WorstPreviews.com Previews "Idiocracy"

[predone]

I checked out Idiocracy at http://www.worstpreviews.com/review.php?id=8 and I think that......this booger is a blatant ripoff of the central idea behind C.M. Kornbluth's much-anthologized short story "The Marching Morons" (originally published in 1951). After the bitch-slapping James Cameron got for lifting central story ideas in The Terminator (1984) from two of Harlan Ellison's scripts for the '60s series The Outer Limits and the undisclosed settlement that writer A.E. van Vogt won when he sued Ridley Scott for plagiarizing his "Discord in Scarlet" (1939) to create the first Alien movie (1979), Mike Judge's rank stupidity in following the fine old Hollywood tradition of blatant intellectual property rights violation is going to get him (and Fox) dragged into court and nailed to the proverbial wall. How truly good.

[paulina_0228]

There is a story written for everything, sometimes more than once. Just because there was a short story that somehow resembled "Idiocracy", don't mean that it's ripping it off. Think about the show "Futurama", where a dumb kids is frozen and wakes up (wait for it), 1 thousand years later. Is "Idiocracy" ripping off them as well? I'm really looking forward to this movie, and I'm sure it will be as funny as any other stuff by Mike Judge, and I pray that some lawyers looking to make a buck won't stop it from being released.

[predone]

There is a story written for everything, sometimes more than once. Just because there was a short story that somehow resembled "Idiocracy", don't mean that it's ripping it off. Think about the show "Futurama", where a dumb kids is frozen and wakes up (wait for it), 1 thousand years later. Is "Idiocracy" ripping off them as well? I'm really looking forward to this movie, and I'm sure it will be as funny as any other stuff by Mike Judge, and I pray that some lawyers looking to make a buck won't stop it from being released.

Keep on looking forward to the movie. It's unlikely that the executors of the original author's literary estate will enter a lawsuit prior to the proposed date of theatrical release.

If you had ever read C.M. Kornbluth's short story - which is still in print - you would (or should) become immediately aware of the fact that the key plot element in Idiocracy is precisely the same as that in "The Marching Morons," and differs radically from what you've seen in Futurama.

In Futurama, does Fry awaken in a future where the human race has overwhelmingly - as the result of overbreeding by the congenitally imbecilic "Jukes and Kallikaks" elements in the population - become genetically degraded hopeless dimwits? It's not that "a dumb kid is frozen and wakes up (wait for it), 1 thousand years later," but rather a situation in which a somewhat-below-average yutz from the present "is frozen and wakes up" to discover that he's intrinsically smarter than the people of the future.

Are you aware of any movies (or books or television programs or anything else in the entertainment media) that make use of this idea? Other than Idiocracy (2006) and "The Marching Morons" (1951)?

This sort of plagiarism is commonplace in the movie industry. In 1979, with Ridley Scott's Alien, the same production company responsible for Idiocracy - 20th Century Fox - got hammered in a lawsuit for violating the rights of the author who had published the novelette "Discord in Scarlet" in 1939. Fox settled out of court with writer A.E. van Vogt when they found out - surprise! - that the literary property they had ripped off was not only still under copyright but also vigorously defended.

I'm looking forward to Idiocracy, too, though I'm pretty sure that Mike Judge will not be applying to this movie the wonderfully vicious wit that I found in Office Space. I think the central idea has sardonically humorous potential.

But, then, I enjoyed the way C.M. Kornbluth handled the same idea in "The Marching Morons" when he created it more than fifty years ago.

[paulina_0228]

I have not read "The Marching Moron", and will take a look at what it is all about. As far as the plot of "Idiocracy", you can really look at it, where a person is the same and everyone around him is different (Seinfeld quote). Stories like that exist in every single episode of "The Twilight Zone".

I'm against plagiarism, but at the same time, I'm against frivolous lawsuits. I'll look deeper into this and see for myself which one this looks to be.

Until then, I'll patiently waiting till September 1st, and I'm very confident that there will be no lawsuit (unless there is one already).

[ishtarian]

Had a friend bring this film to my attention, and I saw some of the clips from it (fairly length one from the hospital, and the intro). This isn't similar to Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" -- it's darned near dead-on! The "similarities" are so close that only a bit of tweaking in phraseology is different. I'm sorry, but this really is a blatant rip-off of a very honored story... the title of the film is rather fitting, as to plagiarize a story that is so well-known, and so frequently anthologized, is not the brightest move in the world....

Don't get me wrong; I think that such a film could definitely have merits. But I also think that Kornbluth should be given credit (can't pay the man, as he's been dead since 1958), but he should at least be given credit.

Here's the Wikipedia article on the story, for those who aren't inclined to look up the original:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

However, I suggest reading the story, as it is actually much smarter and more savage in its social commentary. There is a companion piece, titled "The Little Black Bag", and I'd say several elements from that one have been incorporated in this film, too... and that's just from the little I've seen. It was glaring, in this case.