If I believed in copyright, I’d say J. Neil Schulman’s case against the government(s) for enacting a public performance of the central plot of Schulman’s novel Alongside Night was a good one.
(But I hope JNS won’t sue us when we enact the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre part of the story.)
From an info page about the 1996 Doctor Who tv-movie:
Due to complicated licensing and ownership of the telefilm, no North American (a.k.a. Region 1) home video release has occurred in either VHS or DVD formats as of 2009, and no such release is expected in the foreseeable future. Ironically, several of the featurettes on the UK DVD were produced specifically for US audiences.
In fact, to compound the irony, the entire movie itself was specifically geared toward American audiences – which, incidentally, was one of the reasons it wasn’t as good as the recent BBC revival. Still, I imagine American Who fans would buy it if they were allowed to.
There are some interesting similarities between Doctor Who, the benign but playfully eccentric genius who travels around in a flying police call box, and Willy Wonka, the benign but playfully eccentric genius who travels around in a flying glass elevator.
Each was created independently (Doctor Who premiered in late 1963 and the first Wonka book was published in early 1964), so there’s no initial influence either way. But the Doctor’s characterisation in Doctor Who gradually becomes more Wonka-like over time, suggesting the possibility of influence from the book (and later, the 1971 movie) on the series. (Tom Baker, arguably the most Wonka-like Doctor to that date – both in personality and in candy fixation – took over the role in 1974.)
And the second Wonka book, published in 1973, and featuring Wonka and his elevator traveling into outer space and fighting creepy aliens called Vermicious Knids, quite possibly shows influence in the reverse direction. (Certainly no British children’s fantasy author in the 1970s would have been unaware of Doctor Who.)
Speaking of Doctor Who, I came across a pretty good parody, written by Steven Moffat himself back before the series had been revived. I have to say, Rowan Atkinson’s not bad as the Doctor.
Nice piece by Jeff Riggenbach on William Godwin. And what he says about the respective roles of communism and individualism in Godwin’s theory strikes me as basically right.
It’s also worth noting (since Riggenbach mentions Caleb Williams toward the end) that there’s been a revival of interest in Godwin’s novels as well; indeed I find that among academics he’s perhaps best known for his role in the development of the Romantic novel.
The theme of Caleb Williams might be described as “the problem of other minds, viewed through the lens of class analysis.” It concerns an innocent commoner being persecuted (for complicated reasons) by an aristocrat, where the difference in social status between the two men makes it literally impossible for even the most well-intentioned third parties to take seriously the possibility that the fault lies with the aristocrat; the notion that the aristocrat might be other than as he seems is treated as a skeptical hypothesis that can be entertained in the abstract but cannot seriously be lived. (Godwin had a deep interest in Humean worries about ordinary beliefs’ being unfounded yet impossible to surrender; see my Godwin paper.)
Among Godwin’s other novels, the best known is St.-Léon (originally titled The Adept), about an alchemist who discovers the twin secrets of making gold and of living forever. Just as H.G. Wells seems to have been the first writer to explore what being invisible would actually be like (including the disadvantages it would entail), so Godwin does the same thing for immortality and inexhaustible wealth. Byron once paid the novel a rather Byronic compliment:
[A]fter asking Godwin why he did not write a new novel, his lordship received from the old man the answer, that it would kill him. “And what matter,” said Lord Byron, “we should have another St.-Léon.”
(Given Godwin’s views on archbishops and chambermaids, he could hardly have objected to Byron’s suggested trade-off.)