WNU-TOOB: THE BROTHERS GORCH

It took me longer to finish the second volume of "Crossovers" by Win Scott Eckert, because I found more and more TV crossovers that had previously escaped my notice. And that meant taking a lot of notes!

If only the Toobworld Dynamic could absorb more than just movies and online content - say, comic books, novels, and radio plays - there would be far more to expand the mosaic. (This is especially true in the case of 'Witchblade'.)

But there was one cross-universe link that I had seen before but which escaped my memory until Win brought it up: vampiric cowboys Lyle and Tector Gorch in an episode of 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer'.

The Brothers Gorch were better known in the movie universe (the "Cineverse" as Craig Shaw Gardner calls it) from Sam Peckinpah's classic genre-changing Western "The Wild Bunch". They were played by Ben Johnson and Warren Oates, but in the "Bad Eggs" episode, they were played by James Parks and Jeremy Raitchford.

Now an argument could be made that they looked different from their movie counterparts because vampirism altered their appearances. (The theory would be that they didn't die right away in that Mexican shoot-out, but that vampires - apparently quite prevalent south of the border - later came to feast on them and turned them in the process.)
But if that was the case, then the same theory should have held true for other vampires like Bill Compton, John Mitchell, and Erik Northman.

However, in the 'Buffy' episode "Giles refers to them slaughtering a Mexican village in 1886 - similar to the event that ends the movie, but the movie is set in 1913" (from the IMDb.com).
So rather than the TV Universe absorbing "The Wild Bunch" out of the movie universe - as was the case with the 1966 'Batman', 'Maverick', 'Dragnet', the original 'McHale's Navy' movies (NOT the remake!), and the 'Star Trek' franchise - Lyle and Tector Gorch of "Bad Eggs" stand as counterparts to the Lyle and Tector of the movie, which is the same situation for characters like Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John, Charlie Allnut and Rooster Cogburn (both played in TV pilots by Warren Oates), James West and Artemus Gordon, and the Family Addams.

BCnU!