Homages and Rip-Offs
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With differences between story and movie adaption: Norman Bates outward appearance and Marion´s way of dying under the shower.
As to Gary Seven: I liked Assignment Eternity and l´m eagerly waiting for the Rise and Fall of Khan in Germany (due in April, likely in May
).I am not saying I disbelieve Justman, but copying something, even by accident, is a rip-off, even if you pay for the rights to CYA.
Not if you pay for the rights. A rip-off is supposed to be dishonest.
See my previous thread:
The Trouble With.....Flat Cats!!
As mentioned, I think that the whole idea of the tribbles was lifted (either deliberately or subconsciously) from Robert Heinlein's "The Rolling Stones." There are too many similarities between the Tribbles and the Flat Cats for it to be co-incidental. The physical description is the same, the hypnotic purring is the same, even the massive reproducing is the same along with them threatening the ship's food supply!
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Can't believe no one has mentioned Cause and Effect. Obviously a rip off of, or tribute to depending on your outlook, Groundhog Day. It should be noted that every sci-fi show at the time did their version of Groundhog Day, Stargate, Xena... and Groundhog Day itself is based on 'The Gay Science', a book by Friedrich Nietzsche. Reworking old ideas is a practice as old as the dramatic arts are.
There is only a slight problem in your theory, IE Groundhog day is about one year more recent than TNG's Cause and Effect, so if there was a rip-off it would be the other way around.
Once you go down this rabbit hole you'll realize that nothing is ever 100% original. Legally defensible originality is a fuzzy line that's drawn, but ideas never spawn out of nowhere, nor is it fair that we expect them to.
http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
Don´t forget Data and Geordi playing Sherlock Holmes and Watson. I´ve heard that there were legal issues later on so that they had to stop to show holodeck stories adapted to the ones by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Tom Paris´ Captain Proton is a Homage to the old monochromatic SciFi shows. We had "Raumpatrouille Orion" in Germany, old sixties black and white SciFi show. Lousy setting, great soundtrack.
Tom Paris´ Captain Proton is a Homage to the old monochromatic SciFi shows. We had "Raumpatrouille Orion" in Germany, old sixties black and white SciFi show. Lousy setting, great soundtrack.
Groundhog Day is closer to a rip-off of Richard A. Lupoff's 1973 published short story, "12:01 p.m." There was a short film starring Kurtwood Smith in 1990, which Lupoff was involved in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12:01_PM
I think that has been widely ackknoeledged since the episode first aired.
I wonder what their talking with statics was a rip-off of. The whole breen thing looked like a redux of Morn's old gag of talking only off camera. The breen talk and we're the only ones who never understand them. And the thing about having no blood is kinda weird too. I mean unless they are robots that work on electricity they need a liquid to feed their organs. Call it blood or sap or whatever but you simply can't grow without it.
Not to Ancient Rome, to a historical novel about Ancient Rome. I, Claudius by Robert Graves was published in 1934, and it and its sequels became enormously popular. It's a safe bet that in the 1960s, there were far more people in the general public familiar with I, Claudius than I, Robot. Sure, Stephen Kandel and Gene Roddenberry probably knew about Asimov's work, but they were surely familiar with Graves's work as well, since any culturally literate person who grew up in the '30s or '40s would've been aware of its massive popularity. And surely the general television audience in 1967, upon seeing a title with the form "I, Name," would've immediately jumped to I, Claudius as the reference.
Heck, I daresay both works of science fiction called "I, Robot" -- the Binder story and the Asimov anthology -- were called that in the first place because it was evocative of the famous I, Claudius. That book was Claudius's own first-person account of his life, and Binder's "I, Robot" was Adam Link's first-person account of his life story, so the reference is pretty clear. And Doubleday's editors liked Binder's title so they copied it for Asimov's book (which he wanted to call Mind and Iron).
So even if "I, Mudd" had been named in reference to I, Robot, it would still ultimately owe its title to I, Claudius.
Bloch wrote the novel, but The Outer Limits's producer Joseph Stefano adapted it into the screenplay for the Hitchcock film.
You're right, it's a completely invalid assumption. Doctor Who wasn't shown anywhere in the US until the '70s, and didn't air nationwide until the '80s. Fans often assume Gary's servo imitated the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, but the screwdriver only debuted 13 days before "Assignment: Earth" aired in the US, more than two months after the episode was filmed. And of course Roddenberry originally proposed A:E as a standalone series in November 1966, nearly a year and a half before the screwdriver, and before it started to become commonplace for the Doctor to visit present-day Earth.
Roddenberry and Wallace's December 1967 pitch document for the reworked Trek-spinoff version cites Have Gun -- Will Travel, the Western on which Roddenberry had worked as a story editor, as its primary inspiration, likening "Anthony Seven" (as he was called briefly before they changed it back to Gary) to HGWT's Paladin, a cool, intellectual, larger-than-life hero who seemed like a man out of time. Although that could've just been a way of making the pitch appealing to Western-happy '60s executives. I can definitely see the similarities to Klaatu.
I am not saying I disbelieve Justman, but copying something, even by accident, is a rip-off, even if you pay for the rights to CYA.
Not if you pay for the rights. A rip-off is supposed to be dishonest.
Exactly. "Rip off" is a slang term for "steal" or "defraud." It's an accusation of a crime, which is why I so hate the way people toss it around casually to describe any similarity between two works of fiction.
Yes, and they even considered suing the makers of Groundhog Day for plagiarism.
According to the DS9 Companion (p. 703), the producers' goal was to make the Breen as mysterious as possible, in order to give them some unique quality to distinguish them from all the other aliens. So everything about them was hidden -- we couldn't see them and we couldn't hear them. It wasn't about copying something, it was about not repeating something they'd already done with some other Trek alien. Behr wanted their static to resemble the feedback sounds from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music album, but apparently the final result didn't sound like that.
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The Founders didn't have blood either.
On the other hand they were liquid most of the time, according to the female changeling they rarely left the giant puddle they call the great link.
I thought of Arena at first myself, but since it was credited to Frederic Brown and he was paid before it aired, it was more of an "adaptation." Even if it was an "oops" thing, it was caught before it went out. Now, The Savage Curtain.... that would qualify, since it's clearly "inspired" by Arena.
Nah. There's an outline for a story called "Mr. Socrates" in Roddenberry's first draft pitch for Star Trek, dated March 11, 1964:
Sounds like the basic premise of "The Savage Curtain" to me.
Is that a homage or a rip off?
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