Remakes

Speaking of me getting tired of movie remakes.  It's certainly not a new phenomena.

Last of the Comanches and the well in Sahara.  The first is a run of the mill western, the second is  Humphrey Bogart movie  WWII north Africa movie.  In both they come to a well that is nearly dry, and one of the party goes down and finds a small drip.  Slowly he accumulates water and send it up in a bucket on a rope.  The scene is clearly lifted one from the other, ten years apart.

The plaster coated diamond encrusted cross from a new word catholic cathedral is found after a treasure hunt in TV's Cheyenne and the film Maru Maru with Errol Flynn.  A little Hispanic boys insists it belongs back at the church and gets his way.  The TV episode was Devil's Canyon and came out in 1957, the movie in 1952.

Watchmen and Mad Max with the hacksaw scene.  And in Saw, I guess.  A peril is presented to some poor sod.  The fire is coming, the poison is spreading.  You are chained by the ankle to something heavy.  No time to hacksaw through the metal.  Your only hope is to hacksaw off your foot.  I first saw it in Mad Max, then in Watchmen, then in Saw, but I am sure Mad Max got it from somewhere else.  The scene from the movie to the comic book is only 7 years apart.  25 years from the Max movie to Saw.

All of these are almost assuredly 'borrowed' from pulp fiction stories from the 1930s.  There is nothing new under the sun.

I guess we should be thankful that anything very original is written at all.