Wednesday, December 31, 2003
The Six Degrees of Scooby-Doo
Link
How do you get from Batman to Diane Chambers? Mickey Mouse to Fraiser Crane? Cartman to Cloud Strife? Homer Simpson to almost anybody? If you accept the reasonable premise that anyone who has appeared in a crossover with someone else must logically exist in the same universe, and thus the same universe as anyone they were ever in a crossover with, it becomes evident that due to the working of promiscuous crossoverers (The New Scooby Movies, Cheers and its spinoffs, Happy Days and its spinoffs, The Simpsons, and anything that has ever featured a comic book character as if he were real) a very large percentage of our entire popular culture is one gigantic, amoeba-like fused mass of shows and continuities that makes the Crisis on Infinite Earths look like a two-bit Internet fanfic.
We're all familiar with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Some of us are familiar with the related concept of Bacon Numbers. Might I suggest the idea of Scooby Numbers? The Harlem Globetrotters would have a Scooby Number of one. Gilligan and the other Castaways have a Scooby Number of Two. From there, how many more jumps do you need to get to St. Elsewhere?
Link
How do you get from Batman to Diane Chambers? Mickey Mouse to Fraiser Crane? Cartman to Cloud Strife? Homer Simpson to almost anybody? If you accept the reasonable premise that anyone who has appeared in a crossover with someone else must logically exist in the same universe, and thus the same universe as anyone they were ever in a crossover with, it becomes evident that due to the working of promiscuous crossoverers (The New Scooby Movies, Cheers and its spinoffs, Happy Days and its spinoffs, The Simpsons, and anything that has ever featured a comic book character as if he were real) a very large percentage of our entire popular culture is one gigantic, amoeba-like fused mass of shows and continuities that makes the Crisis on Infinite Earths look like a two-bit Internet fanfic.
We're all familiar with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Some of us are familiar with the related concept of Bacon Numbers. Might I suggest the idea of Scooby Numbers? The Harlem Globetrotters would have a Scooby Number of one. Gilligan and the other Castaways have a Scooby Number of Two. From there, how many more jumps do you need to get to St. Elsewhere?
