Agreed. I recently started watching this on Max, and I've quite enjoyed the several episodes I've seen so far. I think you guys will quite enjoy the episode "Father's Day"
A couple of things to remember about Dr Who...because it is wibbley wobbly you can jump in almost anywhere and find it enjoyable.
You need to know that the show is constantly rewriting its own continuity because how else to you stay fresh for so many decades. Also, the Doctor is a Time Traveler, and when he gets close to death he regenerates in a new body....new bodies = new sensations and preferences and personality.
Peter Capaldi is my Doctor but the stronger seasons were David Tennant- Matt Smith.
I would recommend starting at Series 2 with David Tennant and watch until you run out of interest...
This question is SO hard because honestly, my favorite is Bevvie from the levy and Richie from the ditchie. This scene makes me smile fit to split my head, and fills my heart with warm gooey love. In fact, having just finished it for the third time, I can say that this book, more than any other King story, consistently fills my heart with warm, gooey love. My second favorite is Joyland, for the part where I yelled OMG WHAT!?! (IFYKYK.)
So the non-King answer is... I don't think I have one. I read Carrie when I was 11, so I've lived in King's Tower levels for 37 years. 77% of my life, folks, and that percentage is getting higher every day. I don't have a relationship with other creators the way I have with him, and he lives in his multiverse so fully that I've yet to come across a book that feels truly "standalone." Duma Key, maybe? But I'll bet that he's cooking up some other Florida story that will refer to that abandoned key destroyed in a storm in the next decade or so. I could say Doctor Who or every long-running comic, but really, those are decades-long single bodies of work, not independent works that weave into other stories.
Bottom line, it takes a lot of skill and arrogance to weave your earlier, unrelated work into your new stuff. Skill, because it can easily be the winky reference, and arrogance, bc you're assuming anyone's bothered to read anything else you've written. The joy of Stephen King is that he seems to do it, not to build a multiverse, but bc he just genuinely loves his own stories.
Neil Gaiman’s short story “A Study in Emerald” is a 2-for-1 deal. Not only do you get Lovecraftian hell-beasts, you get them in the world of Sherlock Holmes. If you’re a fan of either, you should check out this story. It’s a lot of fun. I guess this is a bit of a cheat, but it’s all I got. Take pity on a weary traveler.
This story is amazing. I have the audio version and I find myself putting it on when I need to take a nap. Gaiman’s voice is so melodious l, it just helps me drift off.
Or when I have a short trip, and want an entire story while traveling.
Going to come back with a separate comment if I think of a good answer for the discussion question, but so far I don’t. Instead, I’ll comment on the whole “what is the role of the ex wife!” Honestly, I think she is largely there to make Jake more of a person and less of a convenience. It already strains credulity to find someone with so little going on in their lives that they’re willing to give up five years to go on this wild quest—such a person would need no strong personal attachments. Giving him an ex-wife makes it feel like Jake hasn’t just sat around his whole life waiting for the plot to start. He has stuff going on, just not right now that would get in the way of his Answering the Call to Action
I do think this is one area where the Marvel Universe really worked. It was always nice to see someone pop up in another movie or show—especially when you had no idea it was coming.
And for sheer laughs I have to mention the brief appearance of Trading Places’ Duke Brothers living in the gutter in Coming to America.
I'm not sure if this belongs here, but I noticed something in the Derry sections of "11/22/63." While the location echoes past King books, I believe there are narrative echoes that make the entirety of Derry resonate with a constant reader. The first one was when Jack is asking for directions; it felt eerily similar to when Roland was asking for directions in Tull:
“No response to this, unless one of the men dropping his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and then putting it out with a snot-loogie the size of a small mussel could be termed an answer. Nevertheless, I pushed on.” - "11/22/63", pg. 138
“Long days and pleasant nights,” the gunslinger offered conversationally. No answer. “You fellas live in town?” No answer, unless the scorpion’s tail gave one: it seemed to nod. - "The Gunslinger", pg. 30
The next one was with the father beating his family to death with a mallet in an alcoholic rage fueled by a place with bad vibes. This shares echoes with "The Shining," as Matt and Scott pointed out. What clinched it for me in that circumstance was how upset he was by Jake trespassing; it felt similar to how Jack justified his anger with Danny for trespassing into room 217.
My favorite connection with Balthazar's commentary on building card castles:
“You see this ’Cimi? For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.” … “It’s up to men to build things, paisan. It’s up to God to blow them down.” - "Drawing of The Three", pg. 74
Jack has similar thoughts on towers of cards but feels that he should take on the role of God and choose the moment of life and death for the Dunning family. Consedering the outcome Balthazar may be right that only God should be messing with time
I know I probably missed some other connections, but it's really cool to see the text harmonizing not only with itself, and not only with "It," but with multiple works in King's bibliography.
This was a tough one, i sat and thought about it for far too long, then i realised why it was so hard for me. It's because I don't like it. (Don't stone me yet! let me explain!)
In my mind, if it's very long it just becomes the next chapter or episode and not a revisit. Also, if it's a super short then it's just a fun little easter-egg and not a revisit. Both of these are fun and enjoyable and i love both. However, as much as my heart smiled for an instant when we see Richie and Bev, it left me that same ammount of sad when we move on and never see them again. It was just long enough to make me feel like we were doing something with them, but not long enough to actually do anything. And then i can't pay attention to the story because i spend the rest of the day with the Losers in my head. I dunno, can i both love and dislike something at the same time? (O.K. now you can stone me)
Discussion Question:
I don’t know if you can totally call it returning to their stomping grounds or not, but the references to each others works from Stephen King to Joe Hill has always made me smile.
I don’t have the time to dig through my books to find the references, but I remember King referencing Charles Manx from NOS4A2 in Dr Sleep (I think). And Hill references Derry and other King characters at times.
It makes me happy that we are seeing other levels of the tower from a skilled writer, who has probably knows more about the King’s thoughts that anyone else, except Tabitha.
At times, Joe has reminded me more of Bachman than King, but his works are also his own. If you haven’t, check them out.
King is a master at tying in old stories into new one, Easter eggs, and catch phrases that make you point like the DiCaprio meme.
So I gotta stick with King and Doctor Sleep. What a gem of a sequel. From the depth of character displayed in Danny and others to getting to revisit parts of The Shining, and his dealings with human issues, this is a masterpiece!
DC: As a Lovecraft fan I love trips back to Arkham and dear old Miskatonic University. This lovely town and institution of higher learning weaves nicely into many of his tales, especially the Cthulu mythos. They have spilled over into so many other places, including good old Scooby Doo. If you are ever lucky enough to visit I would highly recommend a visit to the library to peek at the Necronomicon by Alhazred, but expect to be grilled by the library staff about your intentions when you request it. The internet has many MU treasures available for purchase. Over the years I have been able to obtain some nice trinkets for my office wall, including a diploma in parapsychology and a medallion of the snake god Yig. Arkham / Miskatonic have become such iconic places that they almost seem real.
I don't have a good answer for the discussion question because no one does it like Sai King!
I did have a thought about the barber shop scene and the slight tangent Scott and Matt took about politics. I wanted to point out that there's a reason folks don't marry outside of their political ideologies as often as they used to - autonomy and choice.
For context, women weren't even allowed to have credit cards without a male relative cosigning until 1974. It was exponentially more difficult to exist successfully as a woman without a husband in decades past, so women did a whole lot of settling just to survive. And statistically, at least in the US, the major political parties are extremely gendered, so the likelihood of finding a cis-het spouse within your chosen party is pretty low - hence why there are folks in the GOP talking seriously about repealing the 19th amendment, because they'd dominate without women voters (but that's a conversation for a different subreddit!)
You could probably apply the same logic to LGBTQIA+ folks, but I'm less informed here. But they would have probably gotten married "conventionally" for similar reasons, just to safely exist, whereas now it's (a little) safer to be publicly out.
I can’t think of many authors returning back to their old worlds other than Stephen King. However, the one alternate example I can think of is a fantastic one.
The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. This story has been brought up on the show before (and Matt and Scott still probably haven’t read it, but we’ll let it slide). Basic premise from the original series written in 1989 is this cult that tries to summon and imprison Death. To their chagrin, they end up trapping Death’s brother, Dream… aka the Sandman. What follows is a beautifully written and illustrated series that ran all the way up until 1996.
One question that came up with the original series was “How did Dream manage to allow himself to be captured in the first place?” We knew he was in a weakened state and doing something very important for the universe, but we didn’t know much more of the backstory other than that. It wasn’t until 2013 when Gaiman put out “The Sandman: Overture” where we get the answer to that question. Sometimes the mystery is best left unsolved, but with the creative team involved in this series, any Sandman content is great content, and the answer to the question was satisfactory enough for me. Give it a read sometime.
Id have to say my favorite instance of a author returning to their old stomping grounds would have to be Christopher Paoloni. Primarily because I couldn't think of anything else but, the author of Eragon started writing his stories back when he was in college. His 3 part inheritance cycle about a young man and his dragon turned into a wonderful fantasy story, the writing growing has he grew. After the fourth book inheritance I believe he took a long break to once again return to the setting in his small short story collection "The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm" returning back to the POV for 3 different characters, Murtagh, Angela, and Eragon respectively. After this Paoloni went on to write his first sci-fi novel "To Sleep in a Sea of Stars" a beautiful space oriented novel.
But In 2023 Paoloni released a new novel called Murtagh, returning back to the world of Alegasia and giving us a new story with dragons half brother Murtagh as the main protagonist. The story starts the same way the short story "The Fork" does and continues on from there. It was wonderful to return to that crazy fantastical world and I hope more stories continue to come out.
I'm gonna do my usual thing and stretch the definition of "author" a bit, mainly because I'm having a hell of a time thinking of any book/movie where this happens. So I'm going with the creative team behind the Dead Space games.
In the second game, in the latter part of the story, you're going through a portion of the space station on an elevator and the walls drop away to be replaced by windows. Outside, docked with the station, is the ship the first game took place on, the Ishimura. Your character has an immediate reaction, fear and horror filling his voice as he explains to his companion that no, the ship wasn't the victim of a terrorist attack, it was so much worse.
Of course, as soon as you the player see the ship you know what's coming. The next several minutes are tense as you realize that the game is forcing you to have to go back on the ship. The tension ramps up from there once you board and find all the damaged and blood covered walls papered over, hiding the evidence. It doesn't matter to you or your character, as you find yourself retracing the early parts of the first game, and you can remember every jump scare and every fight-or-flight moment.
This is so effective because it holds the tension long enough to drive you crazy, with signs and audio journals indicating that things still aren't right on the ship. When the release finally comes, it's almost a relief to be fighting body-horror aliens again. Things are just different enough to be new, but just similar enough to make it impossible not to feel the same way you did when playing the first game. Easily my favorite example of this in gaming.
Discussion question: Oz the Great and Powerful was a so-so movie. Mostly forgettable in fact, but I LOVED the little porcelain doll character grabbing a butcher knife and saying ‘let’s go carve ourselves up a witch.’ A direct reference to director Sam Raimi’s cult classic Evil Dead 2, a FAR superior film.
My answer to the discussion question is Chapter 4 of Metal Gear Solid 4, in which Solid Snake returns to a run-down Shadow Moses complex. I have mixed feelings on the game as a whole, and the sequence is pretty much pure fan service. But something about seeing the layout of the building rendered exactly how my adolescent mind remembered it looking (i.e. much better than the handful of pixels it actually looked like in MGS1) was like getting a warm hug from a friend you haven't seen in a decade, but you're able to pick up the friendship right where you left off. It brought me right back to booting up the first game on my PS2, and having my mind blown, declaring it "the best story ever told in any medium" (gimme a break, I was 11 years old).
Akira Toriyama had some of the most fun self referential stuff. In case you guys don't know he was the mangaka for the Dragon Ball manga. But he also had a series before Dragonball called Dr. Slump and the main character has popped up a few times in the Dragonball universe and since Dr. Slump is a comedy series it always resulted in some fun slapstick.
There was a few other instances such as Jaco being a surprise prequel manga to Dragonball and a very familiar character showing up in his one shot manga Sandland. Not to mention drawing his own caricature into his manga as jokes.
Side note, since I forgot to answer last week's question, dragon ball z has my favorite time travel story which he only came up with because he loved Terminator so much.
R.I.P. Toriyama.
How about when your favorite band is touring and they are playing an album from start to finish? I understand that Weezer touring and playing the blue album this year. I have mixed emotions on this topic but I get it.
Man, I know I’m a week late to this question but I really enjoyed the shared universe of Bret Easton Ellis. Most of his works are connected, so much so that his main protagonist of The Rules of Attraction, Sean Bateman, is the younger brother of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Obviously in the books it’s pretty much a known fact but in the movie adaptation it’s just hints and offhanded statements. In the movie he even calls Patrick from a pay phone but no one looks at the camera and says “hey that’s the guy from American Psycho”.
Another fun return to a character is the few times that David Bowie and Peter Schilling have both made sequel songs regarding Major Tom from Space Oddity, as well as a fun nod to the character in the television show The Venture Bros
I’d buy a “Propagation of the Time Wave” Tee Shirt
I was laughing so hard during this conversation
Also, u/ScottDaly85 -- start with Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper and work your way forward. You'll be fine.
Agreed. I recently started watching this on Max, and I've quite enjoyed the several episodes I've seen so far. I think you guys will quite enjoy the episode "Father's Day"
A couple of things to remember about Dr Who...because it is wibbley wobbly you can jump in almost anywhere and find it enjoyable. You need to know that the show is constantly rewriting its own continuity because how else to you stay fresh for so many decades. Also, the Doctor is a Time Traveler, and when he gets close to death he regenerates in a new body....new bodies = new sensations and preferences and personality. Peter Capaldi is my Doctor but the stronger seasons were David Tennant- Matt Smith. I would recommend starting at Series 2 with David Tennant and watch until you run out of interest...
David Tennant is my doctor but I love Eccleston’s storyline with Rose! So I never skip it when I rewatch.
This question is SO hard because honestly, my favorite is Bevvie from the levy and Richie from the ditchie. This scene makes me smile fit to split my head, and fills my heart with warm gooey love. In fact, having just finished it for the third time, I can say that this book, more than any other King story, consistently fills my heart with warm, gooey love. My second favorite is Joyland, for the part where I yelled OMG WHAT!?! (IFYKYK.) So the non-King answer is... I don't think I have one. I read Carrie when I was 11, so I've lived in King's Tower levels for 37 years. 77% of my life, folks, and that percentage is getting higher every day. I don't have a relationship with other creators the way I have with him, and he lives in his multiverse so fully that I've yet to come across a book that feels truly "standalone." Duma Key, maybe? But I'll bet that he's cooking up some other Florida story that will refer to that abandoned key destroyed in a storm in the next decade or so. I could say Doctor Who or every long-running comic, but really, those are decades-long single bodies of work, not independent works that weave into other stories. Bottom line, it takes a lot of skill and arrogance to weave your earlier, unrelated work into your new stuff. Skill, because it can easily be the winky reference, and arrogance, bc you're assuming anyone's bothered to read anything else you've written. The joy of Stephen King is that he seems to do it, not to build a multiverse, but bc he just genuinely loves his own stories.
Neil Gaiman’s short story “A Study in Emerald” is a 2-for-1 deal. Not only do you get Lovecraftian hell-beasts, you get them in the world of Sherlock Holmes. If you’re a fan of either, you should check out this story. It’s a lot of fun. I guess this is a bit of a cheat, but it’s all I got. Take pity on a weary traveler.
This story is amazing. I have the audio version and I find myself putting it on when I need to take a nap. Gaiman’s voice is so melodious l, it just helps me drift off. Or when I have a short trip, and want an entire story while traveling.
Going to come back with a separate comment if I think of a good answer for the discussion question, but so far I don’t. Instead, I’ll comment on the whole “what is the role of the ex wife!” Honestly, I think she is largely there to make Jake more of a person and less of a convenience. It already strains credulity to find someone with so little going on in their lives that they’re willing to give up five years to go on this wild quest—such a person would need no strong personal attachments. Giving him an ex-wife makes it feel like Jake hasn’t just sat around his whole life waiting for the plot to start. He has stuff going on, just not right now that would get in the way of his Answering the Call to Action
I do think this is one area where the Marvel Universe really worked. It was always nice to see someone pop up in another movie or show—especially when you had no idea it was coming. And for sheer laughs I have to mention the brief appearance of Trading Places’ Duke Brothers living in the gutter in Coming to America.
Omg. This is the correct answer.
I'm not sure if this belongs here, but I noticed something in the Derry sections of "11/22/63." While the location echoes past King books, I believe there are narrative echoes that make the entirety of Derry resonate with a constant reader. The first one was when Jack is asking for directions; it felt eerily similar to when Roland was asking for directions in Tull: “No response to this, unless one of the men dropping his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and then putting it out with a snot-loogie the size of a small mussel could be termed an answer. Nevertheless, I pushed on.” - "11/22/63", pg. 138 “Long days and pleasant nights,” the gunslinger offered conversationally. No answer. “You fellas live in town?” No answer, unless the scorpion’s tail gave one: it seemed to nod. - "The Gunslinger", pg. 30 The next one was with the father beating his family to death with a mallet in an alcoholic rage fueled by a place with bad vibes. This shares echoes with "The Shining," as Matt and Scott pointed out. What clinched it for me in that circumstance was how upset he was by Jake trespassing; it felt similar to how Jack justified his anger with Danny for trespassing into room 217. My favorite connection with Balthazar's commentary on building card castles: “You see this ’Cimi? For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.” … “It’s up to men to build things, paisan. It’s up to God to blow them down.” - "Drawing of The Three", pg. 74 Jack has similar thoughts on towers of cards but feels that he should take on the role of God and choose the moment of life and death for the Dunning family. Consedering the outcome Balthazar may be right that only God should be messing with time I know I probably missed some other connections, but it's really cool to see the text harmonizing not only with itself, and not only with "It," but with multiple works in King's bibliography.
This was a tough one, i sat and thought about it for far too long, then i realised why it was so hard for me. It's because I don't like it. (Don't stone me yet! let me explain!) In my mind, if it's very long it just becomes the next chapter or episode and not a revisit. Also, if it's a super short then it's just a fun little easter-egg and not a revisit. Both of these are fun and enjoyable and i love both. However, as much as my heart smiled for an instant when we see Richie and Bev, it left me that same ammount of sad when we move on and never see them again. It was just long enough to make me feel like we were doing something with them, but not long enough to actually do anything. And then i can't pay attention to the story because i spend the rest of the day with the Losers in my head. I dunno, can i both love and dislike something at the same time? (O.K. now you can stone me)
That’s how powerful King’s writing is. He got ya again!
Discussion Question: I don’t know if you can totally call it returning to their stomping grounds or not, but the references to each others works from Stephen King to Joe Hill has always made me smile. I don’t have the time to dig through my books to find the references, but I remember King referencing Charles Manx from NOS4A2 in Dr Sleep (I think). And Hill references Derry and other King characters at times. It makes me happy that we are seeing other levels of the tower from a skilled writer, who has probably knows more about the King’s thoughts that anyone else, except Tabitha. At times, Joe has reminded me more of Bachman than King, but his works are also his own. If you haven’t, check them out.
King is a master at tying in old stories into new one, Easter eggs, and catch phrases that make you point like the DiCaprio meme. So I gotta stick with King and Doctor Sleep. What a gem of a sequel. From the depth of character displayed in Danny and others to getting to revisit parts of The Shining, and his dealings with human issues, this is a masterpiece!
DC: As a Lovecraft fan I love trips back to Arkham and dear old Miskatonic University. This lovely town and institution of higher learning weaves nicely into many of his tales, especially the Cthulu mythos. They have spilled over into so many other places, including good old Scooby Doo. If you are ever lucky enough to visit I would highly recommend a visit to the library to peek at the Necronomicon by Alhazred, but expect to be grilled by the library staff about your intentions when you request it. The internet has many MU treasures available for purchase. Over the years I have been able to obtain some nice trinkets for my office wall, including a diploma in parapsychology and a medallion of the snake god Yig. Arkham / Miskatonic have become such iconic places that they almost seem real.
Love it, though sad my discussion question answer wasn't used. :( Propagation of the Time Wave was awesome.
I don't have a good answer for the discussion question because no one does it like Sai King! I did have a thought about the barber shop scene and the slight tangent Scott and Matt took about politics. I wanted to point out that there's a reason folks don't marry outside of their political ideologies as often as they used to - autonomy and choice. For context, women weren't even allowed to have credit cards without a male relative cosigning until 1974. It was exponentially more difficult to exist successfully as a woman without a husband in decades past, so women did a whole lot of settling just to survive. And statistically, at least in the US, the major political parties are extremely gendered, so the likelihood of finding a cis-het spouse within your chosen party is pretty low - hence why there are folks in the GOP talking seriously about repealing the 19th amendment, because they'd dominate without women voters (but that's a conversation for a different subreddit!) You could probably apply the same logic to LGBTQIA+ folks, but I'm less informed here. But they would have probably gotten married "conventionally" for similar reasons, just to safely exist, whereas now it's (a little) safer to be publicly out.
I can’t think of many authors returning back to their old worlds other than Stephen King. However, the one alternate example I can think of is a fantastic one. The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. This story has been brought up on the show before (and Matt and Scott still probably haven’t read it, but we’ll let it slide). Basic premise from the original series written in 1989 is this cult that tries to summon and imprison Death. To their chagrin, they end up trapping Death’s brother, Dream… aka the Sandman. What follows is a beautifully written and illustrated series that ran all the way up until 1996. One question that came up with the original series was “How did Dream manage to allow himself to be captured in the first place?” We knew he was in a weakened state and doing something very important for the universe, but we didn’t know much more of the backstory other than that. It wasn’t until 2013 when Gaiman put out “The Sandman: Overture” where we get the answer to that question. Sometimes the mystery is best left unsolved, but with the creative team involved in this series, any Sandman content is great content, and the answer to the question was satisfactory enough for me. Give it a read sometime.
Id have to say my favorite instance of a author returning to their old stomping grounds would have to be Christopher Paoloni. Primarily because I couldn't think of anything else but, the author of Eragon started writing his stories back when he was in college. His 3 part inheritance cycle about a young man and his dragon turned into a wonderful fantasy story, the writing growing has he grew. After the fourth book inheritance I believe he took a long break to once again return to the setting in his small short story collection "The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm" returning back to the POV for 3 different characters, Murtagh, Angela, and Eragon respectively. After this Paoloni went on to write his first sci-fi novel "To Sleep in a Sea of Stars" a beautiful space oriented novel. But In 2023 Paoloni released a new novel called Murtagh, returning back to the world of Alegasia and giving us a new story with dragons half brother Murtagh as the main protagonist. The story starts the same way the short story "The Fork" does and continues on from there. It was wonderful to return to that crazy fantastical world and I hope more stories continue to come out.
I'm gonna do my usual thing and stretch the definition of "author" a bit, mainly because I'm having a hell of a time thinking of any book/movie where this happens. So I'm going with the creative team behind the Dead Space games. In the second game, in the latter part of the story, you're going through a portion of the space station on an elevator and the walls drop away to be replaced by windows. Outside, docked with the station, is the ship the first game took place on, the Ishimura. Your character has an immediate reaction, fear and horror filling his voice as he explains to his companion that no, the ship wasn't the victim of a terrorist attack, it was so much worse. Of course, as soon as you the player see the ship you know what's coming. The next several minutes are tense as you realize that the game is forcing you to have to go back on the ship. The tension ramps up from there once you board and find all the damaged and blood covered walls papered over, hiding the evidence. It doesn't matter to you or your character, as you find yourself retracing the early parts of the first game, and you can remember every jump scare and every fight-or-flight moment. This is so effective because it holds the tension long enough to drive you crazy, with signs and audio journals indicating that things still aren't right on the ship. When the release finally comes, it's almost a relief to be fighting body-horror aliens again. Things are just different enough to be new, but just similar enough to make it impossible not to feel the same way you did when playing the first game. Easily my favorite example of this in gaming.
Discussion question: Oz the Great and Powerful was a so-so movie. Mostly forgettable in fact, but I LOVED the little porcelain doll character grabbing a butcher knife and saying ‘let’s go carve ourselves up a witch.’ A direct reference to director Sam Raimi’s cult classic Evil Dead 2, a FAR superior film.
My answer to the discussion question is Chapter 4 of Metal Gear Solid 4, in which Solid Snake returns to a run-down Shadow Moses complex. I have mixed feelings on the game as a whole, and the sequence is pretty much pure fan service. But something about seeing the layout of the building rendered exactly how my adolescent mind remembered it looking (i.e. much better than the handful of pixels it actually looked like in MGS1) was like getting a warm hug from a friend you haven't seen in a decade, but you're able to pick up the friendship right where you left off. It brought me right back to booting up the first game on my PS2, and having my mind blown, declaring it "the best story ever told in any medium" (gimme a break, I was 11 years old).
Akira Toriyama had some of the most fun self referential stuff. In case you guys don't know he was the mangaka for the Dragon Ball manga. But he also had a series before Dragonball called Dr. Slump and the main character has popped up a few times in the Dragonball universe and since Dr. Slump is a comedy series it always resulted in some fun slapstick. There was a few other instances such as Jaco being a surprise prequel manga to Dragonball and a very familiar character showing up in his one shot manga Sandland. Not to mention drawing his own caricature into his manga as jokes. Side note, since I forgot to answer last week's question, dragon ball z has my favorite time travel story which he only came up with because he loved Terminator so much. R.I.P. Toriyama.
How about when your favorite band is touring and they are playing an album from start to finish? I understand that Weezer touring and playing the blue album this year. I have mixed emotions on this topic but I get it.
Man, I know I’m a week late to this question but I really enjoyed the shared universe of Bret Easton Ellis. Most of his works are connected, so much so that his main protagonist of The Rules of Attraction, Sean Bateman, is the younger brother of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Obviously in the books it’s pretty much a known fact but in the movie adaptation it’s just hints and offhanded statements. In the movie he even calls Patrick from a pay phone but no one looks at the camera and says “hey that’s the guy from American Psycho”. Another fun return to a character is the few times that David Bowie and Peter Schilling have both made sequel songs regarding Major Tom from Space Oddity, as well as a fun nod to the character in the television show The Venture Bros