Why It Doesn't Work Everywhere Else:

Let's get one thing out of the way right up front: Shared brands ain't enough to go on for a crossover. Yes, they eat the same fake brand of potato chips at Paddy's Pub as they do at Greendale Community College. But the thing about the Let's-Potato-Chip-verse is it's just not a meaningful connection. On a similar note, Quentin Tarantino fans also like to connect Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction due to them both having swords in them ... which only seems like something you'd do if you'd never seen swords before.

Miramax

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

What is this giant knife apparatus?

A major issue with these shared brand theories is less about plausibility and more about whether or not they're all that interesting. If you tell me that all the big horror movies from the late '70s to today have been an epic saga chronicling the Necronomicon and climaxing with the apocalypse in Cabin In The Woods, that's a lot more interesting than people eating the same potato chips.

A lot of these crossover theories tend to mistake slight connections for full-blown Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein crossovers. Are samurai swords or potato chips that scarce of an artifact that they necessarily connect two worlds with little else in common? Does every single person in old-timey neckwear have to be a Time Lord? We're all drawing from the same collective subconscious here, and we're going to be treading the same territory in multiple stories. To mix and match every Gandalf and Dumbledore does a disservice to both of them.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Gilbert Smith is a writer, but what he really wants to do is direct silly little stop-motion cartoons.

For more check out 5 Horrifying Fan Theories That Make Way Too Much Sense and 5 Mind-Bending Fan Theories About Famous TV Shows.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out 8 Great Movies Made Even Better By Fan Theories, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook. We'll blow your mindhole.

It's Spring Break! You know what that means! Hot coeds getting loose on the beaches of Cancun and becoming imperiled in all classic beach slasher ways: Man-eating shark, school of piranhas, James Franco with dreadlocks. There are so many films about vacations gone wrong, it's a chore to wonder if there's even such a thing as a movie vacation gone right. Amity Island and Camp Crystal Lake are out. So what does that leave? The ship from Wall-E? Hawaii with the Brady Bunch? A road trip with famous curmudgeon Chevy Chase? On this month's live podcast Jack O'Brien and the Cracked staff are joined by some special guest comedians to figure out what would be the best vacation to take in a fictional universe.

Get your tickets here: