At least four Brazilian soap operas did this. O Cravo e a Rosa was The Taming of the ShrewIN 1920s SÃO PAULO! (the main characters were even still Catarina, Bianca and Julião Petruchio.) Mandala was Oedipus the KingIN 1987 RIO! (the main characters retained their Greek names: Jocasta, Edipo, Laio and Creonte)note The Parental Incest was toned down to just a kiss by the censorship. Some called it a hypocritical move since the violence wasn't censored: a character was killed by serveral shots on-screen. And Pygmalion - best known by some asMy Fair Lady - earned both the indicatively titled Pigmalião 70 (PygmalionWITH A MAN IN 1970 RIO DE JANEIRO!) and the 2016 one Totalmente Demais (PygmalionWITH MODELS IN 2016 RIO! And not only the makeover girl was still named Eliza, but the series was described by its writers as PygmalionmeetsTop Model).
Both the old and new series are heavily inspired by series creator Glen Larson's Mormon faith, making it effectively The Book of MormonIN SPACE!
Hmm...the twelve tribes colonies, originated from Eden Kobol, was forced to move from their homeland to find a promised land Earth that only was known from legend, all due to the actions of a certain man, who after receiving visions and power from a higher being, eventually become the founder and leader of Judaism Christianity a monothestic religion and preach about grace, and after wandering around the desert space for forty four years, manage to arrive on a lush green place planet that is eventually OUR Earth, all according to the plan of the higher being. Hmm, sounds like a familiar book...
The re-imagined series gave us the episode "The Captain's Hand" = Crimson TideIN SPACE!
Blake's 7 was The Dirty Dozen mixed with Robin HoodIN SPACE! In a specific episode example, the Space Rats, the antagonists in the episode "Hyperdrive", were criminal outlaw bikers IN SPACE!
The Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode "Space Vampire" is Dracula...In Space, complete with a wrecked ship with a ship's log that documents the deaths of the crew and a passenger named William Helsing from "New London"
The Dateline segment To Catch a Con Man is To Catch a Predator WITH CHRIS HANSEN TELLING CON MEN TO TAKE A SEAT OVER THERE INSTEAD OF ONLINE PREDATORS!
Parodied on The Daily Show during a short in which Jon Stewart, Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert are TV producers trying to come up with a new reality show. At one point, Colbert complains that "Every pitch [Stewart] makes is just one of mine with the words IN SPACE added to the end."
Half of all Doctor Who episodes ever are "Hammer Horror/Classic Literature/Contemporary Movie/Greek Mythology etc., WITH ALIENS!" Doctor Who author Ben Aaronovitch once said that "Talent borrows, genius steals, and Doctor Who authors get it off the back of a lorry, no questions asked." (He was talking specifically about his novel, The Also People, which was The Culture! IN DOCTOR WHO!)
"Have you seen?! There are these things, these great big space rhino things, I mean, rhinos from space, and we're on the Moon! Big space rhinos, with guns! ON THE MOON!"
"The Big Bang": The Doctor once took Amy to "Space Florida", and at the end receives a phone call about an incident onboard the Orient Express IN SPACE!
The Duck Factory featured a young Jim Carrey tasked with rebooting a stale cartoon show. After finding he'd just proposed killing off the producer's favorite character, he notes the producer's office decor and saves the day by adding, "did I mention this all happens IN SPACE?"
The Expanse isn't preciselyDon QuixoteIN SPACE! but it borrows enough thematic elements to feel that way.
However, quite a bit of the plot-line concerning Detective Miller's search for Julie Mao can be summarized as LauraIN SPACE!
Family Matters went on for nine seasons before some bright crayon decided Urkel would be even better IN SPACE! Urkel returned. The show did not. Cracked.com used this as an example of TV shows that went beyond Jumping the Shark and just completely lost their shit.
Far Out Space Nuts is a Saturday morning Gilligan's IslandIN SPACE! Complete with Bob Denver playing Gilligan's Expy. "I said LUNCH, not LAUNCH!"
Farscape, with varying degrees of delight, made several such episodes. Possibly the most memorable is the one where, locked inside his own mind, Crichton turns his existence into a Looney Tunes cartoon, with a lot of reference to the Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons.
For that matter, the entire premise of the show is really just Alice in Wonderland... in SPACE. It has also been compared to Blake's 7WITH A BUDGET.
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and Power Rangers Zeo were aversions, and not just because they were the originals. Production took the seasonal themes from Super Sentai such as dinosaurs and Chinese mythological creatures for Mighty Morphin Seasons 1 and 2, and ancient world cultures (or something) for Zeo and downplayed them so that things were kept as generic as possible - so stuff was recycled, but not IN SPACE!Mighty Morphin' Season 3 and Alien Rangers (a mini-series that served to transition to Zeo that you could count as Season 3.5), however, went a fair way towards being Power Rangers AS NINJAS!
Power Rangers in Space: Despite the name, averted! The move to outer space brought a lot of changes to the status quo, such as more complex villains and mostly abandoning the City of Adventure setup in favor of searching alien planets for their kidnapped mentor. Some of these things were then recycled into future seasons, others weren't.
Gene Roddenberry also described James T. Kirk as a space-age Horatio Hornblower in the book The Making of Star Trek (1968).
The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Balance of Terror" is the 1957 WWII submarine movie The Enemy BelowIN SPACE! Even the bearing of the unidentified initial contact and the captain's maneuvering orders to the helm are copied nearly verbatim. The Romulan ship is cramped and has lots of piping and conduits in all background scenes. The Enterprise's phasers act like depth charges, and at one point the Enterprise and the Romulan ship both go to silent running, fearing to talk loudlylest the other vessel hear them.
The Romulans in this episode were The Roman EmpireIN SPACE!, as exemplified by Mark Lenard's dignified Centurion character. They didn't stay that way, though. Compare the Romulans in Star Trek (2009) reboot movie.
The much-maligned Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Meridian" was, as admitted by producer Ira Steven Behr, BrigadoonIN SPACE! Recalling this idea at a later date, Behr admitted: "I am a moron."
The original concept for Deep Space Nine (before they shifted the location from a Federation colony planet to a space station after J. Michael Straczynski pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount) would have been Star TrekON LAND!
The episode "Starship Down" is basically Das BootIN SPACE!
The episode "Duet" of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a Recycled In Space take on the play The Man in the Glass Booth. The main difference is that the latter is about Nazis and their victims, while the former centers on the Cardassians, who are A Nazi by Any Other Name."
The episode "Explorers", in which Sisko builds a copy of an ancient Bajoran solar-sail spaceship and proves it could travel as far as Cardassia, is essentially The Voyage of the Kon-TikiIN SPACE!
In the episode "Melora", Jadzia Dax lampshades that Melora Pazlar's storyline bears some similarity to The Little MermaidIN SPACE!
White Dwarf is Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard in a science-fiction setting; with an added subplot adding elements of political intrigue and exploration of prejudice and tolerance.
was The Taming of the Shrew IN 1920s SÃO PAULO! (the main characters were even still Catarina, Bianca and Julião Petruchio.) Mandala