In this post I tell the story of Elysium, a super-8 film that my friend and I made in 1983. After editing the camera original footage, my friend carelessly dropped his backpack off at his front door whilst he went inside to attend to a physiological imperative; and when he came back, the pack – and the film – had been stolen. From what I read in the other thread, Universal Soldier has a similar theme.
Around 1981/1982, my friend had a great idea for a film. There’s this kid who really likes a particular video game. He’s very good at it. It turns out that the game isn’t just a game. It’s a testing machine placed in the arcade by aliens to find recruits to fight in its interstellar war. I couldn’t wait to shoot it! And then The Last Starfighter was released in 1984.
After his 1994 film Cut Up, my friend had another idea. This one would be about a secret organisation of influential people (à la the Bilderbergers) who have a plan to control the world once and for all time. Working against them is an FBI agent who has the ability to visit crime scenes and catch psychic glimpses of what happened there. You guessed it; in 1996 Chris Carter brought us Millennium. My friend had spent a couple of years developing his idea, and suddenly he couldn’t do it. He re-worked it into a satire called Night for Nixie. I think the original idea would have turned out great, had we been able to do it.
Now, I can understand a coincidence once in a while; but to have three ideas from the same guy turn up in one form or another in other films is just weird.
While serving in the Navy during the mid 70’s, the ship I was on was upgraded for satellite communications. Except for large antenna used to receive the info, I at the time was wondering why it would not be possible to have satellite communications within our homes and cars. You could drive cross country and never have to change your radio station. But there were other things in my life a bit more important at the time and when I did pitch the idea, I usually got a “Yeah, right”. Of course we now have satellite TV and radio.
Stolen ideas? Try stolen lives. The four main characters of 8-Bit Theatre are complete rip-offs of myself and my three friends. We’ve been discussing suing over the unrequested use of our personalities in an artistic medium.
I spent 25 years gathering and collating data on Beatles records worldwide, and the recording and variation details on each one, which I had a notion might make the definitive Beatles encyclopedia, with verified and correct-as-possible information. Then computers happened. I thought it would make a great CD-ROM encyclopedia. Then the internet happened, and the millions of Beatles websites, doing exactly what I had been doing, only before I got there, and for free.
> Around 1981/1982, my friend had a great idea for a film. There’s this kid who
> really likes a particular video game. He’s very good at it. It turns out that the
> game isn’t just a game. It’s a testing machine placed in the arcade by aliens to
> find recruits to fight in its interstellar war. I couldn’t wait to shoot it! And then
> The Last Starfighter was released in 1984.
The problem is that often many people simultaneously come up with a clever idea. This is one of the best examples of this. I have heard a number of people say that they came up with this idea before they saw The Last Starfighter or any of the several other cases where this idea was used in movies or in fiction. It’s an interesting idea, but it actually wasn’t that hard to come up with once you see a video game of that era and wonder if there’s some reason why video space war games should suddenly become popular. A couple of people were lucky and got the idea made into films. A couple others were lucky and had stories published based on this idea. After that, it was considered somewhat of a cliche, and editors and script readers would reject such stories and movies saying, “It’s already been done.”
I’ve mentioned this before. Since my mama is from Arcadia, CA and is the queen martyr of all time, my family jokingly calls her Saint Joan of Arcadia. (Saying, “FINE, Saint Joan” is a good way to make her laugh and stop the guilt trip.) Now there’s a TV show with an almost identical title, making us look far less clever.
Not QUITE what the OP was looking for, but when Quilted Northern bathroom tissue first started showing the TV commercials with the cartoon women sitting around the giant sheet of toilet paper quilting, they were using knitting needles, and I immediately went, “HEY! That’s not right!”
Within a week, they had changed the ad to show them using quilting needles instead. There must have been a lot of outraged textilists out there mailing letters to Georgia-Pacific.
And this is definitely not what the OP had in mind, but…
I just got done driving through Nevada (If you get the chance, buy a plane ticket). I’d had the idea that people would start calling French ticklers “Freedom Ticklers”. Guess what I saw in two different truck-stop condom machines? Freedom ticklers. I shit you not.
Reminds me of a Bissell ad that showed a dog’s birthday party. One of the party treats was apparently ice cream milk bones - dipped in chocolate. It was one of those little things that just bugged the hell out of, since dogs and chocolate are not a good mix. Every time the commercial came on, I’d rant silently.
A few months later, the ice cream bones were white (looked very much like a digital color replacement). I figure enough people wrote them about it that it finally got changed.
As to the OP, I have a few threads around here where I lament the fact that Lynn Johnston, of “For Better or Worse” fame, is apparently siphoning thoughts out of my head; twice in close succession, thoughts that occured to me appeared in her strip very shortly after. Obviously she’s not siphoning my thoughts; if she were, I’d feel very sorry for her
My friends would atest to times I have thought aloud of ideas for movies that I thought would be cool and later someone does something with a similar scene or idea. Also a book title I was so proud of thinking I was so derned clever showed up months later as a series title for a completely different type of story.
With 6 odd billion people around I’m sure there are a lot of people who have had ideas “stolen”. When you think of it there really aren’t that many plots or unique story Ideas out there now are there?
When I was 17, I had been making techno and house music for a few years. But one of my true loves was primitive folk, blues, and americana recordings like those by Alan Lomax and those that Harry Smith archived in the “Anthology of American Folk Muisc.” I decided to combine the two, sampling old blues recordings and putting them over techno beats and ambient synthesizers.
A year lady, Moby came out with Play, which took this concept (literally) to the bank. :smack:
I wasn’t going to post here but this reminded me of something:
2 years ago I was in the middle of writing a long, intricate poem, one of the themes of which featured an inspired female going through school. I even took a journey to the places I was writing about for inspiration. The title was also a play on “Joan of Arc”. Then the TV show came out.
When I was a toddler, my father used to crawl around on the floor on his hands and knees with me, making me giggle and laugh, bumping into me playfully - you know, get silly with the kid quality time. He used to make this funny, high pitched sound that sounded like “snork, snork”. So he would call us “Snorks”. If I wanted Daddy to play, I’d crawl around and go “snork! snork! snork!” or “Come on, Daddy, let’s play Snorks!”
Several years later… well, you know the rest if you’re into 80s cartoons.* My father gasped in amazement when he saw it and immediately bought me a stuffed toy Snork. He always said we could have cashed in on that one (how, I’m not sure - all we had was the name, after all).
Not into 80s cartoons? Well, **The Snorks ** was a cartoon. In the 80s.
In summer of 2002 I wrote an essay called The Future of Hentai for my website which suggested that as soon as the 3D tech used to produce Final Fantasy the movie got cheap enough to be economically practical for hentai users, it could make a whole lotta money for the firm that was first to get it right.
Also in 2002, the film “Demonlover” by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas was released. In it, two rival corporations vied for … you guessed it … control of a new tech that could create 3D hentai imagery.
Assayas undoubtedly anticipated me since I’m sure that for the film to be released in 2002, the script had to be completed in 2001, and very likely earlier than that. And as I pointed out in my essay, it didn’t take a lot of brains to see that 3D anime had potential. An interesting coincidence, nonetheless.
Demonlover’s central concept was mocked pretty thoroughly by reviewers – the French firm that was so desparate to get this 3D porn tech was huge and was doing big real estate deals and stock trading. It was like Smith Barney thinking that their economic salvation would be gaining control of Danni’s Hot Box website. Silly, in short. I never made any such grandiose claims, but Demonlover sure did.
I once told my mom the entire plot for Boys from Brazil when I was like ten. I was crushed when she told me someone else had already done it.
But I am always reinventing the wheel. Once, not too long ago, I spent an entire night explaing my great idea to modify a CD ROM drive to play cd’s on the go so we could listen to music in the car before it dawned on my that I’d owned a portable CD player for years.
I brainstormed about writing about an everyday guy that attained God’s powers for years before Bruce Almighty came out. Not how I would’ve executed it but very similar in concept.
