The Lion King is basically Hamlet with animals.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Lion King is as much Hamlet as Frozen is The Snow Queen, which is to say, it really isn't.
Lion King is loosely inspired by, but doesn't actually follow the same story structure or present the same conflicts/tension or explore the same themes as Hamlet.
The Lion King is a rip-off of Japan's Kimba the White Lion.
That's been debunked, afaik. There are only surface similarities.
Now, if someone watches the restoration of the original unfinished 1960s ‘The Thief and the Cobbler’, they might notice some glaring parallels to another Disney cartoon. Not in the story, though, for the most part.
In case anyone is interested in watching a lengthy video essay about how that not the case here: YMS: Kimba the white lion
The Orville is clearly a copy cat of Star Trek and is too tier.
I think it's just tier enough.
It’s 100% meant to be a Star Trek show for someone that grew up on TNG.
Seth MacFarlane is a huge Trekkie and The Orville is him paying homage
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See also: Galaxy Quest, which is like the third or fourth best Star Trek movie.
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We talking, like, O Brother, Where Art Thou? being based on Homer’s Odyssey?
I still go back to listen to the music from that sometimes.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a Daredevil parody/love letter.
They get their powers from the same accident that gives Matt Murdoch his.
Mentor? Splinter / Stick. Enemy? The Foot / The Hand.
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Jaws is basically "An Enemy of the People" (by Henrik Ibsen) in a modern wrapping.
And Avatar is pretty much space-Pocahontas
I think early Disney movies are pretty good. They usually just took an archaic horror story intended for adults, got rid of all the gore and murder, rewrote the rest, and somehow ended up with a children's movie. Those ripoff versions became so famous and influential that people no longer think of the originals.
Maybe in two hundred years someone will start ripping off Saw movies to make kindergarten holo-ventures. Oh no! Jeff Denlon, the ice cream merchant, got stuck in the freezer. Can you find the key to the door?
The Grim brother tales were always meant for children, they even did some early edits to make them more child friendly such as changing evil mother for evil stepmother. I guess we just had more tolerance for exposing children to violence back when they were released.
The first versions were pretty brutal, even by the standards of the day. After all the revisions, those stories were probably more tolerable, but they were still pretty metal IMO. For example, here's a quote from Cinderella.
And when it was evening Cinderella wanted to go home, and the prince was about to go with her, when she ran past him so quickly that he could not follow her. But he had laid a plan, and had caused all the steps to be spread with pitch, so that as she rushed down them the left shoe of the maiden remained sticking in it. The prince picked it up, and saw that it was of gold, and very small and slender. The next morning he went to the father and told him that none should be his bride save the one whose foot the golden shoe should fit. Then the two sisters were very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it, for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed her a knife, and said, "Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will never have to go on foot." So the girl cut her toe off, squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her with him on his horse as his bride, and rode off. They had to pass by the grave, and there sat the two pigeons on the hazel bush, and cried,
"There they go, there they go!
There is blood on her shoe;
The shoe is too small,
Not the right bride at all!"
Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, saying she was not the right one, and that the other sister must try on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large. Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, "Cut a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will never have to go on foot." So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince, who took his bride before him on his horse and rode off. When they passed by the hazel bush the two pigeons sat there and cried,
"There they go, there they go!
There is blood on her shoe;
The shoe is too small,
Not the right bride at all!"
Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how the blood was flowing from the shoe, and staining the white stocking. And he turned his horse round and brought the false bride home again. "This is not the right one," said he, "have you no other daughter?" - "No," said the man, "only my dead wife left behind her a little stunted Cinderella; it is impossible that she can be the bride." But the King's son ordered her to be sent for, but the mother said, "Oh no! she is much too dirty, I could not let her be seen." But he would have her fetched, and so Cinderella had to appear. First she washed her face and hands quite clean, and went in and curtseyed to the prince, who held out to her the golden shoe. Then she sat down on a stool, drew her foot out of the heavy wooden shoe, and slipped it into the golden one, which fitted it perfectly. And when she stood up, and the prince looked in her face, he knew again the beautiful maiden that had danced with him, and he cried, "This is the right bride!" The step-mother and the two sisters were thunderstruck, and grew pale with anger; but he put Cinderella before him on his horse and rode off. And as they passed the hazel bush, the two white pigeons cried,
"There they go, there they go!
No blood on her shoe;
The shoe's not too small,
The right bride is she after all."
That wasn't from the latest Saw movie. That was from a book that's intended for children, as far as the author is concerned. Who knows how messed up the first version was.
Ad Astra (2019) is Apocalypse Now (1979) but in space.
Avatar (2009) is Dances with Wolves (1990) but in space.
‘Apocalypse Now’ is based on Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella ‘Heart of Darkness’, in which the events happen on the Congo river.
The video game Spec Ops: The Line is essentially both stories, but set in Dubai after a cataclysmic sandstorm.
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Back when Avatar came out, I heard someone call it "Fern Gully with better graphics."
There was a YouTube trend of making Avatar trailers with the audio but then using the graphics for movies like Fern Gully and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). Turns out there are a lot of 'going native' movies.
Avatar is absolutely not Dances with Wolves. It is Pocahontas. Throw in a couple musical numbers and it's real close to being a shot-for-shot remake of the Disney movie.
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F. W. Murnau wanted to make a cinema adaptation of ‘Dracula’, but didn't get the permission. So he shrugged, changed some details, and made the 1922 ‘Nosferatu’.
Guess what, the original Dracula wasn't affected by sunlight. That whole trope of the vampire genre comes from ‘Nosferatu’.
Romeo & Juliet was based on Tristan & Isolde
10 Things I Hate About You was based on The Taming of the Shrew
Clueless was based on Emma
"Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal."
Afaik more than a few of Shakespeare's stories come from contemporary plays, he just retold them in his own manner.
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I mean the Title of 10 things even rhymes with its source material’s name.
Apocalypse Now is basically Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
But in Vietnam.
Battle Beyond the Stars is just The Magnificent Seven in space, which was The Seven Samurai in the west.
All of them.
There are only a couple dozen or so quality stories.
Everything is a ripoff or mashup of those.
Some have narrowed it down to only 7 stories.
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Rebirth
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Voyage and Return
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The Punisher is just The Executioner with the serial numbers filed off. Any given person is much more likely to have heard of The Punisher.
Willy’s Wonderland is a way better Five Nights at Freddie’s than the actual Five Nights at Freddie’s.
After Michael Crichton's Westworld bombed, one of his friends recommend he explore the same themes with dinosaurs instead, so he wrote Jurassic Park.
Rent is based on La Boheme, it never tried to hide it. The character have almost identical names and they swapped tuberculosis with AIDS and it’s 100 years later.
I always wondered if La Boheme hit as hard in the 1890’s as Rent did in the 1990’s.
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Warcraft 1-3
For anyone wanting more details on this: https://kotaku.com/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-5929161
Warcraft was originally supposed to be a Warhammer 40K game, but Blizzard ended up not getting the license, so they created their own universe instead.
Not quite the same, but: more than a few classic films are remakes. The 1959 ‘Ben-Hur’ is a remake of the 1925 film, which itself was the second cinema adaptation of the novel, after the 1907 film.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine being strongly influenced by the original pitch for Babylon 5 is a pretty famous, if variously disputed, example.
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A lot of people thinks Shakespeare was pretty good
I think there's also an important distinction to be made here, especially for many of these examples.
Ripoff - "a usually cheap exploitive imitation"
Homage - "something that shows respect or attests to the worth or influence of another"
I think many of the examples of "good ones" would likely be homages, rather than ripoffs. Although thats not to say, some ripoffs can't be good on their own too.
Watchmen
That's an adaptation.
The TV show on HBO wasn't, which may be what they're referring to here.
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You're going to get into the blurry distinction between a ripoff and a tribute or an homage.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier has a lot of Three Days of the Condor, but is that a ripoff, or an homage?
Ditto Star Wars and Hidden Fortress.
Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More were uncredited remakes of Yojimbo and Sanjuro, and as I recall Kurosawa was pretty annoyed, so that probably counts as a ripoff.
Oreo cookies came out four years after Hydrox cookies, and I'd say they surpassed the original.
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