OT:An Observation

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Sorry. I wasn't exactly bitter, it's just that sometimes I enjoy being bitingly ironic.

Which still doesn't help. I'll stop now.

[Jack Simth]

It's not very common to run across a concept both original and (widely considered) good in a well-established media (either seperately is reasonably common, however), simply because people have been at it for a long while. When something both original and good comes along, it's often a smashing success. Others, seeing that success, copy it, and then the attack of the clones begins. For a while it works - with film, the first few copycats include their own spins and twists, often have better effects due to bigger budgets, better performers, et cetera, and the idea hasn't become old news. After a while, however, the concept is old news, the copycats have flooded the market for that style, people get sick of it, public intrest flags, and budgets folow. It can be cyclical - a copycat of a piece that hasn't been done in fifty years or more is new to the majority of the current audience.

[Randallw]

I have been told that basically all TV and movie plots are based on the same 6 Greek Plays.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

there's theory's like that. Biggest I've heard is 37.

I've always had the sneaking suspision that that owes more to laziness than anything else.

[Gandalf Parker]

I had a great list (I think I got it the starting list from a Dragon Magazine) for generating plots for DnD campaigns. It had a bunch of "madlib" style plots such as "A xxxxxx approaches you in a bar and asks if yyyyyy is yours" or "A xxxx approaches you to help save a yyyyy".

I built a random generator around it and had alot of fun. The second one might come up "a cleric approaches you about saving a town" or "a town approaches you about saving a cleric".

That first one came up Silver Dragon and dog. I turned it into "A Silver Dragon pokes its head into the bar and asks 'Is this someones dog?'. When you look you see he is holding out his foreleg and your dog is hanging from it growling and chewing. What do you do?"

Anyway, we had a lot of fun with that list. Everytime we heard an interesting plot-line we removed the nouns and put it in the file.

[EvilGenius4ABetterTomorro]

Hey Atro, I saw another submarine movie like that. It was called the Bedford Incident. It plays out just like Enemy Below but it was a Russian Sub and in the end both vessels launch nuclear tipped torpedoes at each other. A reporter on the destroyer wonders why the Capt. isn't trying to evade. How do you evade a nuclear tipped torpedo? Double nuke boom!

[Cipher7071]

The classic remake that I remember most is "West Side Story." Many of you might not remember that one, but it was an intentional clone of "Romeo and Juliet," using two New York gangs as the feuding families. And the Star Trek episode may very well be an intentional clone of "The Enemy Below."

As far as plots go, one can, as Gandalf Parker suggests, throw a bunch of elements into a bag and draw them at random to produce a script. Odds are that every so often similar plots will result from the process.

[Jack Simth]

*shrug* how many basic plots there are is up for debate - with the primary argument being "how similar can they be before we say they are the same plot?" A lot of the cloning is due to laziness - an artist wants something that sells, and sees that this other thing is selling, so he makes his own Version of it - but when similar plots are developed on opposite sides of the world before reasonable world wide travel or communication is in place? That pretty much rules out laziness. And yet, it's happened.

As for random plots, well, you are throwing those random elements into some framework (or, perhaps, another randomly selected framework) - and most of those who categorize plots by Greek plays (or however) aren't so much looking at the specific setting (fantasy/sci-fi/Greek Gods/whatever), nor the characters (Bilbo Baggins/James T. Kirk/Hercules/whoever), nor even the species of the characters (elven/alien/human/whatever) - they tend to classify elements by how they fit into the plot (the mentor/the hero/the villian/whatever), and the whole by a general outline of the plot (the rescue/the war/the coming of age/whatever). Such a random plot is going to fit into a Category, pretty much regardless. Granted, you will get a gargantuan number of variations on those plots, many of which are interesting, and keep them fresh for a long time - but when it comes down to it, they are all variations on a limited number of themes; they aren't fundamentally new plots.

[ June 10, 2004, 18:30: Message edited by: Jack Simth ]

[Gandalf Parker]

I remember the heated debates about copy-cat plots amoung the addicts of the various incarnations of Star Trek. True some seemed AWFULLY similar but some of them were majorly stretched in trying to make a connection

[Atrocities]

Originally posted by Randallw:
Ok, sorry. Didn't mean to take the thread off in a bitter direction.

Apology accepted, now set course for somewhere out there.