5 Famous Titles That Were Stolen From Other Works

5

Blade Runner Was Taken From A Story Actually About Blades And Running Them

Science fiction legend Philip K. Dick anticipated a lot of 21st-century problems. If you think about it, Blade Runner is basically about Harrison Ford as a badass, gun-toting CAPTCHA, making sure robots don’t get away with pretending to be human.

Warner Bros.

“You’re in the desert, and you see a turtle. Which of these squares have turtles in them?”

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But PKD (as we’ll refer to him from here on out because even we have our limits on Philip K. Jokes) was still writing for a 20th-century audience, and he knew what they wanted. He was a veteran of the pulp SF magazines that defined the genre for decades, where stories had to be immediately arresting and intriguing enough to grab someone who’s considering buying some M&Ms or cigarettes instead. That’s why so many of PKD’s titles aren’t just long but downright ungainly, like “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” or “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” or “A Little Something For Us Tempunauts” or “Luigi Kincaid’s Seven-Figure Memory” — Okay, we made that last one up.

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In any case, when the time came to adapt one of PKD’s most famous novels, everyone knew it would need a different name than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Early versions of the script had titles like “Android” and “Mechanismo,” but you probably don’t want a meditative, visionary future-noir to have the same name you’d give your vibrator. Eventually, screenwriter Hampton Fancher turned to one of his inspirations for adapting the book: Yet another dystopian novel called Blade Runner (A Movie).

Blue Wind Press

Definitely not a name you’d give your vibrator, especially “(a movie).”

Blade Runner (A Movie) (a book) was a trippy, gory vision of a collapsed future New York written by William S. Burroughs, who was known for having trippy and gory visions of pretty much everything. The grand tradition of ripping off the cool knife-speeding title doesn’t end with him, though. Burroughs actually started the project as a film adaptation of Bladerunner, one last dystopian novel by Alan E. Nourse. 

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Nourse was a practicing doctor as well as a writer, and Bladerunner is about a medical dystopia: Everyone who gets medical treatment legally has to be sterilized to combat overpopulation, so most doctors work illegally and in secret. They need medical supplies, mostly stuff for surgeries like scalpels, and so they need smugglers like the main character to run those blades. Good thing Nourse didn’t call them “scalpel smugglers,” or we’d be back in vibrator name territory.

4

I, Robot Wasn’t The First To Say So

Isaac Asimov was another science fiction writer who was both ahead of his time and hopelessly stuck in it. Just to give you a taste, one of his groundbreaking robot stories was a merciless takedown of the Birther movement written 15 years before Obama was actually born, but another is about how a female programmer isn’t happy with any of her robots until she creates a robot baby she can mother.

New York World-Telegram

“Cool story babe, now make me a positronic brain.”