You know - Deep Impact vs. Armageddon, the one Volcano movie vs. the Devil Volcano movie with Pierce Brosnan. Apparently, now there are competing Snow White updates coming out. There are a bunch of well-known movie examples.
But it is more than just movies. I was posting to the thread about True Crime recommendations, and, in suggesting the book Agent Zigzag, recalled this from the review:
It totally sucks to be Nicholas Booth, apparently.
Also, the French Essayist and Philsopher **Michel de Montaigne **is going through a bit of a re-discovery - to which I say “yay!” - but, along with references in a variety of current business and sociology books, there were two books published which were meant to be airport-book-ready, for-folks-who-like-those-books-on-Longitude-Dictionaries-and-other-cool-topics - one of which was a huge success in the book world (How to Live: a Life of Montaigne) and one which didn’t sell well (When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?). I read them both, and How to Live is much, much better. Again, sucks to be the other guy.
In your area of interest, what competing versions have you noticed, especially where they came out very close together and one was much better OR successfully (or both) than the other…
I know the movie stories come to mind, but I am more interested in less-well-known stuff with interesting stories or something you would never have expected to have enough interest to warrant competing versions, if that makes sense…
Musical adaptations of Phantom of the Opera. I doubt that Ken Hill’s or Murray Yeston’s works will ever see Broadway.
The movie Whistle Down the Wind was turned into a musical twice, the latter version by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman. Neither version saw Broadway.
Two versions of Dangerous Liaisons came out about the same time. I saw the one with Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Uma Thurman, which was so good that I had no need to see the version that came out the next year, called Valmont.
To expand on the Robin Hood version I linked to above, there is no Sheriff of Nottingham, and at the end there is a reconciliation between the Saxons and Normans. Of course, there is no need to limit this to films released in the same year. In Robin and Marian, a middle aged Robin Hood returns from the crusades to find Marian is now a nun. At the end she poisons him instead of attempting to heal him, and then takes poison herself. Neither are particularly good films, but are quite different from the usual Hood story.
In 1989, three “underwater monster” movies came out: Leviathan, Deep Star Six, and The Abyss. Granted, The Abyss had a somewhat different slant, but the first two were practically identical.
No coincidence here: they had the same producer. And they didn’t come out at the same time: The last Francis film was in 1956 and Mr. Ed began in 1961. Finally, Francis was a series of movies; Mr. Ed was a TV show.
The best example of movies is Harlow and Harlow, which came out within five weeks of each other in 1965. Critics are divided as to which is better.
It is interesting to compare Red Dragon (2002) and Manhunter (1986). Both are based on the same novel but diverge from it in different ways. Very different takes on the characters by the actors.
This is a shame because IMHO Valmont has a lot going for it.
After *Animal House *came out ABC, CBS and NBC all came out with zany college frat kids sitcoms (one of them, Delta House, was the official adaptation of the movie). Of course, they all bombed, because none of them had John Belushi.
Then there’s the moive FM about a group of hip deejays at a radio station, whose characters include a black, ultracool nighttime guy, and one who was a complete burnout. That movie came out in April 1978, shortly after a struggling sitcom writer named Hugh Wilson dug into his background to shoot a series pilot about a group of hip deejays at a radio station, whose characters include a black, ultracool nighttime guy, and one who was a complete burnout. CBS bought the show, called WKRP in Cincinatti, which premiered the following September and ran for four seasons.
The Doom Patrol: DC superhero team that originally debuted in the spring of 1963, the premise was that a paraplegic mentor figure gathers together a team of super-hero “freaks” (characters whose unusual powers / attributes make them appear hideous and frightening to the common man) to fight the good fight against villains such as the Brotherhood of Evil. Aside from their wheelchair-bound mentor, the DP members all wore matching uniforms (all slightly varying from character to character.)
the X-Men: Marvel superhero team that originally debuted in the Fall of 1963 (about three months after DP), the premise was that a paraplegic mentor figure gathers together a team of super-hero “freaks” (in this case, the fact that they were all born with these powers and essentially made up a new species of homonids to rival homo sapiens made them appear frightening to the common man) to fight the good fight against villains such as the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Aside from their wheelchair-bound mentor, the X-Men all wore matching uniforms (all slightly varying from character to character.)
Of course, comic book superheroes are nothing if not derivitive, so even if the X-Men were a copy of the Doom Patrol (as the DP creator asserts in the wikipedia article), it is more than likely that the DP were themselves aped from Marvel’s already very popular Fantastic Four team, who all dressed in similar outfits and at least one of the members - the Thing - was considered a hideous freak by the general public. And Stan Lee willingly admits that the FF were created deliberately to rival DC’s Justice League of America (and there’s more than a slight resemblance between the FF and DC’s earlier Challengers of the Unknown.
And there’s the “Superman vs. Captain Marvel (Shazam!)” rivalry. But that’s a whole other story.
