It's old news, but - B5 was pitched to Paramount and rejected. Straczynski then had to find money to develop his show himself and find someone to broadcast it, with no big studio behind it. Paramount took the idea and spun it into DS9 with all the power and money of a big studio behind it. Thus they managed to get DS9 to air faster.
The dude who replied is an Ensign... zero experience to know that Zombie threads are a no-no. i know if i were new, i would NO IDEA about that, and wonder what the problem is (especially as that conversation would be new to that person...and for many of us, we forgot Also, if this is on anyone's Watched Threads list... it would be interesting if anyone's opinion has changed over the years (especially on the side of appreciating BOTH series), especially with the number of movies and shows that might repeat themes (NPR just brought up the asteriod movies from 1998, for example)
Any day now, JMS is going to name the people he met with at Paramount. He's going to name the executives who irrefutably and unmistakably ripped off Babylon 5 beyond the simple idea of a show about a space station. Any day now he's going to back up those vague accusations he's been making for thirty years. He's just been waiting for the right moment. Any day now. Just like the Second Coming.
I kinda doubt this thread appeared on the first 25 pages - said Ensign had to go looking pretty deep for a nearly 9 year old thread. Hence the belief someone was trolling here.
My opinion is the same as always - I believe it happened that way, but we got two really good shows that I loved, so what the hell.
Nope. This is simply not accurate to the way DS9 was developed and put on a production schedule. When pressed, jms admitted that he didn't believe that Berman or Piller knew about his pitch. Based on the few similarities of setting, he chose to believe that they were "guided" by (unidentified) studio executives who were just fucking determined to not only copy a pitch (who at Paramount was this "pitched" to, anyway?) but to rush to production of their new show ahead of an as-yet ungreenlighted low-budget series (the B5 go-ahead was given by Warners in May 1993 based on response to a TV movie version that aired in February of that year). "The wonderful thing about conspiracies is that, while it can't be proved they exist, it can't be proved they don't exist," - John Corry, 1996
It's the reuse of some of the names that really convinces me. Broad concepts can be thought up independently at the same time by sheer coincidence, but not one but two very specific and not at all common names? That's a little hard to credit to pure coincidence. And if it is plagiarism, it's really REALLY lazy plagiarism since changing names is by far the easiest thing to do to obfuscate if an idea is recycled or not. We may not know who specifically at Paramount was passing someone else's homework off as their own, but it's pretty clear *someone* probably was based on the outcome.
Nope. That's happenstance that someone exaggerates when they're determined to find conspiracy. If you're going to steal, the first thing you do is change all the names. So, when these mysterious suits who were (according to jms) maybe guiding and offering suggestions to Berman and Piller on their new show had meetings with their producers, do you suppose they were telling them "Here, we want you to use these names? Because, we've got, uh, research showing that these names are winners?" And then the two guys who'd been producing Trek for years and had lots of their own ideas didn't ask any questions about all of this amazingly specific guidance. They just tugged their forelocks as they backed out of the meeting saying "Yes, sir!"
I wouldn't be surprised if Dukat/Dukhat was a coincidence. It does actually happen. Neither Charles Sheffield nor Arthur C. Clarke ripped off the other, but there were surprising coincidences when they chose to write about the same thing at the same time forty-odd years ago. Quoting from Tor.com: One of the more remarkable examples of this type of unfortunate concurrence occurred in 1979. Working on opposite sides of the planet in an era long before everyone had email, Charles Sheffield and Arthur C. Clarke wrote novels about…well, let me just quote Mr. Clarke’s open letter, which was reprinted at the end of Sheffield’s book… Early in 1979 I published a novel, The Fountains of Paradise, in which an engineer named Morgan, builder of the longest bridge in the world, tackles a far more ambitious project—an “orbital tower” extending from a point on the equator to geostationary orbit. Its purpose: to replace the noisy, polluting and energy-wasteful rocket by a far more efficient electric elevator system. The construction material is a crystalline carbon filter, and a key device in the plot is a machine named “Spider.” A few months later another novel appeared in which an engineer named Merlin, builder of the longest bridge in the world, tackles a far more ambitious project—an “orbital tower,” etc. etc. The construction material is a crystalline silicon fiber, and a key device in the plot is a machine named “Spider”… The situation would have been one very familiar to Clarke, because not only did Clarke, Jack Vance, and Poul Anderson publish stories about solar sailing within a few months of each other in the early 1960s, Clarke and Anderson even used the same title, “Sunjammer.” Names are the easiest things in the world to change. The Orville, after all, doesn't refer to "Starfleet" or the "United Federation of Planets." Would thieves really be stupid enough to leave big honking clues? Or could it just be coincidence?
One name is coincidence, two is a pattern. Two names, plus every other commonality . . . you'd have to be a very special brand of obtuse to try and wave that off as coincidence. It may all be circumstantial, but there is enough of it to be at least reasonably suspicious.
Did you read the Arthur C. Clarke quote? Merlin/Morgan, Spider/Spider. Similar name and the same name. Coincidence.
Nope. "Obtuse" is a word l like. Another is "credulous." One would have to be pretty damn credulous and unfamiliar with the facts to give this overly-familiar kind of conspiracy story more than a passing thought. Instead of looking for little pieces of a blank puzzle and cutting them to fit, apply logic. The answer to this is not only self-evident, but inarguable. It's exactly this sort of "corroborating detail," so uncritically clasped to the bosoms of Those Who Believe, that points up just how threadbare and lacking in supporting evidence this entire nonsensical tale of conspiracy is. Also and BTW, this kind of foolishness is the reason that so few professional production companies will read scripts on spec. Writers get their stories rejected, see something on the show they submitted to that in some way resembles the not-all-that-remarkable-or-original story they wrote, and start talking lawsuit. It's a headache. Parenthetically, I was a bystander to Charles' end of the Clarke incident. For a few years we were both in an informal writers workshop that was hosted on Wednesdays by the then-editor of Amazing Science FIction. I remember considerable consternation on the part of his publisher and a kind of calm, good-humored bemusement at it all on Charles' part. I'm sure that he was concerned as well, but he wasn't the excitable or overtly emotional type. As I recall, it was all worked out with an exchange of letters, with grace and without rancor. They were both, I suppose, quintessentially British. Certainly not "Hollywood."
And, of course, Sheffield's book and Clarke's were quite different; I recall enjoying both of them. Not unlike DS9 and B5.
There are two names in common: "Dukat/Dukhat," and "Leeta/Lyta." The two pairs of characters have nothing in common. Dukhat was the revered leader of the Minbar and mentor figure to Deleen, seen only in flashback, whose tragic death led to a war; Dukat was the evil head of the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor. Leeta is a minor recurring character whom some of the men lust after, who works in Quark's Bar, and falls in love with Rom. Lyta is a main character, an oppressed minority who goes from being part of an apartheid regime to being a radical revolutionary. The other elements DS9 and B5 have in common frankly strike me as the inevitable outgrowths of them being made at around the same time and in response to the same external influences and pressures. They were both being made in the shadow of the enormous success of TNG at a time when the American TV landscape was far more limited than it is today and people didn't think there was room for a lot of science fiction space operas. So the most logical way to immediately set yourself apart from TNG if you're making a space opera in the early 90s? Set it on a space station. You want to set yourself even further apart? Incorporate things that were anathema to TNG-style storytelling, such as religious and mythical influences. So right off the bat, they make two really obvious creative choices that almost anyone trying to make a space opera that's not TNG would probably make circa the early 90s. And a lot of the other similarities essentially flow from those two choices, because those two choices create a common set of artistic challenges that have a common set of artistic solutions. If you're set on a space station, you're going to have to do stories about the consequences of your choices, because you can't just swan off to the next planet. So serialization becomes almost inevitable. If you're on a station, you have to find ways to get people to come to the station and have conflict -- and that lends itself to telling stories about how diverse cultures interact, and have conflicts, on or near your space station. That lends itself to telling war stories, particularly since you're trying to set yourself apart from TNG with its safe, antiseptic future. You've got religious elements? Well, hey, you're doing space opera in the early 90s, you want those religious elements to be dramatically interesting, and you've probably read all the old sci-fi novels about Space Messiahs and such. So you probably are gonna end up making your main character a religious figure somehow. The conventions of early 90s television practically demand it. Etc. It goes on. B5 and DS9 are prime examples of how creators working apart from each other but living in the same zeitgeist can end up producing stories that are similar in premise but have very different executions. A really good recent example would be how many parallels and similarities there are between Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, both released in 2016. Not because either one was copying from the other, but because both sets of filmmakers were facing similar artistic challenges in the same pop-culture zeitgeist. Another example? TOS's "Assignment: Earth" and early Doctor Who. It is almost impossible for Gene Roddenberry to have copied Doctor Who because DW just hadn't come to L.A. yet, but his "Assignment: Earth" TV series premise was of an older man with a mysterious alien background possessed of time travel abilities, capable of transporting himself instantly to any point in the world through an innocuous-looking door in a secret room with an advanced computer, with a small pen-like device that can open any door and interface with computers, assisted by a beautiful young woman from Earth who's not part of his fantastical world. The parallels between Gary Seven and the Doctor are incredibly striking, but it's almost impossible that Gene Roddenberry could have been stealing from Doctor Who at the time! This stuff happens.
Are we still discussing something that may or may not have happened nearly 30 years ago? How sad is that?
No, DS9 did not rip off B5. But it's certainly plausible that Paramount executives nudged some ideas from the B5 pitch to DS9.
Well, in that case, it's certainly possible that there are corpses of extraterrestrials stored at Area 51. "Certainly possible" doesn't really get us very far, does it?