Are there any cases of authors/writers that have intentionally stolen a character name from another work?

  • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Edge of Tomorrow, the movie where tom cruise is put in a weaponized time loop to stop an alien invasion, stars a female lead named Rita that the male lead pines and tries to earn the love of. This is a reference to Groundhog Day’s female lead named Rita.

    I kinda wished that they had named the male and female leads named Phil Connors and Rita Hanson, so that it could be interpreted as the weirdest AU fan-work of Groundhog Day ever.

  • Wolf314159@startrek.website
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    3 days ago

    They let Larry Niven write some episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series, so now the K’zinti (cat people Niven originally introduced in his Ringworld stories) are canon in the Star Trek Universe. The producer (or maybe director, I don’t really remember) of those cartoons was color blind and as a result, those cat like aliens became cannonicaly purple.

    • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Aww jeez, that’s got to suck. Not the crossover part, that’s awesome, but the fact someone who is colorblind and might not know it would be put on the spot like that. As an artist, I notice a lot of people from the colorblind community pop up and need help with creative feats that come normally to other people, and I don’t have the heart to expect anything in response.

      • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
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        2 days ago

        @shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee Don’t worry so much, the director, Hal Sutherland did very well for himself.

        @ryujin470@fedia.io @Wolf314159@startrek.website

    • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
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      2 days ago

      @Wolf314159@startrek.website No, the Kzin themselves are still brown, even with their bat-ears. It’s their uniforms that got made day-glo purple.

      @ryujin470@fedia.io

  • Denjin@lemmings.world
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    2 days ago

    Not quite what you’re asking for but in Douglas Addams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe, there’s a side character called Hotblack Desiato which is the name of the estate agent in Islington that Addams walked past to get to his office each day and he liked the name so much he created the character around it.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    3 days ago

    Sometimes entire characters get integrated, especially ones in the public domain. Like Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood.

    I’ve seen Sherlock in Batman stories and Robin Hood is in The Last Unicorn.