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I know this comment is remix of commentaries from many individuals over the span of forever, but here goes anyway.

I'm not going to defend Hollywood's endless regurgitation of the same material. The dearth of original ideas in that town is appalling. However, if you read Joseph Campbell, other mythologists, and literary experts, you'll know that there are really only a limited number of original stories in the first place. Kirby Ferguson even mentions Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. One author whose name completely escapes me at the moment wrote that there are only about 60 stories - various tragedies, romances, heroic adventures, and even comedies have their roots in basic stories that have been told for millennia. Other experts will say there are fewer stories than that, others will say more, but you get my point. However, it's HOW those stories are retold is what makes them great, mediocre, shitty, etc.

Take the movie The Fighter. It's a classic story of an underdog beating the odds and achieving greatness. In this case it's a true story, but it's a classic. Just ask Rocky. However what made The Fighter great was in the details, especially the acting. Melissa Leo, Amy Adams, and Christian Bale all turned in great performances.

Also George Lucas did take a LOT from other films, but he made the material his own and succeeded wildly with Star Wars. (Then 20 years later he took all that greatness and took a huge fucking dump on it, almost souring me on my love of the originals.)

So I don't mind stories being retold, as long as the filmmakers can make them their own, keep them interesting, and stock them with good actors (not necessarily famous actors, but good actors). I hope Kirby Ferguson touches on this in the third part.

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I think this is true simply because of the way that our minds work, except that description has a double linkage. First, even the most original creator or developer of something is going to at least subconsciously reference other things that they have experienced or been exposed to, because our minds search for context inside of our own past.

And second, and perhaps more interestingly, our minds are going to see links between the new and the old and assume (correctly or not) that the new thing was clearly inspired by the old thing. Sometimes (many times) that may actually be correct, but we can easily be overestimating or inferring a connection that doesn't really exist because our brains are always looking for context and ways to pigeonhole things.

I don't really see any of this as anything to apologize for; even in the cases of the basest examples of regurgitated material. And in some cases, an homage that less than 1% of an audience will even pick up on (say perhaps the whistled tune in Kill Bill -- I certainly didn't get the reference) can be a very cool addition.

Tolkien has always struck me as having had an amazing creative mind. He drew from various mythologies, referenced a great many sources, but made an entire world with a history, population, and major events all in his own imagination. Of particular amazement to me is that a large percentage of what he created was just backstory, which he apparently never particularly intended for consumption by a larger audience (The Silmarillion for example).

you know what I love? People asking for money at the end of there videos so they can make more...

I learned most of this in school, but it's cool to see it all condensed into a short clip -- Now go watch all of the movies that Star Wars was stitched out of! (They're all classics that you should have seen by now.)

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