@SympathyX:
…and where do you think they got the idea for Classic-Master?
Perhaps too flamboyant in The Great Game. It's a bit of a shock and I wasn't sold on him but in The Reichenbach Fall… bugger me... that was a thinker, that was a meticulous deviant for the age of the dark corners of the internet.
Whatever, all I see is some silly over the top stereotype. Guess they got the idea for him from New Who Master.
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
@RobbyBevard:
And where did you get this impression? All the spin off media over the decades?
The guy was only legitimately in one story in the original books. Its everywhere else that makes him a super overarching permanent rival that had his hands in everything. There's a TON of room for interpretation where Moriarty is concerned. Him being a little mad works, IMO. Joker to Holme's Batman.
Of course, there's also the chance there's more than one Moriarty…
From that one story which I read 10 times. Yes he has been subject to a ton of interpretations but Doyle did a good enough job building him up as his own character and truly a force to be reckoned with even if he was just an excuse to kill off Holmes.
Here's the paragraph which first describes about him
"He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it, he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the University town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and come down to London. He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city…"
A Joker he is not. He's the very opposite of mad. But again, my problem is less "It's not the same!!!" and more "this just isn't original or memorable let alone next to the original".