.
Literature
Live Action TV
Radio
- In a particularly obscure example, the Nebulous episode "The Lovely Invasion" is a very close parody of an early Doctor Who episode "The Claws of Axos". Additionally, the episode "The Deptford Wives" is just The Stepford Wives with a little Jurassic Park thrown in for good measure.
Video Games
- Chapter 3 of Bully is basically the plot of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is very similar to the 1980s, Al Pacino-starring remake of Scarface. A criminal, exiled from his old stomping grounds in the eighties, winds up in (a) Miami(-like city) and builds up a criminal empire, including an opulent mansion, but gets betrayed by a partner who ends up seeking his death. The way the protagonists end up is different, though.
- The first third of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is basically Juice mashed together with Boyz n the Hood.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 pretty much lifts the entire plot of The Rock for one mission.
- Red Dead Revolver, as a game where the Showdown at High Noon is a frequent occurance, has a quickdraw tournament in the vein of The Quick and the Dead.
- Earlier in the game, there is a stage where the player must blow up a bridge on a battlefield by wading into the water and placing explosives on the pillars, much like in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
- In Mass Effect 2, Thane's loyalty mission, where he tries to make his son go down a different path than the one he took, and to make up for not being a part of his son's life is basically a whole plot reference to Harry Chapin's song "Cat's In The Cradle," to the point where the achievement for completing the quest is named after the song.
- World Of Warcraft was always big ont the Shout Outs, from single NPCs to entire quest lines, but two zones in the Cataclysm expansion brings it to a new level. The Redrige Mountains are all about Rambo, while around half of Uldum consists of Harrison Jones fighting for an ancient relic against nazi goblins.
- Devil Survivor 2 has a series of Eldritch Abominations, utterly immune to conventional weaponry, attacking Japan, which only a handful of special poeple have the potential to stop, is a World Of Woobie, has major Kill The Cutie, Order Versus Chaos themes, a White-Haired Pretty Boy who loves humans (and happens to secretly be one of said abominations) and viciously deconstructs all tropes related to its genre. Where have I heard this before...?
Web Comics
- Ctrl+Alt+Del's Animated Adaptation did a two-episode homage to Star Wars.
- Pv P did a series of strips echoing the plot of Watchmen when the movie came out, but due to the difference in mediums, Scott Kurtz used syndicated cartoon characters and called it "The Ombudsmen". They mapped onto the Watchmen superheroes (Dagwood for Dr. Manhattan, Dilbert for Ozymandias, etc.) surprisingly well.
- Pibgorn did A Midsummer Night's Dream with Gender Flipped roles and actual fairies IN THE THIRTIES!
- Jane's World's current arc is literally The Last Star Fighter with lesbians.
- Just Peachy does this in one story arc with the movie "Singing in the Rain". They even reference the movie in this strip.
- Many Sluggy Freelance parodies cobble together from different works in a genre, but the "Torg Potter" storylines were mostly whole plot.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Which animated show did the first epic Star Wars Whole Plot Reference? Hint: It was neither Family Guy nor Robot Chicken. It dates back to Muppet Babies ("Animal Vader!!"), Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs (a rather nostalgia fuel one since they had used the whole cast), and The Muppet Show in the episode with Mark Hamill, with Gonzo as "Dearth Nadir".
- The Simpsons has done this many times (Mary Poppins, Lord of the Flies, and more).
- Family Guy did Poltergeist, Back to the Future and Rocky III, as well as Family Guy Presents: Laugh It Up, Fuzzball for Star Wars.
- American Dad also did this with a whole episode based off of The Da Vinci Code. And one for James Bond (or perhaps that style of spy fiction in general, it's hard to tell). They also once did What's Eating Gilbert Grape, with squirrels.
- Lampshaded in "Return of the Bling," which is (as the name suggests) a Lord of the Rings parody. At the very end, Roger bites one of Stan's fingers off for no apparent reason. When Steve demands to know why, Roger just shrugs and says "They did it in the movie."
- Jimmy Two-Shoes had "I Am Jimmy", the first half of which was parallel to I Am Legend, with Jimmy and Cerbee being the last man and dog in he— Err, "Miseryville".
- Sealab 2021 played this trope straight... on itself. The show is a comedy "sequel" to Sealab 2020, starting out simply with footage from the latter show being Gag Dubbed to episodes with increasing original animation. However, one episode, "7211" had the new voice actors re-dubbing a Sealab 2020 episode verbatim, letting the originals' boring plot and surreality of the situation play out for laughs. Sealab still explodes at the end, of course.
- Animaniacs was made out of this, doing cartoons inspired by sources such as Apocalypse Now ("Hearts of Twilight") and Duck Soup ("Good King Yakko").
- Tiny Toon Adventures did an impressive rendition of Sunset Boulevard featuring Elmyra as Norma, Montana Max as Joe, and Hamton as Max. Another episode of Tiny Toons was a parody of "Voyage of the Kon-Tiki", of all things, with Plucky as Thor Heyerdahl ("aah, mango juice").
- Pinky and the Brain did a parody of The Third Man titled "The Third Mouse". This was just one of many Orson Welles in-jokes added into the show due to the Brain having a vocal similarity to the actor.
- An even more subtle one is "Yes, Always", an homage to an infamous clip of Welles going ballistic while doing commercial voiceovers. The story goes that Maurice LaMarche (Brain's voice actor) used the "Yes, Always" clip as a warm-up, so they wrote an episode spoofing it.
- So far, the Animated Adaptation of Spaceballs seems to consist mainly of these.
- The Chipmunks Go to the Movies, the last season of Alvin and the Chipmunks, consisted only of these, the targets being relatively recent movies such as Batman, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Back to the Future, and whatnot.
- South Park also did The Wizard of Oz and Die Hard episodes, and a parody of Great Expectations, appropriately starring Pip as... Pip. Except for Estella's out-of-period insults such as "butt pirate", this version is more faithful to the book than a lot of serious adaptations. At least, until the end of the second act when it goes completely off the rails and becomes an action movie parody. (Estella doesn't kill a giant pile of bunnies in the novel? Next thing you know, we'll claim the robot monkeys don't appear in Dickens.)
- There were also episodes based on the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the The Lord of the Rings ("The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers"), King Kong, 300, The Da Vinci Code, The Lottery, The Grapes of Wrath, TRON, The Day After Tomorrow, High School Musical, The Human Centipede the 'Star Trek episode "Dagger of the Mind", Hannibal Lecter's scenes in The Silence of the Lambs''.
- Actually, there are there are dozens of minor references to Star Trek in South Park, and at least three whole plot references: the afore mentioned Dagger of the Mind Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods, City on the Edge of Forever (Flashbacks)/The Galileo Seven, and The Wacky Molestation Adventure/Miri, although the latter is also a whole plot reference to Children of the Corn.
- Futurama's pilot episode is a goofy version of the already satirical novel Immortality Inc. Funnily enough, Bender would later become more like the corresponding character from the book — the scene where Bender and Fry go to a bar ends with them becoming fast friends, while in the book the Bender-analogue takes the opportunity to drug him and sell his organs.
- The World's Greatest Super Friends consisted entirely of Whole Plot References to classic tales like The Wizard of Oz.
- The Fillmore! episodes "A Cold Day at X", "Two Wheels, Full Throttle, No Brakes" and "Immune to All But Justice" were essentially kid-friendly versions of Assault on Precinct 13, Gone in Sixty Seconds and Lethal Weapon 2 respectively.
- Of course Fillmore! as a whole is referencing every late 60's/early 70's Quinn Martin detective show.
- Rugrats did a an episode based on Flowers for Algernon, replacing Charly's temporarily heightened intelligence with Chuckie's temporarily heightened sense of smell, and an It's a Wonderful Plot episode. There's also one where Angelica and Susie remade Thelma & Louise.
- The 2003 Strawberry Shortcake series has an episode where, inspired by Around the World in 80 Days, the Peculiar Purple Pieman challenges Strawberrry to travel around the world in 80 days. She makes it by exploiting the same loophole as in the book, which she even points out.
- Kids Next Door has done this many times, usually the genre of film can be discovered by the character in the lead role. Numbuh 5 is whenever it's a straight adventure film (Indiana Jones or Pirates). Numbuh 2 has become the star of various horror flick parodies. Anything in a genre that borrows from James Bond goes to Numbuh 1.
- The entire second season of Freakazoid! was composed of whole-episode parodies, from The Godfather to The Island of Dr. Moreau to Mission: Impossible to Hello, Dolly to flippin' Amadeus. It seems that every single episode is one of these. Additionally, the first season had a parody of, of all things, The Crawling Eye (in "The Cloud").
- The "Decepticon Air" episode of Transformers Animated is basically one large send up to Die Hard, with a touch of Con Air, obviously.
- Hey Arnold! loved to do this a lot with a lot of semi-obscure movies/radio shows/etc like Marty, The Birdman of Alcatraz, War of the Worlds, 12 Angry Men, Carmen, and even The Longest Day.
- The Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Senate Spy" shamelessly rips off Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, swapping CGI Anakin Skywalker & Padme Amidala for Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
- On Dexter's Laboratory, the "Dial M For Monkey" short "Wrasslor" is based on a story from Marvel Two-In-One Annual #7, with Wrasslor taking the role of The Champion and Monkey taking the role of The Thing.
- The plot of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Squeaky Boots" is one long shout-out to Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart,
- The Beetlejuice cartoon did a few of these, including homages to It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
- Martin Mystery has done this at least twice, with The Thing and Evil Dead.
- Courage the Cowardly Dog did its own rendition of The Nutcracker...taking place in a dump.
- Minoriteam had "Evilfellas", a brilliant episode-long take on Goodfellas and Casino. The action is moved to a circus world, with a Monster Clown filling Joe Pesci's roles. "Funny, how?"
- The plot of the Thomasthe Tank Engine episode "Edward and Spencer" is reminiscent of The Tortoise and the Hare.
- My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic has a couple. "Swarm of the Century" is essentially "The Trouble With Tribbles" with less Klingons.
- In Read it and Weep most of the episode is spent recounting a book that Rainbow Dash is reading. The book is essentially the first Indiana Jones film, with ponies.
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Book 3-Chapter 2 episode "The Headband" is a WPR towards Footloose of all things.
- Regular Show - the episode "High Score" is a WPR towards the documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, with GBF being an Expy of real-life video game champion Billy Mitchell.
- The episode "Video Game Wizards" is a another towards The Wizard. They even have a power glove like device that turns to be a dud.
- The Canadian animated show Olliver's Adventures had one episode that was basically a kid-friendly version of Fight Club.
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