Do you have examples of copycatting in music, movies, tv, comics, etc.?

Lady Gaga Born This Way compared to Madonna’s Express Yourself

If you listen to the bass and guitar lines starting at 0:08 in In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, you can hear the similarity to Sunshine of Your Love.

You can hear the A-G-F chord progression starting at 0:18 in All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix, and the same progression can be heard throughout Stairway to Heaven and particularly at about 6:30.

The same formula used in crime drama shows like the 80 versions of CSI and Law and Order.

Here are a few more.

A particularly glaring and controversial one is between Repo! The Genetic Opera and Repomen. Both have basically the same plot, and Repomen came out very quickly after Repo!

All Summer Long -Kid Rock directly lifts
Werewolves of London – Warren Zevon

Also it often seems studios are rushing to release similar films:
Antz vs. A Bug’s Life
Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano
M*A*S*H vs. Catch-22

Back ground music for lupe fiasco – show goes on
is modest mouse’s float on

Um…wash it out…?

I can’t listen to that Kid Rock rendition @Blueroses. It ticks me off too much.

This seems to now be an acceptable practise. Lift the music from someone else’s work and apply new (usually crappier) lyrics.

Wow, wrong answer to the wrong question….my bad….

It’s not just Tarantino’s film references, he copycats whole segments. The plot of Reservoir Dogs is loosely based on a Korean film I believe he likely saw. I’m not saying he copies, but he certainly absorbs, much like the argument comedians will use when they misappropriate material unintentionally. You watch enough of something and you can’t help it.
A sequence at the beginning of Jackie Brown reminded me of the film Slacker: you expect the camera to leave the subject, but instead it follows the subject into the next ‘scene’.
Dreamworks versus Disney/Pixar etc. etc.- a whole essay in itself on the eerie ‘coincidences’ of animated movies coming out at similar times, e.g. Antz & A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo & A Shark’s Tale.
Then there’s an entire cottage industry based on popular movies, with almost identical stories, DVD covers, and names: Men In Black and The Man In Black would be an example I just made up. The thinking behind this, one has to assume, is that people who liked the original might like to see the story done again on a miniscule budget (doubtful) or that most people in Blockbuster are dumb enough to be fooled into renting your cheap imitation (more likely!).

How about the rampant copying and remaking of films and TV series:

Three’s Company is a for-Americans version/copy of a British TV series.

Steven King’s Kingdom Hospital is not actually Steven King’s idea – it’s a for-Americans version/copy of the Danish mini-series The Kingdom.

The Asylum is a hilarious film company which makes cheap funny (or just baaad) copies of current films: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum

The film with Tom Hanks The Man with One Red Shoe is a for-Americans version/copy of the French classic comedy Le Grand blond avec une chaussure noire (the tall blonde man with one black shoe).

How many versions of The Visitors are there? The first one, again, was French.

The Magnificent Seven is an American Western version of a Japanese Samurai movie.

More Hollywood “gee let’s make a Hollywood version of an old popular thing because we have no original ideas films”: The Avengers, Bewitched, Mission Impossible, oh there are tons…

There are quite a few Hollywood movies that either directly or indirectly use classic novels or plays, ones I can remember include:

Shakespeare:
Taming Of The Shrew -> Ten Things I Hate About You
The Tempest -> Forbidden Planet
Othello -> O

Jane Austen:
Emma -> Clueless
Pride and Prejudice -> Bridget Jones Diary
(these two apparently borrow some themes plus a few character names)

There are quite a few Hollywood versions of movies that were successful in other countries, e.g.

REC -> Quarantine (the original movie is Spanish)
Bella Martha -> No Reservations (German)
3 hommes et un couffin -> 3 Men and a Baby (French)
Mon père, ce héros -> My Father the Hero (French, this is especially bad, since the main actor is the same)
Ringu -> The Ring (Japan)
Män som hatar kvinnor -> The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Swedish)
Nattevagten -> Nightwatch (Danish)

For double movies released at a similar time, there is a list in Wikipedia maintained as a user document at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProhibitOnions/List_of_films_with_similar_themes_and_release_dates

If you are talking about copycatting movies, there is another example (don’t know if this is completely true)

Supposedly an executive at Disney/Pixar took detailed notes of story ideas for movies they wanted to produce and the went to Dreamworks and produced movies based on loosely the same ideas, e.g.

a movie about monsters, a movie about rats, a movie about fish/sharks, a movie about ants

(edit: just noticed that bugs and fish were mentioned before by @Rheto_Ric)

Movie scriptwriters and some songwriters like to call it ‘borrowing’, which of course sounds more noble than copying…..or plagiarizing.

Listen to the late 60s hit ‘Soul Finger’, and then the theme song from ‘Ghostbusters’.

That’s pretty blatant ‘borrowing’ right there, and I think that somebody owes somebody else some money…