I really don't like this month

One of the difficulties with moving in August is that the few hours when it's cool enough in my apartment that I feel like sorting, packing, etc are the same few hours when I should be sleeping.

Immortality through plagiarism

It's strange to consider that two of the most long-lived (in various incarnations and re-makes) and famous animated series are rather obvious knock-offs of classic live-action TV shows. I'm referring, of course, to The Honeymooners and... Dobie Gillis. (Okay, so one's a bit better remembered, half a century later, than the other.)

What makes this a little less surprising is that "copy what works" was pretty much Hanna and Barbera's stock in trade (along with cheap, limited animation *rimshot*). Not only do you have the official adaptions - of everything from I Dream of Jeannie and The Addams Family to Godzilla - and the endless further mutations of the basic Scooby-Doo formula, one of which replaced the dog with Curly Howard in a shark suit; there's also the expies, like Top Cat (Phil Silvers' Sgt. Bilko) and, for god's sake, Yogi Bear (who, despite being named for a baseball player, is really more a case of H-B going back to the well of Art Carney for another drink).

You can't really call these parody, IMO, as they don't really make fun of the source - they just copy and transplant it, more or less entire, to a new milieu. The modern equivalent would be the AU fanfic. And in many cases, the mannerisms and such become more associated with the animated character than the actor/comedian who originated them. (How many people know who first said most of Bugs Bunny's funniest lines?) The content lives on, without its original context.