Artistic works that were ripoffs of other artistic works

Most of the 70s films by Woody Allen were ripoffs of Ingmar Bergman. Allen admitted so himself.

Madonna's, well, everything.

But especially Vogue.

Good one R1

OP, what is The Wasteland ripped off of?

Exactly, R4.

James Joyce's Ulysses R4, just to name one.

Make 'Em Laugh.

Mine.

The Roman's ripped off the Greeks big time. That was my go-to mental note when studying for art history classes in college, when it came time for exams. It was easy to distinguish between a Greek sculpture and it's Roman knock off of it.

I've never really understood the acclaim for THE HOURS, the Cunningham novel "inspired by" MRS. DALLOWAY (by Virginia Woolf). At the time of publication, I shrugged while the rest of the world raved:

[quote]The Hours is a 1998 novel written by Michael Cunningham. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore.

While Cunningham's writing is pretty accessible (IMHO), it suffers from MFA-itis: artists making art about other art, commenting about other art, writing about the act of writing and reading. Uggh. It's one of the plagues of our age in the visual arts, fiction, poetry, theatre.

And it's a lot of borrowed glory: Cunningham may wrap himself in the mantle of brilliant and tragic Virginia Woolf, but he's no Virginia Woolf.

R4, read the footnotes

The copy:

Ceelo Greene/Sylvester

We Are The World/Do They Know It's Christmas?

Friday the 13th/Halloween

Family Guy/The Simpsons

The copy:

I thought Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin" ripped off elements from Jane Hamilton's "A Map of the World." Slow train-wreck tragedy begins to unravel a frau's perfect domestic life as a town turns on her and she slips into the abyss.

Please also state the originals, not just the copies. Not everyone has the same reading/viewing/listening history as yourselves. Or the same thought process, for that matter.

The Godfather

Ripoff of Scarface 1932

Agreed, Captain. I have no idea how to interpret links labeled "The copy:"

Copy of what? Who copied whom?

R14 is the original.

R12 is the copy.

Any questions?

[Quote] [R4], read the footnotes

I don't think you're a very rude and condescending person. You're obviously a very old elder gay who has just discovered chat and this forum. I worry the Admonishment Troll will get to you for being rude and inconsiderate. Be warned.

Yes, R19. Why are both labelled "The copy"?

R10 Virginia Woolf was a genius. Her life was plundered by an American parasitic leech.

I think R11 meant that there are as many "originals" to the book as there are works mentioned in the footnotes. Am I wrong?

M. Night Shyamalan lifted much of the story of the Village from Margaret Peterson Haddix’s YA novel Running Out of Time. Things were settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

R22 One could say that the Irishman plundered the life of the American.

But I think the Irishman made the boring American's life more interesting than it was.

One of Joan Didion's anecdotes (in Slouching Towards Bethlehem) about an unpleasant experience shopping in a grocery store while wearing a bikini seemed derivative of John Updike's short story A&P. Although if it really happened, I guess it's not a ripoff. I guess tension over women shopping in bikinis at grocery stores must have been a thing in the sixties?

Star Wars (if you consider it a work of art, as opposed to pop art) was basically reheated Flash Gordon with a soupçon of Joseph Conrad.

Good one R26.

The fact that almost all of the Hollywood movies from the past 20 years are remakes of old/foreign movies is driving me nuts. Do something risky and original ffs!

R26 Was it a prematurely air conditioned super market? With lots of aisles? Did they have these bathing caps for sale? Did they have these Fourth of July plumes on them?

OP/R6 is a foolish poseur. She cannot tell the difference between a intentional pastiche representing a pissy intellectual's summation of the poet's times (poets', really, because of how closely Pound edited it) "rip-off." Also, note that this illiterate asshole - a faux reader - has not a rationale or example except a novel's title and a vague wrist-flick about "others." Note also that Joyce saw no "rip-off" in "The Wasteland." Stream of consciousness? Switching points of view and authorial voice? Shit. Those technique predated Joyce by centuries. And the thematics of the two pieces actually are at odds.

Nothing is worse than a non-intellect pretending to knowledge beyond its capture and wisdom beyond its capacity. There's a sadness to such a phony.

My humble offering is the well-known theft of Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" by Comden and Green (or Donen, in other renditions) with "Make 'Em Laugh." Even Donen said it was "100% plagiarism." And Porter didn't sue. That's professional magnanimity for you.

Or perhaps the OP/R6 will sniff that popular music is not "artistic work." Because she's obviously such an auteur.

Every show with a fat man married to a skinny woman is basically a rip off of [italic]The Honeymooners[/italic].

R32’s post is like a palate cleanse to r31’s.

Wow, R31 has some anger issues fo sho.

Shawn Colvin's "Sunny came home" had the same musical hook as Sophie B. Hawkins' "As I Lay Me Down." Dunno if that was intentional or not.

R34 He sounds like a professional critic, and a misanthrope.

Alan Moore stole Watchmen from an episode of The Outer Limits

AND stole Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow from Robert Mayer's Superfolks.

Don't we use terms like homage and quotation these days instead of plagiarism?

The movie [italic]Clockstoppers[/italic] lifted its plot from a first season episode of [italic]DuckTales[/italic].

Some people seem to accuse John Carpenter's "Halloween" of ripping off "Black Christmas." Having never seen the latter, I can't say if that's true or not.

Walt Disney Productions turned into the world’s cuddliest recycling center some time around 1960.

[quote] James Joyce's Ulysses [R4], just to name one.

Wait. What?

One is a poem and one is a novel. They do not have similar characters nor settings. What they have in common is a vision of the modern world that other writers of the time shared: hence they are called "modernists." That's not "ripping someone off": that's sharing a vision, and being part of a literary movement.

The completed works of both texts came out in the same year. Eliot was one of the earliest and most influential critics of Joyce's novel. But he had written most of his poem before he had read the entirety of "Ulysses" and had reviewed it.

Trump's presidency

The entire Regency Romance genre is a deliberate ripoff of Jane Austen. I know this because I have a relative who goes through the things like toilet paper, she's a lovely person but has this one bit of godawful taste. She buys them by the dozen, or gets them by the bagful at library sales, they're all the same but she must have gone through hundreds of thousands of them.

I don't know of another book genre (I won't call it "literary") that's produced millions of books that are ripoffs of one author, unless it's the Fantasy genre ripping off J.R.R. Tolkien.

R6 'The Wasteland' is in the English language. 'Ulysses' is in the Gibberish Language.

'Rebecca' is a repetition of 'Jane Eyre'

The Hours openly acknowledged the debt to Woolf, it wasn't a "ripoff"

R20, the footnotes are part of the poem. Eliot himself tells you what he borrowed from where.

R14 is REALLY mixed up. "Sweet LIttle Sixteen" was recorded in 1957. The Beach Boys ripped off the music for "Surfin' U.S.A.", which was released in 1963. Berry used the same melody on an earlier song, "The Little Girl From Central" recorded on Checkmate in 1955. But it was always HIS song. He never ripped it off from anyone.

r31, you seem pretty pretentious yourself. "Illiterate" people haven't even heard of The Waste Land.

R47 This American parasite may have 'acknowledged the debt' to the late Virginia Woolf but did he pay anything to her estate?

He stole salacious aspects from her life to use for his own parasitic ends without recompense.

R51, generally you do not need to pay dead public figures for the use of details of their life.

I am not even sure what the legal mechanism would be for that.

Nor why you think heirs born after Woolf's death should benefit from another writer's work.

"My Own Private Idaho" ripped off Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V.

"Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" ripped of "The Odyssey."

Neil Gaiman ripped off "Coraline" from a short story by Lucy Clifford called "The New Mother." He ripped off his "Sandman" comic series from a lot of sources.

R51, what the hell are you talking about? You don't need to compensate someone to write about a historical figure. People write fiction about historical figures all the fucking time. Why is it only wrong in this case? The only thing I can come up with is that a lot of DLers hate successful gay men.

The Truman Show ripped off a Twilight Zone episode

M. Night Shyamalan ripped off some Y.A novel for The Village

Golden Girls is just old Designing Women.

Many works are homages or adaptions of earlier works. They’re only rip-offs if they’re not any good.

[quote] Golden Girls is just old Designing Women.

Both of them are slightly skinner variations on [italic]the Facts of Life[/italic].

R52 It's theft

It's illegal to steal the image of Churchill, Hepburn, Monroe, Bogart and Dean.

And it's just plain rude to presenting private details amongst people who haven't the slightest intention of reading her life's work.

Skinnier, I mean.

Dressed to Kill is just a sexed up version of Psycho. You have the gender confused slasher, the biggest star of the movie being the protagonist for a good chunk of the movie and then being brutally murdered before switching to another female protagonist who helps solve the crime and figure out what happened. There's also a suspenseful bit where the new heroine must snoop in the killer's quarters to find out clues and is attacked before being saved by someone right before they're about to be killed. They even both have clunky psychiatrist explanations at the end to spoon feed the audience about why the killer did what they did.

The structure of each film is very similar, but it's the little details about the characters and locations that turn it from theft to homage.

George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" is a rip-off of The Chiffon's "He's So Fine." He ended up paying off a big copyright lawsuit because of the similarity.

Colleen McCullough's The Ladies of Missalonghi is a plot-point-for-plot-point rip-off of L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle.

Get rich in America by stealing other people's lives

GORDON LIGHTFOOT : If You Could Read My Mind - 1970 WHITNEY HOUSTON : The Greatest Love of All - 1986 May be one of the biggest plagiarism of pop music. .

In April 1987, Gordon Lightfoot filed a lawsuit against Michael Masser, alleging that Masser's song "The Greatest Love of All" stole twenty-four bars from Lightfoot's 1970 hit "If You Could Read My Mind." According to Maclean's, Lightfoot commented, "It really rubbed me the wrong way. I don't want the present-day generation to think that I stole my song from him." Lightfoot has stated that he dropped the suit when he felt it was having a negative effect on Whitney Houston, as the suit was about Masser and not her

Whitney's version wasn't the original; George Benson's was in 1977. Was Gordon Lightfoot really unaware of it until the cover version came out?

R65 Yet ANOTHER really good one... I hear it, and I believe.

R59, on the off chance you are not a troll and are genuinely ignorant about IP law.....

In the cases you cite, the copyright of those images would belong to the photographer not Churchill, Hepburn, Monroe, Bogart and Dean. To duplicate an image you would need permission of the artist who created the image, not the public figure.

There are publicity rights, which is a different thing, but asserts that a public figure has the right to control how his/her image is used in a commercial context.

But as long as the book cover does not bear the likeness of Virginia Woolf, neither law would apply.

I am not sure why you have a link to the Churchill Copyright page. It refers to copyright of his writings, not use of details about his life.

Churchill is a great example. He has appeared as a character in many novels as well as plays and films. I can assure you, the producers of The Crown and others who have used him as a character have not paid anything to Churchill's heirs for the right to do so. They do not have to.

r64, he didn't steal anything.

Are you going to dump on Shakespeare for writing a play about Richard the Third?

J.K. Rowling ripped off the 80s B-movie Troll.

Hunger Games was a ripoff of the Japanese manga Battle Royale.

R31 is Chloë Sevigny

I can't be the only one who read R31's post in Dame Maggie Smith's voice.

This thread ripped off the broadway rip-off thread

I'm not sure why R31 even mentioned "Make Em Laugh" and "Be A Clown," since they were mentioned prominently upthread.... and then he/she incorrectly attributed the song to Comden and Green.

[quote]The song "Make 'Em Laugh" (by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed) in the film Singin' in the Rain is very similar to "Be a Clown," although Cole Porter did not make a complaint. Both films were Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions and starred Kelly, who appeared in (but did not sing) the "Make 'Em Laugh" segment of the latter film, in which the song was performed by Donald O'Connor.

Nino Rota allegedly stole the score of The Godfather from an obscure Sicilian composer. There was a lawsuit but the case was dropped.

The love theme was also self-plagiarized from an earlier film, Fortunella. That's why the score was withdrawn from consideration for the Academy awards.

Joyce Carol Oates releasing a book about the aftermath of grieving her husband's death months after Joan Didion had just released the same thing was an odd literary moment.

Madonna ripping off Debbie Harry's career.

R76, I’d forgotten that: the haunting “Godfather” theme was lifted from one of Donizetti’s last operas, “Don Pasquale.”

"Ice, Ice Baby" was a ripoff of "Under Pressure."

"Ghostbusters" theme was a ripoff of "I Want a New Drug." Settled out of court.

This...

R61: Your post is clever, thought-provoking and on the money! But it made me think: every Brian DePalma flick is a rip-off of his own "Dressed to Kill." I actually watched "Dressed to Kill" for the first time AFTER having seen a lot of his other movies, and I couldn't believe how much he pimped his own creation! That split-screen thing, especially.

So many Brian DePalma films are based on other films. Dressed to Kill is from Psycho. Blow Out is from Blow Up. etc. etc.

Dynasty ripped off Dallas.

Not really a "rip-off," but "Back in the USSR" (Beatles). Horrible song, possibly their worst. One of the Beach Boys suggested that the Beatles do a song like "California Girls" and that's how "Back in the USSR" came to be. Yuck.

The entire oeuvre of that hussy, Cilla Black

When Harry Met Sally is a ripoff of Annie Hall.

"Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, oooh, la la la la life goes on!"

Another self-plagiarism - "If I Loved You" from "Oklahoma" is a variation on "Make Believe" "from Showboat".

Quincy Jones remarked about Mick Jagger's distinctive style by saying that Jagger stole moves and style from both Little Richard and Elvis, adding, "that's what the great ones do. They take from other, better performers and then add their own style."

The Flintstones and the Jetsons are the same, except one ostensibly depicts the past and the other, the future.

oops from "Showboat".

Double oops- "If I Loved You" is from Carousel

RENT.

Della - I think The Flintstones also has a touch of The Honeymooners in the mix.

lol, r93, you're right.

Murder, She Wrote ripped off Agatha Christie

Two Broke Girls ripped off that cultural juggernaut Laverne & Shirley.

The original creation:

The rip off:

Andrew Lloyd-Webber ripped off everyone.

[quote]The entire oeuvre of that hussy, Cilla Black —Miss Warwick

Luv, I'm singing the song in Heaven. I know you'll never be here to hear it, but maybe your friend Lucifer will take to your version.

Too many to list.

The trill of brass from the ending of the film version of The Wiz is exact same as the ending notes of Judy Garland's I Happen to Like New York.

Salute or theft?

R31 must be some kind of misguided parody.

I don't think we're quite out of the era of pastiche, remix, reimagination, sampling, collage... I think we're in the same artistic period as those aforementioned Modernists, but most of it now seems hollow or cold.

Mariah Carey made millions off of Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love, although I guess if you delve into musicians sampling other original work, the examples become endless.

If it's a sample that's bought and paid for, it's not a rip-off.

DL Fave Stevie Nicks got sued by some obscure singer-songwriter for allegedly plagiarizing the song "Sara." Settled out of court, if memory serves.

Madonna's title track "Ray Of Light" was a verbatim rip off of an early 1970's folk song, right down to the lyrics.

Ms Catherine Bush would never grind her pussy into the piano bench like... her

The original animated version of The Lion King lifted its plot from Hamlet and much of its visual style from a Japanese anime TV series called Kimba the White Lion.

De Palma always steals from himself, too. The ending to Dressed to Kill is pretty much the exact same ending from Carrie with even Pino Donaggio's score sounding almost identical. Raising Cain has a very similar set up to Dressed to Kill as well with the unfaithful housewife fucking some guy and getting in trouble for it.

Body Double has a similar sassy sex worker character to the Nancy Allen character in Dressed to Kill, except she's played by Melanie Griffith this time.

I'm sure you could pick apart any director's career and see the shots, concepts, themes, and characters they most respond to.

A variation is not a rip off or 'self-plagiarism.' You sound like the idiot who thought Make Em Laugh was written by Comden and Green.

[quote] Mariah Carey made millions off of Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love, although I guess if you delve into musicians sampling other original work, the examples become endless.

R106 is right. The rip-offs are when you have to sue (like "Ghostbusters" / "I Want a New Drug") because there was no permission.

There was a great, obscure documentary I watched years and years ago that focused on Henry Miller and Anais Nin. When an older Miller discovers his decades old notes on Tropic of Cancer, he sort of laughs to himself and admits that he stole tons from Dostoyevksi. It was charming actually.

I don't know if any of you remember that awful Tilda Swinton monstrosity called I Am Love (actually and very pompously, Io Sono L'Amore, cuz she Italian, you know). It leaned very heavily on Visconti's La Caduta Degli Dei. I don't think it was acknowledged in any official way.

Wasn’t there direct lifting of much of the Single Ladies video From some dancing trio TV special?

R116, I do not understand why video rip off choreography. Single Ladies rips off Bob Fosse's Mexican Breakfast. How many video's rip of de Keersmaaker? Do they know know that they are not the only ones who can watch dance on YouTube?

[quote] A variation is not a rip off or 'self-plagiarism.' You sound like the idiot who thought Make Em Laugh was written by Comden and Green.

I know, r112. My hyperbole was deliberate.

This is Datalounge, not Factopedia.

The world is Factopedia.

There's a John Legend song that to my ear sounds way too similar to Stormy by Classics IV. I wish I could recall the title of the Legend song... something especially about the beginning and one particular interlude.

There's another Legend song I've heard on the radio which is reminiscent of another 70s R&B song, same four chord progression... sadly I do not know the title of it either.

It’s called Save Room—and stormy was sampled, r120.

R121 Thanks... so I'm assuming all legit then... Do you know of the other, it's stuck somewhere in the back of my mind. I enjoy Legend, just to be clear, I'm not taking shots at him. I think he's very talented and attractive.

I saw Io Sono L'Amore. What a doozy.

[quote]The entire Regency Romance genre is a deliberate ripoff of Jane Austen.

Jane Austen is basically a ripoff of Jane Austen.

While her books are enjoyable, they are basically the same story. The girl of precarious marriage odds always winds up with the hot richer man in the end.

Self-plagiarism; some songwriter sold the same song to three singers:

Kelly Clarkson - Anytime

Alexandra Burke - Overcome

Anastacia - You'll Never Be Alone

[italic]A Fistful of Dollars[/italic] is pretty much a scene-by-scene rip-off of Kurosawa's [italic]Yojimbo[/italic]. Kurosawa sued Sergio Leone and won, being awarded the profits from the far-east distribution of Fo$, IIRC. Supposedly Kurosawa made more money from that than from any of his own movies.

[quote]While her books are enjoyable, they are basically the same story. The girl of precarious marriage odds always winds up with the hot richer man in the end.

Was Jane Austen a gay man?

Mariah Carey's "Dream Lover" is a rip-off of the 70's hit, "It's Too Late to Turn Back Now," by the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose. And I, shamefully.....love them both!

[quote]Self-plagiarism; some songwriter sold the same song to three singers:

Carole King said that when she and her first husband were working in the Brill Building (the expression, not the place), they constantly repurposed whatever had worked in another song. If a song was a hit, they would use the baseline again. Or play it backward.

The worst I ever saw, and I saw it for myself having no idea of the controversy at the time it was made was Modern Times. I went to see Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberte his Le Million being one of my favorite films. I'm sitting there watching it and suddenly thinking dear god this is Modern Times. Looks like Chaplin blatantly and heavily lifted from Clair's film. The producers wanted to sue Chaplin but Clair was appalled. You don't sue one of the screen's greatest artists who has been such an important influence on so many people.

[quote]It's illegal to steal the image of Churchill, Hepburn, Monroe, Bogart and Dean

Marilyn Monroe's image is public domain. She died in California but her estate claimed New York residency for tax purposes. NY doesn't have rights of publicity after death, so though the Strasbergs think they owned and could sell her image, they couldn't. Each photographer owned the rights to their images, not the Strasbergs. Any image that can't be attributed to a specific photographer is currently in public domain.

What ABG (American Brand Group), the corporation found out when they paid Anna S. millions. ABG then had to purchase the rights to photographs from the estates of photograph hers and that is what they control. NOT the image of Marilyn.

Meaning if you have a photograph your dad took of her in Korea, publish it, put it on shirts, mugs or whatever because you own the rights.

Oreos are a rip off of Hydrox

R122: Maybe you’re thinking of Every Day Gets Better. The intro kind of sounds like the Spinner’s I’ll Be Around, and Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Neil Young.

R133 Thanks again for your reply. Yes, I agree with you on that one as well... It reminds me of The Four Tops In These Changing Times a bit as well. The other earworm I was thinking of has an intro which reminds me of/sounds similar to Lou Rawls You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine.... again, there's a refrain or another bit which sounds derivative of it also.

I'm not familiar with much of Legend's "catalogue", but was listening to some songs this afternoon hoping to find it, yet no such luck.

Wasn't Bob Dylan accused of plagiarizing some of his songs?

R135, yes he was, but, as he pointed out, there’s a long tradition in folk music and blues of adapting and reusing other people’s material.

Bob Dylan sold the Jews out by becoming a born-again Christian.

R132. And, in that case, a distinct improvement.

Hello Dolly. I believe the first 10 notes are exactly the same as the song Sunflower. Herman was forced to pay a hefty settlement. I would have fought it. After those first 10 notes Hello Dolly soars but Sunflower falls off a cliff. Listen to Sinatra do it on youtube at his too smooth Columbia worst.

Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine" is such a ripoff of "Streetcar Named Desire", I'm surprised Tennessee Williams' estate hasn't sued.

Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres" is essentially a modern retelling of "King Lear." And yet I don't recall much shock, outrage and / or rioting over it.

Homage, R140

A lot of Allen's recent work is based on older pieces. Math Point was An American Tragedy.

There's enough different in Blue Jasmine to make it stand out from Streetcar, but the structure is exactly the same. Just like Dressed to Kill's structure is identical to Psycho.

You have the woman who has fallen from grace who comes to live with her poor sister and her sleazy husband who don't take to her airs very well and she ends up meeting a nice guy that she thinks she can rope into marrying her, but he breaks up with her which leads to a full psychotic break and, in the end, both women's fates are sort of up in the air as they're lost in their own delusions.

I'd actually give Allen credit for making Jasmine's ending even more cruel. Then again, I found Jasmine to be a much more conniving person than Blanche. Underneath it all, Blanche seemed sweet and kind, but Jasmine seemed harder and more calculating. I'd say it's one of his better films.

Jerry Herman said in both interviews and in his autobiography that he was resolved to fight the plagiarism suit because he was sure he would win. But he was under immense pressure from the producers and the other members of the Hello, Dolly! creative team to settle because the suit was holding up the sale of the film rights, which meant they were all being put on hold for their share of the millions the film rights were going for.

It was a complicated situation. Eventually he settled just to have everything over and done with. There are only 4 bars in question, and it's true that those bars are melodically and harmonically identical, but as pointed out above, the songs are otherwise very different with Dolly being hands down the better song. Herman went to his grave insisting that he had never even heard Sunflower before writing Hello, Dolly!

If you read about the situation, you will hear over and over that Herman lost the suit. There was no suit. Herman settled out of court before it ever went to trial.

Jerry Herman said in both interviews and in his autobiography that he was resolved to fight the plagiarism suit because he was sure he would win. But he was under immense pressure from the producers and the other members of the Hello, Dolly! creative team to settle because the suit was holding up the sale of the film rights, which meant they were all being put on hold for their share of the millions the film rights were going for.

It was a complicated situation. Eventually he settled just to have everything over and done with. There are only 4 bars in question, and it's true that those bars are melodically and harmonically identical, but as pointed out above, the songs are otherwise very different with Dolly being hands down the better song. Herman went to his grave insisting that he had never even heard Sunflower before writing Hello, Dolly!

If you read about the situation, you will hear over and over that Herman lost the suit. There was no suit. Herman settled out of court before it ever went to trial.

^ I mispoke above saying there was no suit. There was a suit and what I meant was that there was never a court ruling against Herman because it never went to trial after Herman settled.

A young David Leavitt had the audacity to STEAL from the life of Stephen Spender.

Now, I don't have a high opinion of either of them but it was a verifiable THEFT.

Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" was a rip-off of Ace of Base's "Don't Turn Around."

"Dusty's Trail" rips off "Gilligan's Island" -- or is it a "re-working, since both were created by Sherwood Schwartz?

There's Dusty,

The Wagonmaster, too,

The Millionaire,

And his wife,

The Dance-Hall Star,

And the rest,

Are here on Dusty's Trail!

I agree with Blue Jasmine. When I saw it the theater, I sat there thinking, "This is almost like a retelling of 'Streetcar'." And as it went on, I kept having mouth drop moments, like, "Oh my fucking God. How blatant is this?" And here's the thing: I LOVE Blue Jasmine. But it is plagiarism. It's not just the structural similarities; one of the standards of determining plagiarism in literature is the psychology of the characters--are their motivations, reactions, and backgrounds the same or strongly similar? Check, check, checkity check. There is no way Allen did not see 'Streetcar'; you could never hit all those same notes without seeing the original. (Even the disguised ones, like changing Streetcars gay husband for Jasmine's embezzling one, were psychologically similar). I love them both but without Streetcar you'd never have Bkue Jasmine. That was a retelling, at best, not an original story.

Blue Jasmine changes several key details, but you're right - the characters are psychologically so similar. I can buy Blanche having the same ending as Jasmine if things had gone in a slightly different direction. They're both women who want everyone to believe they're someone they're not, because who they really are wouldn't be deemed lovable or perfect enough. Very tragic characters.

Not only was there a suit, R147, it was my Sunday best.

R32 recently I learned that the first two seasons of memetic Millennial teencom DRAKE & JOSH leant heavily on the THE HONEYMOONERS for inspiration.

That is far-reaching influence for one little old sitcom.

[quote] If a song was a hit, they would use the baseline again.

Oh, dear.

[quote] Mariah Carey's "Dream Lover" is a rip-off of the 70's hit, "It's Too Late to Turn Back Now," by the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose. And I, shamefully.....love them both!

Mariah's Emotions--possibly her second-best single ever next to AIWFCIY--is also a rip off Emotions by (who else) The Emotions. AND she also sampled The Emotions's Blind Alley for Dreamlover. I read that the Emotions were pissed over not getting credited for Emotions.

R88 somewhere, a Scouser’s head just exploded.

[quote] Madonna's title track "Ray Of Light" was a verbatim rip off of an early 1970's folk song, right down to the lyrics.

From wikipedia:

[quote] He "couldn't believe it" and was initially a bit annoyed, but became pleased with what Madonna had done with his original composition.[4] He was also satisfied with the 15% royalties he received as songwriter credit. Madonna took 30% royalties, another 15% were given to Maldoon's estate and the rest were earned by Madonna's record company.

[quote] The structure of each film is very similar, but it's the little details about the characters and locations that turn it from theft to homage.

I think Dressed to Kill is filmed like a giallo dark comedy, not a Hithcock film. Yes, the plot is similar to Psycho but I feel like the movie is doing something very different.

R99 what most annoys me about Webby is how he plagiarised the superlative ELISABETH to make EVITA, only to have the latter sounding and playing so much worse.

If you’re going to steal from an excellent work, you’d better make it better, bitch.

Movies like Dressed to Kill are fascinating, because it gives you an idea about how someone else would interpret a similar story. Turns out, it's almost always totally different. It's like watching a new retelling of a classic fairy tale. Everyone always puts their own spin on it, which keeps it fresh. I can't stand the remakes and ripoffs that borrow whole scenes and characters from previous iterations and don't bring anything new to the table.

I forget which film but in one of them Allen makes a joke about always wanting to play Blanche in Streetcar. Blue Jasmine though heavily influence by Streetcar I feel stands on its own. Now Match Point is a different story. A total steal adding nothing to the basic plot.