Too many people are getting bent out of shape nowadays about originality.

Whether its the nonstop stampede of stand-up comics blaming other stand-up comics for stealing each others’ material… Just because a comedian has used a premise, doesn’t mean he was the first to think of it and is the only one from now on who’s allowed to use the premise.

Or this whole ghostwriting in rap controversy… There is a wave of people who just found out some singers and rappers don’t write their own lyrics – and they’re pissed!

It seems everyone has forgotten where people get ideas from in the first place – other people.

.

“Simpsons did it” is a phrase from South Park which sums up the whole idea of inspiration/collaboration. It is from the 2002 South Park episode Simpsons Already Did It, Season 7 Episode 6.

In the episode – Butters, as his supervillian alter ego Professor Chaos, plans to wreak havoc on humanity. He begins planning and committing dastardly deeds. Such as blocking out the sun and cutting off the head of a town statue. Every plan Butters comes up with, his sidekick tells him that The Simpsons have already done it. Butters begins ranting through lists of evil plots. But to his dismay, after each one, his faithful companion shouts at him “Simpsons did it”.

But the phrase pertains to more than just The Simpsons, or South Park for that matter. It means: everything comes from something. Not just in TV, Movies, Music, Literature. Not even just in Art and Entertainment. But in creating in general… and if you wanna get real heady, then in Creation itself. The big bang or the evolution of unicellular organisms into human beings… But I won’t be talking about quite all that here. At least not now.

.

Lets start with the inventor, industrialist, and entrepreneur – Henry Ford. In grade school, I was taught that Henry Ford invented the automobile. And the way he built them was through another invention of his own, the assembly line. Instead of these fallacies, it would have been far more interesting to learn where Henry Ford actually got his ideas from.

Most people already know by now, that Henry Ford was not the first to invent the automobile. But he did, what all creatives do. He saw something that existed that inspired him. And he took that idea, added his own ideas, the ideas from outsiders/peers/coworkers, and made something better out of it. This is part of the creative process: You see something you like, and you perfect it or make something completely different out of it.

From 1861, here is one of the first steam-powered automobiles:

Here are a few more early automobiles:

In 1896, Henry Ford built his first vehicle, a pure ethanol-powered motorcar.

While Ford was developing his Ford Model A, an abundance of different cars were developed by numerous inventors.

In 1903 Henry Ford released the Ford Model A.

Ford released the Model T in 1908 and was mass producing it soon there after.

For a more complete visual history of early American automobiles, click here.

And as for the assembly line…

The basic idea of dividing up work to the best skilled at each task, has been around since intelligent man. There were hunters, gatherers, craftsmen, etc.

In Plato’s Republic, written around 380BC, he spoke of the division of labor. Which, summarized from a couple different Wikipedia articles is, “The specialization of individual workers’ or organizations’ skills, through education, training, and practice. Then, allocating tasks to the individuals or organizations according to the skills and/or equipment they possess.”

Plato simply and eloquently explained it by saying “(our state) will need a farmer, a builder, and a weaver, and also, I think, a shoemaker and one or two others to provide for our bodily needs.”

Humans have been mass producing goods for centuries. Think Ancient China – and how they mass produced fine china, armor, and weapons. And the idea of assembling things in a line, goes back to at least the Venetian Arsenal in about 1104. Where “ships moved down a canal and were fitted by the various shops they passed.” (isn’t Wikipedia grand?)

In 1867, the first US assembly line started in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. Animal carcasses, hung on meat hooks and carried on a pulley system, would be disassembled by a series of workers at fixed stations.

Henry Ford was inspired by the efficiency of the Chicago slaughterhouses. So he took this assembly line concept, and didn’t necessarily make it better, but he expanded it and implemented it in his own work. And doing so allowed him to grow as a creator. This is the other big part of the creative process: You see something you like so much, that you add it to part of your own creation, maybe slightly adjusting it to fit your needs, but not necessarily making it better. Some ideas/concepts/songs/stories are so perfect, that everyone wants to take a piece of ’em for themselves – to benefit from them.

.

I wanted to find one piece of art – be it a play, song, book, movie, – and show the influences that inspired it, what the artist added to it, and how they put it all together. But Trey Parker and Matt Stone already did it for me. And since Trey Parker is a genius, I will just detail what he has already written and created.

Trey Parker based the South Park episode Simpsons Already Did It, on an old Simpsons episode. A Simpsons episode that was itself an homage to an even older Twilight Zone episode. Trey Parker did this to show how: everything has been done before.

The Twilight Zone (a show that really isn’t praised enough) aired an episode in 1962 that spawned these animated adaptations. It was titled, The Little People.

In the episode, two astronauts land on a foreign planet to repair their ship.

The co-pilot is fed up with his placement in life. He wishes he could be in charge and control people. While surveying the planet, the co-pilot discovers a society of microscopic people. He keeps the discovery to himself, but eventually his commanding officer finds out.

The co-pilot becomes power hungry and steps on their tiny homes and buildings.

The little people begin to fear and worship the astronaut who harmed them, so they erect a statue in the co-pilot’s honor. The commander tells his co-pilot,”You’re no god…you probably got them to believe in the devil. (If) I’m the guy that removes you from their lives…maybe they’ll build a statue to me.”

Lost in madness, the co-pilot decides to live alone, with only these little people on their planet. He thinks he’s their god as he stands over them and makes them feed and fear him.

The episode ends with a pair of gigantic spacemen landing on this strange planet. They notice the co-pilot. He is miniature to them. One picks him up.

But the giants are so big, the co-pilot is accidentally crushed as he is picked up.

The Simpsons’ 8th season Treehouse of Horror VII episode from 1992 – had a segment titled The Genesis Tub, which uses elements of The Twilight Zone episode The Little People.

In the segment, Lisa creates a science project out of her tooth that recently fell out. She puts the tooth in a little tub and pours pop on it to show soda’s effect on tooth decay.

Lisa accidentally gives the tooth a static shock.

The next morning, Lisa checks on her tooth under a microscope. She discovers a miniature society living in the tub, that she has unintentionally created.

The society evolves rapidly. After breakfast, Lisa comments that “her little stone age tub dwellers…have already reached the Renaissance”.

By the next day Lisa’s tiny society has advanced to a futuristic civilization.

Bart barges in Lisa’s room and starts crushing homes and buildings with his finger, destroying part of the city.

The little people retaliate by attacking Bart while he sleeps.

Then they go back to Lisa’s room and shrink her down to their size.

There, they have built a statue of Lisa and worship her as God. In turn, they fear Bart and believe him to be the Devil.

Lisa is now trapped in this little world. Bart doesn’t know Lisa is in the tub, so he comes back to terrorize the town.

But Bart just ends up bringing the tub to the school science fair, so he could win a gift certificate.

The episode ends with Lisa permanently stuck in the tub. Upset by her fate, Lisa shows signs of becoming a vengeful god as shes barks at her disciples “shouldn’t you people be grovelling?”

You can notice similarities, just in the the blocking and framing of some of those images, from The Simpsons compared to The Twilight Zone.

In the South Park episode Simpsons Already Did It, Cartman orders a sea-monkey type product called “Sea People”. Cartman believes these creatures will “play basketball and stuff.”

Like the co-pilot from Twilight Zone, Cartman likes the idea of these little people that he could rule over.

Cartman dresses up in a crown and cape to greet the little men to earth. But he is quickly infuriated when he realizes they are just tiny normal brine shrimp.

From here on out – this becomes a truly disgusting episode, even for South Park standards. I’m not going to go into all the details because they repulse me. But I do have to touch upon it, because the extremely inappropriate gross-out humor, is part of what makes this episode so clever. It takes elements from family-friendly shows, Twilight Zone and Simpsons, and presents it all through the sick childish humor that defines South Park.

Basically, the boys confuse Sea People with semen, so they add human semen to the aquarium filled with Sea People. This causes the Sea People to evolve – like Lisa’s static shock that sparked her tiny world. And just like Lisa, Cartman wakes up the next morning to discover it.

So the boys get a bigger tank and add even more Sea People and semen. Which quickens their rate of evolution. Again Cartman wakes the next morning and is excited by how his little people have evolved.

Cartman sees that the Sea People have built a statue of him.

This thrills Cartman so much that he shouts out his bedroom window, “I am god of the Sea People, you hear that!”

As this all is going on, the b story of the episode is about Butters, as his supervillian alter ego Professor Chaos and his plans to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting town of South Park.

His first plan is to block out the sun. But his sidekick informs him that Mr. Burns already did that in an episode of The Simpsons.

So Butters cuts off the head of the South Park town statue.

His sidekick regretfully tells him that Bart cut off the head of the Springfield town statue in an episode of The Simpsons.

The South Park news reports on the head of their statue being stolen, and the town loves it because they see it as a tribute to their favorite show, The Simpsons.

This pisses Butters off, so he creates a list of evil plots. He rattles through them, but to his dismay, after each one, his faithful companion cites the exact Simpsons episode each idea is from and shouts at him “Simpsons did it”. This enrages Butters.

On the edge of sanity, Butters builds a device that takes the cherries out of chocolate covered cherries and replaces them with rotten mayonnaise. His sidekick says, he has never seen that on the Simpsons because they “would be more clever than that”.

Butters is temporarily satisfied until a commercial comes on the TV for a new episode of Simpsons where Bart does the same thing with chocolate covered cherries.

This makes Butters completely lose it. He beings to view South Park as a sort of nightmarish Simpsons Bizarro World.

Back in Cartman’s bedroom, Cartman tells everyone how he wants to be shrunk down to the size of the little Sea People so he can live with them.

But Butters eagerly tells Cartman that the Simpson’s already did that.

This conversation perfectly illustrates my point. Trey Parker is saying its okay to have the same ideas and to let your inspirations grow. Everything is based on something that came before it.

The episode ends with the Sea People creating a statue of one of the other boys, Tweek.

The Sea People who worship Cartman and the Sea People who worship Tweek both launch missiles at each other, destroying the aquarium and everything in it.

.

The world of filmmaking is all about using different influences and resources to create something new.

As a child, George Lucas would watch old 30s and 40s Hollywood serials on his favorite 1950s show, Adventure Theater. The program played solely on a local San Fransisco station, KRON-TV, which was the only channel available at that time in George’s hometown of Modesto, CA.

His favorite serial was a space opera called Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940).

Flash Gordon was originally a 1934 adventure comic strip. It was inspired by and created to compete with the, already long running since 1928, Buck Rogers comics.

As an adult, George Lucas wanted to make his own adaptation of the Flash Gordon serials, but he could not obtain the rights.

I wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie, with all the trimmings, but I couldn’t obtain the rights to the characters. So I began researching and went right back and found where Alex Raymond (who had done the original Flash Gordon comic strips in newspapers) had got his idea from. I discovered that he’d got his inspiration from the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of Tarzan) and especially from his John Carter of Mars series books. I read through that series, then found that what had sparked Burroughs off was a science-fantasy called Gulliver on Mars, written by Edwin Arnold and published in 1905. That was the first story in this genre that I have been able to trace. Jules Verne had got pretty close, I suppose, but he never had a hero battling against space creatures or having adventures on another planet. A whole new genre developed from that idea. – George Lucas

Thankfully, instead of making a series of straight-up Flash Gordon remakes, Lucas took elements from the Flash Gordon comics, movie serials, and show – then combined them with inspirations from Buck Rogers, Akira Kurosawa films, Sergio Leone westerns, Casablanca, The Lord of the Rings, Greek mythology, the legends of King Arthur, WWII, etc… The list of influences incorporated into Star Wars is endless.

For a detailed list of the similarities between Star Wars and Flash Gordon, as well as explanations of several of George Lucas’ other direct influences, click here, here, and here.

Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino are also famous for using their childhood movie favorites as direct inspiration for their films.

Jurassic Park is basically a remake of the fantasy adventure films from the early days of cinema, like King Kong (1933) and The Lost World (1925).

The Lost World was the first time audiences saw dinosaurs come to life on the big screen. The creatures were all stop-motion animated by special effects pioneer Willis O’Brien.

The Lost World was based on the 1912 book of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle. A lifetime later, Micheal Crichton wrote two books in the 90s about a similar topic of a far off land inhabited by prehistoric beasts, Jurassic Park (1990) and The Lost World (1995). – Spielberg used all of this to build his Jurassic Park franchise.

The concept of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones was created by George Lucas, to again be a modern version of the old serial films.

ET, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, Jaws – all movies inspired by the campy genre films of Spielberg’s youth. Spielberg even produced a Twilight Zone movie in ’83, where he directed a segment which was a remake of an original Twilight Zone episode.

Quentin Tarantino’s entire filmography is an homage to other films. Like Lucas and Spielberg, Tarantino was a childhood film buff. These self-educated film scholars sat through every old bad movie, so we don’t have to. They take all the best elements from countless hours of old crappy movies and present them in the most entertaining of ways. They refine shit and turn it into cinematic gold.

Tarantino’s first 3 films are directly influenced by crime movies and novels. His third film, Jackie Brown, is actually based off the novel Rum Punch by the genre defining crime writer Elmore Leonard.

After Tarantino’s trilogy of crime pictures, he started blending his influences together to create movies that are like… seeing the timeline of film history through a cinema- cornucopia-kaleidoscope.

The Kill Bill series combines Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns with Shaw Brothers kung fu movies, as well as including elements from other genre films like blaxploitation films, Japaneses yakuza films and samurai cinema.

Here are a couple obvious examples of the Kill Bill’s direct influences…

The character Pai Mei from Kill Bill Volume 2 is a legendary figure in Chinese mythology. He is said to be a real historical figure from 1600s China. He is also known as Bak Mei and his life has been fictionalized in several martial arts films.

Uma Thurman famously sports Bruce Lee’s iconic yellow jumpsuit in Kill Bill Volume 1.

The list of films and ideas that influenced Tarantino are endless. There are plenty of articles and entire websites devoted to what inspired Tarantino, so no need to talk on that any further.

Stanley Kubrick, the greatest filmmaker of all time, is a master collaborator. Every single Kubrick film is based on or inspired by a book that Kubrick had read. In the credits to each of his 11 films, there is a book cited.

In most cases, Kubrick would read a book that he discovered or that was recommended to him and that book would spark an idea in his head. So, Kubrick would write a script directly based on or loosely inspired by the book; often working with the writer of the novel (e.g. Full Metal Jacket) or sometimes giving the script to another writer to work on it, after its been written (e.g. Eyes Wide Shut).

…Same with the traditionally animated Disney films – they are all based on books/stories. Whether its short fairy tales like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or a series of longer novellas like Jungle Book or Alice in Wonderland. Disney relied on the source material of others as the basis for their animated classics…

And that is just the writing process.

The pre-production, production, and post-production of a film is an overwhelmingly gigantic and complex collaborative process.

I talked about how many people went into making a Kanye West song in my first post, and that is just a song. There are dozens of songs in a movie. Most filmmakers have lifelong actors, editors, costume/set designers, cinematographers, and composers, who they work with on film after film.

…I mentioned Alice in Wonderland, which has to be the most referenced and ripped off piece of art of our time. The white rabbit / rabbit hole concept from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the mirror that leads you to another world from its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871) – these two ideas alone have been reused countless times by practically everyone from Jefferson Airplane to The Matrix. There are two Wikipedia pages that just list works based on Alice in Wonderland. And to top it all off, Lewis Carrol’s original Alice in Wonderland novels are about a magical land made up of allusions to early literature. Both books are full of references to nursery rhymes, poems, songs, Shakespeare, and historical figures. Here is a great little list…

.

In a time before the world was super connected by the internet, somehow a bunch of dedicated, resourceful teenagers from the UK in the 60s – got their hands on a lot of fairly obscure blues records from America’s deep south. Music that most white folks in America weren’t hip to at the time, and frankly still aren’t today. This American blues, inspired the music of UK bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin.

They say, these white musicians “stole” this music from black artists. Elvis is actually one of the first of many rock ‘n’ rollers who continues to be accused by the public for stealing the sound of black singers and musicians. No one can deny their influence – blues rhythms and lyrics are simply a part of rock ‘n’ roll.

The problem people seem to have is that these countless rock covers of blues and soul songs became much more popular than the originals. People feel like the credit is given to the wrong musicians. That’s all a part of the creative process though. Even large contributors are often left out of the spotlight. And blues music isn’t going anywhere. Blues will always be appreciated, even more so because it spawned rock music. The phrase “appropriation of black culture” gets thrown around far too much nowadays. I think music speaks for itself and tells its own story of its influences.

…Not to say a lot of shady rich white music executives didn’t take advantage of all the black writers, singers, performers, musicians they could find. But that has to do with artists making bad deals and signing bad contracts. A whole separate issue, that even crippled Elvis’ career and the careers of countless white performers…

The mainstream prominence of rock, means the cover songs made a lot more money than the blues originals. And in film, TV, and music – the writer is not usually highly paid. So even though most of these rock musicians obtained the rights and credited the black music they were covering, the amount of money was next to nothing that the black artists received.

Then there are rock bands, that just took existing blues songs and didn’t even think anyone would ever notice. The Rolling Stones were successfully sued for plagiarism 40 years after the fact in 2010, where the court ruled that Robert Johnson’s Love in Vain and Stop Breaking Down were not in public domain. And Led Zeppelin have been sued for stealing several different parts of songs, from artists such as Willie Dixon, Howlin Wolf and Richie Valens. If you are interested in music plagiarism lawsuits, read up on them here.

Biting lyrics is just rude. But what does it really mean to “steal” music. Most guitarists will tell you “there are only so many chords on a guitar.”

Isn’t all art, especially music, about incorporating fragments of your influences into a whole? So when these fragments start to become chunks, is that when its stealing?

The whole thing sounds pretty silly.

I get that The Rolling Stones have a lot of money and the estate of Robert Johnson doesn’t. But I’m sure the Stones aren’t the only folks to cover his songs, they are just mega successful and easy to suck a few bucks out of.

What’s really aggravating are instances like Led Zeppelin. Where they are so beyond famous that their songs are combed through by music executives for any musical or lyrical similarity to existing music and then they’re sued for their own songs.

You need to let an artist breathe and allow them to be influenced by everything. There has never been a court ruling against Zeppelin for plagiarism, but there have been several out of court settlements.

…One of the most simply beautiful live recordings I’ve ever heard is – George Harrison and Eric Clapton performing, My Sweet Lord at The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. It is a tranquil hypnotic song that makes you feel at peace while somehow energizing and invigorating you.

It is an extremely spiritual song about George Harrison’s longing for a relationship with the higher power. In a song which, repeats a only few lyrics as almost a mantra, George Harrison expresses his desire to communicate and have a relationship with god.

But since George Harrison was a multi-millionaire former Beatle, he was sued for My Sweet Lord. The song does sounds remarkably similar to The Chiffon’s 1963 single He’s So Fine, a radio hit 7 years prior to Harrison releasing My Sweet Lord.

Its pretty damn uncanny. But if a nobody recorded My Sweet Lord, then nobody would care. Since it was George Harrison who recorded the song, there were businessmen looking to sue. So this frivolous, little, vain He’s So Fine song about wanting to date some guy because of how attractive he is – won a lawsuit – against the religious experience George Harrison gives us with My Sweet Lord.

Only a fraction, if any, of the money from these plagiarism lawsuits actually reaches the hands of the artists. In the end, the money just goes into the fat pockets of lawyers and executives.

.

In this post, I have used words like endless and countless – several, numerous times. That is because, what I am talking about is not unique to the examples I gave. Every movie, book, song, even your car, TV, and toaster was the result of a collaboration of influences. I wanted to spark a conversation; whether its with family/friends/coworkers or an internal conversation in one’s head. Think and discuss all the influences you see in the things you love and maybe even in those you hate.

.

I want to end this with one of my favorite stories of inspiration – a look into an early influence on the world’s greatest animation artist.

Hayao Miyazaki is possibly the greatest visual artist and storyteller the world will ever see. If you haven’t seen his films, then you haven’t seen a number of the best films ever made. Miyazaki is undoubtedly the best animated filmmaker – just as Kubrick is without question the greatest live action filmmaker. If you know your stuff, then you know that’s just the way it is.

Hayao Miyazaki was influenced early on by the books of Ursula K. Le Guin, an American children’s fantasy and science fiction writer.

Much like how George Lucas wanted to adapt Flash Gordon into his own film but failed to obtain the rights – Miyazaki wanted to adapt Le Guin’s Earthsea series into an animated film, but she rejected his offer because he was a new filmmaker and she was unfamiliar with him.

Earthsea is a fantasy series about a magical world that faces political and social turmoil, shown through the view and led by strong female protagonists who are trapped in a fight between man vs. nature.

Since Miyazaki wasn’t able to make Earthsea films, he took the themes from this world he loved and he incorporated them into his own works.

The influences from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea can be seen most prominently throughout Miyazaki’s films Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Castle in the Sky (1986), and Princess Mononoke (1997).

Decades later, after Miyazaki became established as one of the worlds leading animators and creative minds, Ursula K. Le Guin saw one of his films, My Neighbor Totoro. She only knew of the Disney style of animation, so once she saw the look of one of Miyazaki’s films and realized how an animated film could portray the substantial issues that her work was made up of, she immediately wanted Miyazaki and only Miyazaki to adapt her books. She felt Miyazaki would have been the perfect person for the job all along.

So Le Guin reached out to Miyazaki and asked him to direct a film based on her books. By this time, Miyazaki had already done everything he wanted with the characters and themes from Le Guin’s work. Miyazaki was winding down his career, thinking about retirement and the last thing he was considering was retreading on ideas he had already successfully established in his own work. He passed on her, like she did to him so many years before.

The president of Miyazaki’s Japanese animation film studio, Studio Ghibli, offered Le Guin to have Hayao Miyazaki’s son, Gorō, direct the film as his debut effort. Le Guin was disappointed, but she anxiously accepted.

So Gorō started production on Tales from Earthsea, and Hayao did not retire – he actually went on to make several of his greatest films to date. But Hayao was not happy with Studio Ghibli’s decision to let his son, as a first time director, helm a film based on the works of his cherished author. Miyazaki was so upset that he reportedly wouldn’t speak to his son Gorō during the production of the film. It got so bad that the media was falsely claiming that Miyazaki disowned his son.

When the film was released – Ursula K. Le Guin and Hayao Miyazaki, along with critics and fans alike, were unsatisfied by Gorō Miyazaki’s film, Tales from Earthsea. It is a tediously slow and boring film… it’s just not good. A decade later, Tales from Earthsea (2006) is still widely considered to be the worst film ever made by Studio Ghibli.

After all that nonsense, it is unanimously agreed that Hayao Miyazaki’s early films are a much better interpretation and representation of Le Geuin’s work. So it goes…