User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20170222073756/@comment-4028641-20170224003115

Alright, you can't compare this film's plot to a rap-battle.

It's simply not a "cultural reference" if the characters appearing are fully licensed and are shown in the right context.

The Daleks are a part of the "villain squad" that attacks Gotham. It's not a futurama background gag where the Fourth Doctor is walking around unliscensed. They're there and it's clear who they are.

You can't just call this a "Reference" over an "Appearance" over some marginally irrelevant notes about how many lines the Daleks have and if someone in the movie makes fun of them for two seconds.

It is a licensed appearance. It is explained why they are in this universe. The DWU is explored in the Lego series.

I think an important note is, once again, anything that isn't Doctor Who in this movie is irrelevant to the discussion. This conversation will likely be used in the future to make a judgement on all LEGO media, so it's important that we closely inspect the Who branch of the franchise above all other things.

If they specifically designed the plot of the movie and surrounding media so that it could be explained how the Daleks did arrive in the Batman universe, then it was in some sense meant to be set in the DWU. Let's compare it to Looney Tunes: Back in Action, as someone did in another thread.

Back in Action is set in a universe with cartoon animals living alongside people. The reason it does matter in that case that the universe is different from the DWU is that it's never explained that the Daleks aren't from the universe that they're currently in. They didn't go out of their way to explain how it makes any sense. The Lego products did do that.

The important clarification is that the film is not set in the DWU at all. But we do not literally chose to call things valid or invalid based off of if a story is set on "Earth-5556" or not. The film is set in a universe on a tangent to the DWU, and it's explained how characters from the DWU ended up there. That's what actually matters.

There was a clear-cut effort to make this appearance, and indeed all of the uses of Doctor Who characters, make some resemblance of sense. They wanted us to understand how this all tied in. Thus it sort of is based in the DWU.

Things that this movie is not:

It's not the Family Guy sketch, because the Family Guy sketch is presented as a fictional episode of Doctor Who within Family Guy. It's never presented like we're meant to take it as a real narrative that could have actually happened.

It's not LT:BIN because the Daleks are properly licensed and it's explained how they are in a universe where we wouldn't expect them to be.

It's not a Futurama or Simpsons cameo because it is not an unlicensed joke appearance.