I’m aware that Bloch’s episode Catspaw is directly based on his own late-1950s short story, called, iirc, Broomstick Ride, even down to the name of the planet and many incidents, e. g. the dangling of a small model of a spaceship over a candle to burn the real ship (what is this called again, btw–using a representation to damage or kill a person?). Since he is credited with writing, solo, his three episodes, and chose to adapt from his own previously published work, I assume he did not ask for (possibly could not ask for) any type of “Based On” or “Story By” credit.
Are either of his other two episodes, What Are Little Girls Made Of? and Wolf In The Fold, similarly derived from his own work?
Are any other episodes based directly on previously published work, besides the one I mentioned and Arena which was adapted from Fredric Brown’s short story?
Note, I’m not looking for “inspired by” or “ripped off of” epsodes such as Balance of Terror and The Enemy Below. Just looking for ones like the two I mentioned.
iirc, in the book The Star Trek Compendium, there were several stories listed as being adapted from older works. Alas, I can not find my copy and I don’t remember which ones they were.
But, not to fear! Other Trek Dopers will soon beam in.
Robert Bloch wrote more than once about Jack the Ripper, IIRC. Certainly he wrote a short story, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper. (I think it’s in one of the Dangerous Visions anthologies). It’s not the same plot as the Star Trek epispde, but you could say it’s a theme he played with. (I wasn’t aware that he’d based an episode on one oif his stories. Neat! Incidentally, I think the film Brain Damage owes something to Bloch’s story “Enoch”.)
The story I’ve heard about “Arena” is that they were already working on a similar episode when the similarity was pointed out, so they simply co-opted the Brown title and elements of the story into their already-existing framework. It’s similar to the story they’re now telling about the movie I, Robot. To tell the truth, I suspect it’s a Hollywood “legend” created to cover up their real reasons for radically altering their source material. Read the Brown short story if you get a chance. It’s been heavily anthologized (see “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I”, or “The Best of Fredric Brown”) – It’s very different from the Trek episode. Especially the end. Heck, read anything by Brown you can find. He’s a helluva writer, and getting less well-known by the year.
I can’t recall any other episode based directly on another work (Norman Spinrad said that “The Doomsday Machine” is Moby Dick, but that’s a stretch), but I’m sure I’ll start thinking of them as soon as I send this,
I’ve heard the same story about Gene L. Coon and the adapting of Brown’s Arena, and give it some credence because I’ve heard nothing but testimonials to Coon’s good ethics. Ellison even sorta kinda seemed to like him.
I’ve read a lot of Brown and Bloch, and think it may be time to give both masters a re-reading.
Thanks for the answers and for the answer of “sympathetic magic.” I was thinking “effigy,” but it didn’t sound right.
The DV story was a sequel of sorts to a similar one, very famous, which I’ve never read. I can look it up in Sam Moskowitz’s chapter on Bloch.
As noted, Gene Coon did the story independently, then gave Brown the credit when it was pointed out . Coon said that he never read the story, which I believe because they are different enough. But he did the right thing in any case. I don’t think this is similar the the i, Robot situation - hardly anyone can claim to not know that book. I believe they put an Asimov wrapper around another story idea.
Well, I’ve seen some people say that Spinrad ripped off Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker stories. I don’t buy it, since the Berserkers were sentient robots, with a grudge against all life, and nothing at all like the big planet eating carrot in the episode. (I love Windom’s “I can overact worse than Shatner” performance in that one.) Gerrold’s tribbles were an acknowledged copy of Heinleins Martian flat cats from The Rolling Stones but he asked Heinlein if it was okay, and Heinlein gave permission.
Well, the scene on the Enterprise bridge where Spock releaves Decker is an homage to The Caine Mutiny. Right down to having William Windom nervously fiddle with those data carts (Bogart used a couple ball bearings).
Didn’t Jerome Bixby hae a prose story about a guy slipping sideways into an alternate dimension?
I’m not saying he based his episode Mirror, Mirror directly on it, but it was a theme he had dealt with, iirc.
I would think that Bixby with four episodes to his credit would have been one to cribbage wholesale his own published work for his teleplays. Sorta surprised there was never a crazy kid who sent people to the quadrotriticale fields.
And I did not include it before, but Larry Niven adapted his short story The Soft Weapon into The Animated Trek Series, calling it The Slaver Weapon.
I his book The Trouble with Tribbles he says that he thought he was retelling the story of the rabbits in Australia. He acknowledges that he’d read The Rolling Stones, but had completely forgotten about this. It might be, he notes, that his subconscious dredged it up.
I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’ve seen (and experienced) similar things. But he didn’t ask Heinlein permission, and was embarassed when people started asking about it.
Hardly anyone can claim not to know of the book. That doesn’t mean they’ve read it. I’d hard that the current movie started out as a film to be called Hard Wired. The Asimov similarity may have been found out later, and so they grafted the Asimov book and name onto the pre-existin concept. I can see it happening. They tell a similar story about Verhoeven and Starship Troopers. I’m not sure I believe it.
I read an interview with the screenwriters of Starship Troopers and they said that went to the studio, said, “We want to do bugs in space.” The studio said that they needed more than that if they were going to greenlight a picture. The writers dug around, found out that they could get the rights to Heinlein’s novel and the rest is history.