97 Years Later, This Sherlock Holmes Quote Still Defines the Franchise

Sherlock Holmes is a character who simply won’t go away, with the 139-year-old consistently being revisited and reimagined in media adaptations, from 1900’s silent short film Sherlock Holmes Baffled to a recently-announced project, with the working title Animated Sherlock, which will see the famed detective in an animated series aimed at an adults-only audience, currently in production. That comes in a year that has already seen the Sherlock-adjacent third installment of Netflix’s Enola Holmes and Prime Video’s Young Sherlock, developed by Guy Ritchie, the man behind 2009’s Sherlock Holmes and its follow-up, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. These projects have generated a number of memorable quotes (including this one), but only one, first uttered in 1929, still defines the character to this day: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”