Franchise Tarts

This project was initially inspired by the remarkable acting career of Julian Glover, who according to IMDb is the only actor to appear in the Star Wars, James Bond and Indiana Jones film series. However, when I looked into his credits more closely, it turned out that IMDb were understating his achievements by a considerable margin and I began to wonder if he was in some way unique. Was there anyone else who had achieved a similar level of ubiquity? Thus began the search for the world’s greatest franchise tarts.

Of course, the definition of a franchise in the context of film and television is up for debate and you may well disagree with my choices here – but please do read my much more detailed discussion below before hurling yourselves into the comments. In the meantime, may I present to you what I am unfortunately obliged to call The Tartboard. Details of the role – or indeed roles – taken by each actor for each franchise may be found by moving your mouse over the cell in question.

Notes

There is a long-standing and honourable tradition of classically-trained, frequently British, character actors donning prosthetics and declaiming portentous bollocks about Grabthar’s Hammer and suchlike (God, I miss Alan Rickman). It’s an admirably honest transaction: the actor brings class to an otherwise questionable project and the project brings – one assumes – daft amounts of cash to the actor in return. Having thus established a degree of financial security, the actor can then go on to perform in those esoteric experimental theatrical productions that they had always imagined themselves doing. Or they can spend it all on cocaine and hookers. Either way, I’m happy for them.

But what is a franchise? In the world of business, it’s basically a strong brand that anyone with sufficient resources can buy into. You pay your cash, you agree to abide by the rules of the brand and then you use it to build your own business. When the word migrated over to the entertainment world, the meaning shifted slightly, in that the brand owners retain absolute power and essentially employ others to develop new projects under that brand umbrella, but the end result is pretty much the same: the punters know what they’re getting.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is an obvious example, as is Star Wars or Star Trek. You could also make a case for saying that any long-running television series is potentially a franchise, and this is where it starts to get a bit tricky because there are rather a lot of long-running television series. The rule that I’m tending to use here is that in order to be regarded as worthy of inclusion, a series has to (a) have a strong brand, (b) run to several seasons and (c) have a large cast, ideally with potential for frequent guest appearances.

On this basis, I would argue that Blake’s 7 certainly qualifies. For those of us in the UK, it was prime time television in the early 80s and it had big ambitions that outstripped its budget by several orders of magnitude. Perhaps not unrelated to this, it also included a rare example of a classically-trained thespian who decided not to show up for all but the final episode of each of the third and fourth seasons because he was busy doing proper acting. The fact that he was playing the titular character Roj Blake was an awkward but not insurmountable obstacle.

The Avengers (the one from the swinging 60s) also qualifies, providing as it did a vast range of opportunities for guest appearances – including no less than four by Julian Glover himself, playing a different character on each occasion. I could hardly leave them out, could I?

I’ve decided to include voice-only appearances, including cartoons, because it seemed the fair thing to do. Also Lego, obviously. However, I’ve left out video game appearances, as they get quite complicated and to a large extent (but not always), actors are reprising their film appearances anyway.

As far as keeping score, any appearance in a franchise counts just as much as ten different ones – even if they are quite distinct roles. I guess this is a bit tough on, say, Warwick Davis, who would probably go right to the top of the board on the basis of his many Star Wars roles alone, but I’m sure he can cope. I’ve restricted entry to the dartboard to actors who have notched up three or more franchises, which keeps out one or two famous names, but I’m sure they’ll cope too.

I’ve kept the MCU and X-Men separate for now, as it all gets a bit of a mess if you bundle them all together under Marvel, along with all the Deadpools and Venoms and whatever. Maybe I’ll work out a way of handling that at some point in the future. Equally, the whole DC thing is a horrendously tricky mess to navigate – do you include every single one of the various Superman versions, for example? I may end up revisiting this if the proposed DCU thing actually bears fruit, but for the time being Superman and Batman are off-limits.

I dithered about leaving Heroes in. Given how massive it was at the time, it should have been a shoo-in, were it not for the fact that most of the cast of largely unknowns have remained about as unknown as they were prior to appearing in it. I’m basically hanging on to it to reward myself for the inordinate amount of time I spent scrolling through Eric Roberts’s mad filmography only to decide in the end that his Star Trek appearance in Star Trek: Captain Pike is completely non-canon. Incidentally, has anyone ever done an in-depth study of Eric Roberts’s work, because there’s a whole PhD there. I’m struggling to think of any other Oscar-nominated actor who has appeared in so many films with a rating of 4 or under. Indeed, at the time of writing, IMDb lists no less than 92 upcoming projects. Does the man ever sleep?

One thing which is quite depressing is the clear male bias, and this probably reflects the scarcity of character roles for women – particularly older women. There is evidence of change – Olivia Coleman is clocking up a few, including a splendid turn in the MCU’s underrated Secret Invasion. And Phoebe Waller-Bridge has – if you count a screenwriting credit (I do) – matched Julian Glover himself in covering Star Wars, James Bond and Indiana Jones. But there’s still a long way to go and there are plenty of mature actresses crying out for some meaty roles.

So what next? There are plenty more franchises that I haven’t explored yet. For a start, I’m quite tempted to have a scan through UK favourites like Waking the Dead, Silent Witness and Midsummer Murders – all of which, incidentally, feature guest appearances by Julian Glover. Of course they do. The Jurassicverse will almost certainly reveal some treasures, as may the Fast and Furious series. I’m slightly tempted to look into the Carry On series too, although I suspect that the Venn diagram of Carry Oners and the rest of the franchise fraternity may well turn out to be two very distinct circles.

Paradoxically, I quite like the fact that IMDb don’t offer any kind of easy API and their CSV download is pretty limited, which means that I have to trawl through listings manually and this tends to throw up some unexpected connections. But it does mean that I’ve almost certainly missed a load of stuff, so feel free to offer suggestions in the comments, or drop me a line here. Play nicely, though.

And Finally…

I’m not intending to plaster this place with adverts unless it happens to go really viral, and we all know that’s not going to happen. However, if you do feel like rewarding me for the hours I’ve spent on this absurd and quixotic venture, you could always buy one of my books. A lot of people have enjoyed them, you know.