Franchise Origins Across the Decades

James Bond began not on screen but on the page: Ian Fleming introduced the character in his 1953 novel Casino Royale, nearly a decade before Eon Productions started its long running film series with Dr. No in 1962. The novels, continued by later authors after Fleming's death, remain the franchise's true origin point.

A year after Bond's debut, Toho released Godzilla in 1954, directed by Ishiro Honda, introducing a nuclear age monster widely read as a response to Japan's experience of the atomic bombings and the Lucky Dragon 5 hydrogen bomb testing incident that same year. The film founded the kaiju genre that Toho has continued across more than thirty sequels.

Star Trek began as a television series rather than a film or a book: Gene Roddenberry's original series premiered in 1966 and ran only three seasons before cancellation, then found a much larger audience in syndicated reruns, the pattern that let the franchise grow into further series and thirteen feature films.

George Lucas's Star Wars opened in 1977 as a single film, later retitled Episode IV, A New Hope once it grew into three trilogies. Lucasfilm's own effects and sound companies, Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound, were built to serve the production, technology that reshaped filmmaking well beyond this one franchise.

Ridley Scott's Alien opened in 1979, built around a creature designed by the Swiss artist H. R. Giger and centered on Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver across the original film and its sequels. James Cameron's 1986 sequel Aliens reframed the series as action horror rather than repeating the first film's slower dread.

Indiana Jones followed in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark, a joint creation of George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg styled as a tribute to the adventure serials of the 1930s and 1940s. Harrison Ford's performance as the archaeologist professor carried the character across four more decades of films.

Transformers began in 1984 not as a film or a novel but as a toy line: Hasbro's American arm merged elements of the Japanese company Takara's Diaclone and Microman toys, launching them alongside a Marvel Comics series and an animated television series the same year, a toy driven franchise model Transformers is credited with pioneering alongside contemporaries like He-Man.

Mario himself first appeared as the player character of the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, but the franchise proper began in 1985 when Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros. launched him into his own platform game series for Nintendo, the start of what became the best selling video game franchise in the medium's history.

A year after Mario's own series began, Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka released the original The Legend of Zelda in 1986, sending a hero generally named Link across the kingdom of Hyrule in a style of open world exploration that made the game an early and influential example of action adventure design.

Pokemon began in 1996 with Satoshi Tajiri and Game Freak's video games Pokemon Red and Green for the Game Boy, an original creature collecting concept that Nintendo expanded within a year into an anime television series, then into trading cards, films and manga, growing into what is generally regarded as the highest grossing media franchise in the world.

Harry Potter, like James Bond, began on the page: J. K. Rowling's first novel was published in the United Kingdom in 1997, four years before Warner Bros. began its eight film adaptation series in 2001. The seven novel series has sold more than 600 million copies, among the best selling book series in history.

The trail closes with Naruto, which began in 1999 when Masashi Kishimoto's manga started serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump, running until 2014 across 72 collected volumes that have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. Its anime adaptations and manga sequel Boruto carried Kishimoto's story forward into every other medium this trail has already crossed.