This article will be a pastiche of personal opinions, references and will pretty much have nothing to do with the movie it was aiming to explore; this is not professional on my behalf whatsoever but, as a mentor once taught me, I will use it as a pretext to talk about something else that I like.
Let’s at least get the small stuff out of the way: The league of extraordinary gentlemen is a 2003 action movie based on Alan Moor and Kevin O’Neill’s homonymous comic book series. A cast of literary heroes (this was before Avengers was cool) has to stop a criminal mastermind. They do, good job, the world is safe, yey. Oh yeah, Sean Connery is the main character, so at least it has that going for it.
While the cinematography has its moments, there is a bit of CGI which is kinda meh and all in all it’s at least an entertaining watch.
I would give this movie a shabby 7 out of 10 parallel universes.
Now, let’s get to the good stuff…
The base idea of the movie and of the original comic book is to gather together a company of protagonists from different sources, usually classic novel, and see how they interact with one another. For a voracious reader this could have two very different effects: the purist (who doesn’t get the point) would scoff at this creative experiment, the enthusiast would like every single scene and conversation. I hope it is clear enough that I am willingly biased and obviously I can also accept the points of view of other people, but since it’s my article I’ll do as I please.
In the case of The league of extraordinary gentlemen, the characters used are Alan Quartermaine (Henry Rider Haggard – don’t ask, I don’t know him), Captain Nemo and his Nautilus (Jules Verne), the invisible man (the one written by H. G. Wells and not R. W. Ellison), Wilhelmina Harker (from Dracula), Dorian Gray, Tom Sawyer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (spoiler, as the same individual). Other characters appeared, such as Ishamil (doesn’t need introductions – also, he is the first mate on the Nautilus) and many others are merely mentioned such as Phileas Fogg (also Jules Verne) or Jack the Ripper.
This is most certainly nothing new for literature; in my opinion, several works of Jules Verne were included because he also used the “ploy of transversal plots” (hopefully this is an original term and no one will copy it). It is for instance without warning that we, as readers, assists at Nemo’s death in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. Less known fact, in his An Antarctic Mystery (I can assure you that not all his books have the word mysterious in them), the French writer follows the adventures of Gordon Pym (written by Edgar Alan Poe) and re-envisions what the finale represents; also in a small note he adds that a submarine had gotten to that point of the Antarctic, obviously referencing the Nautilus.
There are other instances, usually written by the same author, where a continuity can be traced in different novels. One of my personal favorites derives from James Clavell’s pen (Shōgun, Noble House and Gai-Jin especially) where he merely hints at some connections between certain characters. It is a way for the writer to wink towards a passionate reader.
Obviously in movies this game of transversally becomes much easier to execute and notice. Before the Marvel and DC generation (I am referring to the movies seeing that the comic books did this much earlier), I have to remind people that “back in my days” the Jetsons met the Flintstones. Just as later on, Futurama would have a close encounter with the Simpsons. Not to mention all the “special guests” that made an appearance on Scooby-Doo (the Globetrotters, Batman and Robin, The Adams family, Oliver and Hardy and so on).
I would go on and talk about comic books, but that would open up a chapter that would be impossible to cover in an article, from the multiple crossovers among many of the beloved superheroes to the “What if” series of comic books. This topic alone would be worthy of a book. Honorable mention: DeadPool being DeadPool and completely shattering any literary boundary and expectation.
So, here is where it gets ugly…
Because of oversaturation, there have been literary experiments that have taken the source material and added a completely different element (mostly for the lulz). There even exists a niche for these parodistic works. I don’t know if you were aware, but we have examples of books, some of which have even become movies, such as Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, Little Women and Werewolves, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (yeah, you are reading these correctly).
Now, the question is, have we gone too far?
In this writer’s opinion, as long as it is an homage to the source material and there is no copyright issue, why shouldn’t people be able to enjoy something they like? While in my mind many works are directly correlated with Sturgeon’s Law, I also encourage people to peruse their literary (guilty or not) pleasures. My problem, as usual, is that the production of such pieces is more concerned with financial gain rather than the deconstruction of a genre, but that is a topic for another time.
Link to the article in italian: https://quirkyhorizons.com/la-leggenda-degli-ubermensch-letterari/