Is Who the largest fictional creation ever made?

[Alex]

Sorry for the badly phrased title, but I was wondering if anyone has ever worked out if Who has the largest body of work centering around one fictional creation?

For instance, Coronation Street has been running for 50 years, and Star Trek and Star Wars have all the spin off's and books and comics, etc, etc, but I wonder if the Who-niverse is the largest ever created, what with all the episodes from the tv show but also the novels, audio books, comics, annuals and all that kind of thing?

I guess it's something which is very difficult to correlate, but it's something I've been musing on for the last couple of days and wondered if anyone knew the answer...

[Dino]

Well the Star Wars franchise has a fair amount of stuff. Even if you gave up with it after "Attack Of The Clones". (I did, and I regret nothing!)

But then what about the superheroes? Batman and Superman?
They've been around in comic form for longer than the Doctor.
I really want Doctor Who to be the largest fictional creation, and I'm not picking holes for the sake of it.

Doctor Who= Massive body of TV work, New Adventures books, Big Finish and Planet Skaro audios. Doctor Who magazine and Dapol figures and now New Series figures.

Star Wars= Only 6 films that were massive, the Clone Wars and the figures.
Star Wars magazine (not sure if it still gets made) plus merchandising on pretty much every piece of plastic crap going.

Superman= 4 Christopher Reeve films, 1950's TV show, comic strips, merchandising, toys etc.

Not sure where I'm going with this, maybe Doctor Who is the biggest British fictional creation, but I'd need to know what he was up against internationally?

Oh, I've forgotten about Star Trek. True, Doctor Who came first, but is the TARDIS more recognised than the Enterprise?

Good topic!

EDIT: I think the Doctor might be up against Superman. I know which side I'd rather be on.
(The one who wears his pants on the inside)

[Simon R]

I'd love to know how many published books about Doctor Who there are. All the Targets, all the New/Missing/EDAs/PDAs/Telos books, all the non-fiction ones. It must be in the thousands.

[Alex]

EDIT: I think the Doctor might be up against Superman. I know which side I'd rather be on.
(The one who wears his pants on the inside)

That's a good point about Superman, there's also Lois and Clarke, and 10 years worth of Smallville, along with all of the comics. The problem is how do you compare one issue of Superman to an episode of Doctor Who? The time it takes to read it perhaps?

I guess it's a pretty impossible question to answer, but one I'm intrigued by anyhow!

[J.R. Southall]

Perhaps the question shouldn't be about how much "stuff" has been made (seeing as it's very difficult, as has been pointed out, to compare "volume" in different media), but about how wide the remit has stretched?

Star Trek, for instance, has been a television series, a film series, a cartoon series, and exists in book form and presumably comics (I'm getting out of my area here), whereas Doctor Who has existed as all of those things but has also appeared on the radio, and as a series of audio adventures... Have those things happened with Star Trek? And as for Superman...?

[Simon R]

There was a BBC Radio version of Superman in the 90s as it had some of the same producers or something as the two Pertwee radio Whos.

[Si Hunt]

Who may have been going for 50 years, but there wasn't an awful lot of spin-off fiction before about 1980 was there? Just a couple of audio stories and an annual every year. So in terms of being more than a TV show, it's probably just as young as Star Wars and Star Trek - and they've literally been haemoraging comics and novels ever since.

So no, I'd guess!

Si.

[Larry]

I'd love to know how many published books about Doctor Who there are. All the Targets, all the New/Missing/EDAs/PDAs/Telos books, all the non-fiction ones. It must be in the thousands.

well my collection of Target, / NA/ MA/ EDA/ PDA/ and 9th/10th Doctoe novels amounts to 274 , and I don't even have all of the novels from all the ranges plus I think i've given a few to charity shops over the years. So I'd guess the total number of Doctor who novels written over the years is well over 300.

If you then add onto that nearly 170 Doctor Who BF audios plus the dozens of spin off audios and the well over 100 odd DVD releases I think you'd be hard pressed to find any other sci-fi series that can match the body of work Doctor Who has.

[SiHart]

Who may have been going for 50 years, but there wasn't an awful lot of spin-off fiction before about 1980 was there? Just a couple of audio stories and an annual every year. So in terms of being more than a TV show, it's probably just as young as Star Wars and Star Trek - and they've literally been haemoraging comics and novels ever since.

Doctor Who had a comic strip that ran for just about every week from 1964 to 1979. It might not have been great, but it was running. That's an awful lots of stories.
And in fact the comic strip is the longest running strip based on a TV series in the whole world ever, so that's got to count for a hell of a lot.

Si xx

[Larry]

Doctor Who had a comic strip that ran for just about every week from 1964 to 1979. It might not have been great, but it was running. That's an awful lots of stories.
And in fact the comic strip is the longest running strip based on a TV series in the whole world ever, so that's got to count for a hell of a lot.

Si xx

and don't for get the Doctor Who, christmas annual..

[Jason Thompson]

And as for Superman...?

Superman has been a comic, a radio serial, a film serial (it pre-dated television, with Kirk Alyn in the lead role), a few cartoon series, a couple of television shows, a few feature films, it's been around!

Check it out

As an amusing piece of trivia, kryptonite, now so famous as the glowing green stuff that deprives Superman of his powers, was originally created on the radio serial as a way to cover the unexpected absence of the guy playing Superman, who was sick. This was in the days before pre-recording radio serials, so his absence was a big problem. Solution: invent kryptonite and have him trapped ina cave for a few days (until the actor recovered), and in the meantime cover his part with someone else making the occasional feeble moaning sound....

[Lissa]

It's certainly been in the Guinness Book of Records as having the largest number of novels written around a single character.

[Si Hunt]

Sophie Aldred?

Si.

[Alex]

Who may have been going for 50 years, but there wasn't an awful lot of spin-off fiction before about 1980 was there? Just a couple of audio stories and an annual every year. So in terms of being more than a TV show, it's probably just as young as Star Wars and Star Trek - and they've literally been haemoraging comics and novels ever since.

So no, I'd guess!

Si.

I was going to query whether or not Star Wars had that much, but then checked the lists of comics and books on wikipedia and was astonished to see how much they've put out. Most of it since the prequels, and not of that high a standard apparently, too.

[Rob McCow]

So the main contenders so far are:
Doctor Who
Star Trek
Superman

Into that list you might also be able to chuck X-Men, who are a comics behemoth notorious for spin-offs and an enormous continuous narrative. And surely Batman has a larger 'history' than Superman these days.

One of the things about Batman and Superman is that they're subject to the occassional reboot / re-invention. So while the body of fiction may be large, Chris Nolan's movie Batman is different from the comic strip Batman as he is from the Adam West Batman. Are they really the same character?

[Lissa]

You could argue that the Doctor that travelled with John and Gillian, the Doctor of the New Adventures and the Doctor tootling around with Amy Pond are as different as the comic strip, Adam West and Dark Knight versions of Batman.

It seems to me that Doctor Who's universe is different from all the others because Doctor Who doesn't have a finite, coherent (or semi-coherent) universe. The nature of the series means there are thousands of specific points in time and space but no overall "whole".