Seems like Journey to the West is referenced and copied so much in Eastern cultures without any fear of it getting old or going stale.
Is there something similar for Westerners? Is there some Shakespearean story we keep re-imagining again and again without shame?
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I’d like to throw Goethe’s Faust into the ring. Someone being seduced by the devil while they think they’re playing the devil to do good deeds is a classic trope.
Tolkien. Copied over and over again. Essentially invented the fantasy genre.
The Arthurian legends come to mind.
King Arthur isn’t “one story” though. King Arthur is closer to 1100s-era fanart / fanfiction culture.
EVERYONE was making King Arthur stories back then. And guess what? They contradicted. That’s why we have Excalibur vs Sword in the Stone (sometimes they’re the same sword. Sometimes they aren’t. Its a big contradiction because there’s no singular author).
The Chinese Great Novel “Journey to the West” is truly one story by one author with multiple millennia of copycats. Meanwhile, King Author is basically a millennia of copycats without anyone knowing who the original was to begin with. Very different fundamentally.
The odyssey
The Canterbury Tales
You see the theme a lot, sometimes quite literal, like Hyperion, sometimes just a group on an adventure where each member has a story, like LOTR. Also in movies like The Breakfast Club, Love Actually or Snatch
Hyperion is so fucking good, I recently re-read the entire series again.
Canterbury Tales also has some amazingly good stories despite it’s age. I guess some things are timeless!
If by “western” you mean “everything west of China”, then the Shahnameh.
If you mean “European/Mediterranean”, then Homer.
If you specifically mean “western Europe”, then yeah—probably Shakespeare.
If you’re okay restricting it to Britain, someone mentioned King Arthur.
Anything can be Shakespeare if you look hard enough
Hamlet is a favorite to repackage, I felt like I unlocked a cheat code to understanding media after I read it as a kid
Chronicles of Riddick was Macbeth.
I never thought about it until you said it, but yeah.
The Illiad and the Odyssey for sure. Pretty sure Homer is just the concept of a person that we think might have written them because all those stories were primarily told orally and told slightly differently with each recalling
The Odyssey for sure, for a given value of “west”.
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.
The plot of Hamlet gets reused again and again.
Famously, The Lion King is Hamlet with a happy ending, for example. Any other ones you’re thinking of?
You know, I read Hamlet and watched The Lion King. There’s an evil uncle and ghost dad visits. That’s a couple parallels but otherwise the plots are not overly similar.
There’s an evil uncle and ghost dad visits
Evil Uncle who becomes king. Former King becomes a Ghost Dad after Hamlet/Simba goes crazy on drugs. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (Timone and Pumba) jump in and provide 4th wall breaking commentary and comedy.
You seem to have missed quite a few references.
I’m not sure there being a couple funny guys is unique enough to count, comedic duos are a very standard setup and appear in totally different Shakespeare plays as well. Both center on royalty though, that’s true.
The ghost dad thing happens in completely different places in the story. Simba grows up in exile instead of being back from college at the beginning. The Ophelia thing. Everyone doesn’t die at the end in an accidentally comical pileup of errors. There’s no Fortinbras, but there is Rafiki. I can’t remember if there’s anything like the hyenas in Hamlet, but I kind of don’t think so. At best the uncle had a couple of henchmen.
If the meme was that they’re strikingly similar, I’d agree with that, but the meme is that it’s an exact ripoff.
I can’t remember if there’s anything like the hyenas in Hamlet, but I kind of don’t think so
Gravediggers at the Elephant Graveyard.
Eh, it’s a stretch. Maybe they included a bunch of bones thinking of hamlet, but they used them in a totally different way. IIRC that was another comical duo with little connection to the story, and then Hamlet shows up and makes it edgy.
Ophelia doesn’t get driven suicidally insane in the lion king.
Black Panther is clearly Hamlet in reverse.
Even got the spirit of ancestors / ghost scene, kings, wrong princes, duels and lots of killing.
The heros journey.
Its been copied so much no one really knows what the original was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey#/media/File:Heroesjourney.svg
Gilgamesh, the first story ever written, basically follows that construction, more or less. 5 indenpendent adventures written down separately in Sumerian around 2100 BCE (from a likely centuries older oral tradition), then compiled in a single Old Babylonian story around 1800 BCE, rewritten over the next 600 years. We literally don’t have any written story older than that beside individual poems.
Not: Gilgamesh is the oldest still surviving written story.
There was writing older than Gilgamesh. There were cities and culture before 2000BCE. Its just so old that nothing at all survived beyond that time period.
There’s the Bronze Age Collapse, Burning of the Great Library, and many other events that destroyed history in the 1000BCE period. Those old people may have had older records than Gilgamesh, but all we have today is Gilgamesh if that makes any sense.
