Zootopia: Hollywood, Quit Stealing My Ideas!

Zootopia was a lot of fun.  It's well-written, full of easter eggs and casting jokes, and has a great message about racism.  They put so much work into the little details, with all the billboards and magazine covers and so on.  The only thing I didn't enjoy was all the screaming kids in the audience, but that's unavoidable when seeing a matinee of an animated movie.  I can't wait to see Zootopia again on home video, so I can hear all the dialogue.  I'm probably going to wear out my pause button trying to read all the signs in the background.

One thing that bugs me as I get older, is that a lot of my unrealized ideas keep getting made by other people.  No, I'm not accusing anyone of plagiarism, it's just that there's 7 billion people in the world, sooner or later we're going to come up with similar thoughts.  I keep sitting on my ideas for decades, while other people are more motivated to publish their work.  On the bright side, a lot of these works end up being better than mine would have been.  So I'm glad the idea made it out there for the world to see.  On the downside, if I were to finally publish my old ideas, it would look like I was the plagiarist. 

My "Bounty Hunters" story, about a small team of bounty hunters that live on a spaceship?  There's a popular anime that uses the same concept.  The two stories are nothing alike beyond the initial theme, but still it's kind of annoying.  One member of my bounty hunting team is Raven, a woman with short hair who wears a trench coat.  Not long after I created her, the Highlander TV series created a spin-off called "Highlander: The Raven", featuring a protagonist who looked similar to my Raven.  The characters were nothing alike beyond appearance, but it was still a weird coincidence.  I mean, if they'd called it "Highlander: The Mockingbird" I wouldn't have even noticed the similarities, but they had to pick a Raven.

And there's more, and I'm not saying I was always first.  I once wrote a short story about a woman who gains skills by remembering past lives, only to find out there was already popular comic book with a similar plot.  When it happens in that order, I'm never quite sure if I actually came up with the idea, or read about the other comic first and forgot about it.  Another example is The Cat Club.  When I was a kid in the early 80s, I drew comics by that name.  Later I found a series of children's books in the library, called "Jenny and the Cat Club." 

My Cat Club was basically GI Joe, but all the good guys were cats and the bad guys were dogs.  In later years, I put a couple of evil cats on the dog team... but not vice-versa.  I didn't go into too much detail about the civilians of this universe, but usually they were shown to be cats.  There were a couple of examples of dogs betraying their kind to help the cats, but for the most part it seemed like all the dogs in the world were evil.

After I graduated high school, I started thinking about modernizing the idea.  But when I really looked at the subject matter, I thought, "Man, that's racist."  So I started writing out ways to make it non-racist.  Or better yet, make racism the central theme of the universe.  In my modern, unwritten version of the Cat Club, only dogs and cats evolved into more humanoid forms (there is an in-universe reason for this).  Dogs and cats live together in shaky harmony.  There are some racial supremacists on both sides, but most citizens believe in equality.  Still, a lot of dogs and cats are nervous around each other, and tend to hang around their own species. 

A lot of racism issues would be touched upon.  There would be some inter-species dating, but some groups would be against it.  Some retailers would refuse to sell to the opposite species.  Some sports would only allow one species or the other.  Legal or not, some employers would more readily hire one or the other.  I'd try to avoid any direct correlation between dogs/cats and real-life races.  In some ways life is better for the cats, in some ways it favors the dogs.  Neither would be inherently evil or good.  They have a lot of biological differences that make them more suited to certain jobs, but society tries (and often fails) to treat them as equals.

My main character was Midnight, an ex-military cat who is constantly at odds with his own racism.  He had a dog-related tragedy in his past, and has distrusted them ever since.  On an academic level he believes dogs and cats should have equal rights, but on a personal level he doesn't want anything to do with dogs.  That's as much detail as I'll go into for now, but you see where I'm going with this.  Zootopia has a lot of the same themes.  Instead of cats vs dogs, it's carnivores vs herbivores, but the racism theme is very similar.  Mine's different enough that I could easily release it without being sued, but a lot of people would still read it and say, "He got that idea from Zootopia."

I suppose that's not the worst thing in the world.  There's a lot of popular media right now where it's obvious where the authors got their inspiration.  It just bugs me that I could be accused of copying when I had my idea more than 20 years before Zootopia.  All that proves is that I'm lazy.  Still, if someone was going to read my mind and run with it, I'm glad it was Disney.  Zootopia is awesome.