"Borrowed" story lines, characters, etc.

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This will probably require looking up obscure references, but does anyone else enjoy finding movies, books & television shows that seem to "borrow" story lines & characters from other works?

Three that I know of off-hand:

Waterworld & The Road Warrior (practically the same movie except one is in the desert, one on water. Entire subplots & characters lifted)

The Stand & Earth Abides (first half of The Stand is like a condensed version of Earth Abides, then it gets all Stephen King)

Daniel McCormick from, "Forever Young" & Arnold "Beef"/"Ice Man" Beifneiter from, "Misfits of Science"
okay, that last one is obscure, so:

Misfits of Science (1985-86)
"...placing himself in an experimental cryogenic suspended animation unit back in 1937 due to grief caused by the loss of his beloved Amelia Earhart. "

Forever Young (1992)
"In 1939, Captain Daniel McCormick is a United States Army Air Corps test pilot. After a successful run and subsequent crash landing in a prototype North American B-25 Mitchell, McCormick is greeted by his longtime friend, Harry Finley who's a scientist. Finley confides that his latest experiment, "Project B", has succeeded in doing the impossible. The machine, built by Finley and his team of scientists, is a prototype chamber for cryonic freezing. When McCormick's girlfriend, Helen goes into a coma from an accident and the doctors doubt she will ever recover, McCormick insists he be put in suspended animation for one year, starting November 26, 1939, so he will not have to watch Helen die."

Star Wars (A New Hope) is basically Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress filtered through Flash Gordon.

I could look through my film collection and find dozens of examples like this.

(reads up on it)

Ooooh, nice! Thank you, that is a good example!

Sometimes I like it, sometimes it annoys me. I didn't like the Harry Potter series at first because it seemed like a rip off of Diana Wynne Jones and some other works whose titles escape me. It eventually grew on me, but I never thought it topped its predecessors.

I do like "derivative" works--works that are intentionally retelling old stories and fleshing them out. It really has to add something to the original mythos for me to figure it to be worth my time.

Good examples are:

FILM:
The Brothers Grimm, starring Heath Ledger and Matt Damon. A bit silly but lots of fun and great special effects, retelling pretty much every Grim story ever, with a monster-fighting twist.
O Brother Where Art Thou, starring George Clooney and O God is it good. A retelling of Homer's Odyssey, reset in Depression-era Louisiana with three escaped prisoners and lots of great folk music. Everybody is awesome in this. Go rent it now, you won't regret it.
Chicken Run, starring Mel Gibson. That's right, it's an animated movie about chickens, escaping a horrible fate in an English chicken farm with the help of a cocky American rooster. It's fabulous, really funny, and pays homage to The Great Escape, Flight of the Phoenix, and every other POW escape movie you ever saw. From the makers of Wallace and Grommit.

BOOKS:
Charles de Lint's Jack of Kinrowan, an urban fantasy retelling of Jack the Giant Killer. If you read one author this year and you like fantasy, you MUST read Charles de Lint. Everything he writes is excellent.
Tanith Lee's Blood Red, Snow White, a dark retelling of Snow White, with Snow as the bad guy
Jane Yolen's Briar Rose, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty

"Charles de Lint"?

(looks up author & checks local library)

I haaave a new author, I haaaave a new author...!

I've burned through everyone else I could find semi-randomly, from Anne McCaffrey to Juliet Marillier (who became tedious in certain series).

Wow. I crushed hard on Courtney Cox in that. Totally forgot about that show. Wasn't McGivers brother one of the stars too? Obscure is right.

Yay! my plot is working!

Try Tim Powers too. He specializes in historic fantasy, taking real people and real events that were somewhat mysterious, and gives them fantastic, bizarre explanations. For example, Lord Byron was seen walking around in London when it was an established fact that he was gravely ill in Greece at the time (true story). Anubis Gates has it that evil magicians bent on bringing back the Egyptian gods had made a magical clone of him. (That's what you thought, right?) In another book, we all know that Blackbeard held Charleston, SC for ransom so he could get... a box of herbs. Nobody knows why. In On Stranger Tides, it's revealed that Blackbeard was actually a voodoo master trying to get rid of a ghost infestation and find the Fountain of Youth. They made a terrible movie loosely based on it, but the book is 1,000 times better.

Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and the plot of the movie "Forbidden Planet".

The premise of Star Wars and the premise of Harry Potter.

just remembered: Bridget Jones' Diary = Pride and Prejudice

Happens with Shakespeare a lot:

West Side Story = Romeo & Juliet

The Bad Sleep Well = Hamlet

10 Things I Hate About You = The Taming of the Shrew

In television, IIRC the 90's series "Unhappily Ever After" was a struggling network's direct knockoff of the long-running FOX success "Married With Children" (but with one extra kid and a sock puppet instead of a dog):


Instead of the "Love and Marriage" Sinatra theme song I think they used "Hit the Road Jack" by the Ray Charles singers.

These are wonderful!