Sorry, Greg, I hadn't read your comments on The Alligator People before I posted!
JB
No problem. Not sure I've ever actually seen the movie, just some photos of the monsters.
Is there any lore that Nomad was based on the Daleks?
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No problem. Not sure I've ever actually seen the movie, just some photos of the monsters.
Here's another one I've heard. The recent continuation of the recent Spider-Man comic mini-series Renew Your Vows (Thank you, Marvel!) is being written to copy the Lois and Clark comic series that DC is doing, never mind the fact that the Spider-Man miniseries in question was extremely well received and sold well and was probably revived because of that.
I see mention of when Doctor Who the series aired in the US but the ersatz Doctor Who and the Daleks movie with Peter Cushing shows a US release date of July 1966. Would that put that in the realm of possibility that it conceivably could have influenced the implementation of Nomad?
EDIT: oops, I see that did get mentioned earlier
EDIT: oops, I see that did get mentioned earlier
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Whether a thing is remotely possible is useless to demonstrate, because there are plenty of things that are theoretically possible but still not true. What matters is whether something is likely, and in this case, it's extremely unlikely. Yes, the Cushing film had a US release, but not a very wide one. According to Wikipedia, Doctor Who and the Daleks "did not perform as well in the US, however, where the Doctor Who television series and the Daleks were relatively unknown." The sequel wasn't even released in the US, no doubt because the original didn't do that well. It would be amazing if John Meredyth Lucas or Gene Roddenberry had seen the movie.
And as I've said repeatedly, there's no reason to assume any influence at all. The similarities between Nomad and the Daleks are minor -- monotone voices, metallic bodies, a fondness for mass destruction. But all the similarities are ludicrously easy to explain away. They have monotone voices because that was the standard "robot voice" trope of the era. They're in boxy, metallic bodies because that's what was budgetarily feasible to construct. They kill because they're villains. And they're not even all that similar, because Daleks aren't robots. They're Hitler-squids in personal mini-tanks.
No assumption was made, nor argument made, just asking if it was possible.
It seems you have gone with the assumption that there is no way it could possibly occur. I don't see the harm in playing with the idea however unlikely. Besides Hollywood seems like a place where the movie might have played and why wouldn't people who work in science fiction not have been interested in checking it out (or at least having seen the trailer).
It seems you have gone with the assumption that there is no way it could possibly occur. I don't see the harm in playing with the idea however unlikely. Besides Hollywood seems like a place where the movie might have played and why wouldn't people who work in science fiction not have been interested in checking it out (or at least having seen the trailer).
No, I'm going with the reasoned conclusion that it's far more likely to be false than true, because likelihood is what actually matters. I see no value in the question of whether something is "possible" in the absolute, because it's too binary to be useful. We can never be absolutely sure of anything -- we can just assess probabilities. We can say that, given the information available to us, the probability of a hypothesis is extremely high or extremely low. We can weigh the relative probabilities of different hypotheses and say which one is most likely. In this case, the vague "similarities" are far more likely the result of coincidence or shared antecedents than anything else.
Indeed, the imagined parallels in this case strike me as little more than pareidolia, imagining similarities that aren't really there. As I've said, there are other 1960s Doctor Who monsters, like the Quarks or the Krotons, that bear more similarity to Nomad's shape than the Daleks do. And the Quarks, unlike the Daleks, actually are robots. I suppose if I wanted to, I could argue it was "possible" that somehow John Meredyth Lucas had gotten his hands on some of the UK comics in which the Quarks were featured as major villains (despite appearing as the villains' servants in only a single TV story) and decided to plagiarize them to create Nomad. It would make about as much sense as the idea that he ripped off the Daleks.
At the time the Cushing movie was released in America, John Meredyth Lucas had hardly worked in science fiction at all. He'd worked as a writer, director, and/or producer on various shows like Zorro, Whiplash, Ben Casey, and The Fugitive, but the only science fiction credits in his filmography as of 1966 were the English dub scripts he wrote to the Japanese apocalyptic-SF movies The Last War (1961) and Gorath (1962). His next SF credit would be directing an episode of The Invaders in early 1967, and then writing "The Changeling" for ST.
As for Gene Roddenberry, I never got the sense that he was an avid consumer of sci-fi cinema. He was clearly familiar with Forbidden Planet, but that was from a decade or so earlier. Most of his interest in science fiction seemed to be oriented toward prose instead of the screen. Indeed, part of his incentive in creating Star Trek was that he had a low opinion of the screen SF of the day and wanted to create something better, something with the intelligence of the prose SF he enjoyed, and of popular adult TV crime dramas and Westerns and the like. So he wasn't going around seeing what other screen SF was out there and trying to copy it. He was trying to outdo it.
Well, that makes me wonder, who designed Nomad? John M Lucas was the writer, but that doesn't mean he came up with anything more than a name and possible description, right?
Is Nomad's appearance and voice mannerisms in the script?
Matt Jefferies designed many things we saw, and never wrote any episodes, so it's flawed to assume the writer(s) designed Nomad.
Is Nomad's appearance and voice mannerisms in the script?
Matt Jefferies designed many things we saw, and never wrote any episodes, so it's flawed to assume the writer(s) designed Nomad.
Good point. I don't have the script at hand, but, yes, the design and voice performance might not have been up to the writer. I would't be surprised if the the script just said something about "a levitating steel mechanism who speaks with a robotic cadence" or something.
I seem to recall that Norman Spinrad had mixed feelings about the way The Doomsday Machine was visualized onscreen . ...
Matt Jefferies, naturally. And if the point of this is to try to postulate some hypothetical design similarity between Nomad and the Daleks, I would say there is absolutely none. Pick out an assortment of boxy mechanical characters from the first several decades of screen science fiction, put them next to each other, and I'm certain that nobody would point to Nomad and the Daleks as having any specific resemblance to one another. Everything is different -- the shape, the size, the appendages (or lack thereof), the color, the details, the mode of locomotion, the means by which the prop was operated. The only thing I'd say they have in common design-wise is the lights that flash in time with their speech, but that's common to many sci-fi robots and computers, and they're quite different, because the Daleks' are two exterior lamps atop the head while Nomad's are multicolored lights inside the casing, shining through the grilles. (Or more likely white lights shining through colored gels inside the grilles.)
As for the voice mannerisms, I just replayed a clip from "The Changeling," and I realize that Nomad's voice characterization was even less Dalek-like than I'd thought. The early Daleks, as voiced by Peter Hawkins and David Graham, tended to speak in a slow, staccato monotone like the type of robot voice that was already cliched in fiction. Even though the Daleks weren't actually emotionless and robotic, they did tend to speak that way in the early years, in contrast to the more expressive, rage-filled voices they developed over time. (Although there were exceptions, like the creepy "Daleks are the masters of Earth" chant in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth." And then there was Hawkins's terrific work in "The Power of the Daleks," where the Daleks were pretending to be the humans' servants and you could hear the suppressed rage and disgust in their voices while they said "I am your servant." I think that was the inspiration for how the Daleks came to be played later on by actors like Roy Skelton and Nicholas Briggs.) But Vic Perrin's voice for Nomad isn't a slow monotone with each syllable pronounced separately; it's basically just a normal announcer-type intonation, not that different from Perrin's Outer Limits Control Voice. And, of course, it doesn't have the Daleks' ring-modulator distortion or anything much like it -- the only treatment Perrin's voice is given is a bit of a metallic echo, plus the speeding up when Nomad malfunctions at the climax.
Really, I have no clue where this is even coming from. There is no visual resemblance between Nomad and the Daleks. There is no vocal resemblance between Nomad and the Daleks. There is, at best, a very loose conceptual similarity between them, a similarity they share with dozens of other sci-fi villains.
Man-Thing is without a doubt a rip off of DCs Swamp Thing surely?
JB
JB
Wasn't John Meredith Lucas working in the UK in the early to mid sixties anyway? Not that I've ever believed or even see a resemblance to nomad in The Daleks!
JB
JB
Not that I can determine. I found his autobiography on Google Books, and though I can only see a few excerpts, it seems from there and other sources that he actually spent 1961 in Australia. He seems to have been back in Hollywood by 1963, because he has some writing credits that year, and he was writing and directing Ben Casey by '64. The only mention of a trip to England is one following the cancellation of a show he frequently directed, Police Surgeon, and that would've been 1975. (I also searched his autobiography for references to Doctor Who and the Daleks, and there's not a one. But then, there's no reference to Nomad or "The Changeling" either.)
We know Americans in the business were watching the UK, because in the 60s, several UK shows were bought by American networks and shown in prime time alongside American programs- The Saint, The Avengers, Secret Agent (Danger Man), The Prisoner.
But the fact that network execs looking for new content were aware of those shows does not say anything about whether TV writers and producers in Hollywood were aware of the same shows, since the writers and producers were busy making their own shows and didn't have time to go shopping for overseas content. Hollywood has a division of labor like any other industry.
I've recently been watching The Edgar Wallace series of films and I'm sure there is a John M.Lucas listed as a director on a few of them but I'll have to check for sure!
JB
No apparently it isn't him! Then where did I read a similar sounding name then? 
JB
JB
Did anyone bring up the failed Terry Nation American Dalek spinoff series? Under different circumstances, Nomad and the Daleks might have been broadcast buddies if nothing else. 
TC
TC
I think it's also worth pointing out that '60s Doctor Who was far more crudely produced than the UK shows mentioned above that did make it to the States, like The Avengers and The Prisoner. DW was shot as-live on very stagey sets, with production values that US television had left behind in the '50s. That's probably a factor in why it wasn't picked up by any US stations at the time, and maybe in why US networks weren't interested in Nation's Dalek spinoff. By the time it did start showing up stateside in the '70s, its production values had improved somewhat, though they were still well below US network standards of the day. The serialized format might also have been a consideration, since US networks liked the freedom to show episodes in whatever order they wanted. (When the show was first nationally distributed in the '80s, as opposed to the local/regional broadcasts of the '70s, it was shown on PBS stations with the serials cut together into "movie" form rather than shown episodically.)
As I recall, they debuted within a few months of each other, and, to complicate matters, the creators of both were roommates at the time. So it could just be that, over pizza and beer one night, they got talking about swamp monsters and then each ended up selling stories along those lines, to DC and Marvel respectively.
And, of course, both Swamp Thing and Man-Thing owe a debut to an earlier swamp-monster character, The Heap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_(comics)
