THE HAT SQUAD: ER BRAITHWAITE & "TO SIR, WITH LOVE"

From the Guardian:

ER Braithwaite, the Guyanese author of "To Sir, With Love", has died at his home in Maryland at the age of 104.

He took a job as a teacher at St George-in-the-East school in London’s East End, which was recovering from the battering it had taken during the war. This experience formed the basis of his autobiographical novel "To Sir With Love", his 1959 book later adapted into a film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier.

That movie belongs in two different fictional universes.  O'Bviously, the Cineverse is the main one.  But in 1996, Poitier returned to the role for a TV movie.  So both movies co-exist in a dimension called the Borderlands, where movies and television can be joined together without being part of the main TV dimension of Earth Prime-Time.

In the past I have had no problem with just absconding with a movie, snatching it right out of the Cineverse and claiming it for the Toobworld Dynamic - "Maverick", "Batman" - 1966, and the "Star Trek" franchise (at least until Spock entered the black hole.) I even "stole" a Rosalind Russell movie ("The Velvet Touch") which had no real connection to television, but the main detective (Sidney Greenstreet's Captain Danbury) may have been a mentor to Columbo when he was just starting out as a NYC patrolman.  (At the very least, Danbury might have taught Columbo's mentor Sgt. Gilhoolie everything he knows.) 

But in this case, I can't just steal the 1967 movie and claim it's part of Toobworld.  That's because the character of Mark Thackeray already exists in Earth Prime-Time, thanks to a production from 1974 starring Hari Rhodes.

From the IMDb:

A black foreign-exchange teacher must adapt his lesson plans in order to instruct the lower-middle class London students who are his pupils.

Maybe someday Mark Thackeray might make it into the Television Crossover Hall of Fame as a Multiversal Honors.  But if that does happen, you'll know I was grasping for candidates....

BCnU!