Adaptation Overdosed

L-R Top-Bottom: Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, and Batman. And not all of them are in here, of course.

"Maybe it's time to let the remakes die
Maybe it's time to let the remakes die
Four remakes is a lot to take
Hell, this made my grandma cry
Maybe it's time to let the remakes die"

— Honest Trailers for A Star Is Born (2018) (sang to the tune of "Maybe It's Time" and referencing previous versions made in 1937, 1954, and 1976)

Let's say you write a book. The readers love it, the critics love it, and everyone wants to see a movie of it. But when the movie finally comes out, it's a major letdown. Or perhaps it works out fine, but a few years later, people still love the book yet don't seem to remember that the movie ever happened.

Not wanting to waste a good story, the studio makes up its mind to try again.

And again, and again, and again.

Anyway, this is all about stuff that doesn't merely get multiple or long-running adaptations, but actually has a whole bunch of Alternate Continuities (preferably at least three within the same medium) as a result. Perhaps in some cases, the audience will "win" and one adaptation will cement itself in the public memory for all time.... Perhaps the studios will keep playing anyway. In most cases, it seems they just can't seem to get it right, but that's always a matter of opinion.

This is not about works that simply have lots of sequels or vast expanded universes within the same continuity; in other words, Star Wars and Star Trek are not examples. ^note  Star Wars almost could count as an example for the sheer number of times the individual storyline of each film has been adapted. A New Hope, for example, has two novelizations, three comic strip versions, a manga version, a Radio Drama version, some journals written from the POV of the characters, is retold in part of the LEGO Star Wars video games, and a version written In the Style of William Shakespeare. However, all but the Lego and Shakespeare versions supposedly take place in the same continuity.

Compare Whole-Plot Reference (and the Sub-Tropes listed on that page).

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Example subpages:

• Ultimate Marvel

Other examples (listed by the original work):

Anime & Manga

• Appleseed (manga, 1980s anime OVA, recent CGI movies, and now a new CGI series)
• Boys over Flowers: The original manga has no less than four official live action series adaptations (one in China, one in Tokyo, one in Korea, and one in Thailand), plus a second, unofficial Chinese adaption, remakes in Indonesia (which got its own remake in 2017) and India, a drama in Turkey inspired by the premise, and an anime. Its sequel manga also recieved a live action adaptation in 2018.
• Code Geass has only one full-length anime, but there are four separate and completely different manga adaptations as well as three games based on it. As of early 2012, two spinoff OVAs, a film version of the original series, and yet another alternate-viewpoint manga are planned (the original anime came out in 2006).
• Cutey Honey has five animated incarnations, three live-action incarnations, and five manga incarnations. Try asking a fan of the show where Honey's powers come from. Try asking them whether or not she's human; the answer changes in every version. You'd think they'd run out of answers to a yes/no question eventually, but no...
• Death Note became so popular that it got adapted into an anime, two light novels, various tabletop games, a mini web series, a musical, and four Japanese live-action films plus an American one, with reports that the American version will have a sequel.
• Dragon Ball:
  • The Saiyan, Namek, Androids/Cell, and Buu arcs in Dragon Ball Z might count, as almost every game released ever since they started back in 1988 covers one or several of them and quite a few cover those and just those (despite this necessitating that they start about a third of the way through a serialized story, entirely skipping Dragon Ball). The only exceptions are either sequels to them or the ones that cover Kid Goku stories (either Dragon Ball or Dragon Ball GT), which are very few. They're the only arcs to be adapted on Dragon Ball Z Kai. It has gotten to the point where "Radit to Buu" has become a fandom shorthand for works focused only on this period. The original seventeen Non Serial Movies were also loose adaptations of series events, and were repeatedly implied to be set in the same continuity as one another.
  • There are three versions of Dragon Ball Super, all based on Akira Toriyama's original plot outlines and sketches: the film series, the manga, and the anime TV show. None of them are in-continuity with one another, all have mutually exclusive depictions of the same events, and all of them ran (often at the same time), throughout the mid to late 2010s. As a bonus, Super has also been adapted in a ton of video games already.
• GeGeGe no Kitarō has had six different anime series across various decades, one Darker and Edgier anime, and a few live-action versions.
• Ghost in the Shell (manga, movies (animated and live-action), Stand-Alone Complex anime TV series, Arise OVA series).
• Great Teacher Onizuka has a 43-episode anime adaptation, a live-action film, and no fewer than 4 live-action TV series. And then there's the spinoff GTO: 14 Days in Shonan and the sequel GTO: Paradise Lost. Its predecessor GTO: The Early Years also has several live-action adaptations and an OVA series.
• Himitsu no Akko-chan has three anime, a Live-Action Adaptation, and a reboot manga.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi probably gets the award for the most thorough invocation of this trope in the shortest amount of time. At present, there has been the original manga, two broadcast Animated Adaptations, a Live-Action Adaptation, a few OVAs, a second manga released parallel to the first, a Spinoff Babies series, and a movie covering an alternate end to the manga. Only the OVAs and the first manga seem to occupy the same continuity.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion is famous for this. The original anime and manga series are set in similar, but distinct continuities. Then after that you get into the Raising Project games, the Raising Project, Girlfriend of Steel/Iron Maiden, Rebuild of Evangelion, Angelic Days, Campus Apocalypse, Eva Pucchi, the reportedly-still-under-development live-action movie... oh, and End of Evangelion as possibly alternative ending.
• Pokémon: The Series has two different multi-volume manga (The Electric Tale of Pikachu being the first and Satoshi to Pikachu being the second), a theatrical musical adaptation, multiple theatrical films, numerous manga adaptations of said films, various Tie In Novels, several novelizations (the most famous being Pocket Monsters: The Animation), and several radio dramas (including Pokémon: The Birth of Mewtwo which was later animated as the prologue to the first film).
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The original TV anime, a manga (plus two Spin-Off manga), a novelization, a PSP game, and now a pair of Compilation Movies. And all of this was announced in less than a year after it started, so there's still the possibility of more still being created.
• Robotech spun off of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, merging it with Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. Then there were novelizations and RPG and comic adaptations, none of which quite perfectly matched with the others. There were spin-off novels and comics, as well. Then there was an abortive 3-episode sequel series, which was again adapted and continued three different ways in comics, novels, and games. Then there was the sequel Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles.
• Sailor Moon has, in roughly chronological order: the Sailor V manga, the actual Sailor Moon manga, the original anime adaptation in the '90s, the original set of musicals from the '90s (which lasted until 2005), a live-action adaptation in 2004, a bucketload of video game adaptations/spin-offs/what-have-you (from typical '90s beat-em-ups and arcade games to an official smartphone game), a new batch of musicals unrelated to the first in every way, and the 2014 anime. This is discounting the attempted American cartoon-live-action hybrid thing in the '90s, and — if one wants to consider them different adaptations because of how different they are — various dubs from around the world. Also, a weird set of American novelizations from the '90s, and who knows what other obscure (but official/licensed) adaptations from other corners of the world. Every adaptation is very different from the rest.

Comic Books

• Archie Comics: There have been one made-for-tv film, one live action show, numerous animated adaptations dating back to the 1960s, and at least one radio show.
• Batman: The Batman mythos has very much fallen prey to this. Batman was already one of the most commonly-adapted characters, with three adaptations/series in the 2010s alone (The Dark Knight Trilogy, the DC Extended Universe, and The LEGO Batman Movie). But then there's the Batman: Arkham Series, the Joker film, a new potential movie series starting with The Batman, Gotham, Pennyworth and Titans and some glimpses in the Arrowverse (there's been four different live action incarnations of Bruce Wayne in 2019 alone with Gotham, Joker, Titans and Crisis on Infinite Earths), and numerous animated series. And that's not even counting the DC Universe Animated Original Movies. And the death of Bruce Wayne's parents isn't done being reenacted in many cases.
• Hellboy: Despite being a relatively young property owned by one guy, Hellboy has at least four continuities, including the original comics, the animated series, the live-action film series and a film reboot. There are also at least two "little Hellboy" spinoffs.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch: There have been two live-action TV shows, three cartoons, and a Made-for-TV Movie.
• Spider-Man: Of all the superhero properties, Spider-Man has been rebooted the most frequently in recent years: his appearances in Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame and his solo films Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home and Spider-Man: No Way Home has marked the third iteration of the character in just over ten years. And that's not counting multiple cartoons, live-action series in both the US and Japan, videogames and a Broadway musical!
• Superman: As the first superhero, Superman, has been adapted over and over again since the first animated version in the 1940s - The Other Wiki's article on that opens with a laundry list of actors and voice actors who were the Man of Steel at some point! In live-action alone, the 2010s had the DC Extended Universe, Smallville, and the version in the Arrowverse, and also a Superboy in Titans.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Starting as a comic book series it has expanded to four cartoon series (one only loosely based on the original comics; another that started out a direct adaptation but later diverged; the third somewhere in between, the fourth being a rather fresh take), two anime OVAs, two live-action specials (song themed), a live-action series, three other comic book series, a daily strip, five live-action films, two CGI films, several kids' books, novels, magazines, games, and crossovers, and heaven know how many toys and merchandise (including a set of "automutating" TMNT transformers).

Comic Strips

• The Addams Family started as one-panel comic strips, then became a TV show in 1964 and many other adaptations followed, including two live-action theatrical films, two animated TV series, a Broadway musical and, after a relatively long period of quietitude, an animated film, which then got a sequel. There was also a spin off focused on the daughter, Wednesday Addams, simply called Wednesday.
• Likewise, Garfield has lots of television specials, two cartoons (Garfield and Friends and The Garfield Show), two live-action movies, a few straight-to-video animated movies, many video games, a Boom! Studios comic book... and some different approaches, such as the book/special Garfield: His 9 Lives and the Pet Force series.
• Little Orphan Annie has had several film adaptations, a fairly popular radio series, and a hit musical which spawned three of its own film adaptations as well as sequels both on screen and in the theatre.
• Peanuts inspired many animated films and television specials, two stage plays and some video games, a Boom! Studios comic book, and feature film. Plus lots of merchandise.

Fan Works

• Within the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanbase, many fan works exist that attempt to retell the series with new characters, concepts, or twists. Because so few of these last long enough to cover all nine seasons of the canon show, a common practice is to only adapt the events of the first season and its 26 episodes. As a result, fans who pay attention to a lot of fanfics and abridged series will inevitably see these 26 episodes adapted over and over and over again; Friendship is Witchcraft, My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series, Scootertrix the Abridged, Twilight Gets A Puppy, and The Winningverse are all examples that retell specifically these entries.

Films — Live-Action

• The 2011 Korean film Always has had four remakes so far with different names: a 2014 Turkish version called Sadece Sen, a 2015 Indian-Kannada remake titled Boxer, the 2016 Hindi version Do Lafzon Ki Kahani (trans. A Tale of Two Words), and lastly, a 2020 Japanese remake with the name Your Eyes Tell.
• Halloween has been retconned and rebooted at least four times, not counting the comic books adaptions:
  • The original intent of John Carpenter was to makes an anthology movie serie. With each movie telling a story unrelated to the previous with sole connection the theme of Halloween and supernatural horror. The first two movies released three years after the first, tell the story of Michael Myers, a silent psychopath terrorizing the Haddonfield neighborhood. The third movie Season of the Witch opens a new story. Viewers were expecting to see Michael Myers again and weren't pleased to see something irrelevant to what they expected.
  • The aptly named Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers brought back the masked killer, only for two increasingly worse sequels to eventually bring a continuity fix in Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, ignoring all but the first two. And after the sequel to that tanked, a remake of the first was made, even warranting a follow-up. Ultimately, another continuity purging was done in Halloween (2018), which took only the first movie as canon.
• A new version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers seems to be released once every twenty years. There's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Body Snatchers (1993), The Invasion (2005), and a fifth version is in Development Hell as of this writing.
• Similarly, the Tear Jerker Korean movie Miracle in Cell No. 7 has several adaptations, including an Indian Kannada film, a Turkish film and a Philippine film that were both released in 2019, an Indonesian film, and will have an upcoming Spanish remake in 2021.
• My Sassy Girl, another successful Korean movie, has 8 remakes. It had been remade as a Korean series (though remade as a historical piece), a Japanese series, an American film, a Nepalese film, an Indian film, a Chinese film, a Lithuanian film, and a Philippine film was announced to be released in 2021. The original is so iconic that there are remakes still being made for it today, even though it's an old 2001 movie.
• Nikita: Since being released in 1990, the French Luc Besson film has directly inspired one American film remake, Point of No Return (1993); one Hong Kong remake, Black Cat (1991); two TV series, La Femme Nikita (1997-2001) and Nikita (2010-2013); and indirect remakes like Korean film The Villainess, which is itself getting an American TV adaptation.
• The Italian film Perfect Strangers, about seven people at a dinner party whose secrets are exposed after they agree to share every e-mail or text message they receive that evening. Since its release in February 2016, it has been remade at least 14 times (some more offical than others) in different countries, with more on the way, the first of those released in Greece in December 2016.

Literature

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has 16 different film adaptations, including two by Disney, a Darker and Edgier video game, a TV miniseries, an anime remembered in many places that aren't the States, a re-imagining book series, Sci Fi, etc...
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie has had multiple film adaptations. The novel's plot has even become a trope in its own right.
• Anna And The King Of Siam has given us one Broadway musical, four movies (two of which are based on the musical), and a short-lived sitcom.
• Every decade or two, The BBC goes on a Jane Austen kick and remakes most of her most famous works (usually Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Emma) as miniseries. Each of those four novels has three or four BBC adaptations as well as several movie adaptations. Her works also frequently receive the Setting Update treatment (Bridget Jones books and movies, Clueless or The Lizzie Bennet Diaries).
• The Baby-Sitters Club books have had 2 different TV series, 4 CD-ROM computer games, graphic novel adaptations, as well as a movie.
• The baseball series Battery has had an audio drama in 2000, a manga in 2004, a live-action film, a live-action series, and an anime.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964, and by its 50th anniversary in 2014 had already yielded one sequel, several audiobook versions and a pop-up book abridgement, and the following adaptations, all of which are distinct takes on the story:
  • Two movie versions (1971 and 2005)
  • A stage play in The '70s
  • A touring stage musical in The '80s
  • A ZX Spectrum video game
  • A BBC radio play
  • A ride at England's Alton Towers
  • An opera
  • An island in the online game Poptropica
  • A 2013 West End stage musical (which includes Internal Homages to and one song from the film adaptations but is not a Screen-to-Stage Adaptation at all)
  • The two film adaptations have each been incorporated into other media: The 1971 film was greenlit to launch a still-extant defictionalized candy brand, its songs appeared in a 2005 stage musical (Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka) that otherwise stuck closer to the novel, and in 2013 it was the basis for licensed casino slot machines. The 2005 film was the basis for several tie-in video games. There is also a 2023 musical origin movie, titled Wonka.
• A Christmas Carol: Has been made into no less than 40 films, including animated versions, made-for-tv movies, musicals, silent films, and a Muppet version. There are also many stage adaptations, and at least one ballet version! And that's not even getting into the Yet Another Christmas Carol trope. Best exemplified by Twelve Hundred Ghosts, which is 400 adaptations of the work in one video and still isn't all of them.
• The Count of Monte Cristo has also had a ton of adaptations. The film with Jim Caviezel is only one of many.
• The The Divine Comedy has been adapted hundreds of times (although most of the adaptations focus on the Inferno), including at least twenty-four films, four operas, video games for the Commodore 64 and Xbox 360, and a few comic book issues during certain runs of the Disney Mouse and Duck Comics and the X-Men.
• Dracula: The fact he has his own page on this very website should be proof enough of how often he tends to appear in media of every shape and form. Most tend to adapt more from the famous 1931 Universal film than the original novel by Bram Stoker. See here for a list of adaptations and derivative works.
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley has spawned many adaptations. Thomas Edison produced the first movie in 1910! Plus many Spiritual Successor stories using its Artificial Human plot.
• Freaky Friday became a Disney movie in 1976. Then, from The '90s until at least The New '10s, Disney produced at least one new version of the story per decade, for either TV, the big screen, or the stage.
• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time one novel that received: three television series, four live-action films, one animated film, and two manga adaptations.
• Heidi has received many film adaptations, as well as an anime series.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a 6-expanded-to-12-episode radio comedy, then a series of novels based on it, an adventure game, a TV series, a sequel radio comedy series, and a movie. Each one of them considerably different from the others. Unusually, this was intentional on the part of Douglas Adams (who was the primary or sole writer of the radio, TV and novel versions).
• I Am Legend has had three movies since it was written in the 1950s, and all of them take the plot and characters in different directions.
• Ikebukuro West Gate Park has the original novel series, the live-action series from 2000, three different manga adaptations, and an anime from 2020.
• All James Bond books and almost all short stories had film adaptations (three times in the cases of Casino Royale —including TV— and two times for Thunderball), and many were also translated into comics, radio plays, and the occasional video game - though in most places, the film series is the one serving as inspiration.
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë gets adapted in film or miniseries or on stage a lot, and not only in English-speaking countries. Check the work's film page.
• The Jungle Book has had so many film and TV adaptations, both live-action and animated, that Rudyard Kipling's version is probably the least well-known.
• Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, in addition to being part of a 5-book series, has itself been adapted to film at least five times, with the last (most famous) one being a remake of a previous screenplay; a graphic adaptation by Marvel, and inspired a series of classical oil paintings when it first came out in 1827, along with having some local landmarks named after the characters.
• Les Misérables has over 60 adaptations for radio, anime, theatre, TV, film (the latest being a big-screen adaptation of the stage musical) and at least one fighting game. Yep.
• Little Women has been made into several stage plays, movies (see 1933 film here), TV miniseries, anime, an opera and a Broadway musical.
• Mutiny on the Bounty: At least three film versions, a few novels, probably a play or two.
• Noddy has had 8 TV series (including one that reused segments from another incarnation), an animated short, a theatrical film and multiple stage productions.
• Oliver Twist has over a dozen cinematic adaptations, multiple tv adaptations, the musical theater adaptation Oliver!; which was subsequently adapted into the successful 1968 film of the same name. Adaptations range from faithful retellings of the source material to contemporary setting updates such as Disney's Oliver & Company. Oliver Twist remains one of Charles Dickens' most recognized and adapted works, beaten in volume of adaptations only by A Christmas Carol.
• The Phantom of the Opera began as a novel by Gaston Leroux. Has since been adapted into goodness knows how many movies, at least six stage musicals (seven if you count Love Never Dies, which is a sequel to the most famous musical version), quite a few additional novels and numerous spoofs/reworkings on TV. Plus songs about it by Iron Maiden and Iced Earth.
• Sherlock Holmes's Evil Counterpart Raffles, while nowhere near as popular as the consulting detective, has been the subject of several unrelated films, a 14-episode television series, various radio and theater plays, as well as a bunch of pastiches, including The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Anno Dracula.
• The Ring has been made into a film four times - twice in Japan (once as a semi-pornographic TV movie!), once in Korea (as The Ring Virus), and once in America. There have also been two Japanese TV series, three Japanese sequels, and one American sequel (directed, oddly enough, by the same guy that directed the original Japanese film). It was also adapted into a manga.
• Sherlock Holmes definitely deserves to be mentioned separately, having been played by over 75 different actors in 211 films. Plus the book adaptions and Pastiches... and the TV shows... and the occasional graphic novel....
• Starship Troopers has spawned a 1988 anime miniseries, three strategy tabletop games, a 1997 live-action film with two sequels, a CGI television series, a CGI film, a video game, and a live-action Hollywood reboot on the way.
• Similarly, Tarzan has had so many movies, TV shows (both animated and live-action) and graphic novels based on it that the original books by Edgar Rice Burroughs are obscure by comparison.
• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. A quick search on IMDb returned over 50 results on film alone. And one the book's second sequel, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, has been adapted to film many times as well, mostly using Man in the Iron Mask or "The Iron Mask" in the title. This page has a list of various adaptations of those books. On a side note, this is mitigated for France on the big screen as there has been no French-produced version between the 1961 and 2023 ones (there's been plenty on French TV, however, and original theatrical films taking cues from the sequels as well, such as Revenge of the Musketeers).
• Tolkien's Legendarium has been made into two three-part film series, several full-length animated films, a Tv show based on the Second Age, several radio plays, and many video games and tabletop games.
• Treasure Island has many film adaptations, including an Anime, a Muppet version and a couple of versions set in space. There are also a number of television series, as well as theater, radio, video games and music.
• The first Twilight novel has had several adaptations and retellings (including some written by Stephenie Meyer herself). Twilight was adapted into a film in 2008 and then into a two-part graphic novel in 2010 and 2011. Meyer began work on Midnight Sun, a retelling of the first book from Edward's perspective, which was eventually published in 2020; prior to that she wrote and published Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, which is a gender-flipped retelling of the first book, in 2015. Then there's the unofficial adaptations: Fifty Shades of Grey started out as a Twilight fanfiction before being published as an original work in 2011 (those familiar with both stories will be able to see the remaining similarities) and it got both a film adaptation and a retelling from another character's POV in 2015.
• There have been several adaptations of most of H. G. Wells' books, especially The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. The former is especially prone to getting a Setting Update about once a generation.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has 39 books, a series of silent short films, the classic musical adaptation which itself has a sequel, a prequel and an Andrew Lloyd Webber-helmed stage version, a Muppet version, an anime series, an anime film, stage plays including a pop music-driven reimagining with an all-black cast which itself got a film adaptation helmed by the unlikeliest of directors, a modernized TV series, an alternate interpretation of Oz and the villain (which in itself has a musical and an upcoming film), cartoons, and a Russian translation that diverges considerably as it goes on. Since the first several books are in the public domain, there are also hoards of derivative works (such as the prior mentioned Wicked, Was, Dorothy Must Die, and several unofficial sequels) have been released as well.
• Zorro has been adapted many times.

Mythology & Religion

• Arthurian Legend. Every few generations needs a new adaptation of the old stories, starting with Le Morte d'Arthur by Malory and moving on to Tennyson, T. H. White, Peter David...
• The Bible has been adapted hundreds of times, covering every medium there is, which can be expected, since it's a sacred text for three of the world's largest religions.^note Judaism doesn't believe in the Christian New Testament, and Islam puts it second behind The Qur'an, but let's not split hairs. Among the most commonly adapted Bible stories:
  • The Noah's ark story from the Book of Genesis.
  • The first 20 chapters of the Book of Exodus, (most people skip the incredibly painstakingly detailed instructions for building the tabernacle in the second half of the book) especially the liberation of the Jews by God through Moses the Prophet.
  • The story of Samson and Delilah from the Book of Judges.
  • The accounts of Jesus's life, death, and Resurrection from The Four Gospels.
• Many stories from Classical Mythology are a popular choice for all kinds of adaptions, be it the The Iliad and The Odyssey, the adventures of Herakles, the journey of Jason and the Argonauts, the quest of Perseus...
• The legend of Mulan might be best known to contemporary audiences through Disney's two film adaptations, but it has also been adapted to the stage (including a 2013 dance version called The Legend of Marissa Inouye), in novels, several Chinese-produced films, and on television.
• Robin Hood also has a ridiculous amount of adaptations, including TV shows, movies, books, video games, and that's not even getting into "Modern Robin Hood" territory.

Theatre

• Carmen is known for its frequent adaptations. Although most of them are derived from one particular adaptation, Bizet's opera, with the original novella falling victim to Adaptation Displacement.
• Chess started out as a Concept Album in 1984. It was adapted into a stage musical for the first time in 1986, but a mixture of Executive Meddling and attempts to cope with the end of the Cold War meant that for some time, every time the show popped up in a new location it was practically a new musical, sometimes venturing pretty far from the album's storyline. Even a couple decades later there's no consensus on which staged version did it right if any did at all, so new variations of the story continue to pop up.
• The Odd Couple originated as a stage play that debuted in 1965 and has been adapted into a film that got released in 1968, a well-known 1970-75 TV series, a 1975-76/77 animated series adaptation, a 1982-83 reboot TV series with black leads, along the way a rewrite of the original play for female leads that debuted in 1984, a 1993 TV movie followup to the '70s series, a 1998 theatrical sequel to the 1968 film, a 2002 rewrite of the original male version, and a 2015-17 reboot series. There's also been a lot of merchandise for mostly the 1970s series, including a mid-1970s comic book adaptation that Neil Simon told Paramount to halt after its first issue, as he'd only signed away the rights to adapt the original male play into movies and TV series. This is only a list of all the official, recorded adaptations originally in English. This entry doesn't even start getting into all the foreign adaptations, parodies, spiritual adaptations/sucessors, and usage of the basic character archetypes and plotline within other works. Neil Simon spawned a fucking genre. Now that he has died and is no longer around to tell Paramount not to step outside the formal bounds of his 1963/64 sale of the IP's adaptation rights to them, who knows how many more adaptations it can spawn and how much merchandise is yet to come?
• L'Olimpiade (The Olympiad) was originally an opera by Antonio Caldara with a libretto by Pietro Metastasio. Metastasio's libretto, based on Herodotus' The Histories, was extremely popular, and many composers decided to use it with their own music, abandoning Caldera's version. There are now over sixty different versions, each with their own production history. The composers who did this include Antonio Vivaldi, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Thomas Arne, Josef Myslivecek and a version by Gaetano Donizetti that was left incomplete.
• Stage versions of William Shakespeare's plays don't count as adaptations, but the many straight up stage-to-screen adaptions, and the inspiration for new scripts, easily number into the hundreds. The BBC appears to feel a need to produce a definitive TV version of the complete Shakespeare folio, approximately once every fifteen years or so.

Toys

• Likewise, sister franchise G.I. Joe (both are by Hasbro, and earn the occasional Crossover). Ever since the second generation in 1982, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, was accompanied by a comic book and an animated series, the franchise has since earned plenty of other comics and cartoons, two movies, and the occasional game.
• Transformers has to take some kind of a record. It has — let's see now — several lines of toys, the original American cartoon The Transformers, several successive anime that continued from where the American one left off (Transformers: ★Headmasters, Transformers: Super-God Masterforce, Transformers Victory, Transformers Zone), five or six different comic book series (The Transformers: All Hail Megatron, The Transformers (IDW)), spanning all the different TV show and toy eras (Transformers: Generation One, The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers), American and British (The Transformers (Marvel)), Beast Wars, the Japanese spinoffs (Beast Wars II, Beast Wars Neo), Beast Machines, several more Transformers anime set in Alternate Universes that were dubbed for American consumption after Hasbro succumbed to fan backlash over Beast Machines (they originally intended a sequel to that named Transformers: TransTech), the live-action films which occupy their own AU and possess their own novel and comic adaptations, two more American cartoons which are also their own universes, and a Japanese toy and manga series called Kiss Players which involved Interspecies Romance on the Autobot side and vorarephilia on the Decepticon side.
  
  In short: Look at this full listing of everything and try to not go too cross-eyed. And that's not even counting the Diaclone and Micro Man Japanese lines whose overstocks and remainders were sold to Hasbro to become the original Transformers toys.

Video Games

• The first Final Fantasy got countless ports and remakes, was novelized in Final Fantasy I * II * III: Memories of Heroes and got two separate games reimagining its plot: Mobius Final Fantasy and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin.
• The Lunar series keeps making new versions of the same games. The first game in the series was first released on Sega CD and later reworked for the Saturn and PlayStation, followed by a GBA remake, followed by a PSP remake. The PlayStation version is generally best-known (and pretty troperiffic compared to the Sega CD original). Plus, most of the other games in the series have their own remakes, except just one a piece instead of three. And that's without getting into the novelizations, manga and audio dramas.
• MediEvil (1998) was remade as MediEvil: Resurrection (which was halfway between a remake and a Reformulated Game) in 2005 and then remade again faithfully in 2019 for the PlayStation 4. Plus the various re-releases and ports. Meanwhile, the actual sequel MediEvil II is almost forgotten and the planned third game remained vaporware.
• Pokémon: There's the original games, the spinoff titles (which itself has a load of diverse examples, ranging from rail shooter where you take photographs to a a visual novel that stars a talking Pikachu), the remakes of the older games (which both expand upon the originals and retcon certain aspects of them), the anime, a movie inspired by that visual novel, a collectible card game, at least three manga adaptations of the anime and several movie-specific ones, various adaptations of the games, over 40+ other manga which seem to do their own thing separate of other continuities. And that's just the beginning.
• Sonic the Hedgehog has an anime, an adaptation of that anime, an OVA, two American animated series that were launched simultaneously, a later American animated series, another American animated series over a decade after those three, a theatrical movie, a U.S. comic series, a later U.S. comic series, a UK comic, several manga, and numerous '90s book adaptations not based off any comic. And we haven't even mentioned the spinoff games.
• Super Mario Bros.. Less so now, but as well as the games there are the spinoff games in about ten series, three cartoon shows, about four anime films, the live action film, an animated film produced partially in America, various manga series, three series of American comic books, German comics in Club Nintendo, the Ice Capades, books, and random series that have very little to do with anything (Mario All Stars cartoon series consisting of recycled stuff from the first three, King Koopa's Kool Kartoons).

Western Animation

• The Classic Disney Shorts started with simple animated shorts and with inspire comic books, animated shows, feature films, and theme parks.
• The Looney Tunes started with animation shorts, and would later inspire comic books, TV cartoons, the occasional feature film (including live action hybrids in case of the Tunes), theme park rides, video games and all sorts of merchandise.
• Scooby-Doo spawned numerous animated series, including a Spinoff Babies series, as well as many animated movies (Reluctant Werewolf and The Ghoul School), several live action movies, more animated movies (Zombie Island, The Alien Invaders, etc.), another animated series with a modern update, and many more animated movies based off of that series. The latest, SCOOB!, is even intended to launch a Shared Universe with Hanna-Barbera properties.

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