The inspiration for a movie doesn't always spring from the pages of a great book or a screenwriter's gray matter. The boob tube has been the source of plenty of memorable films, and here at RT we thought it was high time to give some love to the sitcoms, mini-series, and Saturday morning cartoons that made the transition from the living room to the multiplex.

In compiling this list, we've set some parameters: these movies are remakes of TV series (i.e. Starsky and Hutch), mini-series (Pennies from Heaven), or sketches (The Blues Brothers). We've also included big-screen adaptations that utilize the series' principal cast members (the Star Trek movies, the Adam West Batman). We've omitted films that, despite having TV incarnations, are derived from other sources (thus, no Superman), but have included others (like The Addams Family) that are best remembered as TV shows. Pull out that remote and click through our 50 Best TV Adaptations countdown!

• Each critic from our discrete list gets one vote, all weighted equally.
• A movie must have 20 or more rated reviews to be considered.
• Reviews without ratings are not counted toward the results.
• Because reviews are continually added, manually and otherwise, we have a cutoff date at which new reviews are not counted. The current cut off date is 6/2/2008.
• We use a weighted formula (Bayesian) to account for variation in the number of reviews per movie. The winners are determined by the rankings, designated as the "adjusted score," after applying said formula:

  (r ÷ (r+m)) × t + (m ÷ (r+m)) × a, with "r" representing the number of rated reviews, "m" the minimum number of reviews needed for a movie to qualify, "t" the Tomatometer score, and "a" the average Tomatometer of all the qualifying movies

• In the event of a tie, the following, in order, will be used to break the tie: the user tomatometer percent, the total number of cream of the crop reviews, and the number of fresh cream of the crop reviews.