Further reading:

IMHO the wildest swing on Holmes came right from Arthur Conan Doyle: in the first Holmes novel, A STUDY IN SCARLET, he takes an almost neck-breaking turn in the last third, where it goes from victorian detective story to a gritty, Utah-set, leather-slapping revenge western. Give it a read.

From HOUSE, to THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE, to RDJ, to Cumberbatch; I'm here for all of it.

Ever since then I've been a sucker for any remixes, remakes, readaptations of Holmes and I've never found the character so precious that I didn't appreciate some of the wilder swings that have been taken. After all, my first Holmes was a bumbling buffoon.

For years after this, my picture of Sherlock Holmes was Michael Caine. In later childhood Sir John Gielgud (as Holmes) and Orson Welles (as Moriarty) would introduce me to a more faithful adaptation of the character, via an old radio show that my grandmother had on cassette.

When my friend and I got home that night, we didn't play jet pilots, like IRON EAGLE 2, we played Sherlock Holmes. I put on two ball caps (one faced forward, one backward to mimic Holmes' deerstalker) and my friend's dad's wool coat and we "investigated" all over the house with a magnifying glass.

A weird pairing to be sure, but I was just tickled because I was seven years old, and I got to see TWO movies!