Crossover of the Week

May 1-October 1957 

FIRST FRONTIER 

The Doctor helped the U.S. government with an affair in Santa Mira in 1956. The Master uses the phrase “Klaatu barada nikto.” Dr. von Scott examines UFO wreckage. Benny Summerfield excavated a series of 500-foot towers on Metaluna. Ace uses the obscenities “qu’vatlh” and “smeg.” A character says, “That’s like something out of Future Boy.” The Darklings, the fungoid inhabitants of Yuggoth, were driven back to 61 Cygni after their war with the Tzun. 

Doctor Who: The New Adventures novel by David A. McIntee, Virgin Books, 1994. The affair in Santa Mira in 1956 is a reference to the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The phrase “Klaatu barada nikto” comes from the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Dr. von Scott is the real name of Dr. Everett Scott in the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The planet Metaluna is from the movie This Island Earth. “Qu’vatlh” is a Klingon swear word in Star Trek. The word “smeg” comes from the TV series Red Dwarf. Future Boy is a reference to the Quantum Leap episode “Future Boy – October 6, 1957.” In that episode, Future Boy is the sidekick of 1950s TV superhero Captain Galaxy on the television series Time Patrol, so the reference to Future Boy as the title of the show is a mistake. The Darklings and 61 Cygni are from the Blake’s 7 episode “Killer.” McIntee identifies them with the Mi-Go (aka the Fungi from Yuggoth) from H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Although most Doctor Who novels take place in the Doctor Who Universe rather than the Crossover Universe, the battle between the Mi-Go and the Tzun is referenced in Stephen Baxter’s “The Ninth Planet,” a chapter of the Cthulhu Mythos “mosaic novel” The Lovecraft Squad: Rising. The Lovecraft Squad series has several crossovers linking it to the CU. This novel also establishes Red Dwarf and Blake’s 7 as possible futures for the CU.

This crossover write-up is one of hundreds included in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, which will be published by Meteor House! Like its predecessors, this volume is an AUTHORIZED companion to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2! 

Crossover TV Episode: The Losers

 

In this episode of Eerie, Indiana, among the objects in the Bureau of Lost are a wooden sled with the word Rosebud on it and an alien pod. The Rosebud sled is from the movie Citizen Kane. Since Charles Foster Kane’s sled was tossed into an incinerator at the end of the film, Rosebud must be a brand name. The alien pod is from the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The sled also appears in Dante’s film Explorers, while the pod was also seen in his movie Gremlins 2: The New Batch. 

This crossover is one of hundreds covered in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, which will be published by Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!

Crossover Cover: The President's Vampire

In the second Nathaniel Cade novel, Cade and Zach Barrows battle a threat that began in Innsmouth in 1928, and at one point Cade flashes back to his part in the Innsmouth raid. In Cairo, Egypt, Cade meets a man called Flint, who was once “The World’s Greatest Secret Agent,” and in his time handled “plots that never made the news: secret space missions, vanishing islands, strange weapons and deadly assassins with steel teeth.” This is clearly Derek Flint from the movies Our Man Flint and In Like Flint. The implication of the description of the plots that he handled seems to be that some of the James Bond films were distorted accounts of Flint's own cases.Other references include: a series of “vampire murders” in Providence, Rhode Island in 1928, during which Benjamin Franklin’s corpse was stolen (from Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"); the “Christmas Invasion” of Kingston Falls, Indiana (from the movie Gremlins); the Pabodie Expedition to the Mountains of Madness (from Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness"); a wave of sleeping deaths in Springwood, Ohio (from the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street); the horror at Red Hook, New York in 1925 (from Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook"); a mysterious creature that terrorized Dunwich, Massachusetts in 1928 (from Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror"); a Gill-Man that escaped into the Everglades after being captured in the Amazon in the 1950s (from The Creature from the Black Lagoon); a 1951 Antarctic expedition, following in the footsteps of the Pabodie expedition, that discovered an alien craft (from the movie The Thing from Another World, which was based on John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?," which is already in, but is so different in its plot and characters that both stories could have happened in the CU); the Pod People incident in the 1950s (from the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers); and rumors of a shadowy figure that preyed on criminals in the 1930s and ’40s (the Shadow, of course.)

Crossover Cover: Hellboy: Unnatural Selection

This Hellboy novel has references to the monster-fighting demon's involvement in the events of three horror movies. One is "something to do with pods" in 1978, a reference to the first remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The remake is very different in its particulars from the original, though a few character names are at least partially retained: Miles Bennell becomes Matthew Bennell, Becky Driscoll is Elizabeth Driscoll, and Jack Bellicec is a main character in both. Presumably the makers of the second film gave the actual people involved the names of characters from the previous one in order to create the illusion that it was a re-imagining of the original story rather than a sequel. (It's also worth noting that Kevin McCarthy has a cameo in the remake where he appears to be playing Miles Bennell, trying to convince people of the invasion as he was at the end of the original.) Another incident was "a shark thing" in 1975, a reference to the film version of Jaws. A third episode was more recent, and involved giant insects that mimic human beings in New York, a reference to the movie Mimic, which was very loosely based on Donald A. Wollheim's 1950 short story of the same name. According to Christopher Farnsworth's The President's Vampire, the title character, vampire secret agent Nathaniel Cade, helped resolve the original Body Snatchers crisis. In the following book, Red, White and Blood, it is implied that Cade was involved in the events of Mimic. Perhaps he worked with Hellboy to help defeat the Judas Breed insects, though Guillermo del Toro evidently omitted their involvement in the incident from his retelling. It's also worth noting that Farnsworth's website formerly boasted a timeline for Cade's universe, which included an entry for the birth of Hellboy, who was not referred to by name.