Hello, Sneakers! It’s the late, late show this week as Ian and Dave recorded the shows in the wee hours due to four different scheduling conflicts. This week: Dave is tired; Dave calls a kettle black and accuses someone else of enjoying the sound of his own voice; Ian confuses Dave with an old reference; Dave’s mixed-up internal organs; why Ian doesn’t put things away; Dave accuses Ian; our podcast marketing plan; re-reading Tintin is getting in the way of Dave re-reading Trollope – outrage; Dave wonders if Trollope is the first world builder – the first author to create a fictitious, but entirely real, interconnected world for his characters to inhabit; Ian wonders what the first TV show to have a spin off was; they talk about the Marvel Universe; Ian doesn’t miss typewriters; they discuss dark, brooding superheroes like Batman, the new Superman and Super-Goof; Ian is still being renovicted and, finally, bold accusations!
Let us know what you think: who was the first world-builder in fiction? (Please don’t say the author of The Bible.) What TV show was the first spin off? Can you think of a character from fiction that was spun off into its own books?
Thanks for listening.
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Adventures of Champion was a spin-off of The Gene Antry Show. This would’ve been in the 50’s. Old but maybe not the oldest.
The best thing about this is I posted the show around quarter to five and twenty minutes later Thomas is making his comment.
What do you expect me to do with my Saturday evenings? Read Trollope?
I missed one of the most obvious literary spin offs, Huckleberry Finn.
We mentioned Gomer Pyle USMC and Mayberry RFD spinning off from The Andy Griffith Show but the program itself was a spinoff of The Danny Thomas Show. George “Goober” Lindsey’s character from The Andy Griffith Show spun off to become a regular on Hee Haw. I’m glad we didn’t mention that, there are only so many times one should say “goober” in a podcast and Super Goof’s goobers were quite enough.
But The Honeymooners debuted in 1955 and it was a spin off of sketch of the same name on The Jackie Gleason show.
Andy Taylor was on the Danny Thomas Show; however, I don’t think he was on enough for it to count as a spin-off, by how you were defining what a spin-off is during the podcast.
I would say maybe Homer was the first world builder, with the Iliad and Odyssey. Maybe the Odyssey would count as one of the first spin off stories as well.
Shakespeare gave Sir John Falstaff a spin-off (apocryphally, at the request of Queen Elizabeth I). He pulled a “reverse Lou Grant,” letting his character cross over from drama, Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, into a comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor.
I hope Ian’s move is going well and that his and Pia’s unique and singular cat will be happy in its new home and will not be too lonely whenever it’s left all alone by itself.