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Whole Plot Reference
aka: Fable Remake

"An island kingdom, a long unseen princess locked away, horse/reindeer playfulness, wild-scoundrel love interest... I swear to god this movie and Tangled started out as the same script."
— CinemaSins, about Frozen

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.

Sub Tropes:

Some other plots commonly used for this purpose are:

See also Homage, Foreign Remake, Fountain of Expies, Characteristic Trope, and Recycled IN SPACE!... sometimes with the Serial Numbers Filed Off.

Expect it to reference/parody the original's Signature Scenes.

Tropes Are Not Bad — a story can serve as a reference or re-mixed version of another one with just ripping it off. Clever parodies put a lot of their own creative thought in while still referencing the original.

Compare Parody Episode, Whole Costume Reference (the clothing version), Recycled Script (internal recycling). May be a Twice Told Tale. For when this is subverted, see Not His Sled. The opposite would be a Shallow Parody, which claims to be a parody but has almost no real references to either the plot or any other aspect of the target.

Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 

    Comic Books 
  • X-Men Fairy Tales is a series of these, casting the X-Men in the role of characters from various fables. Followed up by Spider-Man Fairy Tales and Avengers Fairy Tales.
  • Sometimes in The Spirit Will Eisner would create new versions of fairy tales, set in the 1940s.
  • 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 achieving his goals and finally ending the senseless plot so he can star in a 'real comic'. In the meantime Gorsky leads the resistance under the guise of Morfinius, attempting 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 Scissorhands, 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 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 an extended reference to Slaughterhouse-Five.
  • The plot of the Marvel Comics villain miniseries Identity Disc is taken directly from The Usual Suspects.
  • The plot of Avengers Arena bears more than a passing resemblance to works like Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, and Lord of the Flies, which the writer gleefully owns up to in the first issue. Additionally, the covers of the first few issues are all homages to the movie posters and book covers of the above-mentioned stories.
  • Several DC Comics Elseworlds do this. Most of them are very obvious about it (JLA: Island of Dr Moreau is based on, well...), but one that plays it a bit more subtly is the Legion of Super-Heroes Elseworld Castles in the Sky, which is a 30th century riff on the legend of King Arthur, with Cosmic Boy as Arthur, Saturn Girl as Guenevere, Lightning Lad as Lancelot, R. J. Brande as Merlin, Lightning Lord as Mordred, Mordru as the Fisher King, the flight rings as Excalibur (only Rokk can pull the Nth metal from the ruins of Thanagar), and the Miracle Machine as the Holy Grail.
  • The first four issues of Adventure Time: Banana Guard Academy are a specific parody of the original Police Academy.
  • Many reviewers have noted a similarity between the first couple issues of All-New Wolverine to Orphan Black, to mixed reception. Though to be fair, Laura herself being cloned has been a plot thread almost as long as she's been in the books, and it's a major reason why the Facility has spent the better part of a decade (both real-life and in-universe) trying to get her back.
  • Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Some select stories homage other works in their entirety. For instance, one Italian one was based on Fahrenheit 451, just with the Ducks living in a dystopia where all music is forbidden. There's also a Danish one based on The Shining, though obviously with less ax-murder.
  • Camp Lazlo: A story features a lake monster and Lazlo treats the case like a Scooby Doo mystery. There's a "Mystery Latrine" with a sign painted the same style as the Mystery Machine, Lazlo and his friends split up ("Tradition dictates that we all split up and explore!", Lazlo says), someone theorizes the "monster" is some Corrupt Corporate Executive wanting the land for mining rights and, when the monster is revealed to be the squirrel scouts just out for a midnight boat ride, Lazlo remains convinced that Patsy is someone wearing a mask.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer did one with "The Monkey's Paw," where Dawn and Spike try to resurrect Joyce.
    • Older and Far Away where people who enter the Summers' home are unable to leave references the exact plot of Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel
  • My Name Is Earl, the episode "Get a Real Job" features Earl's plotline being a reference to Rudy, featuring Charles S. Dutton and Sean Astin from the movie in supporting roles, with Earl trying to prove he can be a salesman and not just a stock worker, it features the same speech by Dutton and a scene at the end similar to the 'I believe I am' from Rudy.
  • Just Shoot Me! pulled a neat trick when it set an episode up so that it could suddenly turn completely into King Lear.
    • They also have a Christmas episode parody of The Grinch, with song and everything.
  • Charmed:
  • Tin Man is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz in a Science Fantasy setting. It's technically the actual Oz from the film - just with a few hundred years of technological advancements.
  • Revenge does a Gender Flip of The Count of Monte Cristo but otherwise uses roughly the same plotline.
  • A number of people have noted quite a resemblance between The Fixer and Callan. Both are ITV shows, so copyright isn't an issue here.
  • Early Edition had an episode with a plot that strongly resembled the classic movie Roman Holiday. Princess gone missing, officials covering her while she meets a down to earth man and they enjoy the American city together; and they both end on much the same note.
  • Baywatch episode "Princess of Tides" is Roman Holiday with some extra drama thrown in. Mitch has to protect and rescue the titular princess from assassins.
  • The 3rd Rock from the Sun episode "Citizen Solomon" includes a plot based on a portion of Citizen Kane. Oddly, it's the "B" story which is based on Kane, not the "A" story. In the episode, Tommy is Kane, Alissa is Susan and August is Leland.
  • The original Battlestar Galactica and its sequel, Galactica 1980, succumbed to this several times. It wasn't so much homage or parody as... wholesale plot theft, usually in response to the Dreaded Deadline Doom. Example: "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero" came from The Guns of Navarone.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation's "QPid", the Costumer part, anyway, is pretty much The Adventures of Robin Hood, down to a fight between Robin/Picard and Guy of Gisborne on a staircase. Which makes Vash's absolute refusal to play Marian a whole lot funnier. (Though someone somewhere seems to have gotten Guy of Gisbourne and the Sheriff confused, because Q is clearly playing Basil-Rathbone-Guy but calls himself the Sheriff, and Guy more resembles the dim-witted, rotund Sheriff of the movie.)
  • Eureka later used the TNG episode "Remember Me" as one for the episode "Games People Play". Which was the point, since it was the 100th episode.
  • The MacGyver episode "Countdown" is either a rare example played entirely straight, or a cynical attempt to rip off the plot of a film most of MacGyver's audience wouldn't have seen. The episode "Trumbo's World" went so far as to use footage from the movie it was ripping off. (Respectively, Juggernaut and The Naked Jungle). Then they pulled the hat trick with the episode "Thief of Budapest", which cribbed the footage from the climactic Car Chase of The Italian Job (1969) almost whole-sale (only with footage of Mac and his friends of the week instead of Michael Caine's thief crew). A fourth episode, "Hellfire", is William Friedkin's Sorcerer with the change that Mac's regular on-the-spot inventiveness and general Lighter and Softer approach makes its ending unambiguously happier.
  • Smallville:
    • In the episode "Roulette", Olliver's storyline is blatant rip-off of the 1997 Michael Douglas film The Game, right up to the male lead having suicidal tendencies.
    • They also dished out "Fortune", a rip-off of The Hangover.
    • "Mercy" doesn't even try to pretend that it's not stealing the entire plot of Saw.
  • Doctor Who:
  • Remember WENN did this twice, with Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard.
  • House: Done with the Season 6 opener, "Broken," wherein House is a patient in a mental hospital: did somebody say One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Why, yes we did. Subverted in that while the references are played up, everything was the opposite of One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest: the nurses and psychiatrists are actually trying to help, and House's attempt to "liberate" one of the other patients ends badly. Really badly.
  • Lie to Me made a similar reference. The psychiatrist running the place clearly has it in for Cal (which makes perfect sense) but when he's shown the evidence that Cal's symptoms are coming from ergot rather than schizophrenia he lets him and the other victims out without hesitation.
  • The entire second season of Californication is a Whole Plot Reference to The Great Gatsby, with Hank as Nick and Ashby as Gatsby.
  • The underlying storyline of Heroes' fourth season is Carnivàle with abilities.
  • Magnum, P.I. does this once with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lampshaded by Magnum spending the whole episode racking his brains as to why it all seems so familiar. It hits even closer to home Tom Selleck was considered to star as Indy, but was unable to get out of his contract with Magnum, thus paving the way for Harrison Ford.
  • Good Eats
    • A send-up of Misery in the episode "This Spud's For You Too", and a sequel (featuring an amnesiac A.B.) "Ill-Gotten Grains". Of course, the first is about making potato dishes, while the second is about wheat-grain dishes; both are, by far, more family-friendly.
    • Good Eats does this all the time; the episode about scallops, for example, is a spoof of Jaws. An exhaustive list of examples would be too long.
    • A particularly audacious one was "Oh My, Meat Pie", which was based off Sweeney Todd, with thinly veiled references to the ultimate source of the meats. Yes, on a cooking show.
  • Whether unintentional or a deliberate reference, the Fringe episode "White Tulip" (2x18) borrows heavily from the plot of ''The Broken Bride'' by the band Ludo: A scientist creates a time travel device to go back in time to the day in May when his fiance/bride was killed in a car accident with the intention of saving her life. Minus about 14 years, pterodactyls, a dragon and a zombie apocalypse. It even ends with the time traveler realizing he cannot save his bride and getting in the car to die alongside her.
  • Spaced did this several times, with prominent examples being parodies of The Matrix and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
  • Red Dwarf: "Back to Earth" becomes this to Blade Runner around halfway in, and most of Queeg is based on The Caine Mutiny. Also, "The Last Day" is based on the Jack Nicholson film The Last Detail.
  • On episode of 30 Rock is an extended reference to Amadeus with Frank as Salieri, Tracy as Mozart, and Tracy's porn video game as the masterpiece.
    Frank: I've devoted a lifetime to porn, and he masters it in one day?!
  • Big Wolf on Campus had an episode called "The Manchurian Werewolf." Can you guess?
  • 12 Angry Men is another stock plot that's been much copied. It's been done on The Odd Couple, Happy Days, and The Simpsons just to name a few. The former is interesting in that series star Jack Klugman was in the original film. While it might not be the original example, many examples of the Rogue Juror trope will probably call upon this in some way.
  • The Goodies had an episode called Punky Business. It seemed like it was going to be a spoof on punk, and then it turned into Cinderella.
  • The A-Team:
    • In its final season, the series has an episode called "The Spy Who Mugged Me," which plays out like a James Bond film (complete with an intense card game, killer sharks, etc.).
    • The episode "The Say U.N.C.L.E. Affair" from the same season is essentially a Darker and Edgier episode from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with the Team being support for Napoleon Solo (or rather, General Stockwell — still, the episode milks the Actor Allusion for all it is worth).
  • Community has done a few of these. An easy one to spot is Abed's birthday dinner with Jeff which is a reference to My Dinner with Andre. The twist is that Abed deliberately set it up to be so—he wanted to take a break from being the Meta Guy and have a real conversation, and aping that film was the only way he could think of to try and do that. Jeff points out the irony that it's possibly the most meta thing he's ever done.
  • The Not Going Out episode Life on Mars Bars is a half-hour reference to Life On Mars.
  • When Cold Case isn't basing its episodes off of Real Life cold (and "hot") cases, it often does this. "Blood on the Tracks"= The Big Chill, "Disco Inferno"= Saturday Night Fever, "Detention"= The Breakfast Club, etc.
  • Shows recreating The Breakfast Club in an episode:
    • 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) were brought together because they were accused of starting a Food Fight.
    • Victorious also has an entire episode taken from it.
  • NewsRadio did at least two - "Sinking Ship" (S4) spoofed Titanic, and "Flowers for Matthew" spoofed Flowers for Algernon/Charley.
  • Stargate SG-1: The season 7 episode "Fallout" is basically The Core ON LANGARA! and MINUS HOLLYWOOD SCIENCE!
  • The third episode of the 1980s Degrassi Junior High is based on the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. The resident High School Hustler sells "hallucinogens" (actually vitamin pills) at five bucks a pop. Because nobody wants to admit they aren't "cool," his clients pretend to trip and even go through placebo highs.
  • The Degrassi: The Next Generation film called Degrassi: Las Vegas borrows heavily from the movie Indecent Proposal, with one character even lampshading it by mentioning it to wave off a character's suspicions, only to later offer an "indecent proposal". However, as this is a teen soap things play out differently and the boyfriend is not involved in agreeing to the deal.
  • The Outer Limits did "haircuts" (as the production team called them) of Beauty and the Beast ("The Man Who Was Never Born") and Macbeth ("The Bellero Shield"). Coincidentally, both episodes starred Martin Landau.
  • The remake series The Outer Limits did "Star Crossed", which was basically Casablanca with aliens instead of Nazis.
  • The whole premise of Grimm; set in contemporary Portland, OR, the main character is a police detective who is also the last living descendant of Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm, who in turn were part of a group of people who had the power to see supernatural creatures that appeared human to those without such an ability. The creatures were the inspiration for several fairy tales and folk takes around the world, Grimm or otherwise. Most episodes at least partially reference the original story.
  • Like the MacGyver example mentioned above, the T.J. Hooker episode "Blue Murder" - in which Hooker goes up against a group of uniformed cops under the direction of a superior officer executing criminals that got away - was what can be charitably called "inspired" by Magnum Force, even down to both having a scene with our hero on a practice range. Biggest difference: budgetary and time restrictions kept the vigilante cops down to two (in the movie it was four).
  • Frasier:
    • An episode titled "My Coffee with Niles" was essentially a love letter to My Dinner with Andre.
    • Also, in another episode, Frasier and Niles meet a writer who wrote one amazing book and not another word for 30 years, who was going to publish a new novel. They read the manuscript behind his back when he’s away and are amazed by it, noting the homage to The Divine Comedy in its structure; the writer thinks his book is actually a rip-off of Dante and throws the manuscript off the balcony, thanking them both for pointing out that he’s a hack, and leaves, frustrated and angry.
  • One Life to Live's famous gang rape storyline was lifted from the plot of The Accused, right down to the guilt-ridden bystander who failed to intervene. Although in the movie's case, he had the decency to run and call for help, whereas in the show, he was bullied into participating. A follow-up storyline in which the lead rapist stalked his lawyer was clearly lifted from Cape Fear—seeking vengeance for sabotaging the case when she realized he was guilty, and Wait Until Dark—she was blind following brain surgery.
  • General Hospital: In 1996, Carly came to town and rapidly insinuated herself into Bobbie's life—and into the bed of Bobbie's husband. No references to the movie All About Eve were ever made, but most critics cited the film as the likely inspiration for the storyline.
  • CSI: Miami had an episode called "Dude, Where's My Groom?" which was, essentially, The Hangover with a murder mystery thrown in.
  • The appropriately titled 100th episode of Psych, "100 Clues", abounds with references to Clue, even including three of the actors and multiple endings.
  • The Castle episode "The Lives of Others", like Rear Window, has Castle stuck at home with a broken leg. While watching his neighbors through binoculars, he sees something that looks like a murder. It was staged by Beckett as an elaborate way to get him to a surprise party.
  • The Endeavour episode "Rocket" has the dysfunctional Broom family, whose names, plotlines, and dialogue, reference the bickering Plantagenets of The Lion in Winter (as a Genius Bonus/ Bilingual Bonus, the name Plantagenet supposedly derived from the broom plant- Planta Genista in Latin- on their coat of arms).
  • Season 4 of Arrested Development sees George Michael seeing the software called Fakeblock that he developed in his college dorm become a runaway hit that strains his relationship with his friends, turns him into a bit of a Jerk Ass, and causes his former friend and peer to sue him, all because Michael Cera, when asked if he is generally recognized more for Arrested Development or Scott Pilgrim, replied that he's usually recognized for The Social Network, which he wasn't in.
  • The Father Ted episode "Speed 3" is a WPR to Speed, with a bomb on a milk float that is primed when it goes above 4mph and goes off if it dips below.
  • The Sam & Cat episode "SuperPsycho" is a parody of The Silence of the Lambs.
  • The Only Fools and Horses episode "Fatal Extraction" parodies Fatal Attraction with the twist that the woman isn't stalking Del; it's all in his head.
  • Sisters:
    • A storyline has oldest sister and talk show host Alex hiring a personal assistant who simply lived to wait on her hand and foot. She made herself so indispensable that when Alex was trapped in an elevator, she was able to take over her hosting duties and did such a good job that the producers decided to make them co-hosts. At this point, Alex wised up and realized that the girl was really a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who was out to get her job—driving the point home, her name was Evelyn, making it quite obvious what film this story was based on.
    • Another one had second-oldest sister Teddy's husband being killed via Car Bomb (he was a detective preparing to testify against a drug lord). By the following episode, his Ghost appeared to her both to console her and to protect her from his killer, who was now stalking her. It concludes with them sharing a final dance, much like in the movie.
  • Arrow:
    • Arrow loves referencing The Dark Knight Saga. The first season ends with a villain connected to the League of Shadows/Assassins trying to destroy the crime-ridden Gotham/Glades. The third season centers on a super-strong criminal warlord who takes over Gotham/Glades and forces all police and other government services out; it's even resolved in an all-out clash on the street.
    • The episode "Public Enemy" is basically the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Over the Edge" without the All Just a Dream twist: a cop finds out his daughter is dead, blames the hero despite because the hero kept this from him, the cop finds out who the hero is, and he does everything he can to go after the hero and his allies.
  • Arrow's sister series The Flash (2014) redoes the origin of Gorilla Grodd. Due to the show's mythology, he isn't an intelligent gorilla from the technologically advanced Gorilla City. Instead, he is very much straight out of the new Planet of the Apes films, a gorilla who was experimented on and suffered abuse from humans save for one. The explosion that turned several people into Metahumans granted him his psychic powers which allow him to communicate telepathically.
  • The Leverage episode "The San Lorenzo Job" is a beat-for-beat and twist-for-twist adaptation of The Stainless Steel Rat for President, right down to the fake assassination.
  • Once Upon a Time has incorporated nearly every fairytale known to man at this point, as well as a few things that aren't usually considered fairytales, albeit in a manner that doesn't generally qualify for this trope. Which makes it all the more unexpected when the initial plot of the season 3 finale turns out to be one gigantic reference to Back to the Future, of all things.
  • The backstory of Sully, the white man gone native love interest and eventual husband of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman is virtually identical to that of Dunbar of Dances with Wolves, while Kathleen from the episode "Another Woman" is a virtual Expy of Stands With A Fist—a white woman abducted by the tribe at so young an age that she has zero memory of her old life and can barely speak English.
  • The JAG episode Rogue goes beyond a retelling of the Rogue Warrior novels: it goes to the point of having lookalikes for most of the series characters replete with their personalities, similar conflict with the brass and even Marcinko's and Raglin's justification (stop Osama bin Laden from committing a terrorist attack) are exactly the same.
  • An episode of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody features the class putting on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. When couples are cast in the wrong parts - Cody plays Bottom, his girlfriend Gwen gets cast as Hermia and Zack is Lysander - it causes a massive Love Dodecahedron, which one character lampshades as being similar to the play.
  • While The 10th Kingdom is a Fractured Fairy Tale featuring many subversions and deconstructions of classic fairy tales, it does contain one subtle Whole Plot Reference - the romance between Virginia and Wolf, who is a werewolf that undergoes a Heel–Face Turn because of his love for her. Notice that Beauty and the Beast is the one tale that isn't mentioned directly?
  • In Toby Terrier And His Video Pals, I Love Lassie is one to the chocolate episode of I Love Lucy only with dog biscuits instead of chocolate.
  • A proposed Sesame Street special titled "A-B-Chorus Line", intended to commemorate the show's 10th anniversary, was going to be this to A Chorus Line (but minus the angst, of course). This was scrapped and a more conventional retrospective called "A Walking Tour of Sesame Street'' was produced instead.

    Music 

    Radio 

    Theater 

    Video Games 
  • Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a remake of Journey to the West.
  • 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 '80s, 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, culminating in a Last Stand at said mansion. 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. The last two thirds of the game are basically the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo with a brief interlude to reenact Ocean's Eleven
  • Haunting Starring Polterguy is a WPR to Poltergeist. Comes with a lot of ShoutOuts.
  • 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 occurrence, 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.
  • Mass Effect:
  • 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 people have the potential to stop, is a Crapsack World, has major break and Kill the Cutie, Order Versus Chaos themes, a white haired Bishōnen 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...?
    • Persona 3 also fits this nicely for very similar reasons, also by having 12 major enemies followed by a 13th one who has a human appearance (and has an affinity towards humans).
  • Persona 4 stars a group of Ordinary High School Students gifted with the power of Summon Magic, and use that power to stop a Serial Killer with the same power run rampant on the small, rustic town they inhabit. Hmmm...
  • The Spore mission It Came From The Sky is this to The Thing (1982).
  • The Clan War missions of Borderlands 2, in which you instigate a clan war between the redneck Hodunks and the Irish Zafords and play both sides against one another are a reference to Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing. The only difference is that you are forced to side with one family in the final encounter rather than wiping all of them out.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The quest "A Night to Remember" is this to The Hangover; the Dragonborn wakes up after a drunken stupor and has to find their missing drinking buddy, all while cleaning up the mess they left behind throughout Skyrim. They even got married in all the drunkenness - to a Hagraven, no less.
    • The whole Civil War plot borrows a lot from the main conflict of Fallout: New Vegas. The Empire is a well-intentioned but corrupt and ineffectual government that's hated by a good number of the locals, much like the NCR. Ulfric Stormcloak acts as a stand-in for Mr. House - an ambitious and cunning leader who wants to kick out the government and forge an independent nation under their own rule. On the horizon is the Aldmeri Dominion, a nation of barbaric Nazi elves who once warred with the Empire and plan to do so again, eradicating both sides and claiming the province as their own for a further conquest of the Imperial homeland, exactly the same as the Legion. In the middle of this huge mess is the player, who is in a position to play the sides off against each other for their own personal agenda, or join up with a faction and bring them a decisive victory.
  • Umineko: When They Cry: The relationship between Battler and Beatrice is this towards The Divine Comedy with Beatrice waiting for Battler to find the truth referencing the eternal lady waiting for Dante at the top of Mount Purgatory. Several other names in the series also references this and fulfill the same roles.
    • First of all we have Virgilia, who guides Battler towards the truth, taking the role of Vergilius who guided Dante.
    • In Ep 7 we also have Clair vauxof Bernard, the reader of that Episode who reveals the truth to Will, Lion and the players. Clair takes the role of Bernard of Clairvaux as both are the final guides of the stories after Beatrice has gone to her eternal rest.
    • Then finally we have the name of the metaworld where Battler is trapped, Purgatorio. Here Beatrice wants Battler to remember his sin of six years ago just as Dante had to recognize and acknowledge his sins before ascending to Heaven.
    • The book and the similarities are references in Ep 5 just when Battler does reach the truth:
      ''Vergilius guided Dante to Mount Purgatory, ... and brought him below the feet of the eternal lady who waited at the top, Beatrice. Therefore, ... the innermost depths lay not at the bottom. ... but at the peak of Mount Purgatory. The eternal lady... had been waiting there for Dante... the whole time... And then...I...knew.
  • Soul Sacrifice revolves around horrific creatures that were once men (and animals) born from profane magic, which is spread by a shining, innocent-looking entity. The only way to kill said monsters is to use said magic, which will end up transforming YOU into a monster eventually for others to kill in an endless cycle. Souls, despair, and hope are all central to the story, as despair is what triggers the transformation from man to beast. The main storyline also involves a Ho Yay -filled relationship between two sorcerers, one of which locks himself into an endless loop in order to save his 'dear friend'. Yeah, it's that kind of game.
  • The Wonderful 101 features Platinum Robo, a Humongous Mecha that secretly contains the soul of the pilot's mother, a brilliant scientist thought to be long dead.
  • A mission in H.A.W.X., "Operation Whitehorse" has the player defend a space shuttle launch pad and the shuttle itself, carrying a super weapon to even the playing field in the war against enemy attack. First, the enemy sends wave after wave of airborne-dropped tanks, dropped from cargo planes. Then they begin sending jets to try and kill it. When all else fails, they start firing cruise missiles at it. A near-identical mission appears in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, "White Bird Part I".
  • Metal Gear:
    • Metal Gear Solid is a total retread of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake but with a dark conspiracy subplot as well. All of the setpieces are the same - finding a female soldier in the women's bathroom, Gray Fox warning you about mines using an anonymous radio frequency, a key that's a 'shape memory alloy' that changes with heat, punching the Evil Counterpart to death after losing your inventory, a cyborg ninja turns out to be a character from the previous game, a mysterious woman is revealed through dramatic irony to have a tragic part in Gray Fox's life, there's a battle with a helicopter using missiles, and many, many more.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is The Rock with the serial numbers filed off (New York instead of San Francisco, nukes rather than bioweapons) down to the occasional Homage Shot and Harry Gregson-Williams doing the music in the same style - but also incorporating bits of pomo novel The New York Trilogy. A major plot point revealed near the end of the game is that it's also an intentional, in-universe retread of the first Metal Gear Solid - an isolated island facility that's actually the testing ground for Metal Gear taken over by ex-special forces, having taken hostages and demanding a ransom, threatening the US government with a nuke if the demands aren't met, a lone FOXHOUND soldier sent in to stop them, both main hostages dying not long after they're located, the presence of a cyborg ninja who assists via radio, the lone soldier getting his gear (and clothes) taken away near the end - though, ironically, right around when this reveal happens is when things have started going off the rails into... well, something different.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain contains a subplot that is a Whole Plot Reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion of all things. Huey and Strangelove have built Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, a world-ending giant robot that can only be piloted by children. The three pilot candidates are a clone (Eli), a European Child Soldier (Tretij Rebenok, Russian for "Third Child"), and the child of the creators (Hal Emmerich). Later events wind up with Strangelove dying inside Sahelanthropus's AI Pod, and so it literally contains Hal's dead mother. Just like one of his Japanese animes indeed.
  • Take the classic literary tale of Beowulf, and change the presentation of the story from an epic tale to Professional Wrestling. You just described the entire concept of the character Beowulf from Skullgirls.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: The first level in Yuriko's campaign is about a severely traumatised Japanese schoolgirl who rips out of her restraints at a secret research facility and rampages around the place, messily killing the guards with her psychic powers.
  • DEFCON - Everybody Dies is based on the climax scenes of WarGames, where civilization is imploding in a global thermonuclear war. However, unlike the movie where it's just a computer simulation, it's actually happening in DEFCON and your goal is to ensure the communists/capitalists die in a nuclear fire. Introversion's previous game, Uplink, featured a Shout-Out to Wargames in an Easter Egg.
  • Resident Evil 2 has two parallel plots. Claire's story has a lot in common with Aliens. Last time around, a small group of people stumbled onto something horrible. Now, thanks to the greed of an evil Mega Corp., that same horror has overtaken an entire community in part because everyone failed to heed the warnings of the survivors. A tough young woman stumbles into the mess and befriends a little girl who's been surviving on her own by crawling through places too small for anyone or anything else, and who initially tries to run away. Incidentally, the little girl's father is kinda sorta responsible for the whole mess. The little girl falls into a sewer and almost gets used to breed a baby monster, but she's rescued by the tough young woman at considerable personal risk, just as the helpful Computer Voice warns her that everything is about to explode. Our heroes escape an exploding facility in the nick of time, but the biggest, baddest monster of them all is Not Quite Dead and has hitched a ride on the escape vehicle. The "references" to Aliens even go into meta territory: Resident Evil 2 was a sequel that managed to be even more successful than its predecessor.
  • Resident Evil 3 has an Action Girl Badass fending off a unstoppable beast using a ATM Hardballer, grenade launcher, minigun and Western 1887, which she cocks one handed. Hmmm...where have we seen this before?
  • The EarthBound ROM Hack Equestria Bound is this to the original game. The main thing that makes it this instead of a simple texture swap like Pony Fantasy VI is the fact that doesn't follow the EarthBound plot to an exact letter. In addition to the characters remaining faithful to the FiM roots, the plot is similar, but not exact. Some minor differences and such do pop up, in addition to the new areas added to the game, as well as a ton of new bosses and features.
  • Discworld Noir: To The Maltese Falcon, Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep. All happening at the same time, and with one character playing the roles of all three Femme Fatales. And then part way through, where it turns out to also be a Discworld version of the investigation plot of Illuminatus!, with Eris and the Apple of Discord Expys, conspiracies within conspiracies, a Eldritch Abomination trapped in a polygon shaped building, and Malaclypse ranting.
  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent has a DLC titled Justine that was released as part of the Potato Sack bundle. As a result, the plot of the DLC, a woman being put through hellish 'tests' by another for her amusement, is a subdued reference to Portal, of all things.
  • The plot of Final Fantasy XV is largely lifted from Hamlet.
  • Dirge of Cerberus references Metal Gear Solid extensively, and its sequel slightly. Vincent's a retired war hero who is sent to stop a terrorist group made up of genetically-enhanced military personnel. He fights a ranting shirtless rival dead set on surpassing him in a helicopter. He meets a sexy lady scientist whose sibling has been turned into a cybernetic ninja that thinks of nothing but war, but who also contains the memories of Vincent's lost friend. He fights a psychic in bondage gear. Vincent turns out to have a biological superweapon implanted into him, intended to kill all of the terrorists. Like in Metal Gear Solid 2, it turns out the real villain is an AI preserving itself through the Internet. This is just the beginning of the similarities.
  • The Talos Principle: The plot of the game is basically the Garden of Eden story with AIs.
  • Chaser closely follows the plotline of Total Recall (1990), right down to the Twist Ending.
  • Stellaris:
    • The War in Heaven event chain in the Leviathan expansion pack is a plot reference to Babylon 5. Two hyper-advanced and scarily dogmatic Precursors clash in a titanic war across the galaxy, leaving the more primitive races to take sides or stay the hell out of the way.
    • In Utopia, making a Covenant with the End of the Cycle will lead to you renacting the Fall of the Eldar from Warhammer 40,000. You use your advanced technology and psychic powers to become the undisputed masters of the galaxy, only to unwittingly give rise to an Eldritch Abomination which obliterates your empire and your race, leaving only a small handful on a far-flung world, despised by all.
  • In the children's story "Lafcadio: The Lion who Shot Back" by Shel Silverstein, a hunter shoots at the titular character only to find that his rifle is not loaded, and then Lafcadio eats the hunter. This is very similar to the tutorial section of The Sexy Brutale where a hunting rifle is used to kill Sixpence, who kills the staff member if Lafcadio Boone puts a blank in the rifle. Moreover, Lafcadio-the-lion forgets that he's a lion until he returns to Africa and another lion reminds him of his true identity. The lions and the hunters try to convince him to join their respective sides, but Lafcadio-the-lion rejects both of them and walks off into the distance never to be heard from again. The story of Lafcadio Boone, forgetting his identity as Lucas and being forced to choose the side of either the hunters or the hunted, follows this basic plot.

    Web Animation 

    Web Comics 
  • PvP 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.
  • 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 Singin' 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.
  • Rhapsodies had an episode about the adventures of the house band in Casablanca.
  • Zortic before the reboot consisted almost exclusively in this.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 

Alternative Title(s): Fable Remake

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