Stephen King did it!

Since Stephen King obviously borrowed "Under the Dome" from "The Simpsons Movie," I guess the writers thought turnabout was fair play when they borrowed the idea in "The Scorpion's Tale" from a King short story called "The End of the Whole Mess." The plot is substantially the same, except that in King's story, the causative agent is in a town's water supply, not a flower; mass distribution is caused by an erupting volcano, not Bart Simpson; and the horrible side effect is dementia, not eye boggling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Whole_Mess

-- R Flowers

Dementia would have been a whole lot easier to watch. (shudder) ugghghghh

On Mar 8, 12:49 pm, Armillaria caligata wrote:

Well, they obviously couldn't have used dementia for Grandpa (already there).

-- R Flowers

I am cold, and there are wolves after me.

Except, of course, that Stephen King claims he's still never seen The Simpsons Movie, and Under the Dome has been about 30 years in the making. (And when compared to his early books, it does seem more similar to them than anything he's written more recently.)

• Trevor

First, let me just say that I think it's perfectly fine that ideas are borrowed from different places all the time. Furthermore, I take King at his word that the dome was not borrowed from TSM.

But to address your point about the age of the story - Under the Dome started its life as a story about people trapped in an apartment building, in a story called "The Cannibals". (Maybe there was a dome around the building?) Also, he bases his main villain on Dick Cheney (at least his conception of Cheney) who is the number 2 man in town, in control of a puppet (based on George W. Bush). So

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome

And we can now read The Cannibals in PDF form! --> http://www.stephenking.com/library/unpublished/cannibals_the.html

I think I will.

-- R Flowers

On 3/10/2011 4:05 PM, R Flowers wrote:

This is what he says in the "Author's Note" on page 1073 of *Under the Dome*:

"I first tried to write *Under the Dome* in 1976, and crept away from it with my tail between my legs after two weeks' work that amounted to seventy-five pages. That manuscript was long lost on the day in 2007 when I sat down to start again, but I remembered the opening section - 'The Airplane and the Woodchuck' - well enough to re-create it almost exactly."

The airplane crashes into the invisible dome, and the woodchuck is chopped in half as the dome comes down on the place it is unfortunate enough to be occupying at the moment. So, according to this at least, there was an actual dome in the story as early as 1976 - long before The Simpsons was even thought of.

• Trevor