Most creative retcon in any media

KYRANDIA 3 SPOILERS:

Malcolm never killed the king. It was the enchanted knife. Malcolm was just trying to stop it.

New 52 assuming you mean rebooted

All those bad memories are coming back now...

COIE to me, was one of the best decisions DC ever made. Took decades of weird, confusing stories and multiple universes and condensed it all down into a cohesive and strong single continuity. It was very much needed and executed perfectly. Unlike...another reboot DC has done...

Every episode of Space Dandy.

I'd say COIE. Creative and complex, and they got a lot of sales and future stories out of it. They could have just rebooted everything with no plot at all, but the Crisis was cool and did the job in a way that explained why the inconsistencies where there to begin with. So, it actually dealt with all the inconsistencies on two levels... nice.

Time lord regeneration-it was never shown beforehand but that decision is probably the sole reason Doctor Who is still the longest running sci-fi show.

It's a nice plot device, but kind of obvious really. Doesnt seem especially creative.

@willpayton: How was it obvious at the time, though? Not many major sci-fi shows use regeneration and especially not as implemented as thoroughly as in doctor who. Now imagine that back in the 60s...

This.

And that is why I'll always hate the idea. :P

It's obvious because they did the least possible that you need to explain what the change was. They needed to have: a thing happens and then the Doctor has a new body. Well... there you go. It's not hard to get from that description to regeneration, or something very much similar. It's simple and pretty obvious. Actually, the only interesting thing they did was the changes in personality from Doctor to Doctor... but even then, it makes sense and it's kind of obvious. Each actor was bound to have different characteristics, different strengths in their acting, etc. So, you can ignore those or account for them. If you decide to account for them... the literal simplest thing to do is say "the regeneration slightly changes the Doctor's personality"... and you're done.

With something like COIE it was a much more complex task... how to reboot, completely changing some things, slightly changing others, and keeping others exactly the same? Then, not just that, but you need to account for why everything got convoluted in the past and why stories would contradict each other. And on top of that, how to do it in an entertaining way that would sell even more comics, and set up future stories, and as a bonus... how to have this explanation possibly help you explain new reboots in the future... in case you started screwing things up again (which DC soon started doing... cause they just cant help themselves). And, they found a way to do all this that actually worked. It's really pretty remarkable.

Yeah, and the Pre-Crisis universe never actually got fragged. They just stopped telling stories about it.

@willpayton: Exactly its simplicity was brilliant. It did obvious but yet no other show had done it before and yet it completely changed how the show worked.

COIE has been retconned to death since, the Anti-Monitor has been nerfed, DC multiverse returned, as did Barry Allen and then the entire idea was retconned with New 52. It was a nice little idea while it lasted.