"It's a shame that there was never a good Alien game on the NES... Oh wait, actually I take it back! There were some good Alien games on the NES! They're called Contra and Metroid! Yeah."
While a Spiritual Successor is for any plot that is reused without the same setting/characters, a Spiritual Adaptation is when the plot and even characters are used in a different medium. This often occurs because the creators in the new medium are not the same creators/producers of the original medium, which means they don't have access to the intellectual property rights of the original storyline.
It's particularly evident with video games; most people have certain movie characters with tons of potential they dream of playing as in an amazing game, yet as most movie licensed games are terrible, there's little chance of that happening. The storyline may deal with the same themes or problems faced by a very similar cast of characters, but without getting the license, the creators have put together an original work instead. Fans check out the new work, and recognize story elements from a work in a different medium.
A Sub-Trope of Recycled Premise, where it's the story that is reused for another work. A Sister Trope to Spiritual Successor (where any work that shares the same themes/creators is written in a separate universe), Spiritual Crossover (when one work has the characters encounter Expies from another franchise or work) and Recycled In Space (where the same premise from one work is also reused for a similar but distinct work in another setting). Compare Divorced Installment (where a work did, in fact, begin life as a straightforward adaptation, only to have the Serial Numbers Filed Off during production) and Spiritual Antithesis (where one work has the same characters and themes as its predecessor but done completely different). See X Meets Y, where two or more works are combined together and The Mockbuster where a work doesn't just have similar characters and plot from another work but deliberately rips it off to capitalize on its success.
Examples:
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Comedy
- The European segment of Colin Quinn Long Story Short seems to take a lot of cue from Hetalia: Axis Powers.
Comic Books
- There are many Dungeons & Dragons comics, but the one that captures the spirit of the game the best? Demon Knights.
- There's been plenty of comics based on Star Trek: The Original Series, but only The Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye really captures the spirit of the show, complete with some similar character archetypes. Others feel that it's closest thing to the Firefly continuation that we'll never get.
- Deadpool as a character can be considered something of a gun-toting, katana-wielding spiritual licensee for Freakazoid!
- There has been quite a bit of adaptations of The Leatherstocking Tales in comic book and graphic novel form. The best? The Manga Shakespeare adaptation of the William Shakespeare play King Lear, where the setting is shifted to North America circa 1759 with Lear bringing Chingachgook to mind, as does Gloucester Leatherstocking and his sons the Munro sisters.
- Greg Rucka has openly acknowleged that Queen and Country is a comic adaptation of the cult British Stale Beer spy TV series The Sandbaggers.
- The Walking Dead (and, by extension, its TV series adaptation) is openly acknowledged by its creators to owe a heavy debt to George A. Romero's Living Dead Series and the many films that it inspired. Robert Kirkman, in the introduction to volume one, heaped praise upon Dawn of the Dead (1978) and stated that his intent was to create "the zombie movie that never ends". It even has everybody who dies come back as a zombie as opposed to just those who were bitten by one, a rule that is found throughout Romero's films but is rarely seen in other zombie stories.
- Green Lantern is the best adaptation of E.E. Doc Smith's Lensman ever. Both are Science Fantasy series involving Empathic Weapons created by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens to empower champions who fight with their minds (albeit in different ways). A great many Green Lantern characters resemble ones from Lensman and the general tone of both stories is quite similar as well.
- The Punisher is basically The Executioner in the Marvel Universe.
- Frank Miller has acknowledged that 300 is inspired by The 300 Spartans and thus it serves as an unofficial comic adaptation of the movie albeit heavily stylized. It's got to the point where some regions simply rename the movie to have the same title as the original, as though it were a remake.
- J. D. Salinger and his estate have ensured that there will likely never be an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye for the foreseeable future. Ghost World, however, makes a great substitute, albeit updated for '90s suburbia with a female Holden Caulfield in the form of Enid Coleslaw.
- Alan Moore's V for Vendetta is a comic book adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 with both stories being social satires of specific ideologies (Communism in 1984, Thatcherite conservatism in V For Vendetta) and a totalitarian political party ruling Britain with an iron fist. Unlike 1984, V For Vendetta has the dictatorship being outright overthrown by the main protagonist at the cost of his own life.
- Prez (1973) has a similar premise to cult movie Wild in the Streets - a grassroots campaign helps a young man (24 years old in Wild In the Streets, 20 in Prez) become president of the United States - the similarity is very likely intentional, even if the premise is played on a Lighter and Softer angle.
LARP
- The MagiQuest simulated-adventure franchise, although much lower-tech and modest in scale, is currently the closest that fans of Niven & Barnes' Dream Park can come to savoring the fictional mega-theme park's attractions.
Literature
- Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series will be immediately familiar and fun territory to any Warhammer 40,000 player.
- The Nina Wilde series by Andy McDermott, about a semi-reluctant Adventurer Archaeologist, obviously takes more than a few cues from (and frequently references) Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. However, the number of pitched gun battles in exotic locations and rare vehicles which inevitably explode makes it far more akin to the written form of Uncharted.
- The Hunger Games:
- It's been called an American take on Battle Royale, and for a long time, it was thought that the (then in production) film adaptation would be the closest thing that Americans had to even seeing a legal release of the Battle Royale movie.note This is actually the root of the Fandom Rivalry between the two works, with fans of Battle Royale accusing The Hunger Games of being a ripoff and Hunger Games fans countering that both books draw from similar influences. And on that note...
- It's also been called "The Running Man with teenagers." Both works are set in a dystopian future revolving a televised fight to the death that's used to oppress the populace, the intent of both authors being to satirize contemporary television (game shows in The Running Man, Reality TV in The Hunger Games), politics, and pop culture.
- The best Dungeons & Dragons novel is, without a doubt, The Deed of Paksenarrion.
- Inheritance Cycle is a medieval fantasy adaptation of Star Wars.
- The improbable death scenes of Another make it awfully like a Japanese Final Destination.
- In a rather broad sense, Mogworld is a pretty good novelization of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time.
- Solea Razvan's A Symphony of Eternity series is a mashup of Discworld and Flashman set in a universe akin to Legend of Galactic Heroes only where magic instead of technology is used in this epic Galactic War.
- The Girl With All the Gifts may as well be the novelization of The Last of Us, only with the setting transplanted to England. Both are stories about a Zombie Apocalypse caused by a fungus in the cordyceps
genus jumping to humans, in which a young girl who is immune to the fungus and lives in a symbiotic relationship with it is being transported across a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with zombies and human bandits to a safe zone where scientists will likely slice her brain open to study her immunity. Two of Melanie's protectors in The Girl With All the Gifts, Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks, each correspond to different aspects of the protagonist Joel's personality in The Last of Us, with Justineau being the loving, adoptive parental figure and Parks being the badass killer who develops a grudging respect for Melanie. And both end with the protagonist destroying humanity's hope for a cure for the infection, while implying that the search for a cure was a lost cause to start with.
- The first book of Bravelands is this to The Lion King (1994). Both include a young male lion cub being driven out of his pride (and leaving behind a close female cub) after his father is murdered by another male. The cub is saved by prey animals and is adopted by them, before he eventually ventures off on his own.
- Stephen King's It can easily be read as a literary adaptation of A Nightmare on Elm Street, albeit on a slightly more epic scale, with both IT (in the form of Pennywise) and Freddy Krueger being quick-witted, Faux Affably Evil monsters that prey on children by using supernatural powers to exploit their worst fears. IT's stomping grounds of choice are the sewers beneath the town of Derry, not unlike how Freddy's go-to dreamscape is an underground boiler room reminiscent of where he killed children in life. The 1994 film Wes Craven's New Nightmare takes the influence full-circle by having Freddy turn out to be an ancient demonic entity that latched onto the Nightmare series and took the form of its iconic villain, reminiscent of how IT is something more akin to an Eldritch Abomination. Andrés Muschietti even considered having IT take the form of Freddy at one point in the 2017 adaptation of It (both that film and the Nightmare series were made by New Line Cinema), though he decided that it would be too distracting.
- Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a bit like a loose Gender Flip of Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona, which was published 17 years earlier. Both books are episodic Slices of Life about an average 9-year-old protagonist dealing with the crazy antics of their Annoying Younger Sibling, whom they describe as their "biggest problem," and the climax of both involves the younger sibling destroying something that meant a lot to the protagonist (Ramona ruins Beezus's birthday cake, Fudge eats Peter's pet turtle.) Both books also spawned a series of sequels named after the younger sibling, although the Fudge books keep big brother Peter as the protagonist, whereas the later Ramona books switch the viewpoint from Beezus's to Ramona's.
- Pride and Prejudice can almost be read as a loose retelling of Much Ado About Nothing. Elizabeth corresponds to Beatrice, Darcy is like a Composite Character of Benedick and Don Pedro, Jane and Lydia both correspond to Hero (Jane as Elizabeth/Beatrice's sweet female relative whose briefly loses her love because of a misunderstanding, Lydia as the one whose damaged sexual reputation threatens to disgrace her family), Bingley is like an Adaptational Nice Guy Claudio, the villainous Wickham combines aspects of Don John with the worse side of Claudio, and Caroline Bingley fills out the rest of Don John's role.
- "The Red One", a short story from From a Certain Point of View about R5-D4, the astromech that was almost purchased in place of R2-D2, can be considered a serious version of "Skippy the Jedi Droid" from Star Wars Tales.
- Austin Grossman's Crooked, a horror Alternate History of the Cold War, features Henry Kissinger as an Anti-Villain Humanoid Abomination with necromancer powers and monstrous pacts. The novel works as a prequel to The Venture Bros., where Kissinger fills the same role.
- R. L. Stine said that Goosebumps was inspired by reading Tales from the Crypt comics and watching The Twilight Zone (1959) when he was young. Various books in the series also draw influence from older works, in many cases with just punny titles but also going into plot elements in some.
- Monster Blood, about a novelty slime toy that can move around and eat anything it can envelop, is the series' take on The Blob (1958), albeit with the twist that anything that consumes the titular monster blood will grow in size. A later book, The Blob That Ate Everyone, was a more straightforward homage.
- Say Cheese and Die!, about a Magical Camera whose photographs show the future (including the fates of people and objects photographed with it), draws its inspiration from the Twilight Zone episode "A Most Unusual Camera".
- Night of the Living Dummy, about a Creepy Doll that terrorizes children while driving others to believe that they are acting out, is the Goosebumps version of Child's Play. Stine also said that it was inspired by The Adventures of Pinocchio.
- Welcome to Camp Nightmare shares its twist, that the protagonists are actually aliens who will be heading off to Earth on a mission, with the Twilight Zone episode "Third from the Sun".
- Stine has said that Piano Lessons Can Be Murder, about a piano teacher who enslaves children (or in this case, their disembodied hands) to play the piano forever, was inspired by The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.
- Why I'm Afraid of Bees was inspired by the Robert Sheckley novel Mindswap.
- Phantom of the Auditorium is a straightforward parody of The Phantom of the Opera.
- The Haunted Car is about, well, a Sinister Car that tries to kill people, and is furthermore identified as female (it's possessed by the ghost of a girl who died when she took it on a joyride), while the protagonist is a boy who is obsessed with cars. In other words, it's a kid-friendly version of Christine, though unlike Arnie Cunningham, Mitchell Moinian doesn't become a co-villain himself.
Music
- Songs from the Mountain by Dirk Powell, Tim O'Brien, and John Herrmann was inspired by Cold Mountain, and originally was to have been titled after it before much legal wrangling with the rights holders intervened.
- "Bullet Time" by Tom Smith is The Punisher (2004) as a song. Both are about cops who lose their careers and families to the local crime bosses, and become shells of their former selves as they become homicidal vigilantes.
- Mayday Parade's "Terrible Things" is frequently associated with CLANNAD. It's about a formerly Happily Married man telling his son about his wife who died of a terminal illness years ago.
- LeaF's Surprise Creepy song "MopeMope" is practically a music version of Eversion, featuring what appears to be cute flowery scenery at first and an accompanying jingle that suddenly pulls a complete 180 and turns into a hellscape of otherworldly horrors and nasty music. Both works' creators had to slap on content warnings to make it extra clear that they're not suitable for kids. Its apperance in Muse Dash even features the game scenery randomly "everting" between different kinds, like in early versions of Eversion World 8.
Pinballs
- Both Tee'd Off and No Good Gofers strongly invoke Caddyshack, given they all feature golfers pitted against annoying gophers. Someone even modified a Gofers table into Caddyshack by repainting the cabinet and backglass.
- Hollywood Heat is so close to Miami Vice that it falls into The Mockbuster as a result.
- F-14 Tomcat wants to be Top Gun with more combat, while Gold Wings goes straight into being a shameless mockbuster.
- It's difficult to play Cirqus Voltaire and not be reminded of Cirque du Soleil.
- Inadvertently done with Attack from Mars; it's highly reminiscent of Mars Attacks!, even though Word of Saint Paul insists it's a case of parallel development instead.
- Deliberately invoked with Slick Chick, which was created to capitalize on the then-popularity of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Key Clubs.
- Also deliberately invoked in Gottlieb's Mayfair, which is based on the film version of My Fair Lady.
- Gottlieb's Raven tried to be this for Rambo: First Blood Part II.
- Sega's Sapporo, a pinball game with a skiing theme, was released just before the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan.
- Invoked in Vacation America, which features some very strong parallels to National Lampoon's Vacation.
- America's Most Haunted and Bone Busters are both inspired by Ghostbusters.
- Elvira's House of Horrors is sometimes considered a spiritual Mystery Science Theater 3000 game, as several of the Public Domain Feature Films it utilizesnote were also riffed on by the latter show.
Roleplay
- The forum roleplay Survival of the Fittest, in which a high school class is kidnapped, fitted with explosive collars, brought to an island, and forced to fight to the death, is openly stated by its creators to be inspired by Battle Royale, albeit with the villains being a terrorist organization instead of an authoritarian government.
Tabletop Games
- Heavy Gear is an Armored Trooper VOTOMS game with the setting of Fang of the Sun Dougram.
- If there was ever a tabletop game version of Watership Down, it would be called Bunnies & Burrows.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The Space Marines come almost prepackaged from Robert A. Heinlein. In this case, they double as a Spiritual Antithesis, considering the franchise's very different outlook on Heinlein's militarism.
- Furthermore, calling Warhammer 40000 an expanded adaptation of the Nemesis the Warlock universe wouldn't be too far off the mark. Later publications from the two even started to share writers.
- FATAL is... well, let's be fair. FATAL is probably the worst Berserk RPG ever made, but it's still the closest we'll ever come to a Berserk RPG.
- The board game Thunder Road, the "ram and wreck survival game", is about driving through the desert and fighting with the other drivers. The publishers clearly wanted us to think of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
- Dungeon Lords is Dungeon Keeper: The Board Game.
- In the opening to their RPGnet review of the World of Darkness ripoff Vampire: Undeath, reviewers Darren MacLennan and Wil Hutton argue that many tabletop games are, in some way, heavily inspired by properties from other media. They cite Dungeons & Dragons as owing a heavy debt to The Lord of the Rings (with treants and halflings as, respectively, ents and hobbits), the World of Darkness as inspired by the works of Anne Rice, and Underground as a stealth adaptation of Marshal Law.
- The board game Steampunk Rally is Wacky Races, but Steampunk, and starring history's greatest inventors.
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse is a significantly Darker and Edgier Captain Planet and the Planeteers, given that it's about magical beings tasked by Gaia to battle deformed madmen polluting the Earth For the Evulz.
- GURPS Reign of Steel is very obviously inspired by the Terminator franchise.
- Nemesis is a board game adaptation of Alien in all but name. Its Carnomorphs expansion switches to being a board game adaptation of Dead Space in all but name.
- The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has the World Legacy archetype and its related archetypes, which are based on JRPG characters. The story connecting them all has plenty of similarities to Xenoblade Chronicles in particular.
- The British Boarding School RPGs The Skool Rools (Phil Masters, 1994) and Hellcats & Hockeysticks (Andrew Peregrine, 2009) are very much inspired by molesworth and St. Trinian's respectively.
Theater
- Ever wonder what Romeo and Juliet would look like as a musical set in working-class 1950s New York, with the Montagues and Capulets replaced with rival street gangs? Watch West Side Story and find out.
Theme Parks
- This happens frequently with the haunted houses at Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights event when they don't own the property the house is based on, especially in its earlier years in the 90s and 00s. These days, they're more likely to officially license the property to make a house out of, though the rights to some may be held by other theme parks (namely Disney and Six Flags).
- The RUN series of houses is big on this. The first one from 2001 is this to The Running Man, while the sequel house RUN: Hostile Territory from 2005 is based more on Hostel. The 2015 house RUN: Blood, Sweat, and Fears makes the Running Man influence even more blatant with its '80s retro-apocalypse setting, while also drawing inspiration from The Hunger Games (itself often seen as a YA version of The Running Man; see Literature above).
- 2004's Horror In Wax is this to House of Wax (1953).
- 2005's Demon Cantina is this to From Dusk Till Dawn. They eventually got a From Dusk Till Dawn house in 2014, albeit based on its TV adaptation.
- 2008's Interstellar Terror is this to Event Horizon.
- 2010's Legendary Truth: The Wyandot Estate is this to The Legend of Hell House.
- 2011's The Forsaken is this to The Fog.
- The "Body Collectors" are strongly based off of the Gentlemen from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Hush".
- Universal will likely never be able to use The Joker or Harley Quinn at their parks (not with Six Flags holding the rights to use DC Comics characters), but for the time being, they have Jack and his sidekick Chance, the Monster Clowns who delight in terrorizing, torturing, and killing people with sick games. Chance's 2015 redesign especially is almost a dead ringer for Harley in the Batman: Arkham Series. This became even more apparent when Chance was made the icon of the event in 2016, the same year that Suicide Squad (2016) was released, a decision that many fans believe was made in part to capitalize off of Margot Robbie's popular take on Harley Quinn in that film.
Toys
- Monster High has been described as the closest fans will ever get to a Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School franchise.
- The Grossery Gang action figures in the Putrid Power lineup are often favorably compared to Food Fighters, an 80s action figure line that didn't have any supplemental media to back it up enough to survive longer. The comparison was pushed even further with the Bug Strike wave of action figures, which gave the characters army outfits.
- The Transformers: BotBots line is often compared to the "Changeables" line of Happy Meal toys from McDonald's, being robots that transform from food items.
- The toyline that spawned LEGO Elves: Secrets of Elvendale could easily be considered the closest thing to a Labyrinth LEGO set we have, since it focuses on a teenage girl going on a quest to rescue her younger sibling from a handsome goblin king.
Web Animation
- The Newgrounds flash game Super Adventure Pals is the best Adventure Time platformer that you'll find on the web that isn't actually a licensed Adventure Time game.
- Alvin-Earthworm stated that the Super Mario Bros. Z reboot is, scale-wise, inspired by Asura's Wrath.
- Do you wish The Law of Ueki had more chapters/episodes? You can always watch the countless stick fight animations on YouTube to quench that thirst.
- Death Battle can be seen as a modern, animated successor to the '90s website WWWF Grudge Match, which pit characters from pop culture against each other in hypothetical battles to the death.
- Happy Tree Friends is a real-life version of the Show Within a Show Itchy & Scratchy Show segments from The Simpsons, both being parodies of American animation where the Amusing Injuries are depicted with the gore that would result in real life. There's one key difference, though: while Itchy & Scratchy is intended In-Universe as a children's show (as befitting the satire of The Simpsons), Happy Tree Friends was made for grown-ups.
- Wolf Song: The Movie is a lot like a Survivor Dogs fan-film based around a bunch of original characters. They both involve canines in the wild, feature a lot of bloody fighting, and have similar lore.
- As several fans have pointed out, "The Lost Fable" from RWBY makes for a surprisingly good animated adaptation of The Silmarillion. What certainly helps are the numerous parallels between the two work's respective Big Bads of Salem and Sauron.
Web Comics
- Kill Six Billion Demons is effectively a Planescape comic in all but name. Not only does it feature an identical premise (Portal Crossroad World in the middle of The Multiverse) and share a genre with it, but many of the races and characters are quite evocative of ones from Planescape, and the art style has a similar Dungeon Punk look. The main story even kinda feels like a Deconstruction of the old "what would happen if the Lady of Pain died?" fanfic plot.
- Pixie and Brutus: The comics, which are the amusing and WAFFy adventures of a soft-hearted tough dog with a Roman name and an innocent Cute Kitten, resembles the Looney Tunes short "Feed the Kitty".
Web Videos
- In-universe, this occurs in The Nostalgia Critic's review of The Princess Diaries 2, when the bodyguard says he didn't know they made a video game of The Purge, but the Nostalgia Critic says it's really Grand Theft Auto VI.
- Discussed in Honest Trailers (see under "Animated Films"):
Awesome Voide: And don't tell me there's no way to make a good Fantastic Four movie! It's called The Incredibles, and it's perfect!
- Creep Catchers: Inspired by Dateline's To Catch a Predator. A Canadian grassroots movement (not so much an organization) dedicated to confronting would be child predators. As with Dateline, they pose as children in chatrooms and wait for would be "creeps" to take the bait and arrange a meeting. They will film their encounter and often aggressively persuade the "creep" to own up to their actions in light of the evidence in the chatlogs. The encounter is then posted on social media such as Facebook and Youtube as a shaming tactic. Their encounters with said "creeps" can get confrontational and some of the members have been charged with assault. They are especially noted for the theme song that was created by K-Blitz and adopted by individuals who act as creep catchers. Several individual unaffiliated groups use the name "Creep Catchers". Justin Payne, calls his operation P.O.P or "Prey on Predators" but still has used the K-Blitz theme song.
- Like the aforementioned Death Battle, Epic Rap Battles of History can also be seen as an updating of WWWF Grudge Match for the YouTube age in how it pits both historic figures and pop culture icons against each other, though here, it's done through Battle Rapping rather than an Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
