I was reading a story today about an upcoming Nicholas Cage film. It’s set in a future where people can “backup” their memories in a computer. Their dead bodies can be revived and the memories re-inserted. So, basically, you start over at the point where your memories were backed up, not unlike current computers. Cage plays a cop who is revived to investigate his own murder.
I have to question the story’s creator, though. I have a copy of John Varley’s Persistence of Vision which contains the story, “The Phantom of Kansas”, wherein people can make backup copies of their memories and can have them put into new bodies when the old ones die or are fatally damaged. The memories are re-inserted and the person starts life over at the point when the memories were recorded. The richer you are, the more often you can back yourself up. In the story, an artist is revived and she sets forth to find out who keeps killing her.
Hey, wait a minute, that sounds familiar…
FTR, the Varley story was published in 1976.
Probably either Tom Vaughan or The Jacobson Co. purchased the rights to story by Varney. Then Tom Vaughan and Jim Wedaa sat around and came up with the movie’s story, using the Varney story as a launching point. Once they came up with the new story, Vaughan wrote a spec script.
Or they just stole the idea and will probably get caught (but neither The Jacobson company or Jim Wedaa are rubes in the screenwriting business) or perhaps it is just an obvious story idea.
I’m sure supernatural stories with this plot element exist; here are a couple “science” based ones from comic books.
In the '40’s, Superman’s foe, the Ultra Humanite, used surgery to transfer his consciousness. “Following explicit instructions left by the Ultra-Humanite, criminal surgeons preserved the crimelord’s brain until they had found a suitable host. Racing time, the villains intercepted up-and-coming actress Dolores Winters. The actress was then slain and her brain replaced with that of the criminal Ultra-Humanite.” When seen in a recent Cartoon Network Justice League episode, he was in the body of a giant, white ape.
Thanks to The Golden Age Super-Villain Fact File
In 1965, Wally Wood created T.H.U.N.D.E.R. agents, including NoMan.
“NoMan was originally a brilliant scientist whose body wasted away from two incurable, degenerative diseases. . . . He spent the last few years of his normal life working on replaceable androids into which he could transfer his mind, and succeeded just in time — the very moment he died, he entered the body of the first of them.” As his android bodies were harmed by villains, he would transfer to a new one, paid for by his government employers.
Thanks to Don Markstein’s Toonopedia™.