Popularly Unknown Origins

 They are everywhere: we go out to the street and see scrap packaging with promotions, the out of home' (OOH) advertisings have the characters on their posters, the pirate blankets, the official toys, the DVDs at home (remnants of another era) and the most exciting conversation with any child, young person or university student.

Have we ever wondered the origin of all those stories and characters in cinema and literature? Many come from books, others from comics, others directly from anecdotes.

Pitching is a verb used in cinema for the first time a story is told. Whoever has the first idea acts as a storyteller to convince others to help him make the film.

There are stories that are imagined for the first time in a conversation. In a single breakfast, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and WALL-E were born.

Ultimately everything comes from real life. As David Hume writes, all the materials of thought derive from our  (internal or external) perception. The mind mixes them and thus there are works that are sums of pre-existing concepts. For example:

Squirrel + Rat = Scrat

Rambo = Tears of the Sun + Afghanistan

Pirates + the supernatural = Pirates of the Caribbean

World War 2, Royal Air Force ships had some flaws. It was said, jokingly: “they must have some little monsters, some Gremlins.” Regarding the etymology there are two hypotheses: gremian, which means to vex, or a combination of the name of the Brothers Grimm and Fremlin, an English brewery.

The Hannibal Lecter character came from a doctor locked up in a Monterrey prison: apparently the one who had the last death sentence in Mexico.

Fast and Furious came out of this article.

Spiderman came from a pulp fiction (cheap paper publication) from the 1930s, called Spider. They also wanted to create a superhero that teenagers could identify with.

Iron Man was created as a perfect capitalist to be hated. The public had the opposite reaction.

Batman = bat + Superman

Superman came from Douglas Fairbanks Sr., but Clark Kent from Harold Lloyd + Joe Shuster (the creator). The name comes from Clark Gable + Kent Taylor.

A man who was going to be a father began to play by saying what he imagined the new baby would say. Look who's talking.

Star Wars came out of Flash Gordon.

Andersen's book Den lille havfrue gave rise to The Little Mermaid.

Toy Story came out of Tin Toy:

A newspaper and advertising cartoonist, at age 61 began writing children's books; two years later he wrote Shrek!

Zootopia came from the animation style of Robin Hood + The Wind in the Willows, but also from the mathematical ratio in the population of prey and predators (10/1).

Robin Hood is a story whose origins date back to the XIII or XIV century.

When a certain budding writer's mother died, she transferred her orphan pain to the Harry Potter character, and her intellectual side to Hermione Granger.

From a super reader of pulp fictions came Tarzan, and from Tarzan came Avatar, whose creator says that he mixed all the science fiction that his eyes had read.

Aladar is like a feral child, but in Dinosaur.

I did an article on the influences of The Matrix, called La Fuente de la Matriz.

Ice Age and The Flintstones are based on the dawn of humanity.

Sometimes writers start to concoct many ideas, most of which they discard, thus was born Zootopia (whose story competed with those of The Three Musketeers, a mad scientist cat or a pug dog in space) and The Flintstones (who competed with Romans, pilgrims and Native Americans).

C.S. Lewis explains the origin of Narnia (the mental image of a faun with a parasol and some packages in the forest) in a short essay called “It all began with a picture” where he advises that we not believe writers too much when they say how They wrote their books, because they normally don't know it, because of the emotion that writing causes.

The daughter of a Hebridean-owning viscount (Colbhasa Beag) wrote How to Train Your Dragon, because she remembered her holiday on the Scottish islands.

A boy looking at her dentist's fish tank would become the director of Finding Nemo. Another, who had two pet chickens, would be the creator of Chicken Run. The one of The Incredibles reflected his own dysfunctional family. In 2000 or ca. a couple was in a kitchen and suddenly her husband came up with the story of a rat who wanted to be a chef, thus Ratatouille was born.

There are entire articles on Wikipedia about the influences of important sagas such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. But what triggered Tolkien's was a statement in his mind: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids came, in part, from The Incredible Shrinking Man. And Flubber, from The Absent Minded Professor.

Dead Poets Society of experiences at Montgomery Bell Academy, with teacher Samuel Pickering.

The book that gave rise to Blade Runner came from the creator of Scientology.

Crocodile Dundee is based on the image that Americans had of Australians, as tough Northern Territory bushmen, and the creator said why not give them a hero like that?

A spiritualist had a son who experimented with radios to contact the dead, the granddaughter believed she saw ghosts, the great-grandson wrote the book A History of Ghosts and the great-great-grandson directed the movie Ghostbusters.

Lethal Weapon was conceived as an urban western with a bit of Dirty Harry and a character fighting the same type of person he had been.

An adult opened his parents' old yearbook and wondered what it would be like if he and his father were friends at school: Back to the Future.

When a certain boy's parents divorced, the boy made an imaginary friend, an alien, E.T.

Indiana Jones came out of serial cinema, with a theme of archeology + the supernatural.

They say that Beauty and the Beast could have come from Cupid and Psyche, a story by Apuleius.

Pocahontas came from Tiger Lily, an Indian female character from Peter Pan. I have an article about Pan called Everything that Pan originated.

Die Hard came from the novel Nothing Lasts Forever, a sequel to The Detective, whose author worked in a detective agency, his father's business.

Someone sees a plastic bag blown by the wind for 10 minutes and gets excited. Then he sees how, after the Amy Fisher scandal, the media quickly publishes a comic. These two experiences gave rise to American Beauty.

Godzilla is a kaiju (a Japanese term for a monster that attacks a city and often fights the military) and a metaphor for nuclear weapons.

True Lies came from the French movie La totale!

The Mummy is a remake.

Ghost is somewhat inspired by Hamlet. The Lion King too.

They say that Pretty Woman is inspired by Wall Street + The Last Detail, but that the story could be traced back to Pygmalion.

A father who was going on vacation wonders what his son would do if he left him behind. Home Alone

The Exorcist + Ordinary People = The Sixth Sense

Men in Black is based on a comic that is based on the fact that, according to those who claim to see UFOs, these agents appear when there is a sighting and silence witnesses.

There was a documentary called Titanica, years before the director of Titanic filmed his famous work. When he saw her he wanted to make a similar expedition.

In an interview about an alien movie, the reporter asked why make a movie about aliens if you don't even believe in them? The director interviewed responded about his fascination with the hypothetical arrival: he imagined waking up one morning and seeing enormous ships floating over world capitals. At that moment he got the spotlight for his next work: Independence Day.

A script became a novel, the novel based on ideas of experimental genetics became a script again (Jurassic Park).

Two Michael Jordan commercials with Bugs Bunny gave rise to Space Jam.

Edward Scissorhands came from a drawing in which a boy expressed his inability to communicate with the people in his own neighborhood. That cartoonist loved the Christmas and Halloween holidays equally, how they change the structure of reality (for children especially): Nightmare before Christmas.

An Italian horror trilogy called Black Sabbath was the first inspiration for Pulp Fiction, and we already know the meaning of that title.

The Cadbury chocolate factory visited the school of the boy who would later write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Where did this same article come from? almost everything from the Production sections from each Wikipedia article and the Trivia sections on IMDb.