What comic books, movies, and TV shows are blatantly copycats or rip-offs of previous comics, movies, or shows, but despite being a copycat or rip-off, are still pretty good?
Not quite the same, but: more than a few classic films are remakes. The 1959 ‘Ben-Hur’ is a remake of the 1925 film, which itself was the second cinema adaptation of the novel, after the 1907 film.
After Michael Crichton’s Westworld bombed, one of his friends recommend he explore the same themes with dinosaurs instead, so he wrote Jurassic Park.
F. W. Murnau wanted to make a cinema adaptation of ‘Dracula’, but didn’t get the permission. So he shrugged, changed some details, and made the 1922 ‘Nosferatu’.
Guess what, the original Dracula wasn’t affected by sunlight. That whole trope of the vampire genre comes from ‘Nosferatu’.
Willy’s Wonderland is a way better Five Nights at Freddie’s than the actual Five Nights at Freddie’s.
The Magnificent 7 and A Fistful of Dollars are just Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but westerns.
Speaking of Kurosawa, ‘Ran’ is based on ‘King Lear’, and also “includes segments based on legends of the daimyō Mōri Motonari”.
Polar was ripoff of the Keanu Reeves movies.
Didn’t twilight start as a fan fiction?
Not Twilight itself, but 50 Shades of Gray started as a Twilight fan fiction
Would that fit OP’s question of “actually pretty good” though?
That’s what it was!
I think early Disney movies are pretty good. They usually just took an archaic horror story intended for adults, got rid of all the gore and murder, rewrote the rest, and somehow ended up with a children’s movie. Those ripoff versions became so famous and influential that people no longer think of the originals.
Maybe in two hundred years someone will start ripping off Saw movies to make kindergarten holo-ventures. Oh no! Jeff Denlon, the ice cream merchant, got stuck in the freezer. Can you find the key to the door?
The Lion King is basically Hamlet with animals.
Lion King is as much Hamlet as Frozen is The Snow Queen, which is to say, it really isn’t.
Lion King is loosely inspired by, but doesn’t actually follow the same story structure or present the same conflicts/tension or explore the same themes as Hamlet.
The Lion King is a rip-off of Japan’s Kimba the White Lion.
That’s been debunked, afaik. There are only surface similarities.
Now, if someone watches the restoration of the original unfinished 1960s ‘The Thief and the Cobbler’, they might notice some glaring parallels to another Disney cartoon. Not in the story, though.
We talking, like, O Brother, Where Art Thou? being based on Homer’s Odyssey?
I still go back to listen to the music from that sometimes.
🎵I-----aye am a maan, of constant sorROWS🎵
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a Daredevil parody/love letter.
They get their powers from the same accident that gives Matt Murdoch his.
Mentor? Splinter / Stick. Enemy? The Foot / The Hand.
Jaws is basically “An Enemy of the People” (by Henrik Ibsen) in a modern wrapping.
And Avatar is pretty much space-Pocahontas
The Orville is clearly a copy cat of Star Trek and is too tier.
I think it’s just tier enough.
Twilight zone! There are different run of the series. Many reimagined stories from the first run, some better than others, as is such with the first run. There are stale episodes by today’s standards.
Romeo & Juliet was based on Tristan & Isolde
10 Things I Hate About You was based on The Taming of the Shrew
Clueless was based on Emma
“Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal.”
Afaik more than a few of Shakespeare’s stories come from contemporary plays, he just retold them in his own manner.
That was the only one I knew offhand, but yeah, his schtick was writing rhyming dialogue for existing stories.
