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?
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!
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.
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.”
The Orville is clearly a copy cat of Star Trek and is too tier.
The Orville is Star Trek from a different brand
The Magnificent 7 and A Fistful of Dollars are just Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but westerns.
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 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.
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
