So we can't really accuse the Who production team of stealing the idea then can we, Chris? Whether they took elements of Gary Seven for the Pertwee era I'll doubt we'll ever know!
JB
JB
Is there any lore that Nomad was based on the Daleks?
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You ask that as if my intent were to accuse them of stealing. On the contrary, what I've been saying all along is that neither production was aware of the other at the time and that the similarities are completely coincidental.
Weelll...among Silver Age comic fans, the idea of similarities, influence or imitation ending and ripping off beginning surrounds the case of DC's The Doom Patrol and Marvel's the X-Men. Doom Patrol creator Arnold Drake believed some sticky fingers were involved in the creation of the X-Men:
Many fans always thought the imitation or stealing was obvious, and an industry insider--the DP creator--believed it himself. It does not mean every production or creation with a similarity to another is the result of stealing or imitation, but it most certainly happens.
As a sidenote, the BBC was watchful for trans-Atlantic plagiarism.
In 1966-ish the Beeb cancelled production of Counterstrike, another 'Friendly alien protects present day Earth from hostile aliens' concept because of The Invaders. There's a note from the drama chief in the BBC files wondering if Quinn Martin might have seen the Counterstrike concept when creator Tony Williamson was offering it round US studios, giving the BBC grounds to sue for the money spent on the cancelled series.
Presumably there wasn't any proof of it: and once The Invaders was safely cancelled, Counterstrike was resurrected for a single season BBC1 run in 1969.
In 1966-ish the Beeb cancelled production of Counterstrike, another 'Friendly alien protects present day Earth from hostile aliens' concept because of The Invaders. There's a note from the drama chief in the BBC files wondering if Quinn Martin might have seen the Counterstrike concept when creator Tony Williamson was offering it round US studios, giving the BBC grounds to sue for the money spent on the cancelled series.
Presumably there wasn't any proof of it: and once The Invaders was safely cancelled, Counterstrike was resurrected for a single season BBC1 run in 1969.
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Of course it happens sometimes. But accidental, unintended similarities happen far more often. Even when creators try their best to be original, they're still going to come up with ideas that others came up with independently. It's unavoidable. So it's a mistake to assume that any similarity has to be the result of imitation. There are a few cases where it will be, but most of the time, it won't be.
Not to mention Derek Flint's cigarette lighter in OUR MAN FLINT (1966), which had 82 different functions. "Eighty-three if you want to light a cigar."
No I wasn't accusing you of accusing them of stealing the style one bit! I was accusing no one of accusing the Who producers of using Trek's Gary Seven as the template for Pertwee's Doctor!
JB
Reminds me of how the one thing I use my smartphone for the least is making phone calls.
I hope you're calling me naive. I merely raised the queson question and throughout my posts said I was not trying to connect them. If raising the thought/question is automatic naïveté, then so be it. Not trying to ignite a conspiracy theory at all.
If a mod wishes to close the thread, that would be more than acceptable and even preferred by me.
Don't take it personally, he does that to everyone. I think it's that green blood and pointed ears that does it.
I don't think it's wrong to wonder if a stilted talking cracker box has any relation to a stilted talking salt shaker. Wondering is good. But like they said, nope.
I don't think that one influenced the other, but I'm glad that someone else picked up on the similarities and started thinking about it. I started re-watching all of Trek and Who around the same time, and got to see both the 60s Daleks and Nomad for the first time within a couple of weeks. I thought the Nomad connection would make a great jumping off point for a crossover of some kind. (In the end they went with a Borg/Cyberman connection, which I guess makes more sense, but I was really hoping for either Hartnell Who and TOS or Matt Smith and the reboot crew--the Next Generation setting threw me for a loop!)
TC
Not to mention Lexx!
As much as I am a fan of Marvel comics it's pretty obvious to me that Stan stole most of his ideas from DC comics! Spiderman's Vulture and Daredevil's Owl are The Penguin while Daredevil's Jester is The Joker! While The Lizard is Killer Croc and Sandman is Clayface! And there are millions of other similarities in Stan Lee's many, many storylines!
JB
I take it you've read Amalgam comics?
There was no lore before, but I wonder if there's any data.
Certainly Marvel and DC have both copied the hell out of each other over the decades, but they also drew heavily on precedents that predate comics, particularly characters from '30s pulp literature. Superman was largely based on Doc Savage -- a perfect human specimen whose first name was Clark and who had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Batman was heavily derived from pulp vigilantes like the Shadow and the Bat, right down to his debut story being outright plagiarized from a The Shadow prose story.
The specific comparisons you make don't work that well. The Vulture is a tech-genius supervillain who can actually fly with his maglev wings, while the Owl is a "mutate" with owl-like superpowers. By contrast, the Penguin is just a long-nosed little crook who wears a tuxedo and has an umbrella fetish (although some of his trick umbrellas in the Silver Age did allow him to fly). The Penguin was actually based on a cartoon-penguin mascot in a cigarette ad, I believe. The Joker is famously based on Conrad Veidt's character in the movie The Man Who Laughs, as well as on the iconography of court jesters going back to the Middle Ages.
The Lizard is not based on Killer Croc; the Lizard first appeared in 1963, Croc in 1983. There have been countless "reptile-man" characters in fantasy fiction and mythology, arising from humans' innate fear of snakes and other reptiles.
You beat me to the punch. And, as I recall, Killer Croc was originally more of a scaly-faced gangster; he only gradually evolved into a full-scale lizard monster.
So was Croc a rip-off of The Lizard instead of the other way around? I doubt it. As noted, reptile-men were a cliche long before Spider-Man first fought the Lizard.
Heck, Flash Gordon was fighting the "Lizard-Men" of Mongo as far back as the 30s and 40s. And Let's not the forget the "classic" 1959 movie, "The Alligator People," which featured a reptile man who could be mistaken for either the Lizard or Croc in a dark alley . . .
Well I might have one or two but I can't say I've read any really! I've got a tonnage of them in the cupboard but I don't really buy them anymore!
JB
I wasn't sure about Croc so I'm humbled by your superior knowledge but now I think of it The Lizard was taken from the film The Alligator People where a scientist tried to regrow his arm by using a reptilian formula but changed into a human crocodile instead! True The Vulture and Owl were vastly superior technically wise to The Penguin but I was referring more to the name! I've always thought that Daredevil's Man-Bull was Marvel's version of Batman's Man-Bat as well, although I'm not too sure when Man-Bat first appeared! Who came first Aquaman or Prince Namor-The Sub Mariner?
JB
You beat me to the punch. And, as I recall, Killer Croc was originally more of a scaly-faced gangster; he only gradually evolved into a full-scale lizard monster.
So was Croc a rip-off of The Lizard instead of the other way around? I doubt it. As noted, reptile-men were a cliche long before Spider-Man first fought the Lizard.
Heck, Flash Gordon was fighting the "Lizard-Men" of Mongo as far back as the 30s and 40s. And Let's not the forget the "classic" 1959 movie, "The Alligator People," which featured a reptile man who could be mistaken for either the Lizard or Croc in a dark alley . . .
Sorry, Greg, I hadn't read your comments on The Alligator People before I posted!
JB
I'm sure lots of characters in the history of film and literature, including gangsters, assassins, and the like, have used bird-based aliases. It's hardly as if the Penguin was the first character in history to do so.
Man-Bat appeared just a year before Man-Bull, according to Wikipedia (I'd never even heard of Man-Bull), but they're both drawing on a wider convention of naming monsters (see also Marvel's Man-Thing) which is basically an inversion of the more common "Blank-Man" pattern (Wolf-Man, Fish-Man, etc., and of course Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc.).
The Sub-Mariner debuted in 1939, Aquaman in 1941. However, Aquaman was originally a lot less similar to Namor than he is now. He was just a human whose father had discovered Atlantean ruins and taught his son the secret knowledge and techniques he learned from those ruins. He wasn't revealed as half-Atlantean until 1959, and didn't become king of Atlantis until 1964, two years after Marvel had revived the Namor character as a Fantastic Four adversary. The former was probably a coincidence, since Sub-Mariner had been a dormant character for nearly two decades and had probably been largely forgotten; but the latter seems likely to have been a deliberate imitation.
