speak of Holmes, referring to him only as "the other chap". Frequent speculation as to the "real" Holmes has existed since publication, and Mark Frost's novel The List of Seven (1993) and its sequel The Six Messiahs (1995) are not the first to put a spin on this. Frost has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as its main character and tells the (fictional) story of how Doyle's Holmes was inspired by Johnathon Sparks, a mysterious man who saves Doyle's life from a mad occultist. The Wold Newton family series connects multiple famous fictional characters together to a mail coach that passed a radioactive asteroid in the eighteenth century - Holmes is a descendant of one of the travelers in that coach. Stage Holmes is portrayed in Mysterious Circumstances by Michael Mitnick. Holmes is portrayed in Sherlock's Last Case by Charles Marowitz. Cinema Some of the earliest films use Holmes as a character, notably the early films of William Gillette, the American actor who played Holmes in various plays. The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929) is an early "talkie". Later films would blur the lines between canon and non-canon, however. In the sci-fi film Time After Time (1979), H.G. Wells uses a time machine to go to 1979 America; he tries to use Sherlock Holmes as a false name, thinking the literary character would be forgotten by then. From 1984 to 1985, Japan's Tokyo Movie Shinsha and the Italian TV station RAI released 26 episodes of Sherlock Hound, a show featuring anthropomorphic dogs in various roles in the Sherlock Holmes world. Walt Disney Pictures released The Great Mouse Detective (July 2, 1986), wherein the character of Holmes is borrowed by a mouse. The name "Basil" is no mere coincidence: one of Holmes's aliases in the original Conan Doyle stories is "Captain Basil". Also, the actor Basil Rathbone famously portrayed Holmes on film. The film is based on the Basil of Baker Street novels. Continuing the print tradition of goodnatured irreverence, the comedy film Without a Clue (1988) presents the premise that Holmes was a fictional creation of John Watson's, who was the true deductive genius. Once the character becomes popular, Watson is forced to hire an out-of-work actor to play Holmes. In the movie The Phantom of Baker Street (2002), Conan goes into a virtual Victorian London a computer simulated Holmes and Watson don't appear due to working on another case (Hound