Hollywood ripoff artists

The other night, I watched Flight of the Phoenix. It was not very much like Flight of the Navigator. Anyway, the movie was somewhere between OK and So-So.

On Saturday night, we watched the Star Trek Voyager disk Tara got from Netflix. It had the episode "Rise" on it. Funny enough, there were a number of plot elements in "Rise" that Flight of the Phoenix ripped off. (7 years later. Can the Star Trek people still go after the Flight of the Phoenix people?)

Upon further review, it turns out that Flight of the Phoenix is a remake from a 1965 movie. What? Hollywood did a remake? So maybe the Star Trek people desperately needed a story and watched this movie one night. It looks like an interesting cast, maybe I should get the 1965 movie from Netflix... (Or can the original Flight of the Phoenix people go after the Star Trek people?)

***Spoiler Alert*** - don't read the rest of this post if you have not watched either the movie or the episode, and do not want to hear about it...

Anyway, not really knowing how the 1965 movie went, but assuming the plot was similar, here are the things I noticed:

Format is: Star Trek - Flight of the Phoenix
Shuttle crash after flying through turbulence - Plane crash after flying through storm
No way to contact Voyager - No way to contact anyone
Neelix decides he can fix a space tether - Little guy decides he can build a new plane
Neelix used to work on space tethers - Little guy is a plane designer
Now comes the big spoiler. I have done it in white font, highlight the next line to read
Neelix only used to work on models, not real tethers - Little guy only designed model airplanes

I was amused that Flight of the Phoenix ripped off plot elements from Star Trek to do their movie, which really wasn't all that good. (Was the older one better? Anyone know?) Now I'm amused that the Star Trek people ripped off plot elements from an old movie to do their episode, which really wasn't all that good. (Almost like they needed a filler episode. In later seasons, the filler episodes always involved the Borg, or Seven of Nine, or the Borg children...)

That's right folks, I have no real life.