Shortly after the Look Who’s Talking series premiered there came a series called Baby Talk, a sitcom with the premise of a single mom and her baby whose inner dialogue is voiced by a celebrity. (Julia Duffy was the original star but was replaced after a few episodes by Mary Page “Kiss of Death” Keller, the woman brought in to assassinate quite a few bad series in the 80s and 90s.)
Bewitched, the story of a Manhattanite mortal who falls in love sophisticated she-witch with a wacky family, had many parallels with Bell Book & Candle (a movie prime for a remake, imo), though I don’t know how directly connected they were. (In the movie the witches weren’t omnipotent as they were in the movie).
A shortlived Fox series called Werewolf had many parallels (and I believe the same fx crew) as American Werewolf in London.
Battlestar Galactica (i.e. STAR WARS + MORMONISM = Obi Ben Cartwright) was sued by Lucasfilm who was in turn sued by ABC’s parent company who owned the rights to Soylent Green and claimed R2D2 and C3PO were copied from them. I’m not sure how all these lawsuits turned out.
The playwright of Stalag 17 actually won a lot of money from Bing Crosby Productions over copyright infringement by Hogan’s Heroes,
By the way, are they omnipotent in the movie, or in the movie?
I’d also nominate the TV series It Takes a Thief, which ripped off its premise and its title from the Cary Grant movie To Catch a THief. (Or do I have that backwards?)
:smack: Omnipotent in the “TV series”. (In the movie the witches were basically Human Beings 1.0A- still basically human but with a few more developed powers. In the TV show Endora, Samantha, et al, were essentially godlike.)
There was a pilot episode for a show calledCallahan which was an Airplane-style spoof on the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Never made it as a series though.
Though I never watched the program, it was rather obvious that the TV cop show Hunter featured a lead actor doing his best impersonation of Clint Eastwood as “Dirty Harry.”
A while back, I saw Garry Marshall talking about the first episode of “Happy Days.” Yes, it first appeared as a segment of “Love American Style,” but that’s NOT what Marshall was hoping for.
According to Marshall, “Happy Days” was supposed to be a sitcom all along, and he’d shot a pilot with Ron Howard in the lead role (but with a different actor, not Tom Bosley, as Richie’s Dad). But after Marshall shot it and shopped it around to the networks, he couldn’t find any takers.
In Garry Marshall’s words, “In the Seventies, ‘Love American Style’ was where failed pilots went to die.” Whenever anyone made a sitcom pilot that he couldn’t sell to a network, he could usually sell it to Aaron Spelling for a minimal fee. Spelling’s people would clip out 10 minutes of the funnier stuff and use it as a segment on “Love American Style.”
It just so happened that a few months after that segment aired on “Love American Style,” George Lucas’ movie “American Graffiti” and the Broadway musical “Grease” became big hits. Fifties nostalgia became very hot- so, ABC execs remembered the pilot Garry Marshall had shown them earlier, and decided they wanted a sitcom about the Fifties after all.
It was Harold Gould (ubiquitous character actor best known as Rhoda’s dad or as Rose’s boyfriend on Golden Girls. Gould is one of the few actors I know of who has a Ph.D. (and was one of the 7,001 Jewish actors to play a Nazi on Hogan’s Heroes).
