5 Shockingly Lazy Ways Famous People Recycled Their Old Work

Ironically, the plot of The Island is all about cloning people and pillaging the clones' bodies for spare parts ... and double-ironically, that movie itself is a blatant rip-off of an older one. Did Bay intentionally pick a movie no one cares about to ensure he could get away with it? Was he trying to comment on the disposable nature of modern entertainment? Does he simply not give a shit anymore? Or, had the world simply reached Marky Mark critical mass?

DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Pictures
Mark Wahlberg didn't even know he was in Transformers 4 -- it was all
recycled footage from Pain & Gain.

Garfield is an almost offensively inoffensive comic strip about a slovenly cat with an eating disorder who irrationally hates Mondays (as others have pointed out, he is a cat without a job -- Monday is literally just like every other day of the week to him). However, if you pay attention, the truth is much darker: This is actually the story of a bunch of characters trapped in a hellish Groundhog Day-esque time loop, forced to repeat the same lame dad jokes over and over again. And we mean the exact same jokes:

Paws, Inc./United Feature Syndicate
We're using the term loosely.

The fact that creator Jim Davis is the antithesis of an artist probably has a lot to do with it -- he has talked multiple times about how he doesn't give a damn about Garfield beyond the money-making machine that character has become. Even then, it's surprising to see just how blatant and lazy he is about shamelessly redrawing his old strips:

Paws, Inc./United Feature Syndicate
You'd think Garfield would be used to being disappointed by now.

Paws, Inc./United Feature Syndicate
At least Davis is honest about his top priority in life.

Paws, Inc./United Feature Syndicate
The only loser here is us.

When you do hundreds of strips a year for four decades, some basic ideas are bound to repeat, but look at the poses in the examples below -- Davis (or, more accurately, the assembly line of artists he employs) stopped just short of tracing the originals before putting a new date on them and sending them off to newspapers worldwide, presumably in an envelope filled with his own farts. In some cases, he didn't even bother changing a single word.

Paws, Inc./United Feature Syndicate
At least the background's a different color.

Paws, Inc./United Feature Syndicate
"Just plug in a new number every year. It's a
cat's birthday. Who gives a shit?" - Jim Davis

Paws, Inc./United Feature Syndicate
The only thing greater than Garfield's contempt for Odie
is Davis' contempt for his audience.

Those last two examples were repeated only a year apart, by the way. There are many, many, many, many, many, many more examples, but listing them all would take us several articles. Not even Garfield And Friends, the beloved Saturday morning cartoon from late '80s to early '90s, was above recycling bits verbatim:

Incidentally, they just announced the title of the third live
action movie: Garfield 3: A Tale Of Two Kitties.

That is one of two master cuts of repeated lines that Sorkin has used in all of his shows and films. Because brevity is the soul of you not getting bored and clicking away, here is a master paragraph showing you some of the lines in that video:

"The only thing you had to do to make [parent] happy is come home safe at night."

"I'm not going to like you very much am I?" "Don't be ridiculous, [name], everybody likes me."

"I could buy [place] [number] times over and turn it into my pingpong room."

"It seems more and more we've come to expect less and less of each other."

"This isn't [TV/government] camp. It's not important everyone get to play."

"I'm like Tippi Hedren here."

"The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels."

"[My/Her] legs do go all the way down to the floor."

"As if it matters how a man falls down." "When the fall is all that's left, it matters a great deal."

"Fire me or shut the hell up."

"Well, that was predictable."

Jason Merritt/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images, Kevin Winter/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Mark Davis/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

That last one is particularly biting.

Again, those are only a few of the recycled lines, and we're not even counting the second "Aaron Sorkin's Greatest Hits" video. He repeats lines on a show-by-show, episode-by-episode basis, as if he keeps his favorite phrases tacked up on index cards around his desk while he writes. Some of his best/worst examples include using the name "Mohammed Al Mohammed El Mohammed Bin Bazir," having a character explain how awesome he is by including the joke "and I'm never ever sick at sea," and this very specific gag:

Warner Brothers Television Distribution, HBO
OK.

Hell, even one of the most famous lines in the Facebook movie -- "If you guys were the inventor of [thing], you would have invented [thing]" -- was first used in Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Of course, nobody saw that show, so Sorkin probably figured it was fair game.

In 1983, they released another song called "O My God," in which Sting soulfully croons:

"Do I have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met?
It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet."

Ten years later, Sting proved he still had it by recording a song called "Seven Days" for one of his solo albums. This contains evocative lyrics like:

"Do I have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met?
It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet."

Michael Putland/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
"I just want to sing about my umbrella."

Perhaps the key to unraveling this mystery is the fact that "Every Little Thing She Does" is actually a pre-Police song from a band called Strontium 90 that Sting belonged to in 1976. The Strontium demo version is pretty different from the Police one, except for the first few lines of lyrics, which are as follows:

"Do I have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met?
It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet."

By the spice mines of Arrakis, Sting, please come up with a new metaphor.

That's just one of the more egregious examples from the show's 254-episode run. Look, we're probably going to start repeating ourselves when we get to that age, too, but Bewitched's writers threw in the towel and began remaking episodes as early as season three -- by the last one, more than half of the "new" episodes borrowed something from older scripts. Sometimes it was specific jokes, sometimes it was general plotlines, and sometimes it was, well, the whole thing. One script got used three times:

IMDB, IMDB, IMDB
It was later remade again as the weirdest Mad Men episode ever.

One episode in season five was about little Tabitha's first day in school, when she turns a classmate into a butterfly. Another one in season eight is about a slightly older Tabitha's first day in school (how many of those did she have?), when she turns a classmate into a frog. Both episodes even featured the same actress playing different teachers:

Sony Pictures Television
"Making them the exact opposite of these scripts."

Then again, maybe they felt that since their show was already being plagiarized by I Dream Of Jeannie, they should stop coming up with new ideas for those bastards to steal.

But, that was a garbage sitcom -- you wouldn't see shit like this pulled by an award-winning, groundbreaking show such as M*A*S*H, right? After all, this was a truly great comedy that could take on some big subjects -- such as a season seven episode called "Preventative Medicine," which deals with Hawkeye slipping an asshole colonel a drug that makes him think he has appendicitis, which would result in the colonel being sent home to America. The medics then debate the morality of performing an unnecessary operation on a healthy man to save the lives of the soldiers who would be under his command.

20th Television
"Save this guy!"

And then, you had other episodes that were pure hilarity: like season three's "White Gold," in which Hawkeye slips an asshole colonel a drug that makes him think he has appendicitis as part of a plan to send him home. The medics then gleefully perform an unnecessary operation on a healthy man because he ... just bugs them, basically.

20th Television
"Fuck this guy."

Yeah, it was the exact same premise, played as a comedy first and then a drama, just like that crappy Woody Allen/Will Ferrell movie. The crazy thing is, not a single member of the M*A*S*H crew noticed until one of them happened to watch an old rerun of the show and realized it was the exact same premise as the episode they were filming (this was in the days before the Internet, so they didn't really have a way to check for overlap outside of their own memories). Not having time or money to reshoot, they did the only thing they could think to do: They decided to air the episode up against the Oscars to make sure that it got absolutely buried in the ratings, so that no one would even notice what "blithering idiots" (in the words of the one of the writers) they were.

What they didn't seem to remember was that there was yet another episode with a similar plot -- Hawkeye and Trapper convince an asshole colonel he's ill in order to get him sent home and save lives. Despite the fact that this episode guest-starred Leslie Nielsen, the M*A*S*H staff apparently forgot it ever existed.

20th Television
Possibly because putting a dramatic actor in a comedy series was a recipe for disaster.

Michael Bay and Sting aren't the only guys who are sometimes creatively lacking. Even James Cameron can't make an original movie. See what we mean in 7 Directors Who Stole Their Biggest Hits (From Themselves). And also check out 5 Insanely Blatant Acts Of Plagiarism By Famous People.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 4 Famous Musicians (Who Stole Their Biggest Hits), and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also, follow us on Facebook. Or, you know, don't. We're not going to tell you how to live your life.