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Advertising
"It's not that original, but it's super affordable."
— The Burger King on the BK Breakfast Muffin Sandwitch, a blatant rip-off of the McDonald's Sausage Egg McMuffin
Anime and Manga
"That's how culture spreads. When someone has a new idea, it's immediately copied. It's only natural for this to happen. Your job as the original is to publish magazines that are of a higher quality."
— U.N. Mediator, Humanity Has Declined
Literature
"See, this is the problem when you have an original idea. Five seconds later you've got a million copycats."
— Greg Heffley, Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Live-Action TV
TSA Agent: NCIS? That anything like CSI?
Tony DiNozzo: Only if you're dyslexic.
Tony DiNozzo: Only if you're dyslexic.
— NCIS, "Yankee White"
Music
See I invented Kanye, it wasn't any Kanyes
And now I look and look around and there's so many Kanyes
And now I look and look around and there's so many Kanyes
— Kanye West, "I Love Kanye"
Word of mouth,
this is what everyone is talking about.
So you can tell somebody
to tell somebody
that the next big thing
is the same old thing
this is what everyone is talking about.
So you can tell somebody
to tell somebody
that the next big thing
is the same old thing
— John Reuben, "Word of Mouth"
Don't send in the clones
They're already here''
They're already here''
— Alan Chapman, "Everybody Wants to Be Sondheim"
Yeah, I got a deal and so did John Prine
Steve Forbert and Springsteen, all in a line
They were lookin' for you, signin' up others
We were "New Bob Dylans!" ...Your dumbass kid brothers
Steve Forbert and Springsteen, all in a line
They were lookin' for you, signin' up others
We were "New Bob Dylans!" ...Your dumbass kid brothers
— Loudon Wainwright III, "Talking New Bob Dylan"
Podcasts
"Something that jumps up from the crowd — only to hit its head on the ceiling — is always better in my eyes than the games that keep their heads down and risk nothing."
Video Games
"I invented the First-Person Shooter, you know. Wish I hadn't bothered now. Have you seen how many of the things there are? I expect there's even a space marine in this game somewhere."
— The Lord of Games, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Will Monster Rancher rival Pokémon? Doubtful — The monsters just aren't cute enough.
Webcomics
Web Original
Why the fuck is business-savvy Lex Luthor pulling plays from The Joker rulebook of terrorism? And while I totally get that it's a topical subject, my issue isn't that Lex Luthor is invoking Al Qaeda to get his way... but rather that he has no way to get.
All right buckle the fuck up kids, it's the year 2012 and I've just been handed what should be an easy editing gig by my senior editor. It's a vampire erotica story because one of the final Twilight movies is about to come out, and everything is vampires. Everything. I haven't edited a single thing in months which isn't about vampires.
— Joy Demorra describing a So Bad, It's Good vampire story
a So Bad, It's Good vampire story Web Videos
"In super happy videogame land, some things are about as sure as the sun coming up. One is, if a game is successful there will be a sequel, the other is if a game is successful, it will be copied.""
— Bajo, Good Game (23rd November 2009 Episode)
THE THREE SCARIEST THINGS TO PUT IN YOUR DUMB INDIE HORROR GAME:
1) ENDLESS FORESTS OF PURE BOREDOM,
2) RUNNING AROUND LIKE AN IDIOT, COLLECTING PAPER SCRAPS,
3) SLENDERMAN
1) ENDLESS FORESTS OF PURE BOREDOM,
2) RUNNING AROUND LIKE AN IDIOT, COLLECTING PAPER SCRAPS,
3) SLENDERMAN
"Now everybody wants to be like Toy Story, everybody goes for the same formula, a CG animated film with bright colors, a lot of creativity, dialogue that’s very modern, almost like stuff you’d hear on The Simpsons, a simple story that actually manages to rope in some comedy and, surprisingly, even a little drama, and focusing more on the writing than the actual effects themselves."
— Doug Walker, Disneycember: Toy Story
"You'll never be as popular as Five Nights at Freddy's, so stop copying it, you bellends!"
"Bandwagoning in the games industry has always been stupid, as far too many games publishers still think simply copying a successful game will also copy its success. But it was especially fucking short-sighted to try and flood the market with games explicitly designed to suck up a lot of the user's time and money. You just can't do that! Time and money is finite, as are the people spending it. There was absolutely zero sustainability in essentially strip-mining an audience."
— James Stephanie Sterling, on why this went wrong when it came to the "live service" craze, Announcellation: Entertainment Media Is Losing Its Mind
[It] led to a host of other manga trying to replicate North Star's success, with some even completely changing direction to become more like it, such as Sakigake!! Otokojuku, which started off life as an oddball tough-guy gag manga, but by 1987 had transformed into a full-blown North Star clone, complete with martial arts, pressure points, and the intellectual-property-shattering line, "You're late in realizing it. From the moment our fists met, you were already enchanted by the death god." Sakigake was not alone in this regard: Kirara was basically Fist of the North Star in high school, Sekiryo was Samurai North Star, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was Fist of the North Star if written by a crazy person."
"So, experience the original masterpiece that inspired countless knock-offs, like:
"Die Hard" on a Bus,
"Die Hard" in a tunnel,
"Die Hard" on a mountain,
"Die Hard" in the White House,
"Die Hard" in the White House 2,
"Die Hard" in a mall,
"Die Hard" on a boat,
"Die Hard" on this other boat,
"Die Hard" in a rink,
"Die Hard" on a train,
"Die Hard" in a plane,
"Die Hard" in another plane,
"Die Hard" in the president's plane,
"Die Hard" in a plane, with snakes,
and "Die Hard", but awful."
"Die Hard" on a Bus,
"Die Hard" in a tunnel,
"Die Hard" on a mountain,
"Die Hard" in the White House,
"Die Hard" in the White House 2,
"Die Hard" in a mall,
"Die Hard" on a boat,
"Die Hard" on this other boat,
"Die Hard" in a rink,
"Die Hard" on a train,
"Die Hard" in a plane,
"Die Hard" in another plane,
"Die Hard" in the president's plane,
"Die Hard" in a plane, with snakes,
and "Die Hard", but awful."
"And I'm not going to lie, one of main things that did cement it as number one status here is the influence of Family Guy. How many shows on this list that I mentioned alone were clearly inspired by Family Guy?"
— The Mysterious Mr. Enter, "The Top 10 Worst Cartoons of the 2010s"
"It is an unfortunate fact of life in the world of entertainment that the unique is rarely successful, and, indeed, that the successful is rarely unique. And when the dread god Cthulhu in his cosmic throne crosses his legs and sneakily cracks one off, causing the stars to align and something to come out that is unique and successful, it's all but a guarantee that it will not be remaining unique for very long, as the imitators arrive to bring out a few golden calves for everyone to worship while Moses is fannying about up the mountain. Dark Souls, for example, was a great game, and pretty unique in this day and age for having gameplay more complex than a fucking traffic light, so here comes Lords of the Fallen to hoover up everyone still milling around in the same comfort zone."
—Zero Punctuation, review of Lords of the Fallen
"Truly good and original games are like the itchy spots you get from a venereal disease. A product of love that’s satisfying to scratch, yes, but soon there’ll be a lot more of the buggers and none of them will be as interesting as the first. Case in point, Breath of the Wild. 'Ooh, we like this game,' we said to the soulless daleks that run the games industry. 'We think it’s atmospheric and mechanically intricate and offers a bold new take on the interactive narrative experience.' [Beat] 'Also, it made a lot of money.' 'REPLICATE! REPLICATE! REGURGITATE!'"
—Zero Punctuation, review of Immortals Fenyx Rising
"Nobody told me. Nobody told me to do this. YouTubers be talking all that bullcrap (laughs, then starts mocking his past self) "A few of my friends told me-" Nah. (laughs again) You ain't slick, big fella. You saw somebody do it and was like, let me get them views."
Producer: It's just too bad that I guess we'll never get to see the iconic "King Kong climbing a skyscraper" thing if he's the size of one.
Screenwriter: Yeah well it's a necessary sacrifice 'cause he has to be big enough to fight Godzilla in a couple years, remember?
Producer: Oh, true, we're making this into a cinematic universe!
Screenwriter: We sure are, sir. Praise Marvel.
Producer: Praise Marvel to you as well, my child.
Screenwriter: Yeah well it's a necessary sacrifice 'cause he has to be big enough to fight Godzilla in a couple years, remember?
Producer: Oh, true, we're making this into a cinematic universe!
Screenwriter: We sure are, sir. Praise Marvel.
Producer: Praise Marvel to you as well, my child.
If you're thinking to yourself that this seems a lot like Papers, Please, I have no idea if you're correct or not. This is Border Officer. Very different. "Legally distinct" (probably) from Papers, Please. And it involves you being an officer at the border. Very different. You have to inspect people's documentation and see them through the border. Very different.
Back in the early-to-mid-2010s, there was this very specific era of very short-lived teen dramas that were essentially just shameless copycats of Pretty Little Liars. Studios were trying really hard to capitalize on the craze because PLL had taken over the world incredibly fast and had an entire generation of teenagers and young adults in a chokehold. They all wanted a murder/conspiracy mystery show with hot teenage characters played by actors in their thirties to go on for several seasons by cultivating an obsessive audience.
— Friendly Space Ninja, The Worst Teen Dramas of All Time
Like so many failed blockbusters, Power Rangers tried to do a little bit of everything that was popular at the time, and came out about as bland as you can get.
— Captain Midnight, Power Rangers (2017) - How to Doom a Franchise
Western Animation
"Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren't for someone plagiarizing The Honeymooners, we wouldn't have The Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sergeant Bilko, there'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Hah! Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney."
— Roger Meyers, Jr., The Simpsons
"The easiest way to be popular is to leech off the popularity of others."
— Patty Bouvier, The Simpsons
Real Life
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."
"Imitation is the sincerest form of television."
— Fred Allen
In the wake of its outsized success, seemingly every sitcom on television was a Friends knockoff. There was working-class Friends (The Drew Carey Show), gay Friends (Will & Grace), guy Friends (Men Behaving Badly), girl Friends (Caroline in the City), black Friends (Living Single), nerdy Friends (The Big Bang Theory), and rebooted Friends (How I Met Your Mother). Everywhere you turned on TV, there was a posse of pals sitting around a living room or a bar or a coffee shop or a science lab, trading quips and exchanging furtive glances.
—Saul Austerlitz in Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes
"Find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white."
— Dino De Laurentiis to Orca: The Killer Whale's future producer Luciano Vincenzoni after seeing Jaws
"If any human being on the planet is responsible for the soulless, mindless regurgitation of old Disney characters and designs, it is him. Don't even get me started on his story-sense. His track record speaks for itself. Every movie he has made is a crazy-quilt of borrowed superficialities, completely devoid of wit, humor or genuine emotion."
—Disney director Kirk Wise on Don Bluth
I remember feeling really pissed off with Australia, because not only the industry itself but the audience needed America or England to tell them what was good music, and we'd been basically playing the same kind of stuff.
— Nick Cave, Long Way to the Top: Stories of Australian Rock & Roll
"The creators of the 'grim and gritty' comics that followed in Watchmen's wake are like 1960s musicians who declared, 'The Beatles have revolutionized popular music! We must copy their haircuts!'"
"Fox Publications was the poverty row of comics, their characters all completely and utterly derivative. I once asked the creator of the Blue Beetle, their most important character, what on earth possessed him to create this character named after a bug. He told me, in two words: Green Hornet. Well, there you go."
— Jim Steranko, Superheroes: A Never Ending Battle
They were so impressed with the success of the Age of Apocalypse event done with the X-Men books that they thought it could easily be replicated with the Spider-Man line. The biggest difference between the two stunts was that Age of Apocalypse was a well planned, conceptually strong, story-driven project that was generated by the X-Men editorial staff and writers. The Scarlet Spider stunt, on the other hand, was something that the Spider-Man editors and writers were pressured into doing, and was agreed to with absolutely no story concept or overall theme in place.
— Editor/Writer Glenn Greenberg on The Clone Saga
I have all these people trying to hop aboard the Arpa express hoping that they become cool like me or earn my approval which will magically make their M.U.G.E.N video career somehow. That contest I originally held for the lulz might become the mental death of me...
— Arpa/Chainsawdentist
