Official Crossovers
Crossovers often occur in an official capacity in order for the property rights holders to reap the financial reward of combining two or more popular, established properties. In other cases, the crossover can serve to introduce a new concept that derives from an older one.
Crossovers generally occur between properties owned by a single holder, but they can, more rarely, involve properties from different holders, provided that the inherent legal obstacles can be overcome. They may also involve using characters that have passed into the public domain with those that currently enjoy copyright protection.
A crossover story may try to explain its own reason for the crossover, such as "they live next door" (one example being the casts from Golden Girls and Empty Nest) or "a dimensional rift brought them together" (a common explanation for science fiction properties that have different owners). Some crossovers are not explained at all. Others are absurd or simply impossible within the fictional setting, and have to be ignored by the series' respective continuities. Still others intentionally make the relations between two or more fictional universes confusing, as with The Simpsons and Futurama, where each show is fiction in the other. Others can be from the same company, making it legal. Examples of this are Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts which are both from Square Enix, and CSI:NY and Miami.
Read more about this topic: Fictional Crossover
Famous quotes containing the word official:
“We were that generation called “silent,” but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period’s official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)