"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."
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.
— CinemaSins, about Frozen
Sub Tropes:
- The Bard on Board (anything by William Shakespeare)
- Charlie and the Chocolate Parody (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
- Christmas Every Day (Christmas Every Day by William Dean Howell)
- "Die Hard" on an X (Die Hard)
- Fairy Tale Episode (retelling of famous fairy tales)
- "Fantastic Voyage" Plot (Fantastic Voyage)
- Film Fic
- A Fistful of Rehashes (A Fistful of Dollars / Yojimbo)
- Fractured Fairy Tale (any Fairy Tale)
- "Gift of the Magi" Plot (The Gift of the Magi)
- How the Character Stole Christmas (How the Grinch Stole Christmas!)
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game (The Most Dangerous Game)
- It's a Wonderful Plot (It's a Wonderful Life)
- The Magnificent Seven Samurai (Seven Samurai / The Magnificent Seven)
- May the Farce Be with You (Star Wars)
- Moby Schtick (Moby-Dick)
- Off to See the Wizard (The Wizard of Oz)
- "Parent Trap" Plot (The Parent Trap)
- Raiders of the Lost Parody (Indiana Jones)
- "Rear Window" Homage (Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window)
- Robinsonade (Robinson Crusoe)
- "Rashomon"-Style (Rashomon)
- "Sorcerer's Apprentice" Plot (The Sorceror's Apprentice)
- Where No Parody Has Gone Before (Star Trek)
- Yet Another Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol)
- The Odyssey
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Down the Rabbit Hole, Alice Allusion)
- Freaky Friday ("Freaky Friday" Flip)
- The Prisoner of Zenda
- 12 Angry Men (Rogue Juror)
Examples:
open/close all folders
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.
- Lupin III (Red Jacket) 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 The Bible.
- An episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig is a futuristic homage to Taxi Driver, and another is 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 is "an old movie" with the same plot.
- "Battle Aboard the St. Anne", and "Pokemon Shipwreck", two episodes of a three-part arc on Pokémon, are directly inspired by The Poseidon Adventure.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica bears many, many, resemblances to Goethe's Faust. Not to mention that Sayaka's character arc is a reference to The Little Mermaid (The original Hans Christian Andersen tale, not the Disney one with the happy ending). Homura's experiences in Episode 10 are reminiscent of Phil Rogers repeated attempts to save the homeless man in Groundhog Day.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion is one to Paradise Lost. With some homages to The Nutcracker as well.
- 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".
- Love Hina:
- An episode is based on the Chinese tale of Son Goku, the Monkey King.
- Also, one of the manga chapters was based on the tale of Taro Urashima. Guess who gets to be Urashima.
- The entire Dragon Ball universe is an adaptation of the story of Son Goku, the Monkey King. One guess which character represents Son Goku.
- Ouran High School Host Club has a manga chapter based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and a considerably looser adaptation in one episode of the anime.
- Blame! draws
very heavily on the Iain Banks novel Feersum Endjinn for many elements of the setting and story (the Net/Cryptsphere, its substrate in the megastructure, the system corruption, the governing authority's attempt to restore order, the reincarnating Chief Scientist plotting against her boss, the wanderer walking the Earth until he can incarnate the child that will fix the Sphere). If Feersum Endjinn hadn't wrapped up the story itself, Blame! could easily have been a sequel.
- In YuYu Hakusho, the gang fights a team of baddies who are perversions of the main characters from various Japanese myths.
- Hello Kitty once did "The Little Match Girl". Yes, with the original ending. There's an entire series of Hello Kitty and her friends performing fractured fairy tales called Hello Kitty's Furry Tale Theater.
- There's a series of illustrated stories that transform a lot of fairy tales into yuri, and twist the ending. For example, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" ended with the eponymous character living with the seven women and "The Little Mermaid" ended with the protagonist falling in love with her sister since the princess was a flirt who didn't notice her.
- Prétear is Snow White made into a Magical Girl series.
- Monster broadly mimics the story of the Beast from Revelation 13, but there are many subplots which mirror many popular fairy tales, including Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin. There is also an in-universe example, in that the characters unwittingly enact the plots of Bonaparta's fairy tales and his son's puppet show.
- One chapter of Yandere Kanojo retells "Cinderella".
- In an episode of Strawberry Marshmallow, Miu tells the story of Cinderella, with Matsuri as Cinderella, Chika and Ana as her stepsisters, Nobue as the prince, and herself as the Fairy Godmother. Miu being Miu, however, it's riddled with all sorts of weird additions and changes, and ends up with the Fairy Godmother marrying the prince as compensation for her falling down the stairs twice. She figured the original had a messed-up moral, which, if it's true, means she wants a thousand yen for the beauty salon.
- The Queen's Blade animated adaptation has three of them per season:
- The plot of the first season mimics somewhat the plot of Odin Sphere, especially the Gwendolyn's story on Leina and her family. Heck, even both Leina and Gwendolyn shares the same voice actress as well, except the plot is less depressing than in the game.
- The plot of the second season resembles somewhat the one used in Mobile Fighter G Gundam, including the warriors fighting in their own (or their opponent's) home turf and the fact the winner will rule the land for four years.
- The plot of the sequel, Queen's Blade Rebellion (but only in the novelizations) is a mix between the plots of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light and Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem and some aspects from the Chinese classic Water Margin (the one who Suikoden took inspiration of) and even some aspects from Star Wars. Especially the main villain being the mother of two of the main heroines, Annelotte and Aldra.
- The Tower of Heavens arc in Fairy Tail is one massive reference to the Etherion arc from Rave Master. Subtlety of the points where the older story is references varies. (Having the villains of each arc virtually identical was not that subtle, but some of the moments found
are not ones you would notice if you didn't know to look.)
- The Bount Filler Arc of Bleach is exactly the same as the Chapter Black arc of YuYu Hakusho up to the point that everyone enters Soul Society. What's especially noticeable is the beginning where Urahara's test to show Ichigo he relies too much on bankai is almost identical to Genkai's test to show Yusuke that he runs in without knowing enough about his enemies.
- The Space Dandy episode "There's Music in the Darkness, Baby" (Episode 15) borrows heavily from the narrative style and visual design of Courage the Cowardly Dog. Ukuleleman would not look, sound, or act out of place if he were suddenly transplanted to Courage and made the focus of an episode.
- The episode "The Lilliputian Hitcher" of Neon Genesis Evangelion is a not-quite-completely-following-the-original-plot homage to the film version of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain.
- The Tailor Of Enbizaka, aside from building off of the song it's named after, features large elements from the Japanese folktale of Momotaro, with the primary character being born from a tree, meeting 3 friends who symbolize the animals Momotaro befriends, and going to a place called Onigashima and dealing with a demon there.
Comic Books
- The European western graphic novel series Mc Coy once did a remake of the movie Comanche Station called Mescalero Station. Everything in the movie was in the graphic novel, including the twist ending.
- 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 becomes the Hellfire Club's Queen of Sin under the "authority" of John Cleverly Cartney.note 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
- The Doctor Who fanfic setting This Time Round has enough of these that they have their own section, "Story Time!"
.
- An old Slayers fan comic posted on the Internet featured the cast putting on a production of Hamlet, with such gems of casting as Zelgadis as Hamlet and Prince Phil as Polonius. Hilarity Ensues.
- 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 one to 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 Yu-Gi-Oh! 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".
- The following is a brief summary of the plot of Portal 2: an evil AI is accidentally reactivated after several years by a clumsy yet lovable Personality Core and takes total control of the research facility it was built in, and a determined test subject sets out to stop the rogue AI's reign of terror. Now compare this plot to the plot of My Little Portal. You'll come to realize it's exactly the same.
- "The Five Calvins" from Calvin and Hobbes: The Series is really just "The Five Doctors" under a "Calvin and Hobbes" filter.
- The Non-Bronyverse has two, one of which copies the plot of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Feeling Pinkie Keen", and another that takes the plot of My Little Dashie and replaces Rainbow Dash with Rarity.
- Vinyl and Octavia Duel Destiny is a giant one to the Ace Attorney series. See the fanfic page for specific details.
- Several fandoms are disturbingly fond of WPRs to Jurassic Park, with the characters from the crossover in the roles from the story. Fandoms who have tried this vary from the reasonable (Total Drama, being that it's not impossible that Chris McLean is connected to In Gen and John Hammond in some way) to the WTF (Sonic The Hedge Hog and Harry Potter? The hell?).
- The End of Ends is one for Super Paper Mario.
- Fittingly, Cave Story Versus Im Meen is clearly one of these for both Cave Story and I. M. Meen.
- The Final Quest of Star Swirl the Bearded is a story about the ancient history of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, in which the wizard Star Swirl the Bearded organizes an adventuring party—consisting of a squad of pegasi and the earth pony Humble Pie—to evict a dragon from an old pegasus stronghold. The author has freely admitted that The Hobbit was his inspiration. But because ancient Equestria is not the same as Middle Earth, the plot does deviate from The Hobbit at some key points, particularly the ending.
- A fanfic taking place after The Black Cauldron, Hope for the Heartless, is strikingly similar to the plot of the infamous Beauty and the Beast story: a young smart peasant girl is imprisoned in a scary castle for months by a monstrous royalty who can save himself from a Fate Worse Than Death only by gaining a human's love. Slowly the prisoner and her captor grow closer, with a turning point being when the captor scares the prisoner to flee the castle on horseback and then saves her from Savage Wolves, nearly dying in the process. The prisoner then nurses her captor back to health.
- Pony POV Series:
- Nightmare Manacle's mini arc in the Finale is basically Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion with Rainbow Dash/Nightmare Manacle as Homura, Twilight Sparkle as Madoka, Pinkie Pie as Mami, Bright Night as Bebe, etc. It at least ends happier than the original.
- One special chapter of the Finale is one to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tapestry". Golden Tiara deeply regrets a horrible mistake she made in the past and wishes it never happened, only to be shown that if it never happened, she would have never learned to appreciate what is truly important in life and become a total loser. Some of Picard and Q's lines even get paraphrased.
- Kingdom Crossovers is a retelling of Kingdom Hearts with Zim in the role of Sora, Calvin and Hobbes in the roles of Donald and Goofy, and more.
- The discontinued prequel to Sonic X: Dark Chaos, Fall of the Seedrians, is basically a retelling of Battlestar Galactica (2003) with the Seedrians as the Colonials and Tsali/the Tsali Endoskeletons as the Cylons. The only difference is that it ends much, much worse.
- Equestria Civil War is based on Captain America: Civil War. After Starlight Glimmer causes a major accident that injuries many innocent ponies, an act of checks and balances against all former antagonists is made. The mane 6 and all of Equestria are split on the act and divided into two factions, with Princess Twilight leading the faction against the act supporting the right for a former villain to choose their own destiny, and Moon Dancer leading the other to support accountability and consequences.
- A Recursive Fanfiction of the Both Syllables series called "For The Irken Who Has Everything" is, as one might assume, based entirely on For the Man Who Has Everything.
- The Halloween Unspectacular anthology series has a couple of examples:
- "You Have Died of Dysentery" from the original HU is Oregon Trail with Spongebob Squarepants characters.
- "Unidentified Flying Object" from HU3 was originally meant to serve as the prologue of an Independence Day clone that the author never got around to writing.
Films — Live-Action
- The Forbidden Kingdom is either a remake of the tale of Son Goku, or its "prequel".
- Avatar's storyline was basically a retelling of (pick one or more) Dances with Wolves, A Man Called Horse, The Last Samurai, FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, The Last of the Mohicans, Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa, Call Me Joe, The Word for World is Forest, and/or Pocahontas.
- My Own Private Idaho keeps dropping in and out of the plot of Shakespeare's Henry IV.
- Epic Movie was essentially the storyline of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with a Shallow Parody of everything else they could think of bolted onto it. Likewise, Meet the Spartans did the same for 300, as did Disaster Movie for Cloverfield and Vampires Suck for both Twilight and New Moon.
- 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 amalgam 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, such as the cyclops and the sirens.
- 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 Distaff Counterparts of Ripley and Newt, and dinosaurs instead of the Xenomorphs (with a Tyrannosaurus rex stand-in for the Alien Queen).
- Spiders replaces the Xenomorphs of Alien with giant spiders, and eventually sets them loose in a city, allowing for giant monster sequences.
- While Mel Brooks is fond of referencing/parodying films, classic and contemporary, in his works, Spaceballs is essentially a cross between Star Wars and It Happened One Night.
- Akira Kurosawa's done a couple of these.
- Throne of Blood was basically Macbeth in medieval Japan.
- Ran could be considered King Lear in medieval Japan.
- Some critics argue that Yojimbo is Red Harvest with samurai. In turn, A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing are Yojimbo with American gunfighters. Kurosawa sued Sergio Leone over the similarity with A Fistful of Dollars.
- A Thousand Acres is King Lear on an American farm.
- With the success of Clueless - a retelling of Jane Austen's Emma set in a modern high school - a wave of similar teen comedy versions of classic fiction appeared on the market:
- She's All That for Pygmalion.
- 10 Things I Hate About You for The Taming of the Shrew.
- Get Over It for A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- Cruel Intentions for Dangerous Liaisons.
- O for Othello.
- She's the Man came along later but is still this to Twelfth Night.
- 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. It also copies a lot from the Doctor Who episode "The End of Time".
- 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 training 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.
- Outland is High Noon on a space station.
- Assault on Precinct 13 is Rio Bravo in 1970s Los Angeles.
- One of the Bring It On sequels, In It to Win It, is West Side Story with cheerleaders instead of gangs. The two squads are even called the Sharks and the Jets.
- Teaching Mrs. Tingle is essentially a (semi)serious/teen thriller rehash of 9 to 5 without the awesome cast (except Dame Helen Mirren of course)
- Airheads borrows numerous plot points from Dog Day Afternoon. This becomes especially apparent in the second half of the film, where the crowd outside comes to side with the hostage-taking lead characters, just like in the original film.
- Easy A is basically a modern version of The Scarlet Letter. This is, of course, discussed and lampshaded several times.
- Kingsman: The Secret Service being a riff on Roger Moore era James Bond, Valentine's plan is quite similar those from The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker: He intends to trigger a massive depopulation of humanity while he and a number of individuals deemed worthy hide out in a secure location.
- Juan In A Million: To The Quiet Earth. Man wakes up finding the world empty of people. Man searches fruitlessly. Man goes crazy from the isolation. Man finally finds another person. Man finally takes matters into his own hands and ends up in an ending that doesn't make much sense.
- Do You Believe?: To Crash. Both are hyperlink stories featuring a large number of central characters with their own storylines that eventually converge in a car crash, though Crash deals with race and Do You Believe? deals with faith.
- The Kevin Sorbo film What If?, in which he plays a wealthy, atheist businessman and is taken by an angel to an alternate universe where he is a happily married preacher with children because he chose to stay with his girlfriend rather than leave her, has many similarities to the Nicolas Cage film The Family Man, where Cage plays an unmarried wealthy businessman who is taken by an angel to an alternate universe where he is a humble, happily married family man for the same reason.
- The Faculty for Invasion of the Body Snatchers. One Genre Savvy character also points out that Invasion took a lot from a book called The Puppetmaster.
- Struck By Lightning for Classical Mythology, the story of Icarus. Although this time not Apollo but Zeus kills the protagonist instead.
- Cloud Atlas: The entire structure of the story bears a very strong similarity to Osamu Tezuka's manga Phoenix, including the time jumps, the themes of resurrection and of intertwined fates, the denouement set After the End and much more. The individual stories also qualify:
- "An Orison of Sonmi~451" has several key similarities to Brave New World, such as the foundation of a dystopia following a Great Offscreen War, mandatory consumer quotas, tailor-made clones, a populace kept happy with psychoactive drugs, and a rebellion informed by modern literature. Sonmi actually reads Brave New World halfway through her story.
- Adam Ewing's plot to Moby-Dick (with Melville and whales being mentioned frequently), and Cavendish's story to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (he saw the film once).
Literature
- Several Discworld novels are referential parodies of famous works. For instance, Wyrd Sisters spoofs Macbeth, Lords and Ladies parodies A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Masquerade parodies The Phantom of the Opera. Night Watch is Les Misérables with time-travel thrown in.
- Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia" can be read as a remake of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter".
- The Star Wars: Medstar Duology is heavily referentially to the show M*A*S*H, including the setting (a backwater jungle), the fact that one character can hear the medical transports before they come in, and even direct Cold War ideological debates.
- The second book in the "Tennis Shoes" series of Mormon fiction is called Gadiantons and the Silver Sword. The heroes must take the titular sword to a land far to the southeast and cast it into a box in a mountain where it was forged, while being pursued by servants of Satan who want to recover it. The similarities with The Lord of the Rings could fill its own page on this wiki, starting with the main character's sister remarking on the similarity of their situation.
- This has been done a number of times with the classic novel The Count of Monte Cristo, resulting in the novel Revenge note by Stephen Fry, SF classic The Stars My Destination, and the Filipino classic El Filibusterismo, right down to the main character's arc.
- The Laundry Files is full of Shout Outs, but the plot of The Jennifer Morgue is a whole plot reference to James Bond. An in-universe whole plot reference: the bad guy uses Post-Modern Magik to make himself untouchable by anyone but a person who resembles James Bond, and as a side effect develops a tendency to monologue.
- The plot of the first Rivers of London book is a whole plot reference of Punch and Judy of all things.
- The Man-Kzin Wars novel The Children's Hour by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling does a whole-plot lift of the movie Casablanca, except at the end when "Ilsa" dumps "Lazlo" and runs off with "Rick".
- The story "Honor in the Night" from the third Star Trek: Myriad Universes book applies the series' For Want of a Nail premise to the Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles". The end result can be summed up as "Citizen Kane in the Star Trek universe".
- Hyperion (the first novel of the Hyperion Cantos) is mostly a recreation of The Canterbury Tales... IN SPACE! Specifically, the device of having pilgrims tell each other stories en route to the site of pilgrimage to keep each other entertained. It also emulates Chaucer in having each tale copy a different style of story that was popular in the writer's time (making Hyperion a series of classic Science Fiction homages wrapped inside of a Chaucer homage). However, unlike Chaucer, Simmons finished Hyperion, and wove it into a four-book saga.
- Trapped on Draconica: The "Eastern Alliance" arc bears a stunning likeness to 300 though the author throws in a number of twists and other elements. Notably: the line about The Emperor fighting "free men"; Gothon's offer to Kazem is similar in theme and purpose as Xerxes; 300 Proud Warrior Race Guys guarding a narrow pass; and a Last Stand.
- Lowlands Of Scotland is a four book series by Liz Curtis Higgs, fairly faithfully retelling the biblical story of Jacob, Leah, Rachel, and Dinah, set in the late-1700s (and early-1800s, post timeskip) Scottish lowlands. It works amazingly well considering the disparity between biblical culture and eighteenth century Scottish lowland culture.
- There and Back Again by Max Merriwell is The Hobbit IN SPACE.
- A Whole Subplot Reference occurs in David Weber's Safehold novels. The on-screen confrontation between Gray Harbor and Duke Tirian in Off Armageddon Reef plays out almost exactly like the off-screen one that occurred in Honor of the Queen (also by Weber) between Howard Clinkscales and Jared Mayhew.
- The Phoenix Guards is described by author Steven Brust as a blatant rip-off of The Three Musketeers. Its sequels follow the sequels to The Three Musketeers more loosely.
- The Sundering is modeled very closely on The Lord of the Rings, except told from the villains' point of view.
- Sweet Valley High: When Jessica lands the lead in the school play, her understudy constantly fawns and gushes over her, etc. Jessica is Genre Savvy enough to be suspicious. Sure enough, the girl is trying to undermine her in order to get the part for herself—All About Eve in high school.
- Subverted in Ethan Banning novel Undertow, which, at first, appears to be a recreation of H.P. Lovecraft's A Shadow over Innsmouth. It then goes in its own direction.
- Conan the Barbarian pastiche Conan and the Treasure of Python by John Maddox Roberts is a complete rip-off of King Solomon's Mines.
- The Four Horsemen Universe: The Short Story "Unto the Last—Stand Fast" is a Fantasy Conflict Counterpart of the Stand of the Swiss Guard
by way of Sabaton's song about the battle, "The Last Stand"
, even using lyrics from the chorus as a Trust Password.
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:
- Has an entire episode based on the movie Ladyhawke, down to the eclipse. It's lampshaded by Prue: "I swear I saw this in a movie once."
- "Dead Man Dating", which was basically Ghost, with a young man killed by gangsters as part of a larger conspiracy and sorting out the mystery behind his death with Piper's help (who becomes a Composite Character of Oda Mae and Molly).
- The Season 5 premiere "A Witch's Tail" has a a mermaid making a deal with the sea witch to become human so she can find love. Phoebe also gets turned into a mermaid, which is an obvious nod to the fact that her actress Alyssa Milano was who Ariel was modelled after.
- 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 (1985) 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. A fifth one, "Kill Zone", was essentially The Andromeda Strain just replacing the virus' effects from instant blood clotting to Rapid Aging and changing the climactic self-destruct sequence from trying to stop it to having Mac and Pete pulling an Outrun the Fireball.
- 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:
- The Pertwee-era story "Planet of the Daleks" is a near remake of the Hartnell-era story "The Daleks".
- Seasons 12-14 (Tom Baker's "Gothic Horror" period) did an awful lot of these, due to a showrunner who heavily mined old Horror and science fiction films and tropes and Doctorised them:
- The climactic episode of "Robot" is King Kong.
- "Genesis of the Daleks" is another reference to "The Daleks".
- "Planet of Evil" is based on Forbidden Planet, which itself was a whole-plot reference to The Tempest. It also uses elements from Universal's Jekyll & Hyde.
- The main plot in "The Brain of Morbius" is a reference to the Hammer Horror versions of the Frankenstein's Monster story.
- "Pyramids of Mars" is Blood From The Mummys Tomb, a Hammer Horror movie.
- The Fourth Doctor story "The Deadly Assassin" is The Manchurian Candidate as well as a riff off Who Shot JFK? urban legends, casting the Doctor in the role of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Master as the Government Conspiracy. It also homages The Phantom of the Opera, oddly.
- "The Robots of Death" is a mashup of Isaac Asimov's work, particularly his Baley/Olivaw books (especially in the subplot concerning the human and robot detective team). Only the plot structure itself is Ten Little Murder Victims. And certain aesthetic elements are taken from Metropolis.
- "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" is the Hammer Horror film The Terror Of The Tongs, but incorporating elements of Sherlock Holmes.
- "The Invisible Enemy" is a "Fantastic Voyage" Plot.
- In "The Invasion of Time", the Doctor is placed in the role of an important politician, from where he starts pretending to be mad so he can get away with saying outrageous things while investigating the guilt of the corrupt. Danish-style.
- The classic serial "The Androids of Tara" is The Prisoner of Zenda.
- The Fourth Doctor stories "Underworld" and "The Horns of Nimon" are based closely on Classical Mythology; the Argosy and the Minotaur, respectively. The Doctor even lampshades the second one; after he reminds Seth to repaint his ship so the Anethians know he was successful, he tells Romana that "the last time anything like this happened", he forgot and it caused a lot of trouble.
- "The Twin Dilemma", the Sixth Doctor's regeneration episode, is a Darker and Edgier version of the Fifth Doctor's regeneration story, "Castrovalva" — both are regeneration stories about the Doctor trying to pull himself together after a Freak Out! while godlike child geniuses warp the fabric of reality.
- "Silver Nemesis" to The Ring of the Nibelung, with various groups trying to get a powerful item. De Flores lampshades this.
- The Sinking Ship Scenario episode "Voyage of the Damned" is The Poseidon Adventure.
- The Arc concerning the romance between the Doctor and River Song, beginning in "Silence in the Library" and continuing on, references the plot of The Time Traveller's Wife.
- The Eleventh Doctor story "Victory of the Daleks" is a reference to the Second Doctor story "The Power of the Daleks". Both stories center around Daleks pretending to be servile to humans, with only the Doctor knowing the Cassandra Truth of their danger — the "Victory" Daleks say "I am your SOL-dier" with the same emphasis as how the "Power" Daleks say "I am your SER-vant". Both stories also contain a Mad Scientist (Lesterson in "Power" and Bracewell in "Victory") who turns out to be a Dalek stooge — although Bracewell is a Dalek android, and Lesterson is driven to side with them via Gaslighting. The main difference is that in "Victory of the Daleks", The Bad Guy Wins but the tone is otherwise idealistic and romantic, and "Power of the Daleks" is Darker and Edgier thanks to a Crapsack World setting where everyone has Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
- Another story in the same season, "The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood", has virtually the same plot as the Third Doctor's "Doctor Who and the Silurians".
- "Deep Breath", the Twelfth Doctor's introductory story, borrows an awful lot of elements from the Fourth Doctor's introductory story, "Robot".
- In "Time Heist", our heroes and some weird new allies have to rob a corrupt high-security alien bank with a wildly ruthless female boss. Where have we heard that before?
- "Mummy on the Orient Express" is Murder on the Orient Express...IN SPACE and with A MUMMY!
- 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 UNCLE 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 season 1 episode "The Nox" also feels like something of a modern update of the classic Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy".
- 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.
- Numerous episodes of Psych do this, typically with heavy Lampshading from Shawn and Gus.
- The appropriately titled 100th episode, "100 Clues", abounds with references to Clue, even including three of the actors and multiple endings.
- The episode "Last Night Gus" is based on The Hangover.
- "Shawn and Gus in Drag...Racing" actually manages to be a Whole Plot Reference to both Point Break and The Fast and the Furious. Shawn and Gus infiltrate a group of adrenaline junkie car thieves when one of their members is murdered, but the two of them conflict over whether the leader is a charismatic but dangerous criminal like Bohdi (and the killer), or an Anti-Hero like Dom. Turns out he was the killer.
- "The Head, The Tail, The Whole Damn Episode" is one to Jaws with the twist that their Quint Expy was the killer, not the shark.
- "Heeere's Lassie!" for The Shining, with Lassiter in the role of Jack.
- 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.
- The Legends of Tomorrow episode "Phone Home" is, as the title suggests, one massive homage to E.T., with Young Ray as Elliot and a baby Dominator as E.T.
- The entire first season of Mr. Robot can be seen as one to Fight Club with the disenchanted main character joining up with a subversive group to destroy major corporations and "free" the people. In both cases, the subversive group is led by a charismatic man who turns out to be a figment of the main character's imagination. The main difference is cyber-terrorism instead of domestic terrorism.
- Several X-Files episodes were constructed this way.
- "Eve", which begins with two men who live on opposite sides of the country and have identical daughters being murdered in an identical fashion at the exact same time, is a re-working of The Boys from Brazil (1978). The episode's debt to the movie is most apparent in the reveal of the clones: in both cases, the investigators think they are investigating murders, and are taken aback half-way through when they realise the kids have more than family tragedy in common.
- "Beyond the Sea" is structured like The Silence of the Lambs (1991), with Scully in the role of Clarice Starling and Boggs as Hannibal Lecter.
- "Unusual Suspects" is a play on The Usual Suspects (1995). Like the movie, it begins with the cops arriving at a crime scene where it's not clear exactly what has happened. One of the suspects arrested at the scene begins to tell the story. But can he be believed?
Music
- King Kong from Daniel Johnston's Yip/Jump Music is basically the entire plot of the film King Kong in song.
- The video for the Anthrax song Inside Out plays out like the plot of The Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet".
- Wonderwall's "Song For You" video is a reenactment of "Overload" by the Sugababes. The songs themselves are distinct.
- Slint's "Good Morning, Captain" is based off of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
- "Little Red Riding Hood" by Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs is from the Big Bad Wolf's perspective.
- Within Temptation:
- "Hand Of Sorrow" is about Fritz from Realm of the Elderlings.
- "Jillian" is based on Deverry.
- "Ice Queen" is about The Snow Queen.
- Fall Out Boy's video for the version of "Irresistible" with Demi Lovato serves as a Whole Plot Reference and a psuedo-sequel to *NSYNC's video for "It's Gonna Be Me". The concept of the video not only allowed them to commentate on their status as "accepted underdogs" in the mid-2010s pop scene and give a respectful shoutout to one of the biggest boy bands ever, but also let them goof off with long time friend Demi Lovato and two-fifths of N*SYNC.
- Daughtry's "Waiting For Superman" contains multiple references to Superman to describe a woman.
- Nick Cave's "More News From Nowhere" has two stanzas loaded with references to The Odyssey.
- "Clarissa" by Mindless Self Indulgence is one big reference to Clarissa Explains It All.
- "Monster" by Meg And Dia is based off a short story inspired by East of Eden.
- "A Girl Like You" by The Smithereens retells the story of Say Anything......which is pretty bad since the song was commissioned for the film. The song ended up getting rejected from the film, but released as a single separately.
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.
- The storyline in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy dealing with the Golgafrincham B Ark is a reference to the Doctor Who storyline "The Ark In Space", with the Captain even giving a Title Drop to that storyline in his dialogue.
- Big Finish Doctor Who:
- In keeping with the "gothic horror" vibe of Season 14, "The Valley of Death" is Heart of Darkness with a bit of She.
- "Return of the Rocket Men" borrows heavily from various Spaghetti Western stories, but the final encounter particularly references A Fistfulof Dollars with Steven's virtually identical plan for defeating the gangster terrorising the town.
- The third season of Revolting People had "A Kiss is Just a Kiss", in which Sam found himself in s version of Casablanca, and "Over the Rainbow", in which Mary went Off to See the Wizard.
Tabletop Games
- The d20 Modern adventure A Funny Thing Happened At Carousel #5 is pretty much a Choose Your Own Adventure version of What's Up, Doc?, even having Expies of most of the cast as Non-Player Characters (and one of them even being named after director Peter Bogdanovich!)
Theater
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and the Tim Burton film version, give the titular barber a backstory inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo.
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:
- 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.
- The Mass Effect 3 mission "Rannoch: Geth Fighter Squadrons" has Shepard get Brain Uploaded into a very TRON-like computer world, where Shep has to fight bad code.
- 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.
- Final Fantasy:
- The plotline in Final Fantasy VII concerning Cloud's rivalry with Sephiroth is based on Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro.
- The plot of Final Fantasy XV was largely inspired by Hamlet, though the more explicit plot points from it somewhat dissolved during the director changeover. It was also influenced by William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, though retains little from this other than some aesthetics.
- 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.
- Half-Life takes place in a secret base where teleportation experiments are being carried out. Despite initial successes, horrifying creatures from a different dimension soon come streaming out of the portals, overrun the facility, and turn the humans into mindless monsters. A lone man fights through the chaos, enters the alien dimension through a teleporter, and kills their leader by shooting it in its exposed brain. Sound familiar?
Web Animation
- Nomad of Nowhere is a western/fantasy/anime mashup that follows two women, the tough-as-nails Captain Toth and her cute-as-a-button companion Skout, hot on the heels of the Nomad, an enigmatic individual with mysterious powers, the largest bounty in the world on his head and a surprisingly gentle nature. It's Rooster Teeth meets Trigun.
- Episode 3 of Tomorrows Nobodies is essentially the plot of Half Baked mixed with Daddy Day Care.
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
- AH.com: The Series is fond of them. Examples include:
- Snakes on a Plane - "Sealions On An Airship"
- The Poseidon Adventure - "The Ship Sank - DEAL WITH IT!"
- Red Dwarf - "A Present From The Future" is an homage to the episode "Out Of Time" and is even named after a working title of it.
- The Wizard of Oz - "Story Hcour"
- Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man and every other Charlton Heston film - "The Next To The Last Omega Man"
- Indiana Jones - in both "Dry Dock" and more obviously "Montana Howery and the Mantle of N00b"
- Fantastic Voyage - "Crap-tastic Voyage"
- X-Men - "C-Men"
- Bubba Ho Tep - "Return Of The King"
- Star Trek: The Original Series, specifically "Arena" - "Arena Of Death And Pain And Other Bad Things"
- Mad Max - "Luakels Of The Wasteland"
- King Kong (1933), Gone with the Wind and Planet of the Apes (again) - "To A Theatre Near You"
- The Matrix - "The Thandrix"
- Casino Royale (2006) - "Casino Imperiale"
- Also, series spinoffs AH.com Wars and Luaky Commer are Affectionate Parodies based off each installment of Star Wars and Harry Potter respectively.
- The Nostalgia Critic
- It isn't immediately apparent from the onset, but the review of Scooby-Doo is actually one of these to Star Trek: The Next Generation's series finale, "All Good Things...", right down to the dialog toward the end. The Critic takes up the role of Picard, while his deceased guardian angel, Roger, is Q.
- His review of We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story is one of these to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with him as Raoul Duke and numerous references to the Johnny Depp film version.
- The review of The Shining (the 1997 mini-series closely adapted from the novel, with a screenplay written by Stephen King) is a remake of the more famous Stanley Kubrick movie, with the Nostalgia Critic as a Jack Torrance Expy.
- His review of The Matrix starts out as a remake of the same film's plot, but in the sequels seems to go off in a different direction, ultimately turning out to be one to Dark City, using the exact same villains and premise.
- To Boldly Flee is one of these to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, with Ma-Ti as Spock and a mysterious hole near Jupiter as the collapsing Genesis Planet.
- The plot of Season 2 of Noob is basically The Lord of the Rings: an unexpected and weak character (Frodo / Sparadrap) gets a cursed item (the One Ring / the hacked staff) and has to travel to a hostile area at the end of the world to get rid of it. One member of his party betrays him to steal the item and use it himself (Boromir / Omega Zell).
- Tamanous of the Brackenwoods is The Hound of the Baskervilles in the early 21st century Hoh Rainforest. With werebeasts and a female protagonist.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons has done a few episodes like this. The Jazz Singer, 101 Dalmatians, Mary Poppins, Lord of the Flies...
- "Treehouse of Horror" featured a sequence based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", with Homer as the narrator and Bart as the titular bird. This was later done in "Simpsons Bible Stories", "Simpsons Tall Tales", "Tales from the Public Domain", and "Simpsons Christmas Stories".
- The episode "Cape Feare" deserves special mention for its loving homage to...uh, Cape Fear—both the original and the remake. This episode established the film's main theme as Sideshow Bob's leitmotif, and it's fair to say that the music is now remembered more as Bob's theme than it is the film's.
- In the show's early seasons, any plot that focused on Mr. Burns is likely to be a whole plot reference to Citizen Kane. It's so prevalent, the writing staff have speculated that it's probably possible to reconstruct the entire movie scene-for-scene with clips from the show. The episodes "Rosebud," and "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish" are of special note.
- There was also the Flowers for Algernon-esque episode where it's revealed that the reason for Homer's stupidity is because he stuck a crayon up his nose as a kid and it got lodged in his brain. Removing it turns him into a genius, but he eventually finds that he's unhappy being a genius and gets another crayon jammed up his nose to reverse it.
- The episode "Marge On The Lam" is essentially Thelma & Louise with a reduction in violence (car theft vs. murder), and an increase in satire (a sub-plot with the kids staying at home looked over by Lionel Hutz, the iconic final scene from the film is not done by Marge and her friend, but by Wiggum and Homer (unwillingly), and they are saved by a gigantic landfill on the bottom of the canyon).
- "Barthood" is a Bart Simpson take on Boyhood. Lampshaded at the end where Bart asks Homer if he liked that movie and Homer says, "Oh, is that what this was?"
- Futurama:
- The 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 episode "Parasites Lost" is a "Fantastic Voyage" Plot, but more specifically it's an homage to the Doctor Who serial "The Invisible Enemy", such as using the conceit of having shrunken duplicates that allow Fry to explore his own body — specifically his own brain — along with a character named Leela.
- "T: The Terrestrial" is obviously just ET The Extraterrestrial except the alien and human role are switched around.
- The Ren & Stimpy Show had an episode called "A Yard Too Far" that was basically the same plot as Yogi Bear's "Pie Pirates" episode except that the dog is replaced with a baboon and pies are replaced with hog jowls.
- Garfield and Friends was very fond of these, especially in its US Acres sequences.
- Was the whole point of Alf Tales, a Spin-Off of the Animated Adaptation of Alf.
- Rugrats
- An episode where Tommy's maternal grandfather tells them the story of Passover, which the babies imagine themselves in, while a later episode did the same with the story of Hanukkah.
- Another episode involves Suzie dreaming she is Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
- An episode based on Flowers for Algernon, replacing Charly's temporarily heightened intelligence with Chuckie's temporarily heightened sense of smell.
- An It's a Wonderful Plot episode.
- There's also one where Angelica and Susie remade Thelma & Louise.
- "Fugitive Tommy," is an obvious take on The Fugitive.
- Strawberry Shortcake:
- The 2003 version has retold "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty" and "Rapunzel". The retelling of Rapunzel is basically In-Name-Only, as the title character is already a princess, but so wild and free-spirited that her tutor places her in a tower to keep her from being distracted from her lessons in being proper royalty (super-long hair is apparently very regal).
- Another episode is "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.
- Jim Henson's Muppet Babies often has the kids imagining themselves as the characters in various well-known stories.
- Done in the Adventures from the Book of Virtues episode "Courage" (1998), when Aristotle the prairie dog tells Zach the story of "Zach and the Beanstalk", in which Zach plays the character of Jack.
- Family Guy did Poltergeist, Back to the Future and Rocky III, as well as Family Guy Presents: Laugh It Up, Fuzzball for Star Wars. Completely averted with "Peter Griffin Presents The King and I".
- American Dad!:
- A whole episode is 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 The 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."
- Steve's plot from "Far-Break Hotel" is a reference to Somewhere in Time.
- 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-monster in 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 original's boring plot and surrealism of the situation play out for laughs. Sealab still explodes at the end, of course.
- Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law does the same thing in "Turner Classic Birdman" — introduced by Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osbourne as if it were an old movie on TCM.
- Animaniacs is made out of this, doing cartoons inspired by sources such as Apocalypse Now ("Hearts of Twilight") and Duck Soup ("King Yakko").
- Tiny Toon Adventures:
- 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").
- They also have an episode that is a recreation of Citizen Kane with Montana Max as Charles Foster Kane (saying "ACME!" instead of "Rosebud") although it turned out he was actually yelling "ACNE!".
- Star Trek starring Furball, Plucky and Hampton.
- Indiana Jones with Buster.
- And Superman with Babs.
- The Arthur episode D.W. Tale Spins was a Whole Plot Reference to The Odyssey, of all things. The various characters from the show stood in as the figures from the story.
- Pinky and the Brain
- A parody of The Third Man titled "The Third Mouse". This is 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.
- Mouse of La Mancha was a parody of Man of La Mancha, complete with Framing Story, as the Brain told the other lab mice the story of "Don Cerebro".
- The Animated Adaptation of Spaceballs consists 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.
- Adventures of the Gummi Bears (of all shows) has a whole episode based around The Bridge on the River Kwai (of all films), in which Gruffi Bear decides to build a bridge that will last forever but realizes he has to destroy it when Duke Igthorn uses it to mobilize his army.
- South Park:
- 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 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, Hannibal Lecter's scenes in The Silence of the Lambs and You Got Served.
- There are dozens of minor references to Star Trek, and at least three whole plot references: "Dagger of the Mind/Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods", "The Galileo Seven/City on the Edge of Forever (Flashbacks)", and "Miri/The Wacky Molestation Adventure", although the latter is also a whole plot reference to Children of the Corn.
- Invoked in the Game of Thrones parody: Cartman sends Butters to visit George R.R. Martin to find out how A Song of Ice and Fire ends because he doesn't know what to do.
- And in a situation that drove Butters/Professor Chaos to hallucination was "Simpsons Did It!", where all of his nefarious plots were things that "The Simpsons" had done already. Chef lampshades this trope, along with pointing out some incidents of it that "The Simpsons" had engaged in before.
- 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.
- Codename: Kids Next Door has done this many times, usually the genre of film can be discovered by the character in the lead role. Numbuh Five is whenever it's a straight adventure film (Indiana Jones or Pirates of the Caribbean). Numbuh Two has become the star of various horror flick parodies and a few Film Noirs. Anything in a genre that borrows from James Bond goes to Numbuh One.
- The entire second season of Freakazoid! is composed of whole-episode parodies, from The Godfather to The Island of Doctor 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").
- Transformers Animated:
- The "Decepticon Air" episode is basically one large send up to Die Hard, with a touch of Con Air, obviously.
- The "A Bridge Too Close" two-parter takes some inspiration from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
- Hey Arnold! loved to do this a lot with a lot of semi-obscure movies/radio shows/etc like Marty, Birdman of Alcatraz, The 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 and Padme Amidala for Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. But that's not all! We get one of Gunga Din with Jar Jar standing in for the bhisti, one of Seven Samurai, and one of Godzilla.
- 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 episode "Monstrosi-Dee-Dee", where Dee Dee repeatedly turns into a monster and back with Dexter none the wiser, is based on the Bugs Bunny short Hyde and Hare.
- Bob's Burgers:
- "The Belchies" to The Goonies, telling how the Belcher kids, Jimmy Jr, Zeke and the Pesto Twins go into an abbandoned taffy factory after an old story of Ted leads them to believe there's a treasure hidden there. Louise even befriends a strange creature in the sewers (a taffy statue).
- "The Deepening" to Jaws, where Mr. Fischoeder buys a large mechanical shark to the amusement park. The shark ends up getting loose and destroying the town. The final scene on the restaurant has Bob and Teddy facing the shark in a similar manner that the boat scene plays out in the movie.
- "O.T. The Outside Toilet" to ET The Extraterrestrial, in which Gene befriends a super technological toilet left in the woods. With the kids help, he tries to save it from a man trying to take it away.
- "The Frond Files", Louise's story is one to The Exterminator, in which Frond sends a robotic version of himself from the future to try to kill her, for humiliating him during a ceremony.
- "The Runway Club" is one to The Breakfast Club, telling the story about the Belcher Kids, Tammy, Jocelyn, Zeke and Jimmy Jr. stuck on detention on a saturday with the pesky Mr. Frond watching over, down to even using a parody song of "Don't You (Forget About Me)".
- "Midday Run" is one to the 1993 movie The Fugitive.
- The plot of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Squeaky Boots" is one long shout-out to Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Likewise, the episode "Club SpongeBob" is this to Lord of the Flies.
- The Beetlejuice cartoon has 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 (1982) 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 Thomas the Tank Engine episode "Edward and Spencer" is reminiscent of The Tortoise and the Hare.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic :
- "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 Raiders of the Lost Ark, with ponies.
- "Dragonshy" is basically The Hobbit with Fluttershy as Bilbo and Twilight as Gandalf. The first sign of the red dragon? Smog
- "Wonderbolts Academy" is Top Gun with an interesting twist: Rainbow Dash isn't being Maverick, she is Ice Man, with a new Always Someone Better pony taking the Maverick role; the lesson being that over-confidence and disregard of rules and team-work is a terrible and dangerous thing. Also, there isn't a game of homoerotic beach volleyball.
- "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?" includes shared dreams, plenty of reality-warping (beyond Pinkie Pie), and a guilt-powered antagonist that's been dogging the protagonist in dream after dream until (s)he finally lets go of what's been eating away at the protagonist's psyche. Like Inception.
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Book 3-Chapter 2 episode "The Headband" is a WPR towards Footloose of all things.
- The final two episodes of Season 2 are a WPR to The Empire Strikes Back.
- 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 another towards The Wizard. They even have a Power Glove-like device that turns to be a dud.
- And then there's the episode "Weekend At Benson's". Three guesses what that one is about...
- The Canadian animated show Olliver's Adventures had one episode that was basically a kid-friendly version of Fight Club.
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius episode "Monster Hunt" is a retelling of Jaws, with Jimmy as Hooper, Carl as Brody, Sheen as Drunk!Hooper and Recurring Extra Captain Betty as Quint.
- The King of the Hill episode "A Firefighting We Will Go" references Rashomon with Hank, Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer as volunteer firemen telling their stories to the fire chief about what caused the fire house to burn down.
- Done frequently on Duck Dodgers, usually with a Planet of Hats as a justification for putting Dodgers in a completely different genre. (Planet of The '70s in "Diamond Boogie", Planet of Japanese Media Tropes in "The Menace of Maninsuit", etc.)
- There were two shorts giving A Day in the Limelight for Villain Protagonist Marvin the Martian. Both have Marvin under attack and rescued by Commander K9. However Marvin is oblivious to the attack and thinks it's K9 who's assaulting him, just like Porky and Sylvester in several classic Looney Tunes shorts. The second one also riffed on Classic Disney Shorts, playing up K9's resemblance to Pluto by making the enemies the Goofy Gophers, Warner's answer to Chip 'n Dale.
- Ned's Newt: The episode "Citizen Ned".
- Punky Brewster: The animated episode "Punky's Millions" is basically Brewster's Millions with the millions being a game show prize instead of an Unexpected Inheritance.
- The Looney Tunes Show finale "SuperRabbit" is a whole plot reference to Superman II, with the Looney Tunes cast filling for most of the characters.
- The second half of the second season of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes! infamously began to aim for a feel more reminiscent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, under Jeph Loeb 's leadership and the massive success of the 2012 Avengers film. Among these new touches were the episode "Powerless" coming pretty darn close to being an animated version of Thor. To clarify, Loki pilots the Destroyer to kill Thor, who has been stripped of his powers and rendered a mortal, which is all supposed to teach Thor a lesson in humility and of the strength of mortals as in the film but completely ignores Thor's characterization in the series. The sequel series Avengers, Assemble! remakes the final battle of the Avenger's film with the help of Impossible Man.
- Back at the Barnyard: "Pig Amok" is the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Amok Time" with Otis as Kirk and Pig as Spock.
- Hulk And The Agents Of SMASH: "A Druff Is Enough": The heroes are distracted from their battle with aliens by cute, furry, voracious, and rapidly-reproducing creatures who eventually save the day. Like "The Trouble with Tribbles".
- The entire series of Over the Garden Wall is structured in accordance with Dante's Inferno.
- For such a light series, Littlest Pet Shop (2012) takes from some rather dark sources. "Heart of Darkness" not only bases itself on Heart of Darkness but also Apocalypse Now, "Sleeper" takes heavily from Weekend at Bernie's, "Back Window" is a retelling of Rear Window, and "In the Loop" lifts most of the premise (including the solution) from Groundhog Day. On a softer note, "A Day at the Museum" is done in the general style of Garfield's Feline Fantasies.
- Ivanhoe: The King's Knight is about freeing King Richard I from his Austrian prison much like The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Robert Taylor Ivanhoe film.
- Phineas and Ferb:
- "The Wizard of Odd" has Candace taking on the Dorothy role.
- "Excaliferb" is mostly a parody of The Princess Bride, with Karl reading the story to a sick Monogram, along with some The Lord of the Rings and Monty Python and the Holy Grail references thrown in.
- Summer Belongs to You is an updated and modified version of Around the World in 80 Days, with a wager to travel around the world, numerous unexpected setbacks, and finally coming down to the last tick of the clock.
- The BoJack Horseman episode "Fish Out of Water" borrows much of its plot from Lost in Translation, with a washed-up actor going to a dreamlike foreign country to shoot promo material, not being able to understand the language, and trying to connect with a woman.
- The Mighty Magiswords episode "Grup Jam" is a huge love letter to Space Jam.
- The Real Ghostbusters episode "Citizen Ghost", well the reference is obvious.
- Peter Pan & the Pirates has an episode based on Alice in Wonderland.
- More than you can count in Bobby's World as the entire concept of the show is based around Bobby's imagination making parodies of famous movie plots. For a 6 year old Bobby is quite a cinephile and has seen lots of movies that are nor even for kids.
- The Cleveland Show episode "Die Semi-Hard" was a thirty-minute borderline Shot-for-Shot Remake of Die Hard. Justified because the framing story is Cleveland actually telling "Die Hard" as a story to pass time while he's posing on a Nativity scene.
- Robot Chicken's sixth season had a skit parodying Of Mice and Men with the cast replaced with characters from Rocky and Bullwinkle. The skit ends with Rocky about to kill Bullwinkle in the same manner as George killing Lennie.