More of a homage. Though finding the original source might be hard. It's a pretty old story.
Homages and Rip-Offs
- Thread starter thesadpanda
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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.
Not much beyond name dropping Genghis Khan and pulling people from Earth history. The rest of the "Mr. Socrates" premise went into "Bread and Circuses." The idea of "The Savage Curtain" is more of "alien makes our heroes fight bad guys to the death with the lives of the Enterprise crew in the balance."
It's likely that the the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and Gary Seven's servo were both inspired by the gadgetry common in the spy movie phenomenon of the 60s. I specifically recall one of the Flint movies (the first one is from '66) having the title character casually boasting of some ridiculous number of covert functions that his ordinary-looking pen was capable of.
Source?
The servo, probably. But the sonic screwdriver was originally just that -- a screwdriver. That was the only thing it did, at first. It was only as the years went by that it accumulated more functions. Definitely the Jon Pertwee era in the early '70s was very James Bond-influenced, and Pertwee loved his gadgets and vehicles, so that factor would definitely have been there, influencing the expansion of the sonic's powers. But to start with, it was just a futuristic tool for turning screws. Its only inspiration was the standard sci-fi trope of showing futuristic devices using invisible energies to replace physical components, like tractor beams or force-field walls or hovercars.
Follow the link in the post I was responding to.
Which only points to a Wikipedia page, You have to drill down to the references to find the actual meat:
^^^Source (link)
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.
Not much beyond name dropping Genghis Khan and pulling people from Earth history. The rest of the "Mr. Socrates" premise went into "Bread and Circuses." The idea of "The Savage Curtain" is more of "alien makes our heroes fight bad guys to the death with the lives of the Enterprise crew in the balance."
Not much beyond name dropping, seriously?!? You must have stopped reading the synopsis of "Mr. Socrates" before it got to the part about how the historical figures are really Gladiators and that the whole setting is really a Colosseum staging a deadly game, because there goes your claim that "The Savage Curtain" was 'clearly "inspired" by' "Arena."
The Exorcist would be a ripoff of "The Lights of Zetar," except that the Church had already thought of it.
Absolutely.
"Turnabout Intruder" took its bodyswap premise from an older story, "Turnabout", which has been remade many other times ("Freaky Friday", "Vice Versa", "18 Again"...).
Turnabout was a 1940 movie based on the 1931 novel of the same name by Thorne Smith.
Turnabout was a 1940 movie based on the 1931 novel of the same name by Thorne Smith.
Which, in turn, was developed into a 1979 sitcom that starred John Schuck. I was one of twelve people who saw the show.
I remember it. Unfortunately.
I had totally forgotten that until you mentioned it, but it rings a bell.
The Breen have one of the oddest developments of any major race in Trek really don't they? They start off as a recurring occasional joke, the aliens people talk about as possibly being the villains but are never actually behind things and never actually show up (no doubt they weren't first mentioned with that intent, but as with the 47 gags someone clearly liked the word enough to make it a thing).
Then when one appears, their look is a shameless fun Star Wars gag, that feels as if the costume designer read the scene where Kira reveals she's in the outfit and thought "Wouldn't it be fun if..." and worked backwards from there. Certainly anyone who can watch that and no expect her to go "Someone who LOVES you!" to Dukat is a better person than me.
Then- after a few standard for Trek costume reuses- they suddenly become the major terrible new bad to close out DS9. It always felt a bit random and unconvincing. And whilst I could forgive them forgetting/chosing to retcon Kira stealing the clothes of Breen in their very first onscreen apperance, it was still really hard to take the whole "Ohhh... no one knows what a Breen looks like!" thing seriously when she did the same thing during the ten episode arc.
Is Kira sworn to secrecy about what a Breen looks like? Does she know how to get the clothes off a Breen without seeing their face? Did she steal them off the Breen washing line, or perhaps she always carries a Breen fancy dress costume on her just in case? Is that just an area of the end game no one had really thought through very well resulting in a lot of ass pulled explanations?
More ontopic, The Nuetral Zone (pre-HD remastering) features the names of the actors who played the first six Doctor's on a family tree (all married to one another as well IIRC, sadly the closest TV Trek ever came to treating homosexuality as a normal thing amazingly enough).
Who fans often hold this up as proof the Borg are a "ripoff" the Cybermen. Which is unfair for two reasons:
1: When that epiosode was written the plan was for a completely different-albeit still with a hive mind- insect alien race to be the major new villain.
2: The screen doesn't prove Maurice Hurley was a Who fan, it proves whoever made the graphic for the screen was a Who fan (though not enough of one to avoid the "Peter Davidson" mistake).
I've genuinely no idea if Hurley would have been aware of the Cybermen when he finally created the Borg as we know them (the collected mind isn't really something the TV Cybermen has done at that point, and the "You will be like us" stuff didn't really kick in till the next Borg apperance. Though as tit for tat, Attack of the Cybermen, their last story made before the Borg, has some half-converted humans standing in alcoves that basically look like Borg costumes produced with no money), but Who fans can hardly crow as the Cybermen are just as much indebted to The Cybernauts from The Avengers.
Though Who kept it slightly subtle by not giving them an insane industrialist in a wheelchair plotting to upgrade the world creator.
No, the new series decided to make that explicit.
deleted, didn't realize this was old series only
Closets, lockers, shelves, drawers, supply room.
Why would Kira want the Breen to know someone had one of their "encounter suits," which removing it from a Breen who was wearing one would have informed them?
Come on inflatabledalek, Kira's smarter than that.
The Novels explanation is that one of the races that make up the Breen evaporates when the suit is breached.
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