I like to pretend that it was option d or e, and that Connery was secretly an imprisoned 007 in The Rock. I know the facts don’t add up, but it’s fun wankery.
I just recently realized that the title of the show Being Human could possibly be a play on “human being”.
Interesting. Who was asserting that?
And regarding you guys’ Shakespeare example: not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s Shakespeare. Name one other playwright from four, three, or two centuries ago with several different plays in regular production today. If the faceless executive committees who have brought us interminable new versions of Batman, Superman and whatever else ever come up with something one hundredth the worth of Shakespeare, I might be willing to reconsider my position.
For some, this argument should be self-evident. For others, it isn’t and there’s nothing I could ever do to sway you otherwise. Again, sadly, that’s apparently what movies these days does to you.
In O Brother Where Art Thou (“Based on the Odyssey”) I understood the reason for naming the protagonist Everett Ulysses McGill, but until I read the IMDB Movie Trivia I didn’t understand that his wife was named “Penny” for the same reason.
One of the bad guys is named Homer, but I have no idea what the significance of that might be.
Homer wrote both The Odyssey and The Iliad.
That I know. Ulysses and Penny match up with their counterparts in the original tale. How does Homer Stokes match up with a (possibly) blind Greek poet?
There’s not a literal connection. Some names and events don’t match up 100% between the two. Hell, in the movie, there’s only one suitor for Penny. It’s just a movie inspired by the poem, and some names and events are appropriated for whatever suits the Coen brothers’ purpose.
Geez. I guess someone from 24 centuries ago just wouldn’t count.
Aristophanes. Re-interpreted by Sondheim recently.
And then put into action by the unsinkable Nathan Lane. Enjoy.
I think you’ve missed the point of the Shakespeare example. Any playwright works just as well, provided they’ve had at least two productions of one of their plays. You could use Shakespeare. You could use Wilde. You could use Sondheim. The point still stands, regardless of the antiquity of the play.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about Robin Hood, or King Arthur? I’m not talking about any particular movie, just the stories in general. Should TH White never have written The Once and Future King, because Mallory had already written about Arthur centuries earlier? At what point, during the centuries when Robin Hood stories were being told and retold, should people have just stopped talking about him, and come up with something new?
Hell, Shakespeare himself was not above reimagining an existing work. Notable examples where he did this (not including his Histories, and the Tragedies based on historical events) include Romeo and Juliet and Othello.
A whoosh as far as an actual TV pilot, although there is a Juliet Club which answers thousands of letters written to the fictional character seeking personal advice.
I think in some ways it may have been inspired by Homer by way of James Joyce - in some parts of it seem to reproduce elements that Joyce introduced in Ulysses, such as the cyclops being represented by a racial bigot, and Penelope being courted by a single rival.
OK, I feel like a total moron now. Earlier I was thinking of another show that had a Cyborg, and then it dawned on me that the Borg from Star Trek TNG was just a shortening of the word Cyborg, which is what they are. :smack::smack::smack:
Now *that’s *in line with the intent of this thread.
On a related note: Don’t stop to think about droids from *Star Wars *until the bruises on your forehead heal.
Thankfully I’m smart enough to have realized that droid is short for android.
Of course, technically and etymologically, at least 1/4 of the droids we see in the Star Wars films aren’t really “androids” (andro-, Greek for man, so android is a man-shaped robot). R2-D2, for example.
As I’ve noted before, common use in SF and comics (from about the 1930s until Star Wars) was for “Android” to refer to a non-metallic artificial humanoid construct, generally biological. It’s mostly the doing of Edmund Hamilton, who drew the distinction and used it in his "Captain Future’ stories and his DC comics. This was the common usage of my youth, and stayed that way until Lucas used “droids” for his robots in the first Star Wars film. (He called them “robots” once in that film, too. The only SW film to use the term).
I suspect he was influenced by the film Silent Running, which used “drones” for its robots. But now “androids” and “droids” refer to all kinds of robots.
And, interestingly, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., which introduced the term “robots”, was about biological constructs, which woulda been “Androids” under Hamilton’s protocol.
Theoretically, you could assume that Lucas shortened it to “droid” for exactly the reason that they weren’t all humanoid. If you were feeling generous toward Lucas.
It is interesting that “cyborg” has retained it’s specialized definition (even within the Star Wars franchise…Lobot (Lando’s majordomo in Cloud City) is referred to as a cyborg, because that headset thing is actually a computer interface that’s wired into his brain), but “android” has shifted. I still think that the full word “android” has more of a connotation of at least semi-biological, but the shortened form is pretty much completely limited to Star Wars universe robotics.
Limited to the *Star Wars *universe, IIRC, by a fiercely protected Lucasfilm trademark.
I hope none of your heads explode thinking about the Android phone :p.