So, this past Wednesday CW’s Arrow featured a one-off crossover with the cancelled Matt Ryan Constantine show in an episode called
Haunted. The episode was decent
enough with most of the fun coming from just how gung-ho Matt Ryan was to both
play John Constantine again and get to do all kinds of wizard shenanigans that
he never got to sink his teeth into enough on his own show. However, the episode got me thinking
about the idea of crossovers in general, with a specific lens for the superhero
genre. Crossovers in superhero
stories are as old as the genre itself mainly because “superhero” as a genre is
so vague and open that it tends to absorb a ton of broader genres such as
fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, and horror into it. At the same time, crossovers have always been a great way
for superhero TV to expand its world and test more obscure and bizarre
characters who might not have found an audience otherwise. The best example of this is from the DC
Animated Universe that started with Batman:
The Animated Series and concluded with the massive Justice League Unlimited, which included almost every DC hero
imaginable (even Aztek got in there.)
I’m ranking the individual crossovers from the Batman and Superman
shows.
