A Fish Called Wanda
Bingo!
What performer – known to audiences as TV’s Sherlock Holmes – wound up winning the 2012 Laurence Olivier Award For Best Actor for playing both Victor Frankenstein and his monster at the Royal National Theatre?
A Fish Called Wanda?
ETA: nm
This late 90s science fiction film features characters learning that their entire reality is a simulation.
- at least 3 I can think of, 1 mentioned earlier in this thread.
This 2006 film features stage magicians involved in murder intrigue
-3 answers
Who directed the 1989 film Black Rain, which was set in Japan?
This science fiction novel , first appearing in small self-contained sections in the SF magazines in the early 1960s, was finally assembled into a complete novel and published in paperback. It concerns a desert planet that is incredibly important because it’s the only place in the universe that is the source for a drug obtained from giant animals, which are harvested by the local people, descendants of desert-dwelling earth people. The plot concerns a young man of great importance because of his ancestry, hunted down by forces who want to control the planet. He takes refuge among an underclass before realizing his abilities and starting a revolution.
This science fiction story is about a group of people who awake on their craft , having been asleep for thousands of years because of a malfunction. They find themselves on a savage planet (which turns out to be the Earth, ultimately) that is now rulked by apes, with the chimpanzees as the intellectual leaders and the gorillas as the warriors. The people are at first treated as mere animals and put in a zoo, because the apes don’t realize that they are intelligent and can speak, although eventually they learn otherwise.
1968 science fiction movie in which a large alien artifact is dug up. the artifact has mysterious properties, being made of an unknown material and impervious to drills. It turns out that aliens, through the artifact, influenced human ancestors, tweaking their development to become the human beings we are today. When the artifact is touched after being excavated, it gives off a signal that triggers the rest of the film.
Those last few sound like plagiarism.
There is a whole Hollywood thing about movies with similar subjects coming out at or near the same time (e.g. Armageddon, Deep Impact). If we’re going to hijack this thread onto those, it’s a long road to go down.
Two movies about the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons came out in 1964. One of them had Dom DeLuise, Larry Hagman, and Sorrell Booke. The other was a comedy.
They are exactly half, assuming you discount cameo appearances or interpolated footage (e.g., Bill Clinton in Contact). The other two are Jesse Ventura and John Davis Lodge.
I honestly don’t think so – I think it’s either similar circumstances giving rise to the same expression (a sort of convergent Evolution of stories) or people coming out with the same idea at the same time. That’s something that happens pretty often in SF when people speculaste from the same new ideas or newly discovered facts.
One example of the latter is something that could’ve been an entry in this thread – the SF novels Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke and The Web Between the Worlds by Charles Sheffield. They were so extremely similar in many ways that they actually got Arthur C. Clarke to write a preface to Sheffield’s book, in which he pointed out the many similarities*, but affirming that it wasn’t plagiarism.
But other cases probably were. I really think that Dan O’Bannon ripped off Robert Sheckley’s book The Status Civilization to pad out the rest of the movie Total Recall after he’d exhausted the meager plot of Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can Remember it for you Wholsesale.
And I suspect it was subconscious, if not conscious borrowing by Douglas Adams ’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that made it seem so much like Robert Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles.
*Some of the similarities:
Both books are about the building of the first space elevator.
It’s made of flawless single crystalline material (carbon in one book, silicon in the other)
The orbital tower is designed and built by the engineer/architect responsible for the world’s largest suspension bridge
Each story features a tower-climbing machine called The Spider
You can see how these ideas occur naturally in developing the idea – “stealing” isn’t needed to explain the similarities.
Which Olympic sport was invented at a western Massachusetts YMCA in the 1890s?
What Hollywood movie whose production began in 1938 featured a Southern belle during the 1850’s and 1860’s whose headstrong ways cost her the man she loves? The leading lady won two Oscars for Best Actress, one for her work in this film. The leading man was also an Oscar winner, though only for a different film.
Leading to the expression “Apes rulk. Humans sulk.”
The answer from Trivial Persuit would have been gold and silver (or perhaps just silver), but a recent result based on chemical analysis of his exhumed bones says it was actually made of brass.
I am reminded of a bit from the Agony Booth snark recap of Batman and Robin – an Arkham guard played by Jesse Ventura who gets killed off by Poison Ivy is described as " the last of the state governors that we’ll be seeing in this movie". This comment is now followed by:
What was the Babylonian Captivity?
You’re missing the obvious answer for what Tycho Brahe’s nose was made out of. He also had one made from skin and cartilage.