Harlan Ellison wrote two episodes of The Outer Limits — Soldier and Demon with a Glass Hand — that James Cameron supposedly plagiarized in making The Terminator.
I recently DVRed both episodes, before I realized they were available on Hulu (Soldier, Demon with a Glass Hand).
The opening to “Soldier” takes place on a blasted battleground, with laser strikes from unseen attackers in the sky. I suppose it has a similar feel to the future battlefields of Terminator — but with no skeletal robots marching on the skulls of human victims, no VTOL gunships, etc.
Two laser-armed foot-soldiers, their helmet headsets ordering them to “find the enemy, attack, kill,” soon clash, almost hand to hand, as two lasers from above strike, sending them not to their fiery graves but into the past — our present (circa 1964).
A few things jumped out:
- The soldiers of the future still smoke, of course. That’ll never change, right?
- Our super-soldier decides, in his clash with the police, to disintegrate the squad car they just got out of, but not to shoot either of the armed officers shooting at him. Huh?
- When they shoot his helmet off — really? — our super-soldier, with his super-hearing, can’t endure the cacophony of the city. Um, sure.
- The special effects are understandably bad, but the action scenes are equally bad. The super-soldier actor can’t hold a gun or wrestle to save his life. And he’s no Schwarzenegger, of course. By modern standards he doesn’t even look strong, let alone strong enough to tear through a steel door.
- When the super-soldier eventually breaks into a gun store — because his laser rifle has been taken away, not because he arrived, like the Terminator, naked and unarmed — he commandeers a “big thirty-ought-six Swedish hunting rifle.” You can re-chamber anything, but a Swedish rifle would likely be chambered for 6.5 mm, not .30-06, an American round.
“Demon with a Glass Hand” doesn’t share much with The Terminator, either, just a few elements. The hero, played by Robert Culp, is sent from the future to save humanity — but not by protecting anyone important to our future against robot assassins. Rather, he is the one who must survive, and his enemies are aliens. He seems to have amnesia, and his super-computer glass hand is missing some of its fingers, and “thus” can’t tell him much.
Some things that stood out:
- The special-effects were even worse than the ones in “Soldier,” but the action was much, much better. Robert Culp really can judo throw a stunt-man.
- The opening narration includes an odd error: the narrator says “Sumerican,” for “Sumerian.” How did that slip by?
- Have I mentioned how bad the special effects were? The aliens disguised as humans are literally guys with black rings painted around their eyes, with stockings over their heads, like bank-robbers. I can understand why the hero’s high-tech glass hand is laughably primitive-looking, but why not say that the aliens have near-perfect disguises and avoid the bad makeup?
- I’m not sure that the zinger ending makes a whole lot of sense.
I’m sure Cameron watched both episodes and they influenced his work, but influenced is about it.
The Honor Harrington books (set 2000 years in the future) feature smoking as well — with the logical explanation that it is a fashion that comes and goes over the centuries, with no real downside since cancer was cured long ago.
H.H. is basically space opera, with the clever twist that the weapon range, space ship velocity, accelerations and ship design are all nicely balanced so that the space battles can map directly onto Napoleonic-era naval battles. So the author just copies all the battle scenes and tactics from C.S.Forrester, Maryatt, O’Brien etc.
My only complaints are that the technology is in many cases between 1 and 50 years more advanced than our own, not 2000. And towards the end of the series it starts getting too relationshippy and sexual.
Apparently the author, David Weber, has called Honor Harrington Horatio Hornblower in space and has admitted that the H.H. initials are no accident.