Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good?
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?
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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, for the most part.
In case anyone is interested in watching a lengthy video essay about how that not the case here: YMS: Kimba the white lion
The Orville is clearly a copy cat of Star Trek and is too tier.
I think it's just tier enough.
Seth MacFarlane is a huge Trekkie and The Orville is him paying homage
Which I think is genuinely incredible. Watching the show evolve from a Star Trek Spoof to a Star Trek Comedy all the way to Just Star Trek was breathtaking.
And to think, one of the most crucial plot points of the show--and how it evolved to encompass bigger and more profound issues--came from a gay joke.
It’s 100% meant to be a Star Trek show for someone that grew up on TNG.
See also: Galaxy Quest, which is like the third or fourth best Star Trek movie.
i think that was mcfarlanes in intention, and its a better representation of trek, than kurtzman nutrek.
The Orville is Star Trek from a different brand
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.
Except it’s not.
You’ve spotted some surface similarities, but they’re most likely coincidental or unconscious influences at best. To my knowledge the creators never said Daredevil was a major influence.
From what I've heard, 'TMNT' is basically a wide-reaching parody of the comic genre at the time. 'Daredevil' was one of the influences, just like noted in the Wikipedia article:
Idk how you read that article to have missed that. It's also been noted more than once before that the 'radioactive spill' or whatever by which the turtles are affected is supposedly the exact same incident that is Daredevil's origin story.
Eastman and Laird were taking potshots at everyone because they had nothing to lose, and were both having fun and working hard. It's a specific kind of indie spirit that I'm glad to see all over the place in webtoons and webcomics these days.
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 Grim brother tales were always meant for children, they even did some early edits to make them more child friendly such as changing evil mother for evil stepmother. I guess we just had more tolerance for exposing children to violence back when they were released.
The first versions were pretty brutal, even by the standards of the day. After all the revisions, those stories were probably more tolerable, but they were still pretty metal IMO. For example, here's a quote from Cinderella.
That wasn't from the latest Saw movie. That was from a book that's intended for children, as far as the author is concerned. Who knows how messed up the first version was.
Jaws is basically "An Enemy of the People" (by Henrik Ibsen) in a modern wrapping.
And Avatar is pretty much space-Pocahontas
Ad Astra (2019) is Apocalypse Now (1979) but in space.
Avatar (2009) is Dances with Wolves (1990) but in space.
‘Apocalypse Now’ is based on Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella ‘Heart of Darkness’, in which the events happen on the Congo river.
The video game Spec Ops: The Line is essentially both stories, but set in Dubai after a cataclysmic sandstorm.
I remember reading that one of military story shooter games had a particularly great mission where the player descends on a city from the surrounding elevation or somesuch. And I've heard multiple times recently that ‘The Line’ is quite outstanding with its story and gameplay. Is it the same game, by any chance? I don't think there's any elevation near Dubai, so probably not, but just to make sure.
I don't remember of any particularly great mission descending onto a city, there are some segments that could fot the description, but honestly Spec Ops: The Line is not memorable for its gameplay, it's just average and it's meant to be, the point of the game is in the story. Although I think that playing it now might not be as impactful as when it first released and every other game was a third-person shooter, but it still I strongly recommend it.
Yeah it’s hard to get the same feeling now compared to back in the day when everything was a beige military shooter.
The story is still good but I think that meta layer of “I do this constantly in games and don’t think about it” won’t hit the same way for people that didn’t grow up at the time. A bit sad.
Back when Avatar came out, I heard someone call it "Fern Gully with better graphics."
There was a YouTube trend of making Avatar trailers with the audio but then using the graphics for movies like Fern Gully and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). Turns out there are a lot of 'going native' movies.
Avatar is absolutely not Dances with Wolves. It is Pocahontas. Throw in a couple musical numbers and it's real close to being a shot-for-shot remake of the Disney movie.
Another example of the 'gone native' plot line in the wake of Dances With Wolves. Pocahontas had the advantage of Dances With Wolves coming out first. So it smoothed some of those edges.
Sure, same general premise, but the structure is very different between them. In Dances with Wolves, Dunbar is basically abandoned by his people and slowly assimilates into the local village. By the time Dunbar's people return in the third act, they're no longer his people at all. In Pocahontas and Avatar, Smith and Sully are part of an active and present colonial force, wind up on generally friendly terms with the locals, start dating the chief's daughter, and wind up with a strong case of conflicting loyalties, having to pick between their people and their lover's people when the fighting starts.
Where does Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai fit into this?
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’.
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”.
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.
I mean the Title of 10 things even rhymes with its source material’s name.
All of them.
There are only a couple dozen or so quality stories.
Everything is a ripoff or mashup of those.
Some have narrowed it down to only 7 stories.
Super silly take. Those aren't stories, they're themes. Very vague, general themes.
No. It's a list of The Seven Basic Plots. Themes are different.
Apocalypse Now is basically Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
But in Vietnam.
Battle Beyond the Stars is just The Magnificent Seven in space, which was The Seven Samurai in the west.
Willy’s Wonderland is a way better Five Nights at Freddie’s than the actual Five Nights at Freddie’s.
After Michael Crichton's Westworld bombed, one of his friends recommend he explore the same themes with dinosaurs instead, so he wrote Jurassic Park.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine being strongly influenced by the original pitch for Babylon 5 is a pretty famous, if variously disputed, example.
You know what makes me happy? They settled out of court because the fans said, "We love them both!"
That said, B5 will always have a very soft spot in my heart.
and sg1 was a ripoff of DS9 for the most part.
The Punisher is just The Executioner with the serial numbers filed off. Any given person is much more likely to have heard of The Punisher.
Warcraft 1-3
For anyone wanting more details on this: https://kotaku.com/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-5929161
Warcraft was originally supposed to be a Warhammer 40K game, but Blizzard ended up not getting the license, so they created their own universe instead.
Rent is based on La Boheme, it never tried to hide it. The character have almost identical names and they swapped tuberculosis with AIDS and it’s 100 years later.
I always wondered if La Boheme hit as hard in the 1890’s as Rent did in the 1990’s.
Imagine if instead of AIDS, it was now fentanyl addiction? Gen Z rent and jobs crisis too.
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.
I think there's also an important distinction to be made here, especially for many of these examples.
Ripoff - "a usually cheap exploitive imitation"
Homage - "something that shows respect or attests to the worth or influence of another"
I think many of the examples of "good ones" would likely be homages, rather than ripoffs. Although thats not to say, some ripoffs can't be good on their own too.
The Avengers are technically a rip off of the OG Justice League.
Also, OG Silent Hill to OG Resident Evil.
I guess you could say the OG Avatar rips off Disney's Pocahontas.
Watchmen
That's an adaptation.
The TV show on HBO wasn't, which may be what they're referring to here.
While the characters are based on Charlton Comics characters DC had recently acquired (Dr. Manhattan ≈ Captain Atom, Rorschach ≈ The Question, Nite Owl ≈ Blue Beetle, Silk Spectre ≈ Nightshade, and possibly also Quality Comics' Phantom Lady and DC's own Black Canary, Ozymandias ≈ Thunderbolt, The Comedian ≈ Peacemaker), Moore's story is mostly original, inasmuch as stories can be.
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.
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?
You know more nickle back songs than nirvana.
“Pretty good?” You’ve heard of the movie. It must be pretty good even if we haven’t watched it.
Popular != Good
Good is a matter of opinion. If a lot of people are enjoying it. Yes it’s a good movie. I don’t like the movie but my opinion isn’t everyone’s opinion
That’s what it was!
A lot of people thinks Shakespeare was pretty good
Is Rick and Morty a cheating answer?
You're going to get into the blurry distinction between a ripoff and a tribute or an homage.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier has a lot of Three Days of the Condor, but is that a ripoff, or an homage?
Ditto Star Wars and Hidden Fortress.
Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More were uncredited remakes of Yojimbo and Sanjuro, and as I recall Kurosawa was pretty annoyed, so that probably counts as a ripoff.
Oreo cookies came out four years after Hydrox cookies, and I'd say they surpassed the original.
Deep Space Nine ripped off Babylon 5. Fans love them both, because instead of one sci-fi political drama on a space station, we got two!
The Dog Man books are great and many are based on classic novels like A Tale of Two Kitties, Lord of the Fleas, Brawl of the Wild, Fetch 22, etc. They are among the best kids books I have ever read.
D.E.B.S. is a love letter to spy spoof films
The Wizard of the Emerald City and it's series from Alexander Melentyevich Volkov. The first story was a nearly 100 % ripoff of The Wizard of Oz and later books also contain some ideas from the original stories from Baum, but Volkov also created a lot on his own in the sequels. And I love the world he created. I especially like that villains were portrayed in a manner that made sense. While there also were some archetypical "I'm capital E Evil" the character of Urfin was fascinating to me as a child, as it was one of the first instances of a multidimensional charactersi experienced as child. He was an overly ambitious but smart person in a fairy tale village where everybody else was content with their simple life. And that discrepancy was the start of his road to villainhood.
Wicked was a pretty good book that was also unabashedly a ripoff of Wizard of Oz. I haven't seen the musical.
Adaptation, not necessarily rip off.
Thank you. I was repeating the wording of the post, but that doesn't really fit the material.
Bored of the Rings
Polar was ripoff of the Keanu Reeves movies.
Hangover 2 was basically Hangover 1, and I assume Hangover 3 was as well. Still pretty good