Originally published at: Nowlan Family Trust attempts to stop George Clooney's 'Buck Rogers' | Boing Boing
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have the nowlan family trust hired sidney powell or rudy giuliani by any chance?
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I hear that Rudy is already busy doing public appearances to promote the new Dune film in the role of Baron Harkonnen.
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It’s not a destructive, messy and wasteful fight over the “Buck Rogers” intellectual property until Lorraine Williams gets involved. I’m sure her attorneys are already sharpening their pencils despite the fact that the Dille Trust (once a rival claimant to the the Nowlan Trust for the IP) is more than two years dead.
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I believe George Lucas, way back in the 70s prior to Star Wars, tried and failed to secure the rights to Buck Rogers. Because he failed, he ended up making Star Wars… He had grown up watching the Buck Rogers serials as a kid and wanted to give it the full length film treatment, but couldn’t.
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According to this article and others he went after the rights to Flash Gordon. However, as you note, Luca has always been clear that Buck Rogers (which itself inspired a lot of Flash Gordon) was a major influence.
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OH! That’s right. I always get Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers confused.
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Still, harsh words, but, of course, a cease-and-desist letter doesn’t mean much unless you’re willing to back it up with an actual lawsuit.
Where are the Deadline editors and why aren’t they doing their jobs? This sentence offends me. It’s got more commas than a William Shatner monologue.
Flash Gordon, but he’s a rip off of Buck Rogers, so it’s six of one, half dozen of the other.
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Is Buck Rogers a relevant franchise? I’m in my 40’s and I barely know anything about it except through parodies and references I saw in my childhood. I would have been pretty young when the 80’s reboot aired on TV, I saw some reruns years later. Surely for anyone younger than me it’s fallen out of popular culture.
Why not make something cool that is also new? It’s not like reviving an old pulp scifi setting is really going to be able to compete with Star Wars.
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Thanks already covered in teh above exchange… But yeah, not much difference, so it explains my mixing the two up.
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Nowlan died in 1940. Why isn’t the character in the public domain?
US IP law is weird.
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Will they be cutting out all the Buck Rogers racist bits?
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Buck has long fallen out of relevance, as has Flash. They both had their brief revivals in the late 70’s/early 80’s, and the less said about those the better (neither is anything that could be called decent, though the Flash movie did feature the awesomeness of Queen). Star Wars eclipsed both of them and I really don’t understand why anyone would fight over them at this point when there’s so much modern writing aching for re-working for television or film.
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Yep. Very weird. For example, Buck first appeared in 1928. If it had appeared without a copyright notice, it would be in the public domain. But, it likely appeared with a copyright notice, which means it won’t be public domain for 95 years from date of first publication. That’s in 2023 (edit: I can’t math).
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Now I want Freddy Mercury to come back and do a song about Buck Rogers. Of course, I could’ve stopped at just wanting Freddy Mercury to come back.
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Right? That would be nice… unless it was zombie Freddie Mercury… then maybe not.
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Yeah, zombie Freddy would be no good. Resurrected Freddy belting out Twiki’s “biddi-biddi-biddi” would be priceless.
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Buck Rogers is trademarked, and a quick check shows the filing was updated in October 2020.
You can call the character Anthony Rogers and basically follow the plots of many of stories still in the public domain.
I’d rather see a film that made a new female character based roughly on the original male character. That appeals to wider audiences and has style and whimsy instead of camp. (won’t happen of course)
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Maybe they’re just trying to save Clooney’s career.
