CSotD: Now that is some sincere flattery!
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Okay, here is Lucas Turnbloom's strip "Imagine This" for today:
… and here is the little summary of the strip's premise that runs on the GoComics site:
Some adults wistfully wonder what became of the imaginary friends of their childhood. Not Darin. His are sitting on the couch, too-constant companions sharing every strange moment of his cheerfully frustrated life. There’s Dewey the Dinosaur, with heart of gold and head of fluff, and Clovis, the Teddy Bear With Serious Anger Issues (and some very bad habits). An unemployed 30-year-old graphic designer, Darin lives in his father’s basement, which he also shares with the enigmatic Robert the Plant.
And now, here is a vidcap from the trailer for Seth "Family Guy" McFarlane's new movie, "Ted":
And here's how the website describes the film's premise:
Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane brings his boundary-pushing brand of humor to the big screen for the first time as writer, director and voice star of Ted.
In the live action/CG-animated comedy, he tells the story of John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg), a grown man who must deal with the cherished teddy bear who came to life as the result of a childhood wish…and has refused to leave his side ever since.
Have I mentioned that I am not a lawyer? I am not a lawyer.
But it is my understanding that there are things you can copyright and things you can't, and that then there is the difference between "copyright" and "trademark."
We've all imagined our toys coming alive, for instance. In the early years of the (previous) century, Josephine Scribner Gates had a whole series of books around the theme, starting with "The Story of Live Dolls," a preachy little piece of Victoriana about dolls coming alive with all the disabilities and pain caused by having been treated poorly by their "mommies."
As for less loving depictions of beloved childhood companions, the abundance of Barbie parodies shows there's no limit to that sort of knock off, either, nor is there one for teddy bears, as seen here:
On the other hand, I can promise you that if someone made a movie about two latch-key kids with an imaginary cat that wore a tall, red-and-white striped top-hat, or one that starred a black talking mouse with a high-pitched voice, huge ears and white gloves, the earth would tilt from the accumulated weight of the attorneys gathering on his doorstep.
But, for one thing, a lot of those attorneys would be screaming the word "trademark" rather than "copyright."
And, for another, a lot of them would be on retainers from very large, very successful commercial enterprises capable of dragging the process out forever.
However, let us imagine the testimony about these two images:
One attorney would be screaming "Look at them! Just look at them!" while the one representing the other side would be holding up photos of teddy bears and noting the limited number of ways in which you can depict a teddy bear. It is impossible, he would argue, to create a teddy bear that doesn't look pretty much like every other teddy bear, without departing so far from the concept as to render the character unrecognizable.
And then we'd spend a few hours looking at examples of how a character in CGI differs from its original comic strip form:
And on and on and so forth and so on, with the AttorneyMeter running the whole time.
And it would also be necessary to show that Seth McFarlane had seen "Imagine This" before putting together the concept of "Ted."
George Harrison could hardly have avoided hearing the Chiffons' song "He's So Fine" before coming up with "My Sweet Lord," and Huey Lewis had a big enough hit with "I Want A New Drug" that Ray Parker Jr. had surely heard it before he wrote the theme song for "Ghostbusters." (The latter case was settled out of court)
For a comic strip of non-Garfieldian stature, however, that could be a significant barrier.
When Art Buchwald successfully sued over "Coming to America," he could show that he had actually pitched the concept to the producers, who went on to make it without him.
Nice paper trail if you can get it. (And Buchwald was suing for breach of contract, not plagiarism. They'd not only seen the pitch, they'd optioned it.)
It's perhaps most instructive that the makers of "Cooley High" never sued the makers of "Boyz in the Hood," despite both movies being about young black, poor high school kids with dreams of college in which senseless gang violence claims the one hoping for an athletic scholarship. Cooley High is iconic; there is no chance that John Singleton could have missed seeing it. But is the plot so unique that it couldn't be reused?
Hey, I wrote a variation on Snow White in which the dwarfs are actually a group of rebels seeking to overthrow the cruel queen. If you could sue over stealing that riff, I wouldn't know where to begin first.
Sometimes, you have to shrug and let it go.
Anyway, it looks like the movie sucks. Not that sucking and failing are the same thing these days, but, still …
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