Is Gary 7 really Doctor Who?

[jayrath]

Not actually, of course. But consider: both had companions, both had little sonic screwdriver sorts of things, both had box-like contraptions with doors that could instantly move them in space. Both had knowledge of time travel. Both had headquarters operations on another planet.

And the Doctor could of course travel in time; we might wonder if Gary 7 could, too (in the novels he can). Now, Gary was analyzed as human, and he SAID he was merely educated by aliens -- but I wonder if Gene hadn't been watching some 1960s BBC . . .

 

[Trekwatcher]

Gary 7's show would definitely would have had better special effects! Just think where Dr. Who was at that time.

Plus, Gary 7 had better hair.

(Whovians, don't take that the wrong way. I love Dr. Who as well, but, man, some of those 1960's and 1970's effects were just painful to watch!)

 

[Nebusj]

Interesting notion, although I'm not sure how credible it is. I haven't seen anything to suggest Roddenberry was in the United Kingdom before 1966 (after the show entered production he'd barely have the chance to, really), or even Canada, where Doctor Who ran in 1965.

It's probably mostly a matter of luck on all parts. The Gary Seven notion is really just the super-spy/secret agent stuff that you couldn't get enough of in the mid-60s, given a light science fiction coating that would fit nicely with Space Race chic. It's still not a bad idea for a show.

 

[Christopher]

jayrath said:
...but I wonder if Gene hadn't been watching some 1960s BBC . . .

And how would he have done that, exactly? They didn't have satellite TV in 1966 (which was when the original proposal that later became Assignment: Earth was written). For that matter, most TV producers don't have a lot of time for actually watching TV, because they're too busy making it.

The original A:E proposal involved Gary Seven being sent back from the future to 1960s Earth to battle time-travelling Omegans trying to change history (an idea surprisingly similar to the Temporal Cold War storyline in Enterprise some 35 years later). That's very different from Doctor Who as it existed in 1966, at which point only a very few episodes had been set on present-day Earth. People who see similarities between the Doctor and Gary Seven are basing it mainly on the Pertwee era and after, when stories set on contemporary Earth were far more common. Obviously Roddenberry couldn't have been aware of stories that didn't exist yet, even if he had heard of Doctor Who at the time.

More likely, A:E was inspired by the "time police" types of stories that were fairly common in prose SF in the 40s-60s, books like Asimov's The End of Eternity (Roddenberry and Asimov were friends) and Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series. Heck, maybe Roddenberry just got the idea from "Tomorrow is Yesterday." According to The Star Trek Compendium, the original A:E pilot script is dated 11/14/1966 and the final draft script of TiY is dated one week later. So GR would've been working on A:E simultaneously with the writing of TiY (a concept that had been in development since much earlier in the season, since it was originally to be a sequel to "The Naked Time"). Maybe working on a script about the Enterprise coming back in time to present-day Earth inspired him to come up with a series proposal about an agent sent back in time to present-day Earth.

 

[Turbo]

IIRC, PBS was showing Doctor Who in the States at that time.

If you want something even closer to Who, the Borg are rip-offs of the Cybermen, especially the ones from 1967's "The Tomb of the Cybermen".

A:E may have been partially inspired by Doctor Who, but the premise was different - the Doctor was traveling around time and space at that point, and ended up in deep trouble for interfering with other races. Gary was assigned to "interfere" (read: help) Earth, and AFAIK, was confined to Earth. It could be argued that the Pertwee-era Doctor Who (1970-1974, when the Doctor was largely confined to Earth) stole that idea from A:E.

 

[doctorwho 03]

Doctor Who was not introduced to United States audiences until sometime in the seventies or early eighties during the Tom Baker era.

 

[Quist]

1970s and started with early Pertwee episodes. Later in the seventies they switched to Tom Baker...

 

[Holytomato]

In the states, Jon Pertwee first appeared at the start of "Giant Robot".

Gary Seven is a future incarnation of the Doctor!

There I said it!

In fact he's the 9th Doctor (Christopher Eccelston).

 

[Tomalak]

The sonic screwdriver was first seen on 16th March 1968, a mere thirteen days before Assignment: Earth was aired, so that's obviously coincidental.

Looking back on the Pertwee era, there are similarities with Gary Seven, but since the UNIT setup, with the Doctor on Earth was dreamed up in 1968, before Star Trek even aired in the UK, I think any similarities on either side are entirely coincidental.

 

[Christopher]

Turbo said:
IIRC, PBS was showing Doctor Who in the States at that time.

As others have said, you're off by about a decade. It was shown locally in New York and various other cities in the mid-to-late '70s, and didn't begin showing nationwide until the early '80s.

If you want something even closer to Who, the Borg are rip-offs of the Cybermen, especially the ones from 1967's "The Tomb of the Cybermen".

Like 99% of the "ripoff" accusations on the Internet, this one is totally wrong and ignorant of the facts. The Borg were originally conceived as an insectoid hive race. They were only changed to cyborgs because that was cheaper and easier from a makeup and production standpoint.

Similar ideas crop up all the time in human creativity, and it's not only grossly naive but grossly insulting to assume they must be the result of plagiarism. "Ripoff" is just about the most overused, most obnoxious, most consistently wrongheaded word on the Internet. (Except for maybe "pwned.")

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

If we're talking ripoffs, let's talk sentient holograms and Red Dwarf, positronic androids and Asimov, Requiem for Methuselah and Forbidden Planet, The Inner Light and It's a Wonderful Life, Remans and Buffy The Vampire Slayer's ubervamps?

It's like shooting fish in a barrel. With a howitzer.

 

[jayrath]

I did not intend to suggest a ripoff -- I am just very struck by the similarities.

 

[Shatinator]

Turbo,

The Borg were more an offshot of Gibson's Cyberpunk than Dr. Who's Cybermen.

 

[Psion]

While I think Who and Seven are little more than coincidental characters in real life, it is fun to play with the idea that he is the Doctor of the Star Trek universe. That is to say, the events that lead to our favorite Time Lord of the Dr. Who universe are somewhat different in Star Trek and Gary Seven is the end result.

Another amusing variation would be a chance encounter between Mr. Seven and the Doctor.

 

[Christopher]

I'd rather see a crossover between Gary Seven and Questor (from Roddenberry's pilot movie The Questor Tapes), since they had essentially the same mission and were both operating in the 1960s-70s. But since TQT is a Universal property rather than Paramount, there's little to no chance of such a story ever being told outside of fanfic.

 

[A beaker full of death]

Christopher said:
I'd rather see a crossover between Gary Seven and Questor (from Roddenberry's pilot movie The Questor Tapes[/i

That's funny. Roddenberry originally told Spiner that Data was a cross between Spock and Questor.

 

[Trekwatcher]

Shatinator said:
Turbo,

The Borg were more an offshot of Gibson's Cyberpunk than Dr. Who's Cybermen.

I stopped counting the number of times that Trek and others ripped off Gibson's "Sprawl" cyberpunk trilogy. That was a truly seminal series of books! :thumbsup:

 

[Christopher]

I am so damned sick of the word "ripoff." It's a total misinterpretation of the creative process. It's not theft, it's influence. All creative works are influenced by their predecessors. In science fiction in particular, there is an ongoing dialogue between different creators as they explore, elaborate upon, and critique each other's ideas. It's ignorant, mean-spirited and insulting to call it "ripping off" when it's an accepted and beneficial part of the process. After all, it's ludicrous to assume that a whole new concept, such as the sort that science fiction uniquely explores, can be thoroughly examined in only one work of fiction. On the contrary -- it's a tribute to one author's creativity when others are inspired enough by it to pick up on his/her concepts and explore their further ramifications.

 

[Trekwatcher]

I think there is a difference between inspiration and ripoff. Both are discrete entities. Inspiration seems to involve using old ideas to make new ones, or to use them in a new way. Sci-fi is ripe with what I consider to be genuine ripoffs, where someone essentially takes someone else's ideas and transports them wholesale to another story as a means of avoiding the difficulty of the creative process.

As a tiny kid it was obvious that things like 1978's Battlestar Galactice, or 1980's Battle Beyond the Stars were both flagrant ripoffs of many things from Star Wars (which itself had clear, ACKNOWLEDGED, influences in Kurosawa's work, 1930's serials, etc).

Similarly, after the novel imagery seen in Mad Max and the Road Warrior, how many times did we see movies that featured postapocalyptic goings on that featured cobbled-together cars fighting it out in desert wastelands (see "Spacehunter-Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" or "Steel Dawn" for overt examples of ripoffs).

Gibson's work is a GREAT example of a great idea being ripped off. His Sprawl trilogy, while certainly not inventing the idea of computer-generated worlds in a global network of interconnected computers, presented this and many other concepts, especially hacking, in a truly new and fresh way. Unfortunately, these ideas soon became oversaturated in the medium with crap like Tekwar, Freejack, Strange Days, Swordfish, and some higher end projects like The Matrix trilogy, clearly "borrowing" (r.e. riping off) Gibson's imagery. How many times did we see a thin, bespectacled, caffeine slurping computer whiz "hacking" a mainframe and defeating the defenses of "AI's" or corporate supercomputers with a few deft keystrokes?

Gibson himself acknowledged that he had inspirations, but he did not steal his ideas outright. Gibson said that he walked out of "Blade Runner" after 10 minutes as he felt it was too similar to Neuromancer, which he was then writing, and he did not want to be affected by it, even subconsicously. Now THAT is integrity.

 

[Christopher]

Trekwatcher said:
I think there is a difference between inspiration and ripoff. Both are discrete entities. Inspiration seems to involve using old ideas to make new ones, or to use them in a new way. Sci-fi is ripe with what I consider to be genuine ripoffs, where someone essentially takes someone else's ideas and transports them wholesale to another story as a means of avoiding the difficulty of the creative process.

Maybe that's true, but it's incredibly obnoxious and insulting the way so many people default to the assumption that any and all similarities are grounds to accuse people of plagiarism. It's also usually based in profound cultural illiteracy, because the similarities they're pointing out are things that many, many earlier works of fiction have already used. (Like the absurd argument mentioned in another thread about whether Star Trek or Doctor Who used "Vulcan" as the name of a planet first. Neither one of them was first, by a good century.)

As a tiny kid it was obvious that things like 1978's Battlestar Galactice, or 1980's Battle Beyond the Stars were both flagrant ripoffs of many things from Star Wars (which itself had clear, ACKNOWLEDGED, influences in Kurosawa's work, 1930's serials, etc).

That's a bizarre distinction. How did Star Wars "ACKNOWLEDGE" its use of imitation any more clearly than those other things did? They were all blatant homages to earlier works to the same degree. I mean, it's not like there was anything remotely original about Star Wars.

Besides, this has nothing to do with the original thread. Even the people pointing out similarities between "Assignment: Earth" and Doctor Who are not claiming that the similarities are as blatant and imitative as what you're discussing here. So even if the "ripoff" shibboleth were applicable to what you're talking about, it certainly wouldn't be applicable to Gary Seven or the Doctor.