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I have this great idea for a new novel. It's about a little girl from the midwest who gets swept away by a tornado into a magical land of whimsy and wonder. There, she makes friends with a wild beast, an automaton, and an animated doll. Together, they travel to a city of jewels and fight an evil witch to get her home. Wait, what do you mean it's been done before?
A lengthy joke in which a character describes some new idea, invention, story or script - but is informed that somebody already got there before him, and that all the tropes he thinks are new are Older Than They Think. The punchline is usually a ridiculously mundane or roundabout name for the proposed "new" work, and for added humour value, the story that the character has unknowingly plagiarized is usually something mind-bogglingly well known.
It's based on the well-known phenomena in that there are so many things out there it's incredibly hard to come up with something new, especially since Seinfeld Is Unfunny and oftentimes, people get the idea inspired by something. (Even the great Tolkien's stories were inspired by pulp fantasy writers in the 1930s and borrow heavily from Germanic myths and their opera adaptation about a ring of massive power to who wears it...Sound familiar?)
From a 19th Century BC Egyptian poem: "What has been said has been said." Which makes this trope Older Than Dirt.
Compare Completely Missing The Point.
Examples
Anime
- In Yakitate Japan, several types of "Ja-pan" that Kazuma developed on his own turn out to be just variants on well-known types of bread. For example, Ja-pan Number 34 is basically a croissant, and Ja-pan Number 16 is a naan (an unleavened Indian bread often served with curry) bread bowl in the shape of Mount Fuji.
Comics
- A Bloom County strip parodied this in which a teacher claims there no new ideas in the universe. A student argues the point, but is told that "Failure is hardly original."
- Gyro Gearloose from the Donald Duck comics has a tendency to invent things which already exist. In one comic he is asked to repair a suitcase with 4 wheels, of which one is broken. He keeps adding improvements, such as a seat, a steering wheel, bigger wheels and so on, and proudly delivers it back to the owner, only to be told 'We already own a trailer!' In another comic, he goes picnicking, but is bothered by various elements like ants, the wind and rain, causing him to create a floor, walls and a roof. In the end, he's re-invented the house, and wonders why he didn't just stay home. In another comic, Gyro is found in the woods studying woodpeckers so he can make a "machine that can make holes like them." In other words, a drill.
- In Don Rosa's story "Mythical Menagerie", Donald Duck tries to pull a prank on Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who are going animal-spotting for a Junior Woodchucks merit badge, by gluing props onto farm animals to make made-up creatures... unfortunately, all the creatures Donald makes up are unwittingly based on creatures from mythology: A yellow rabbit with a horn? A mi'raj from the Middle East. A polka-dot cat? A guldon from Scandinavia, and so on.
- UK newspaper strip The Perishers had Marlon, the keen but not-very-bright kid, who on one occasion took up inventing for a hobby. When his friends pointed out that his inventions (fire, the wheel and the horse and cart) had all been invented by other people, he wasn't worried because he invented them quicker and was therefore catching up.
Film
- Austin Powers has Dr. Evil suggesting schemes that include events that happened while he was in a Human Popsicle, which is an excellent excuse for his ignorance.
Right, people you have to tell me these things, okay? I've been frozen for thirty years, okay? Throw me a frickin' bone here!
- Done again in the second film, where Dr. Evil travels back in time, formulating plans based on the same media he was ignorant of while still frozen. These include ideas like his "Death Star" laser on the moon, and even using footage from Independence Day to threaten the President.
- Donald's script in Adaptation is this in about fifteen different ways.
Literature
Live Action TV
- In 3rd Rock from the Sun, a professor being forced into retirement takes solace in the fact that he'll have time to finish his screenplay. "It's like Die Hard, only set in an office building."
- In Frasier, Roz sells an idea for a children's book based on a bedstory that her mother used to tell her - which turns out to be Heidi. Furthermore, not only had she not heard of it, but the publisher to whom she sold the idea hadn't heard of it either.
- Played with in episode '200' of Stargate SG 1: Vala tries to pitch her "adventures" to a visiting TV director, except she's deliberately ripping off well-known plots like The Wizard Of Oz or Gilligans Island.
- In Escape From Gilligan's Island, the castaways try to reclaim their lives away from the island, and all of them have trouble doing so. The Professor's problem is that all the things he invents (such as the electric toothbrush) have been invented during the years he was gone.
Gilligan: Why don't you call it the Frisbee?
Professor: Why?
Gilligan: Because that's what it's called.
- There was an episode of Saved By The Bell where a character described his new invention in detail only to be told he's just invented the pencil.
- Kelso from That 70s Show once came up with the
brilliant ideas for adult strollers (wheelchairs), bicycles with engines (motorcycles) and bicycles without engines (take a guess...)).
- Similarly, in one episode of Becker, Jake and Bob (while drunk) come up with various inventions which, of course, have already been thought of. Interestingly, all of their ideas involved getting "a flat piece of metal".
- Lampshaded on Mystery Science Theater 3000 during an invention exchange, in which Joel presents the Steve-O-Meter, a device which detects whether a given idea or object has already been thought up by Steve Allen. It turns out that everything Joel and the 'Bots present has been already imagined by Steve, including the Steve-O-Meter itself.
- An episode of Blossom featured a character (I forget which) trying desperately to write a song, only to be repeatedly informed by other characters that they were unconsciously plagiarizing various existing songs.
- Particularly during the Tom Baker era, the Doctor often seemed unimpressed by predictable attempts to rule the Earth and/or the universe. A Doctor Who parody by Mark Gatiss and David Walliams involved the villains wanting to be thwarted by the Doctor, but having the non-plussed Doctor inform him that his plans had been done already.
Alien: Oh! What if I were to hollow out the Earth's core, and replace it with a giant motor, so that I could pilot it anywhere in-
Doctor: It's been done.
Alien: Are you sure?
Doctor: Yep.
Alien: Oh. Well, you're the expert...
- Aliens really did try to steal Earth that way, in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth". The Doctor briefly mentions this in "The Stolen Earth" when he says that, "Someone tried to move the Earth once before." The Daleks tried to do it both times.
- The Cybermen tried it once as well, if I recall correctly.
- During one Doctor Who audio drama, the Sixth Doctor (post "Trial of a Time Lord"), runs into Time Lady Iris Wildthyme. The plot culminates with the revelation that the villain is basically her version of the Valeyard, and throughout the entire ending the Doctor complains to both of them just how amazingly unoriginal they're both being.
- This is something of a habit for Iris, as many of her adventures bear a striking resemblance to the Doctor's (or possibly vice versa).
- The Sesame Street skits in which Don Music slowly and painstakingly tries to compose songs that already exist. He usually gets one word wrong, and then has to change the rest to fit, as in:
Stormy night, not even a star in sight,
On my way to where the sky is dark,
Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Yellowstone Park?
- Sesame Street had a scientist character named Dr. Nobel Price, who kept inventing things that had already been invented. Some of his most notable creations include foot-snuggies (socks) and the speaking stick (a microphone), and he discovered an animal that he called the Great Poonga-Poonga (which turned out to be a rabbit).
- Between The Lions has a scientist character named Dr. Nitwhit who announces that he's discovered "the only word in the English Language that X" (has the same consonant at the beginning and the end, is spelled with a given sound). When his assistant responds, it's always with words that just happen to prove that the rule is more general than poor Nitwhit thought.
- In an episode of Seinfeld, Elaine despises a cartoon in The New Yorker so much that she submits her own idea. When her boss sees her published cartoon, he soon identifies the punchline as "a Ziggy", stolen from the newspaper comic of the same name.
- Malcolm In The Middle: Malcolm tries to prove his hand at music by writing a song. Dewey points out that he just added emo words to the "Meow Mix" jingle.
- Homer's done that as well. Which means... ya know...
- Reese once proudly announced, "Guys, I've made a discovery! I mixed blue and yellow, and got a whole new color! I'm going to call it... 'Blellow'!"
- Tenacious D: Jack Black comes up with a killer tune for his song 'Rocket Sauce' ("Rocket... Rocket, all of my Rocket Sauce") then hears a familiar ice cream van jingle through the window...
- One episode of Good Eats had Alton Brown announcing he'd be testing food urban legends, and he was going to call the episodes "Food Myth Busters"... whereupon his lawyers burst in and inform him that it's taken. He amends it to "Food Myth Smashers".
- Done unintentionally on Whose Line Is It Anyway, where one episode had the "unlikely location for a Film Noir" be a gas station. It's been done
 .
- Played with as a Running Gag on The Mitchell And Webb Situation, in which a pair of contemporary writers would swap ideas about a project which would be obviously recognizable as an already existent product, from fairy tales, to the Bible, and even the Great Wonders of the World. Once the recognizable element appeared ("the story's not about the wolf - it's about the pigs..."), they wouldn't be corrected as to the nature of their idea but would eagerly start typing, implying that they were actually the originators of the idea in the first place. Played straight in the final episode, however, in which each writer's idea would be dismissed by the other on grounds that it had already been done.
- Inverted in a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live, where a film studio executive would berate his grandson for wanting to buy scripts that had obviously "been done before." The catch was that the scripts he ended up passing on were, in fact, highly original future blockbusters.
- One example:
Executive: He brought me a script about a white kid who could do martial arts. I said I liked it better the first time, when it was called The Karate Kid!
Grandson: It was The Matrix. We passed on The Matrix.
- And another:
Executive: He wanted to back a film about a bunch of little people living in a magical land. I said I liked it better the first time, when it was called The Smurfs!
- Monty Python's Flying Circus featured Mr L F Dibley who moaned about the critics who said his films (including If, Midnight Cowboy, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rear Window) were just cheap rip offs of better directors' films. He insisted that he came up with the ideas first, but the more high-profile and high-budget versions were "rushed out" whilst he was at the chemist getting his developed.
- In an episode of Northern Exposure, Chris intends to catapult a cow as some sort of performance art until Ed tells him that it was already done in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
- Jon Stewart decided he was going to sign off The Daily Show with his own brand new catch phrase "Keep f*cking [sic] that chicken" before revealing Its Been Done... live... on the news... unironically.
New Media
- One Zero Punctuation review of a Legend Of Zelda game has Yahtzee suggesting, "for variety", an adventure game where you play as a dog in feudal Japan.
- The web cartoon Kerri's Big Invention: At one point Kerrigan comes up with an idea for an invention called "Stick'ems" that turns out to be identical to Post-It notes. One other character points out that she even put notes about this new idea on Post-It notes.
- A YouTube Poop video titled "The FCC Shuts Down Rock TV" contained a parody of the Super Mario World cartoon featuring an episode with a Flashback that cut to a flashback of another episode. The author then apologized, saying he realized another video called "Youtube Poop: the true power of Rock TV" used the exact same joke.
- Titan Legends, a fanfic that is a universe unto itself, actually uses the line "the Simpsons did it" in the following exchange where Gauntlet tries to find something to do:
Gauntlet: Okay, we build a monorail so our city’s citizens can get around quicker!
Robin: Simpsons already did it.
Gauntlet: DRAT! Okay, we take advantage of certain strange government wounded egos to get one of our own sent into space!
Beast Boy: …dude, we go into space all the time.
Terra: We went into space last week because you wanted legit Vietnamese food and wanted it yesterday.
Robin: And Simpsons already did it.
Gauntlet: …..drat. Okay…aha, we assume a superheroic identity and battle evil doers by throwing pies in their faces!
Terra: …Rob we already have superheroic identities.
Starfire: And how would throwing pies in the faces of our foes do anything? It strikes me as ineffective.
Beast Boy: Our methods work just fine!
Terra: We don’t need to change them!
Cyborg: It’s in our union contract! And I’m no good at making pastries!
Robin: And Simpsons already did it.
Gauntlet: Fine. We take over the world and rule it via a complex conspiracy!
Robin: Illuminati already did it. They don’t like competition.
- That Guy With The Glasses subverted this trope by suggesting an original movie: 2 1/2 of exploding babies.
- Retarded Animal Babies has apparently been accused of ripping off Happy Tree Friends, simply because they both feature cute animals and sometimes gory violence. The creator responded to these claims with a Take That in the second episode.
Theater
- In Rent, Roger's attempts at writing the perfect song all end up sounding like Puccini's "Musetta's Waltz" (which, of course, is from La Bohème, on which Rent is based.)
- In Norm Foster's play Office Hours, one character unintentionally pitches an idea identical to Tarzan.
Video Games
- One of the human male /silly options in World of Warcraft is one of these for The Lord of the Rings:
"So, I have this idea for a great movie. It's about two gnomes who find a bracelet of power, and they have to take it to the Burning Steppes and cast it into the Cauldron. They form the Brotherhood of the Bracelet. Along the way they're trailed by a murloc named Gottom, who's obsessed with the bracelet, and nine bracelet bogeymen. It could be a three-parter, called Ruler of the Bracelet. The first part would be called The Brotherhood of the Bracelet, followed by A Couple of Towers, with the climactic ending called Hey, the King's Back!"
Webcomics
- Although the example isn't "lengthy", Free Fall ran afoul of this, inadvertently repeating a joke from another webcomic.
- Greg Dean, the author of Real Life Comics, issued an apology after learning that his previous joke had already been done by Dilbert.
- Another strip had the lead ask his Mad Scientist friend to make him a web-shooter after seeing Spider Man, only for said friend to demur because Fox Trot had already done it. Incidentally, this troper's first exposure to webcomics was Bill Amend's linkback.
- The second page of How to Make a Sprite Comic in 8 Easy Bits has its protagonist think up a few different ideas for his magnum opus - first a Final Fantasy parody, then a Megaman comic...
Western Animation
- An episode of South Park in which Butters attempts to come up with an idea to get revenge on the citizens of the town. However, he's informed that the Simpsons have already used every one of his ideas in an episode, and his desperation to come up with an original scheme briefly drives him over the edge. In fact, the former name of this trope was named after this episode: "The Simpsons Did It".
- According to interviews, this is pretty much how creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone (themselves huge Simpsons fans) feel on coming up with a great idea or joke only to find out that it was done by The Simpsons.
- The DVD commentary for that episode also revealed that Parker and Stone realized too late that the episode's other plot, involving a microscopic society of sea monkeys, had also already been done by The Simpsons. They went on to have Butters Lampshade the fact.
- Done again in the Halloween episode Hell on Earth 2006 where Satan's attempts at a shocking 16th birthday party entrance are rejected when his minions repeatedly tell him" Diddy did it."
- The Simpsons itself did this joke as well, having Principal Skinner come up with a story about an island theme park that clones dinosaurs back to life. His name for it? "Billy and the Cloneasaurus".
- He is then immediately lambasted by Apu, who points out the ludicrousness of the principal not knowing about a multimillion dollar franchise consisting of books, games and comic books (and how awful his proposed title is)... finishing off with a "thank you, come again!"
- Another episode has Homer dismissing jazz as "Making stuff up as you go along" before trying it himself. He ends up singing "de"s to the tune of "Mary Had a Little Lamb". When called on it, he tries again, only doing it again with "doo". Caught again, he shouts, "D'OH!"
- Another episode involved Marge writing a romance novel. Her inspiration was the painting on the wall behind the couch, from which she proclaimed "A book about whaling! That's never been done before! Thank you..." she looks at the painting's title, "...'Scene from Moby Dick'."
- Yet another episode has Homer pitching ideas to Mel Gibson for movies that are all this trope. The scene ends in a subversion when Homer asks if anyone owned the rights to Indiana Jones.
- In yet another Simpsons episode, Homer saves a troubled horse, only for Comic Book Guy to tell them that the Simpsons already owned a horse once. 'Lampshaded' again in the same episode, when Marge starts to develop a gambling problem.
- Similarly, Bart would love to have an elephant. Until he's reminded he had one.
- In the episode "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace" Homer attempts to become an inventor are repeatedly thwarted by the long-dead Thomas Edison - presumably this trope for inventing.
- At the end of "Homer's Barbershop Quartet", the titular band are recreating the famous moment when the Beatles played a spontaneous live concert on the rooftop of their offices, on the top of Moe's Tavern. George Harrison drives past for the sole purpose of pointing out that it's already been done. Of course, the entire episode is a riff on the career of the Beatles, so pretty much everything that the B'Sharps did had been done before.
- Family Guy: The novel Brian has been working on for several years turns out to be identical to the "Iron Eagle" movies, and carries the ridiculous title, "Faster Than the Speed of Love."
- A recurring segment on The Alvin Show was Bungling Inventor Clyde Crashcup who, along with his long-suffering and far more competent assistant Leonardo, tried to invent the chair, baseball, jokes, the bed and dozens of other things, and seldom got it right.
- The Italian film Allegro Non Troppo begins with the director explaining his concept to the audience: a collection of animated shorts set to pieces of classical music, "a fantasia, if you will." Then he gets a call saying that it had already been done by someone named "Prizni".
- In the Phineas And Ferb episode "Interview with a Platypus", Dr. Doofenshmirtz's evil plan is to flood the town of Danville and sell his new invention to the citizens: the Buoyancy Operated Aquatic Transport, or "BO-AT".
- An episode of House Of Mouse had a cartoon called Ludwig Von Drake's House of Genius, where Von Drake presents 'new inventions' that were already done (e.g., presenting a telephone as the "Tele-finger").
- Done on SpongeBob SquarePants when SpongeBob and Patrick are trying to come up with inventions to help Sandy. Patrick comes up with a pencil, a lightbulb, and a parallel universe. The last one is a subversion when SpongeBob claims it's a mirror (cuz it looks just like one and he sees his reflection in it). Then SpongeBob wanders off-screen and Patrick pulls it out again despairing that he had beaten to the punch when SpongeBob's reflection comes back and, in a different accent, tells Patrick that he "thought it was a pretty good idea."
- The Pinky And The Brain episode "Brain Drained" begins with the Brain preparing a plan eerily similar to the one in the episode "Das Mouse", when he realises the similarity of these two plans. Then he brings up a backup plan that's similar to the intended plan from the episode "Snowball", which he also realises. He proceeds to file through his previous plans, every second one being a subliminal message. While the Brain is dejected about his lack of original plans, Pinky compares his situation to Tony Danza, who is noted to have talented writers. This inspires the Brain to hire would-be screenwriters to write original plans for them, then claim the plans as their own and use them as they see fit. Cue Terrible Interviewees Montage.
Other
- Sid Caesar once played a famous German director, who gave his brilliant idea for a film, which turned out to be Gone With The Wind. Right down to having the same title.
"Tell me this, does the North win, or does the South?"
"Why, the North."
"There, how do you like that, he took my ending!"
- On The Late Show, Amy Sedaris talked about an idea for a movie involving a fat, grumpy ginger cat who would solve crimes. David Letterman commented that the character sounded similar to Garfield. Sedaris was disappointed and said that always happens to her, and recounted a story of the time she was watching Godzilla and suggested to her friend that it would be scarier to have tiny creatures terrorizing humans for a change instead of huge monsters. Friend: "Oh, like Gremlins." "Oh, well then forget it."
Truth In Television
- See Troper Tales for fellow tropers' accounts of this phenomenon.
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