Obviously I don’t mean stealing someone’s song or sketch. There are legal sanctions against doing that, and rightly so. But what about when something great and original comes along; in music it could be a band like Nirvana, or in sketch comedy SNL in 1975. Then along come, respectively, the Stone Temple Pilots, and “Fridays”, both of which were mostly panned for being imitative. And sure, STP does sound derivative of the Seattle sound of the time, but–they did write their own songs. They didn’t steal Nirvana’s material. And “Fridays” had some very talented cast members who–again–wrote their own actual, new material, and managed to impart their own very individualistic stamp on the sketch comedy form.
So, why all the hate? If something comes close to the original and can fill an audience’s desire to experience something like the original, is it all bad? Doesn’t it fulfill a useful purpose? Is Captain Marvel despised because, basically, he’s Superman in different colored tights? Or does location have anything to do with it? Would STP’s rep have been better if they, too, had come from Seattle and not Orange County?
Everyone always complains that Hollywood does nothing but remakes, but it seems that it’s always been that way. Philosophically, I’m not against remakes. Sometimes it is valid to retell a story in a modern way as film making styles have changed so much. We have remakes of Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. All of these have iconic characters and it seems almost sacrilege to remake them so soon. Doing the math, though, we are about as removed from them as were were from the Universal Monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, Mummy, Wolfman, etc. when Hammer started remaking them in the 50s - 60s. I can still enjoy the originals anytime I want, and on occasion one of the remakes is actually watchable.
I’m not 100 percent sure, but wasn’t it common in ancient china for artists to copy the style and themes of the master artist? Eventually they might break away into their own style, but for the most part their work was what we would today call derivative.
Captain Marvel wasn’t despised, and (at least originally), he wasn’t Superman in different colored tights. Captain Marvel was much more cartoony (he had, after all, a talking tiger as a friend and a superintelligent worm as an arch-enemy), and a different attitude. The Captain was always a 12-year-old boy; Superman was grown up.
But the dislike for derivative artists stems is best encapsulated by something Alfred Bester said: the only thing an artist has to offer is originality. If you can’t do something in an original way, then you have a weaker claim on being an artist. It’s easy to follow in someone else’s footsteps, but talent finds its own path. If you’re imitating something else, you’re not showing yourself to be at the level of whoever you’re imitating.
There’s also a lot of conflating in the OP. People disliked Friday’s not because it imitated SNL, but because it was inferior to SNL. If you want to follow along, you can show your talent and originality by doing it better, not worse.
MAD TV has the occasional flash of brilliance, and SNL has the occasional dry spell. But MAD TV will always be dogged by the liability of not being SNL. Being pretty good is seldom adequate cover for playing in somebody else’s backyard.