Would it be cool if people started taking old *American* tv shows and dubbing over them with completely different storylines, like what apparently often happened when Anime is westernized?

How about taking unrelated old shows and making them be related, like say, "Buck Rogers" (the 70's version with hottie Erin Gray as Wilma) and Star Trek (the original series)? A local TV station of my childhood used to show those two shows in the same time slot on alternate days.. a real mash-up of the shows would've been perfect.

Now that I think of it, the mid-series change of Buck Rodgers to a more Trek-like format (you remember, when they introduced Dr. Asimov and Chrichton) was already such a bizarre jump that having the next season start off on the olde Enterprise would not be all that strange. And didn't Buck Rodgers have some kind of incestuous relationship to Battlestar Galactica as well?

This is actually a really good argument for the public domain to come back, since only when these shows outlive their copyrights will people have the freedom to do stuff like that.