Twilight Zone Rips Off Star Trek Rips Off Twilight Zone

July 15, 2009 8:41 AM

Does the Star Trek episode Charlie X rip off the Twilight Zone episode It's A Good Life (or vice versa, wrt to the TZ movie)?

First a few housekeeping matters:

1) I know about the original short story. I'm going to assume that everything is kosher with both ST and TZ having their bases covered wrt to that. The particular elements that struck me (see below) aren't present in the original story (that I remember), so the story is probably irrelevant.

2) With Star Trek in particular being endlessly dissected online, you'd think this would already be well documented. But while I can find a lot of acknowledgement of similarity, I haven't found a single reference to the scene I remember or any legal ramifications.

3) While I've used some legaloid language, I'm not really interested in the legalities. I'm just wondering what's going on, because something clearly is.

Now, on to the question.

In the TZ episode, I remember seeing a shot of an aunt who had displeased Anthony and had her mouth removed. Instead, she had just skin there. She was sitting and rocking, I guess driven insane. (It's possible this scene isn't in the episode and that I'm remembering the movie, which reprises the basic concept. Reading over the entry, I think this is likely.) Another classic scene in the episode is seeing the result of one of Anthony's actions only via a shadow. This action happened at a party.

In the ST episode, Charlie is seen walking past a recreation room. Revelry sounds inside but you can't see in the room. All that's seen are shadows cast on the wall. Charlie pauses and all sound inside ceases and he walks on. A woman fumbles her way out and her face is gone, replaced by just skin.

The general commonality is the obvious "child with god-like powers". However, that could be explained away as being an idea that was "in the air" or even as a copy-with-changes to get a different story. But these specific elements make it seem like something was going on:

1) Party is ruined
2) Shadows on wall
3) Face removed

The ST and TZ episodes and the story are all written by separate people. The TZ ep predates the ST one by 5 years while movie comes 15 years after ST.

One hypothesis is this reach: The TZ ep is made (without the face removal). 5 years later, ST makes a similar episode and copies the party + shadow aspect and invents the face removal. 15 years after that, the TZ Movie writers, knowing about this copy, playfully "steal back" the face removal.

posted by DU to media & arts (7 comments total)

With regard to the movie, the filmmakers have clearly licensed the television episodes, so the point it moot -- they can "steal from themselves" all they want.

In the Star Trek case, it's likely they looked at the TZ episode and went, "Hey, that's a good visual that's easy to pull off with simple make-up. Let's do something similar."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:31 AM on July 15

It would certainly be difficult to claim that Gene Roddenberry and the other Star Trek crew were unaware of the story, since not only were William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and George Takei all TZ veterans, but Jerome Bixby--the author of the original story--wrote four ST: TOS episodes (but not "Charlie X", which was written by long-time ST writer D.C. Fontana from Roddenberry's story). I'd argue that it's not really that close of a ripoff, an homage or two aside, because:

1) Beings with incredible power, sometimes over reality itself, were a recurring theme in ST:TOS. Harlan Ellison (according to Stephen King in Danse Macabre) once said that Gene Roddenberry had one story, repeated numerous times with different variations: the Enterprise goes out into space, finds God, and God is either insane, a child, or both. Even in the two Star Trek pilots, you have people that either have the illusion (the Talosians) or the reality (Gary Mitchell) of absolute control over reality, at least the part around them.

2) They're not really that similar--"It's a Good Life" is more about the purported amorality of children, as demonstrated by a child that has no limits on the consequences of his actions and can't be disciplined by his parents. "Charlie X", on the other hand, is about an adolescent who is struggling with the conflict between the same amoral childlike desire and his need to be loved and appreciated. "It's A Good Life" is a more pure and terrifying SF story, while "Charlie X" is more complex and interesting. At least, that's this Trekkie's opinion.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:42 AM on July 15

No, I don't think so. The "shadows on the wall" device was pretty common in those days. It was just a dramatic device used to work within the less explicit, less graphic standards of the time. Even in Psycho, they never showed actual stabbing - and TV was a lot more restrictive than movies. Today, they might show everything that happened to everyone who was laughing. Then, they just showed a bit and you had to imagine the rest.

Still, that faceless chick freaked me out no end as a kid. I just knew the Thasians couldn't bring her back like they did with the other people that Charlie 'disappeared'.

Not to nitpick but Charlie was walking by a hallway, not a rec room.
posted by txvtchick at 11:55 AM on July 15

It's odd that this should come up now, since I'm fresh off of a Twilight Zone marathon which I followed by watching the newly remastered Star Trek first season.

My opinion is that Halloween Jack is quite correct; I sincerely doubt that there were similarities in the minds of Roddenberry et alia between “It's A Good Life” and “Charlie X.” They are actually quite different; the only similarity is really in the notion of a very powerful younger person being a threat. But the boy in “It's A Good Life” is very young, whereas Charlie is very specifically an adolescent with nascent sexual urges; witness, for example, his inappropriate obsession with Yeoman Rand.

The original scripting for “Charlie X” was even more different, as I recall: the episode was to be called “Charlie's Law” or something like that, and that law, stated by Charlie, was: “Be nice to Charlie—OR ELSE.” And even in its finished form, the episode is very much about Charlie's necessary submission to the father role that Kirk provides, and about the growing need for Kirk to take him in hand and guide and order him, explaining what to avoid and admonishing him when he kills people. That really doesn't happen in “It's A Good Life.”

Looking at the episode's Wikipedia page, I confirm that this episode was also one of the proposals for the second pilot; that is, when the studio had rejected the first pilot but the network head really liked the idea for the show, they asked for proposals for a second pilot, and this is one of the proposals that Gene Roddenberry presented. I have a feeling that Roddenberry would not have presented an ‘homage’ and would particularly have avoided a ripoff, in this situation where the spark of originality was paramount; but that's just my feeling.
posted by koeselitz at 12:01 PM on July 15

I'm completely open to the idea of the general idea being similar with no other hanky-panky going on. But that doesn't explain the coincidental facelessness. However, in my theory that that's something from the movie, rather than the TZ ep, I guess I'd need to know the writer(s) involved. Possibly a ST grad?
posted by DU at 7:30 PM on July 15

Well, the answer to that last is guardedly yes -- both Richard Matheson (credited with the script for "It's a Good Life") and Jerome Bixby wrote episodes for Trek. But I doubt there's a specific connection or homage intended -- these were, as noted, simply inexpensive ways to portray a special effect. They're familiar to all of the veterans of the live TV drama era from the 1950s that was influential on The Twilight Zone in many ways.

Basically, it's like the old saw about Shakespeare being derivative. Most of his plays have some sort of predecessor. The thing is, he took the same material and made it timeless. You can't copyright an idea or an element by itself, only the expression of those ideas, and I don't think there's enough here -- a slightly similar scene, expressing slightly similar ideas -- given the quite different context in which they appear.

You may want to ponder the idea of stage and screen conventions. It's like a toolkit that gets dragged out when you have to do certain things in a certain way, and they're familiar, but they're individually so discrete that they aren't really derivative of something else specific. It comes out of the limitations of the technology to communicate ideas, either on stage with no intervention, or on screen with some sleight-of-hand and camera angles. If there was anything there, at best you could say it was something the director ginned up based on a dim memory.
posted by dhartung at 9:14 PM on July 15

In case anyone's interest in that Star Trek episode has been piqued, it's available for viewing here.
posted by illenion at 11:01 PM on July 16 [1 favorite]