I was watching the Twilight Zone episode "People are Alike All Over" (Season 1, Ep 25), and I was struck by the similarity of it and The Cage. GR must have seen this episode because it sure felt like it could have been the inspiration for The Cage. And it also featured Susan Oliver. Has anyone seen it?
The Cage/Menagerie Inspiration!
- Thread starter Scylla
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I don't think they're similar at all except for the topos* of "humans in an alien zoo", which predates The TZ version. Heck, Bertram Chandler in 1957 published a story titled "The Cage", and the plot...
*topos is what most people actually mean when they says "trope", that is a traditional theme or formula. Now people have genericized trope to mean topos, so now we'll have to invent a new word to cover the more specific thing a trope actually used to describe.
*topos is what most people actually mean when they says "trope", that is a traditional theme or formula. Now people have genericized trope to mean topos, so now we'll have to invent a new word to cover the more specific thing a trope actually used to describe.
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Different writers come up with the same ideas all the time -- in fact, we generally try to avoid copying other people's ideas but often end up accidentally doing so anyway. There are only so many ways to tell a story, and we're all working in the same cultural zeitgeist and drawing on the same conceptual vocabulary, so inevitably different creators will come up with similar ideas without specifically trying to. So similarity alone is not evidence of direct inspiration or imitation. Indeed, it's usually evidence that a writer wasn't aware of the other work, since if they'd been aware of the similarity, they would've changed their idea to make it more distinct. Nobody wants to be considered imitative, and nobody wants to be sued for plagiarism.
In this case, it's easy to see where the inspiration for both stories came from. A lot of stories come from role reversal, challenging readers/viewers to imagine themselves in the reverse of their normal situation. What if humans were the ones in a zoo rather than animals? What if humans were the ones being hunted, as in The Most Dangerous Game? What if humans were the food animals, as in "To Serve Man"? The common theme is to encourage empathy, to make us see things from the perspective of the creatures we exploit and ask ourselves if we have the right to treat them that way. You can find plenty of other role reversals in science fiction, like, what if women were in charge and treated men like second-class citizens (as in Roddenberry's Planet Earth pilot and TNG: "Angel One")? One of the unused story seeds (fortunately) in Roddenberry's original pitch document for ST was about an alien world where black people enslaved white people. Clearly Roddenberry was interested in stories that put the characters in reversed or alien roles.
Indeed, that's one of the most fundamental themes of science fiction -- imagining the Other. Positing something different from everyday reality, encouraging the reader or viewer to see things from an alien point of view or imagine a life radically different from the one they know. And one of the most fundamental human drives is empathy -- looking at another being and trying to imagine how they experience life. People have probably been coming up with "what if humans were the ones in the zoo?" stories since the very first zoo was established. (Although, for a long time, humans did put other humans in cages and treat them like animals. Some still do. So many people didn't have to imagine that.)
Anyway, I think "People Are Alike All Over" and "The Cage" are different enough that Roddenberry wouldn't have been worried about the similarity even if he had been aware of the earlier episode. "People" is about an astronaut believing he's found paradise on Mars and only learning at the end that he's an animal in a cage. "The Cage" is about a man aware from the start that he's a prisoner and being offered the illusion of paradise as a temptation to submit. Character-wise, "People" is about a man's optimistic hopes being dashed by a hard reality, and "The Cage" is about a tired, cynical man gaining new hope and resolve through his ordeal. The same concepts and devices show up throughout fiction, but different writers can do very different things with them, just like Rachmaninoff and Little Richard could do very different things with a piano.
In this case, it's easy to see where the inspiration for both stories came from. A lot of stories come from role reversal, challenging readers/viewers to imagine themselves in the reverse of their normal situation. What if humans were the ones in a zoo rather than animals? What if humans were the ones being hunted, as in The Most Dangerous Game? What if humans were the food animals, as in "To Serve Man"? The common theme is to encourage empathy, to make us see things from the perspective of the creatures we exploit and ask ourselves if we have the right to treat them that way. You can find plenty of other role reversals in science fiction, like, what if women were in charge and treated men like second-class citizens (as in Roddenberry's Planet Earth pilot and TNG: "Angel One")? One of the unused story seeds (fortunately) in Roddenberry's original pitch document for ST was about an alien world where black people enslaved white people. Clearly Roddenberry was interested in stories that put the characters in reversed or alien roles.
Indeed, that's one of the most fundamental themes of science fiction -- imagining the Other. Positing something different from everyday reality, encouraging the reader or viewer to see things from an alien point of view or imagine a life radically different from the one they know. And one of the most fundamental human drives is empathy -- looking at another being and trying to imagine how they experience life. People have probably been coming up with "what if humans were the ones in the zoo?" stories since the very first zoo was established. (Although, for a long time, humans did put other humans in cages and treat them like animals. Some still do. So many people didn't have to imagine that.)
Anyway, I think "People Are Alike All Over" and "The Cage" are different enough that Roddenberry wouldn't have been worried about the similarity even if he had been aware of the earlier episode. "People" is about an astronaut believing he's found paradise on Mars and only learning at the end that he's an animal in a cage. "The Cage" is about a man aware from the start that he's a prisoner and being offered the illusion of paradise as a temptation to submit. Character-wise, "People" is about a man's optimistic hopes being dashed by a hard reality, and "The Cage" is about a tired, cynical man gaining new hope and resolve through his ordeal. The same concepts and devices show up throughout fiction, but different writers can do very different things with them, just like Rachmaninoff and Little Richard could do very different things with a piano.
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This is not an absolute, fortunately. Back then, I imagine trying to tell such a story with the kind of requisite respect necessary would have made many of the staff writers' heads explode, but telling just such a story, perhaps in another medium (first, and adapting later, perhaps), is an example of how our culture explores how we can grow and learn. One of the great unspoken goals of speculative and science fiction in general, and of TZ and ST in particular, is to educate the viewer as to how to become a better kind of human being, and using such metaphors is a primary example of how they do so.
I still think "Charlie X" was either consciously imitative of "It's a Good Life", or at the very least an example of cryptomnesia on Roddenberry's part. The "zeitgeist" he was drawing on was heavy with Forbidden Planet and The Twilight Zone. To be fair, FP had its influences, and apparently four episodes of TZ were withheld from syndication due to plagiarism complaints (they are all in the Blu-ray set).
If Kellam de Forest hadn't caught the similarity to a Fredric Brown story, I wonder if "Arena" might have been a lost episode withdrawn from Star Trek's syndication package. Then after the claim was settled, it would have been the biggest bonus feature by far on DVD.
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The Frederic Brown story was practically the 2nd half of Arena. I read the short story many years ago and honestly thought he must have written the Star Trek episode. I was surprised he wasn't acknowledged on the episode credits.
I've been trying to find a copy of the short story ever since - maybe I should look on Amazon LOL,.
But he was: http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x18/Arena_332.JPG
It's available free online in several places -- ironically, it's in public domain now. Here's a PDF: http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~jjl5766/share/Arena.pdf
And here's a podcast audiobook version: http://escapepod.org/2013/11/24/ep423-arena/
It was probably someone else at de Forest's company who caught it -- most plausibly Joan Pearce -- rather than de Forest himself. He didn't work on Star Trek all that much, though he is a fascinating figure with plenty of stories to tell.
de Forest Research also worked on The Twilight Zone, incidentally.
It was also reprinted in an early issue of Starlog magazine, available online:
https://archive.org/stream/starlog_magazine-004/004#page/n0/mode/2up
It's a different show, but around the same time as Star Trek but the original Outer Limits episode: Fun and Games:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun_and_Games_(The_Outer_Limits)
Appeared to be inspired in part by that same short story (about 20 years old at the time the episode was made.)
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