Whole-Plot Reference

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Sometimes rather than just a brief reference or homage to some other work of fiction, a work will actually be a full-blown recreation of something else's story. This is usually done in sitcoms, and likely a spoof to at least some degree.

Sub-Tropes:

• The Bard on Board
• Charlie and the Chocolate Parody
• Die Hard on an X
• Fantastic Voyage Plot (Fantastic Voyage)
• Film Fic
• Fractured Fairy Tale (any Fairy Tale)
• "Gift of the Magi" Plot
• How the Character Stole Christmas
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game (The Most Dangerous Game)
• It's a Wonderful Plot
• The Magnificent Seven Samurai
• May the Farce Be with You
• Off to See the Wizard
• Parent Trap Plot
• Robinsonade
• Where No Parody Has Gone Before (Star Trek)
• Yet Another Christmas Carol

See also Homage, Fable Remake and Recycled in Space ... sometimes with the Serial Numbers Filed Off.

Compare Parody Episode, Whole Costume Reference (the clothing version). May be a Twice-Told Tale.

Examples of Whole-Plot Reference include:

Anime & Manga

• Episode 18 of the Dirty Pair TV series is a straight-up remake of the Clint Eastwood movie The Gauntlet, with the girls filling in for Clint.
• One of the Lupin III TV series spent an episode remaking Murder By Death (with a different set of No Celebrities Were Harmed detectives, and set on a zeppelin for some damn reason).
• Speaking of Astro Boy, his origin story bears more than a few parallels to Pinocchio. Knowing Osamu Tezuka, this was almost definitely intentional. He's remade stories from Faust to Crime and Punishment to, yes, The Bible.
• An episode of Ghost in the Shell: 2nd Gig was a futuristic homage to Taxi Driver, and another was a homage to the sniper shootout at the end of Full Metal Jacket.
  • Lampshaded Trope by one of Section 9's junior members, who thinks that Saito is pulling one over on them: The story Saito tells over their poker game is entertaining, but there was "an old movie" with the same plot.
• "Battle Aboard the St. Anne", and "Pokemon Shipwreck" two episodes of a three-part arc on the Pokemon anime, were directly inspired by The Poseidon Adventure.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica bears many many resemblances to Goethe's Faust. Not to mention that a good number of the episodes take homage to The Little Mermaid. And we're not talking the Disney one, either.
• Urusei Yatsura episode 75 is based on Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None—the episode's title actually means "and then there were none", and it uses a different nursery rhyme ("Who Killed Cock Robin") in the same manner that the novel uses the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Indians".

Comics

• Gorsky and Butch do a brief Matrix parody in their first book. In the third one, they do a more extended parody: Butch makes a Face Heel Turn, joining the agents of Comix, in hope of achieveing his goals and finally ending the sensless plot so he can star in a 'real comic'. In the meantime Gorsky leads the resistance under the guise of Morfinius, atempting to destroy the Comix by making Jerry ( the heroes Butt Monkey sidekick) the main character.
  • They also do Aliens at one point: the whole section of the comic is the movie but it turns out to be an illegal copy with borked subtitles: all sorts of whacky hijinks result from it, most importantly the aliens getting replaced with sheep because their name have been misspelled (makes sense in Polish) - the marines discover a nest with missing colonists hanging on the walls in oversized wool sweaters.
• The comic book version of Pv P did a homage/parody of The Matrix called "The Comix".
• There's a Star Wars Expanded Universe comic featuring Luke's childhood friend Janek "Tank" Sunber, who'd joined the Empire, become a lieutenant, and ended up stationed on a planet of tribal aliens. The plot of that handful of comics is essentially Zulu, with Imperials desperately fighting wave after wave of aliens and being worn down.
• Judge Dredd did this quite a bit in the late 80s and 90s, with parodies of such things as The Wizard of Oz, Twin Peaks, Edward Scissorshands, and many more.
• The whole Hellfire Club section of the X-Men's The Dark Phoenix Saga is basically Chris Claremont's riff on the The Avengers episode "A Touch of Brimstone", in which Mrs Peel gets brainwashed into being the Hellfire Club's Queen of Sin by John Cleverly Cartney. Claremont even gives Mastermind the real name Jason Wyngarde, after Peter Wyngarde, who played Cartney, and Jason King, Wyngarde's most famous role.
• The story of Steve Rogers' return to the land of the living, Captain America: Reborn, is a extended reference to Slaughterhouse-Five.

Fan Works

• Pretty Cure Perfume Preppy is a rather unlikely example, as every so often it parodies episodes from actual TV shows instead of the usual things. To list what the author referenced so far: The Backyardigans, The Powerpuff Girls, Code Lyoko (three times so far!), and even Power Rangers Dino Thunder. Make that of what you will.
• Brave New World is pretty much a Darker and Edgier retelling of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. But with Pokémon!
• The Fullmetal Alchemist fanfic "Who's Your Daddy?" is essentially a Whole-Plot Reference to the movie Look Who's Talking, with a side order of Three Men And A Baby. One of Roy Mustang's one-night stands shows up with the infant son who resulted from their time together, hands him over, and disappears. He shoulders the task of fatherhood, relying on his devoted subordinate Riza Hawkeye to help him while he tries to find his son the perfect mother. Just about the time he realizes she's been there all along, the baby's real mother tries to take him back.
• There is an entire genre of Harry Potter fanfic, the "Harry is sent to Azkaban" genre, which varies between homage, this, and knockoff of The Count of Monte Cristo.
• The Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series fanfic Decks Fall Everyone Dies is a recreation of Moulin Rouge, altered to fit the Yu-Gi-Oh universe.
• The Best Night Ever is a My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fanfic that retells Groundhog Day using Prince Blueblood getting stuck in a loop of the events of the season one finale "The Best Night Ever".

Films -- Live Action

• Avatar received much praise for its visuals, but criticism for its storyline being basically a retelling of, Dances With Wolves, A Man Called Horse, The Last Samurai, Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Pocahontas.
• The Breakfast Club has had a whole litany of these. They include:
  • A whole episode of Degrassi the Next Generation was dedicated to parodying the movie, ending in the "bad boy" and "basketcase" ending up together in the end, with the "pretty girl" and "jock" ending up together. Toby didn't end up with anyone, though... like Brian.
  • Lizzie McGuire also did an entire episode based on that plot. Three kids (including Lizzie) where brought together because they were accused of starting a Food Fight.
  • Victorious also has an entire episode taken from it.
  • An episode of Dawson's Creek was a parody with several characters lampshading it.
• The movie My Own Private Idaho keeps dropping in and out of the plot of Shakespeare's Henry IV.
• Film example: Epic Movie was essentially a parody of The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and a Shallow Parody of everything else they could put together.
  • Likewise, Meet The Spartans did the same for 300, as did Disaster Movie for Cloverfield and Vampires Suck for both Twilight and New Moon.
• Similarly, most of the first Scary Movie follows closely the plot of Scream (with some scenes from the second and a slew of late 90s horror in-between) and the second is mostly based on The Haunting. (the others have the main plot being an amalgalm instead, with the third being a mix of The Ring and Signs, and the fourth mixes War of the Worlds, The Village, The Grudge and Saw)
• O Brother, Where Art Thou? is based off of Homer's The Odyssey. Although the entire plot is only loosely similar, there are certain parts that mirror the source material quite closely.
• Barb Wire is basically Casablanca with more boobage.
• Strange Brew puts the MacKenzie brothers in the role (sort of) of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a loose adaptation of Hamlet. The brewery is called Elsinore.
• The Cheap Detective combines the plots of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Casablanca.
• Now, rip-offs of Alien or Aliens are legion, but the movie Carnosaur 2 repeats the whole plot of Aliens almost scene by scene, with Spear Counterparts of Ripley and Newt, and dinosaurs instead of the Xenomorphs (with a Tyrannosaurus Rex stand-in for the Alien Queen).
  • Spiders is another one. It replaces the Xenomorphs with giant spiders, and eventually sets them loose in a city, allowing for giant monster sequences.
• Repo Men has been accused of being this to Repo! The Genetic Opera.
  • Though the actual film is more like Blade Runner but with bionic organs replacing the replicants.
  • More accurately, Repomen is a more faithful adaptation of the novel which The Genetic Opera was very loosely inspired by.
    • The novel that Repomen claims to be based on came out after the Genetic Opera concept was created. The book came out the same year as Repo: The Genetic Opera, which had been originally a stage play before it was adapted to be a movie by the play's creator. This dates that concept well ahead of the book.
      • The book was in release hell for years though (in fact, the film was in pre-production a few years before the book was published), possibly due to the dark premise. At this point, people should stop claiming one rips off the other as they are more or less totally different films.
• While Mel Brooks is fond of referencing/parodying films, classic and contemporary, in his works, Spaceballs is essentially It Happened One Night in space.
• Akira Kurosawa's done a couple of these. Throne of Blood was basically Macbeth in medieval Japan, and Ran could be considered King Lear in medieval Japan.
• Many teenage romantic comedies do this. To name a few, Clueless is Jane Austen's Emma, 10 Things I Hate About You is Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and She's the Man is Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
  • Easy A is an aversion, since while it repeatedly references Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the plot is not the same at all.
• Although it isn't apparent at first, Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a combination of two G1 cartoon episode plots: the three-part episode "The Ultimate Doom", with the Decepticons attempting to transport Cybertron to Earth via space bridge and then enslave humans to restore it to its former glory; and the two-part episode "Megatron's Master Plan", where the Decepticons receive the help of several treacherous, sycophantic humans, also resulting at one point in the Autobots being exiled from Earth, and their chosen means of escape destroyed in transit by the machinations of the Decepticons, though the Autobots survive in both cases.
• The plot of Ip Man 2 heavily borrowed from that of Rocky IV. This includes: a rival-turned-friend killed in a fight against a foreign fighter, the main character trained to avenge his death, and the fact that the fighter in question was supposed to be an unbeatable juggernaut. Ip Man himself went as far as giving a speech promoting tolerance like Rocky did after he won the match.

Literature

• Several Discworld novels are referential parodies of famous works. For instance, Wyrd Sisters spoofs Macbeth.
• Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia" can be read as a remake of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter".
• The second book in the "Tennis Shoes" series of Mormon fiction is called Gadiantons and the Silver Sword. The heroes must take the titular sword to a land far to the southeast and cast it into a box in a mountain where it was forged, while being pursued by servants of Satan who want to recover it. The similarities with The Lord of the Rings could fill it's own page on this wiki, starting with the main character's sister remarking on the similarity of their situation.
• The novel Revenge by Stephen Fry is a reinterpretation of the classic novel The Count of Monte Cristo, and so is the Filipino classic El Filibusterismo, Right down to the main character's arc.
• The Laundry Series is full of Shout Outs, but the plot of The Jennifer Morgue is a whole plot reference to James Bond. An in-universe whole plot reference: the bad guy uses Post-Modern Magik to make himself untouchable by anyone but a person who resembles James Bond, and as a side effect develops a tendency to monologue.
• The plot of the first Rivers of London book is a whole plot reference of Punch and Judy of all things.
• The "Man-Kzin War" novel The Children's Hour by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling does a whole-plot lift of the movie Casablanca, except at the end when "Ilsa" dumps "Lazlo" and runs off with "Rick".
• The story "Honor in the Night" from the third Star Trek: Myriad Universes book applies the series' For Want of a Nail premise to the Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles". The end result can be summed up as "Citizen Kane in the Star Trek universe".

Live Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer did one with "The Monkey's Paw," where Dawn and Spike try to resurrect Joyce. It only becomes more disturbing after Season Six, since Buffy also seemed to come back wrong but got better. What does that say about what happened with Joyce?
  • Given that one was done by a powerful witch to someone who died a mystical death using a powerful artifact and an ancient ritual whereas the other was done by a teenager with no magical experience on someone who died of natural causes using a ritual gained from an evil demon...nothing good. You get what you pay for.
    • Then again, we see a spell in Season 3 that brings people back from the dead without post-death memories that can be done without any magical skills. Sure, it doesn't heal the body, but that could easily be done with a secondary spell.
    • It also doesn't bring them back to life, just reanimates them as psychotic zombies intent on killing people. Which might be seen as a considerable drawback.
• Just Shoot Me pulled a neat trick when it set an episode up so that it could suddenly turn completely into King Lear.
• Quantum Leap has the episode where Sam pulls the Yet Another Christmas Carol scheme on a Scrooge-like character who shared his "neurons and mesons" and thus could see Al, who played the role of the ghost(s).
• Also the series finale of Dallas, which was a subverted Wonderful Life episode.
• Charmed has an entire episode based on the movie Ladyhawke, down to the eclipse. It's Lampshaded by Prue: "I swear I saw this in a movie once."
• A number of people have noted quite a resemblance between The Fixer and Callan. Both are ITV shows, so copyright isn't an issue here.
• Early Edition had an episode with a plot that strongly resembled the classic movie Roman Holiday. Princess gone missing, officials covering her while she meets a down to earth man and they enjoy the American city together; and they both end on much the same note.
• The 3rd Rock from the Sun episode "Citizen Solomon" includes a plot based on a portion of Citizen Kane. Oddly, it's the "B" story which is based on Kane, not the "A" story. In the episode, Tommy is Kane, Alissa is Susan and August is Leland.
  • Oh hold on...Citizen Solomon, Citizen Kane...SolomonKane. Wow, that's weird.
• The original Battlestar Galactica Classic and its sequel, Galactica 1980, succumbed to this several times. It wasn't so much homage or parody as... wholesale plot theft, usually in response to the Dreaded Deadline Doom. Example: "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero" came from The Guns of Navarone.
  • Even The Return of Starbuck, the one episode of Galactica 1980 that many fans will accept, bears a striking resemblance to Enemy Mine, which had first appeared in short story format in 1979.
• Farscape, especially the first season, references The Wizard of Oz. Crichton sometimes notices.
• Scrubs has an episode based on The Wizard of Oz, from the yellow lines to the exits, to three of the main characters needing a heart, courage and a brain.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation's "QPid", the Costumer part, anyway, is pretty much The Adventures of Robin Hood, down to a fight between Robin/Picard and Guy of Gisborne on a staircase. Which makes Vash's absolute refusal to play Marian a whole lot funnier. (Though someone somewhere seems to have gotten Guy of Gisbourne and the Sheriff confused, because Q is clearly playing Basil-Rathbone-Guy but calls himself the Sheriff, and Guy more resembles the dim-witted, rotund Sheriff of the movie.)
  • Eureka later used the TNG episode "Remember Me" as a Whole-Plot Reference for the episode "Games People Play". Which was the point, since it was the 100th episode.
• The MacGyver episode "Countdown" is either a rare example of a Whole-Plot Reference played entirely straight, or a cynical attempt to rip off the plot of a film most of MacGyver's audience wouldn't have seen. The episode "Trumbo's World" went so far as to use footage from the movie it was ripping off. (Respectively, Juggernaut and The Naked Jungle.)
• In the Smallville episode "Roulette", Olliver's storyline is blatant rip-off of the 1997 Michael Douglas film The Game, right up to the male lead having suicidal tendencies.
  • They also dished out a Hangover episode.
• The finale of Highlander the Series was also a Wonderful Life episode. Nevertheless, it was far and away the best episode of the entire season (even if that's not saying much).
• Doctor Who:
  • The Sinking Ship Scenario episode "Voyage of the Damned" is The Poseidon Adventure.
  • The classic serial "The Androids of Tara" is The Prisoner of Zenda.
  • The first two Christmas Specials with the eleventh Doctor are based on well-known Christmas stories, possibly setting a new trend. The first is actually called "A Christmas Carol", and the second is "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe". Neither sticks very close to the original story past the basic premise.
• Remember WENN did this twice, with Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard.
• House did this with the Season 6 opener, "Broken," wherein he is a patient in a mental hospital: did somebody say One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Why, yes I did. Subverted in that while the references were played up, everything was the opposite of One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest: the nurses and psychiatrists were actually trying to help, and House's attempt to "liberate" one of the other patients ends badly. Really badly.
  • Lie to Me made a similar reference. The psychiatrist running the place clearly has it in for Cal (which makes perfect sense) but when he's shown the evidence that Cal's symptoms are coming from ergot rather than schizophrenia he lets him and the other victims out without hesitation.
• The entire second season of Californication is a Whole Plot Reference to The Great Gatsby, with Hank as Nick and Ashby as Gatsby.
• The underlying storyline of Heroes' fourth season is Carnivale with abilities.
• Magnum, P.I. did this once with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lampshaded by Magnum spending the whole episode racking his brains as to why it all seemed so familiar.
  • It hits even closer to home Tom Selleck was considered to star as Indy, but was unable to get out of his contract with Magnum, thus paving the way for Harrison Ford.
• Good Eats has a send-up of Misery in the episode "This Spud's For You", and a sequel "This Spud's For You Too". Of course, it's about making potato dishes, and is by far, more family-friendly.
  • Good Eats does this all the time; the episode about scallops, for example, was a spoof of Jaws. An exhaustive list of examples would be too long.
• Whether unintentional or a deliberate reference, the Fringe episode "White Tulip" (2x18) borrows heavily from the plot of The Broken Bride by the band Ludo: A scientist creates a time travel device to go back in time to the day in May when his fiance/bride was killed in a car accident with the intention of saving her life. Minus about 14 years, pterodactyls, a dragon and a zombie apocalypse. It even ends with the time traveler realizing he cannot save his bride and getting in the car to die alongside her.
• The Latest Buzz has a full episode based around The Wizard of Oz.
• Red Dwarf: "Back to Earth" becomes a Whole-Plot Reference to Blade Runner around halfway in, and most of Queeg is based on The Caine Mutiny. Also, "The Last Day" is based on the Jack Nicholson film The Last Detail.
• On episode of 30 Rock was an extended reference to Amadeus with Frank as Salieri, Tracy as Mozart, and Tracy's porn video game as the masterpiece.

Frank: I've devoted a lifetime to porn, and he masters it in one day?!

• Big Wolf on Campus had an episode called "The Manchurian Werewolf." Can you guess?
• 12 Angry Men is another stock plot that's been much copied. It's been done on The Odd Couple, Happy Days, and The Simpsons just to name a few. The former is interesting in that series star Jack Klugman was in the original film. While it might not be the original example, many examples of the Rogue Juror trope will probably call upon this in some way.
• The Goodies had an episode called Punky Business. It seemed like it was going to be a spoof on punk, and then it turned into "Cinderella".
• In its final season, The A-Team had an episode called "The Spy Who Mugged Me," which played out like a James Bond film (complete with an intense card game, killer sharks, etc.).
• In Community has done a few of these. An easy one to spot is Abed's birthday dinner with Jeff which is a reference to My Dinner with Andre.
• The Not Going Out episode Life on Mars Bars is, appropriately, a half-hour reference to Life On Mars.
• When Cold Case wasn't basing it's episodes off of Real Life cold (and "hot") cases, it often did this. "Blood On The Tracks"= The Big Chill, "Disco Inferno"= Saturday Night Fever, "Detention"= The Breakfast Club, etc.

Radio

• In a particularly obscure example, the Nebulous episode "The Lovely Invasion" is a very close parody of an early Doctor Who episode "The Claws of Axos". Additionally, the episode "The Deptford Wives" is just The Stepford Wives with a little Jurassic Park thrown in for good measure.

Video Games

• Chapter 3 of Bully is basically the plot of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is very similar to the 1980s, Al Pacino-starring remake of Scarface. A criminal, exiled from his old stomping grounds in the eighties, winds up in (a) Miami(-like city) and builds up a criminal empire, including an opulent mansion, but gets betrayed by a partner who ends up seeking his death. The way the protagonists end up is different, though.
• The first third of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is basically Juice mashed together with Boyz N the Hood.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 pretty much lifts the entire plot of The Rock for one mission.
• Red Dead Revolver, as a game where the Showdown At High Noon is a frequent occurance, has a quickdraw tournament in the vein of The Quick and the Dead.
  • Earlier in the game, there is a stage where the player must blow up a bridge on a battlefield by wading into the water and placing explosives on the pillars, much like in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
• In Mass Effect 2, Thane's loyalty mission, where he tries to make his son go down a different path than the one he took, and to make up for not being a part of his son's life is basically a whole plot reference to Harry Chapin's song "Cat's In The Cradle," to the point where the achievement for completing the quest is named after the song.
• World of Warcraft was always big ont the Shout Outs, from single NPCs to entire quest lines, but two zones in the Cataclysm expansion brings it to a new level. The Redrige Mountains are all about Rambo, while around half of Uldum consists of Harrison Jones fighting for an ancient relic against nazi goblins.
• Devil Survivor 2 has a series of Eldritch Abominations, utterly immune to conventional weaponry, attacking Japan, which only a handful of special poeple have the potential to stop, is a World of Woobie, has major Kill the Cutie, Order Versus Chaos themes, a White-Haired Pretty Boy who loves humans (and happens to secretly be one of said abominations) and viciously deconstructs all tropes related to its genre. Where have I heard this before...?

Web Comics

• Ctrl+Alt+Del's Animated Adaptation did a two-episode homage to Star Wars.
• Pv P did a series of strips echoing the plot of Watchmen when the movie came out, but due to the difference in mediums, Scott Kurtz used syndicated cartoon characters and called it "The Ombudsmen". They mapped onto the Watchmen superheroes (Dagwood for Dr. Manhattan, Dilbert for Ozymandias, etc.) surprisingly well.
• Pibgorn did A Midsummer Night's Dream with Gender Flipped roles and actual fairies IN THE THIRTIES!
• Jane's World's current arc is literally The Last Starfighter with lesbians.
• Just Peachy does this in one story arc with the movie "Singing in the Rain". They even reference the movie in this strip.
• Many Sluggy Freelance parodies cobble together from different works in a genre, but the "Torg Potter" storylines were mostly whole plot.
• Dangerously Chloe fans early on noticed how the premise is close to "Ah! My Demoness". There are, however, obvious differences.

Web Original

• AH Dot Com the Series is fond of them. Examples include:
  • Snakes on a Plane - "Sealions On An Airship"
  • The Poseidon Adventure - "The Ship Sank - DEAL WITH IT!"
  • Red Dwarf - "A Present From The Future" is an homage to the episode "Out Of Time" and is even named after a working title of it.
  • The Wizard of Oz - "Story Hour"
  • Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man and every other Charlton Heston film - "The Next To The Last Omega Man"
  • Indiana Jones - in both "Dry Dock" and more obviously "Montana Howery and the Mantle of N00b"
  • Fantastic Voyage - "Crap-tastic Voyage"
  • X Men - "C-Men"
  • Bubba Ho-Tep - "Return Of The King"
  • Star Trek, specifically "Arena" - "Arena Of Death And Pain And Other Bad Things"
  • Mad Max - "Luakels Of The Wasteland"
  • King Kong, Gone with the Wind and Planet of the Apes (again) - "To A Theatre Near You"
  • The Matrix - "The Thandrix"
  • Casino Royale - "Casino Imperiale"
    • Also, series spinoffs AH.com Wars and Luaky Commer are Affectionate Parodies based off each installment of Star Wars and Harry Potter respectively.

Western Animation

• Which animated show did the first epic Star Wars Whole-Plot Reference? Hint: It was neither Family Guy nor Robot Chicken. It dates back to Muppet Babies ("Animal Vader!!"), Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs (a rather nostalgia fuel one since they had used the whole cast), and The Muppet Show in the episode with Mark Hamill, with Gonzo as "Dearth Nadir".
• The Simpsons has done this many times (Mary Poppins, Lord of the Flies, and more).
• Family Guy did Poltergeist, Back to The Future and Rocky III, as well as Family Guy Presents Laugh It Up Fuzzball for Star Wars.
  • Completely averted with "Peter Griffin Presents The King and I".
• American Dad also did this with a whole episode based off of The Da Vinci Code. And one for James Bond (or perhaps that style of spy fiction in general, it's hard to tell). They also once did What's Eating Gilbert Grape, with squirrels.
  • Lampshaded in "Return of the Bling," which is (as the name suggests) a Lord of the Rings parody. At the very end, Roger bites one of Stan's fingers off for no apparent reason. When Steve demands to know why, Roger just shrugs and says "They did it in the movie."
• Jimmy Two-Shoes had "I Am Jimmy", the first half of which was parallel to I Am Legend, with Jimmy and Cerbee being the last man and dog in he—Err, "Miseryville".
• Sealab 2021 played this trope straight... on itself. The show is a comedy "sequel" to Sealab 2020, starting out simply with footage from the latter show being Gag Dubbed to episodes with increasing original animation. However, one episode, "7211" had the new voice actors re-dubbing a Sealab 2020 episode verbatim, letting the originals' boring plot and surreality of the situation play out for laughs. Sealab still explodes at the end, of course.
  • Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law did the same thing in "Turner Classic Birdman" - introduced by Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osbourne as if it were an old movie on TCM.
• Animaniacs was made out of this, doing cartoons inspired by sources such as Apocalypse Now ("Hearts of Twilight") and Duck Soup ("Good King Yakko").
• Tiny Toon Adventures did an impressive rendition of Sunset Boulevard featuring Elmyra as Norma, Montana Max as Joe, and Hamton as Max. Another episode of Tiny Toons was a parody of "Voyage of the Kon-Tiki", of all things, with Plucky as Thor Heyerdahl ("aah, mango juice").
  • They also did an episode that was a recreation of Citizen Kane with Montana Max as Charles Foster Kane, Star Trek starring Furball, Plucky and Hampton and Indiana Jones with Buster, and Superman with Babs.
• Pinky and The Brain did a parody of The Third Man titled "The Third Mouse". This was just one of many Orson Welles in-jokes added into the show due to the Brain having a vocal similarity to the actor.
  • An even more subtle one is "Yes, Always", an homage to an infamous clip of Welles going ballistic while doing commercial voiceovers. The story goes that Maurice LaMarche (Brain's voice actor) used the "Yes, Always" clip as a warm-up, so they wrote an episode spoofing it.
• So far, the Animated Adaptation of Spaceballs seems to consist mainly of these.
• The Chipmunks Go to the Movies, the last season of Alvin and the Chipmunks, consisted only of these, the targets being relatively recent movies such as Batman, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Back to The Future, and whatnot.
• South Park also did The Wizard of Oz and Die Hard episodes, and a parody of Great Expectations, appropriately starring Pip as... Pip. Except for Estella's out-of-period insults such as "butt pirate", this version is more faithful to the book than a lot of serious adaptations. At least, until the end of the second act when it goes completely off the rails and becomes an action movie parody. (Estella doesn't kill a giant pile of bunnies in the novel? Next thing you know, we'll claim the robot monkeys don't appear in Dickens.)
  • There were also episodes based on the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the The Lord of the Rings ("The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers"), King Kong, Three Hundred, The Da Vinci Code, The Lottery, The Grapes of Wrath, Tron, The Day After Tomorrow, High School Musical, The Human Centipede the 'Star Trek episode "Dagger of the Mind", Hannibal Lecter's scenes in The Silence of the Lambs.
    • Actually, there are there are dozens of minor references to Star Trek in South Park, and at least three whole plot references: the afore mentioned Dagger of the Mind Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods, City on the Edge of Forever (Flashbacks)/The Galileo Seven, and The Wacky Molestation Adventure/Miri, although the latter is also a whole plot reference to Children of the Corn.
• Futurama's pilot episode is a goofy version of the already satirical novel Immortality Inc. Funnily enough, Bender would later become more like the corresponding character from the book—the scene where Bender and Fry go to a bar ends with them becoming fast friends, while in the book the Bender-analogue takes the opportunity to drug him and sell his organs.
• The World's Greatest Superfriends consisted entirely of Whole Plot References to classic tales like The Wizard of Oz.
• The Fillmore episodes "A Cold Day at X", "Two Wheels, Full Throttle, No Brakes" and "Immune to All But Justice" were essentially kid-friendly versions of Assault on Precinct 13, Gone in Sixty Seconds and Lethal Weapon 2 respectively.
  • Of course Fillmore as a whole is referencing every late 60's/early 70's Quinn Martin detective show.
• Rugrats did a an episode based on Flowers for Algernon, replacing Charly's temporarily heightened intelligence with Chuckie's temporarily heightened sense of smell, and an It's a Wonderful Plot episode. There's also one where Angelica and Susie remade Thelma and Louise.
• The 2003 Strawberry Shortcake series has an episode where, inspired by Around the World In 80 Days, the Peculiar Purple Pieman challenges Strawberrry to travel around the world in 80 days. She makes it by exploiting the same loophole as in the book, which she even points out.
• Kids Next Door has done this many times, usually the genre of film can be discovered by the character in the lead role. Numbuh 5 is whenever it's a straight adventure film (Indiana Jones or Pirates). Numbuh 2 has become the star of various horror flick parodies. Anything in a genre that borrows from James Bond goes to Numbuh 1.
• The entire second season of Freakazoid was composed of whole-episode parodies, from The Godfather to The Island of Dr. Moreau to Mission Impossible to Hello, Dolly to flippin' Amadeus. It seems that every single episode is one of these. Additionally, the first season had a parody of, of all things, The Crawling Eye (in "The Cloud").
• The "Decepticon Air" episode of Transformers Animated is basically one large send up to Die Hard, with a touch of Con Air, obviously.
  • The "A Bridge Too Close" two-parter takes some inspiration from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
• Hey Arnold! loved to do this a lot with a lot of semi-obscure movies/radio shows/etc like Marty, The Birdman of Alcatraz, War of the Worlds, 12 Angry Men, Carmen, and even The Longest Day.
• The Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Senate Spy" shamelessly rips off Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, swapping CGI Anakin Skywalker & Padme Amidala for Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
• On Dexter's Laboratory, the "Dial M For Monkey" short "Wrasslor" is based on a story from Marvel Two-In-One Annual #7, with Wrasslor taking the role of The Champion and Monkey taking the role of The Thing.
• The plot of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Squeaky Boots" is one long shout-out to Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart,
• The Beetlejuice cartoon did a few of these, including homages to It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.
• Martin Mystery has done this at least twice, with The Thing and Evil Dead.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog did its own rendition of The Nutcracker...taking place in a dump.
• Minoriteam had "Evilfellas", a brilliant episode-long take on Goodfellas and Casino. The action is moved to a circus world, with a Monster Clown filling Joe Pesci's roles. "Funny, how?"
• The plot of the Thomas the Tank Engine episode "Edward and Spencer" is reminiscent of The Tortoise and the Hare.
• My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic has a couple. "Swarm of the Century" is essentially "The Trouble With Tribbles" with less Klingons.
  • In Read it and Weep most of the episode is spent recounting a book that Rainbow Dash is reading. The book is essentially the first Indiana Jones film, with ponies.
  • "Dragonshy" is basically The Hobbit with Fluttershy as Bilbo and Twilight as Gandalf. The first sign of the red dragon? Smog
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Book 3-Chapter 2 episode "The Headband" is a WPR towards Footloose of all things.
• Regular Show - the episode "High Score" is a WPR towards the documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, with GBF being an Expy of real-life video game champion Billy Mitchell.
  • The episode "Video Game Wizards" is a another towards The Wizard (film). They even have a power glove like device that turns to be a dud.
• The Canadian animated show Olliver's Adventures had one episode that was basically a kid-friendly version of Fight Club.