History Main / InspiredBy

* ''WesternAnimation/TheLionKing'' is inspired by ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}}''. There are some broad commonalities in the concept (the protagonist is a prince who's been away from home and is visited by the ghost of his father, which compels him to fight the EvilUncle who killed the king), and some characters fill vaguely similar roles (a female love interest, a goofy advisor, a surviving queen, a duo of followers), but the actual result is vastly off in structure, tone, themes, and overall events, even if you account for the story now focusing on lions rather than Danish royalty. Most notably, the main inciting incident of ''Hamlet'' is that the titular character learns very early on that his uncle was a murderer, and spends the rest of the play on his quest for vengeance. In ''The Lion King'', Simba only learns this fact near the end of the climax.

* The opening credits for a Soviet film ''The New Adventures of Captain Vrungel'' state: "Screenplay by Alexander Khmelik, based on the memories of the novel by A. Nesterov".

* The {{Paratext} for ''Theatre/JasperInDeadland'' says it was inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice. However, Jasper and Agnes clearly aren't supposed to be the same characters, they're just in a similar situation.

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* ''Machinima/CouriersMindRiseOfNewVegas'' [[OnceAnEpisode ends each episode]] with the message "Inspired by Machinima/FreemansMind." FollowTheLeader indeed.

** ''Film/TheApparition'' was an earlier film even more loosely inspired by the Phillip Experiment - about all it has in common with the "true events" is that it involves people in a college trying to summon a spirit as part of an experiment.

For similar stock phrases that more or less indicate the same degree of adaptation (un)faithfulness, see SuggestedBy and RippedFromTheHeadlines.

* ''Fanfic/OyasumiMidoriya'' has "Inspired By ''Anime/SerialExperimentsLain''" as one of its tags on Website/ArchiveOfOurOwn.

* ''Series/TheWatch2021'' is "inspired by the novels of Creator/TerryPratchett". Inspired loosely enough that the custodians of Literature/{{Discworld}} (Creator/RhiannaPratchett and Rob Willkins) have distanced themselves from the whole thing, and implied that BBC America were promising a more faithful adaptation right up until the ink was dry on the contracts.

* ''The Quiet Ones'' was inspired by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_experiment the "Phillip Experiment,"]] an experiment where a group of parapsychologists attempted to create an artificial poltergeist through expectation of human will. The results the participants reported, much of which were undocumented to begin with, were exaggerated for the movie; Also, the characters and circumstances were fictionalized, and the setting was moved from 1970s Toronto, Ontario to 1970s Oxford, England.
** ''The Apparition'' was an earlier film even more loosely inspired by the Phillip Experiment - about all it has in common with the "true events" is that it involves people in a college trying to summon a spirit as part of an experiment.

* In June 1997, Lela and Raymond Howard of Salado, TX, decided to set off for a festival in nearby Temple, despite Lela's Alzheimer's and Raymond recovering from brain surgery, and were found two weeks later, dead, at the bottom of a ravine near Hot Springs, AR--which is more or less in the same direction from Salado as Temple but is ''over 22.5 times further away''. Tony Scalzo, frontman of a group called Fastball, read journalistic articles about this and was inspired to write "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0wfu3tOrtQ The Way]]", which is a considerably more romanticized version of events--though the line "they'll never get old and gray" might imply that it still ends in death, just a considerably happier one.

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* ''WesternAnimation/{{Frozen|2013}}'' is "inspired by" Creator/{{Hans Christian Andersen}}'s ''Literature/TheSnowQueen''. Both of these works have the same basic plot: a girl goes on a dangerous journey through a winter landscape to find the [[AnIcePerson Snow Queen]] in order to save an estranged and depressed childhood friend with an ActOfTrueLove. However, the reasons why the friend has to be saved, the form of the ActOfTrueLove, how the two characters had come to know each other and how they came to be estranged, the course of the heroine's journey, and the characters she encounters all differ significantly to the point that the two stories end up being extremely distant. Notably, the childhood friend and the Queen are different characters in ''The Snow Queen''; in ''Frozen'', they're the same person.
** It gets even more confusing when you realize that all of Frozen's sequels and spinoffs are still "inspired" by ''The Snow Queen''.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Frozen|2013}}'' is "inspired by" Creator/{{Hans Christian Andersen}}'s ''Literature/TheSnowQueen''. Both of these works feature a queen with ice powers and a girl who goes on a dangerous journey through a winter landscape to find the Snow Queen in order to save an estranged and depressed childhood friend, but the reasons why the friend has to be saved, how the girl saves them, how the two characters had come to know each other and how they came to be estranged, the course of the heroine's journey, and the characters she encounters all differ significantly to the point that the two stories end up being, at best, extremely distant. (Most notably: the childhood friend and the Queen are different characters in ''The Snow Queen''; in ''Frozen'', they're the same person.)

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Frozen|2013}}'' is "inspired by" Creator/{{Hans Christian Andersen}}'s ''Literature/TheSnowQueen''. Both of these works feature a queen with ice powers and a girl who goes on a dangerous journey through a winter landscape to find the Snow Queen in order to save an estranged and depressed childhood friend, but reasons why the friend has to be saved, how the girl saves them, how the two characters had come to know each other and how they came to be estranged, the course of the heroine's journey, and the characters she encounters all differ significantly.