Crossover

In response to the announcement of a Family Guy/Bones crossover, William Rabkin recalls a story he and Lee Goldberg almost did for Diagnosis Murder until they ran into rights troubles: Dick Van Dyke solves a mystery with the help of Scooby-Doo. Lee Goldberg also supplies his own account of the planned Scooby crossover; the idea had to be dropped because Hanna-Barbera had been bought out by Warner Brothers, which dragged its feet on letting them use the character.

The upcoming Bones/Family Guy crossover is being promoted as something big and new because it’s an animated character appearing on a live-action show. But really it’s a very old-fashioned crossover where characters from one long-running show pop up on another long-running show on the same network. Though I guess Family Guy is more popular than Bones, this isn’t really the sort of crossover that’s done to boost a show’s popularity. It’s more the sort of crossover that happens when two shows are produced by the same studio, and so when the live-action show wants to do an animated segment, they arrange to borrow a character from their sister show.

I didn’t see the season premiere of Dancing With the Stars last night — more specifically, I didn’t want to see it, because this year’s lineup of celebrities doesn’t interest me much — but it had its best-rated premiere in several years. The reason was the power of cross-promotion, which works for reality even better than it does for something like Grey’s Anatomy: