Sincerest Form of Flattery

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

— Attributed to Charles Caleb Colton (although he probably stole it from someone else)

The above quote is an axiom that holds especially true with Follow the Leader. After all, why follow something that you don't think has enough merit to follow?

So this is a Sub-Trope, where the creator of a Follow the Leader work has explicitly stated they are taking something as inspiration for their work.

Just the inspiration being obvious is not enough. There has to be a direct admission that this is so. Admitting in the form of a Take That! might still count, as it's just denying that they are following this trope, even when we know better. For this kind of thing in fiction, see Irritation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery.

Also compare What Would X Do?

Note: We don't require citations like The Other Wiki does, however, since this trope is about comments made by a creator about a work of media, it is highly recommended that citations be provided.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• The creator of Batman admitted the main character to be based on Zorro. This is the reason Batman watches a Zorro movie the night his parents are killed.

Fan Works

• Fluttershy's Night Out: Word of God in the comments states that the fic was inspired by John Steinbeck's The Crysanthemums.
• The Night Unfurls: StaffSergeant, the author, has admitted that the original version of the fanfic is inspired by two Kuroinu fanfics on FanFiction.Net — The Irregular by Omegas Prime, and Kuroinu Rebellion Challenge by Wimblegurk Brigade. The statement is present at the beginning of Chapter 1, where the author's note is.
• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines is based on Ashes of the Past. Pokemon: Shadow of Time is based on both of them, along with Symbiosis and The Sun Soul.
• Vow of Nudity inspired multiple other authors to write their own stories using its style of 'Meta LitRPG', and many also borrowed its emphasis on nudist warrior protagonists. Typing "Vow Of Nudity" into AO3 search brings up a slew of results by other authors acknowledging the series as an inspiration.

Film

• Supposedly, when the Wachowskis were peddling the script for The Matrix, they brought with them a comic book and told prospective buyers that, basically they wanted to do something like that as a movie. The comic in question? Ghost in the Shell.
  • Not just the comic, too. Watch the GITS movie's scene of Kusanagi going invisible. Then watch the Trinity scene. They specifically showed the movie to Joel Silver to give him an idea how they wanted The Matrix to look.
  • Also The Invisibles.
• The writers of MAD admitted that their movie Up the Academy was heavily inspired by Animal House, another movie based on a comedy magazine (National Lampoon). They ended up disowning the film.
• La La Land was marketed as a "love letter" to The Golden Age of Hollywood, particularly musicals.
• Donkey Xote's cover art◊ straight up says: "From the producers who saw Shrek". No, we're not kidding.

Literature

• Isaac Asimov
  • "The Author's Ordeal": The apology at at start of the poem admits that Dr Asimov was imitating W. S. Gilbert when he was composing this poem.
  • "The Foundation of S.F. Success":
    • The apology at the start of the poem admits that Dr Asimov was imitating W. S. Gilbert when he was composing this poem.
    • This work subtly admits that Dr Asimov's success comes from imitating historical society (such as The Roman Empire).
    • This work subtly admits that Dr Asimov's success comes from imitating Edward Gibbon (for his The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire).
    • This work subtly admits that Dr Asimov's success comes from imitating Thucydides (for his The History Of The Peloponnesian War).

Live Action TV

• The producers of Tallafornia openly stated that they were trying to make Jersey Shore in Tallaght.
• In the first episode of Sze U Tonight, Johnson mentions that he is inspired by American talk shows, and that he wants to re-create it for Hong Kong audiences. That said, the show has since developed its own quirks and style.

Music

• Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt admits "Ending Credits" is "totally a Camel ripoff". He's also acknowledged that "Slither" is his attempt to rewrite Rainbow's "Kill the King", which is fitting for a song intended as a Ronnie James Dio tribute.
• Nobuo Uematsu acknowledged lifting the intro riff of Jimi Hendrix' "Purple Haze" for "One-Winged Angel".
• David Bowie admitted that the chorus of "Starman" is basically a rip-off of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow".
• Tony Banks has described playing back a recording of Genesis' "Afterglow" and realising to his horror that he had just rewritten "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". From the same band, Phil Collins admitted to stealing the Evil Laugh in "Mama" from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
• Tears for Fears have done this a lot:
  • Word of God admits that "Sowing the Seeds of Love" and "Schrödinger's Cat" are both pastiches of "I Am the Walrus" (main songwriter Roland Orzabal also notes that the piano break on "Schrödinger" is "reminiscent of [Thunderclap Newman's] 'Something in the Air'"). These were far from the only Beatles pastiches the group recorded; large parts of The Seeds of Love and Everybody Loves a Happy Ending bear clear Beatles influence (although maybe not quite this clear). "Everybody Loves a Happy Ending" and "Who Killed Tangerine?" could almost be lost Beatles tracks, for example.
  • "Brian Wilson Said", as might be expected from the title, is a The Beach Boys pastiche (it also alludes to Van Morrison's track "Jackie Wilson Said", which appears on Saint Dominic's Preview, though if there is any other Morrison influence on the track, it's oblique at most).
  • With "Lord of Karma", Orzabal says the group were "trying to get somewhere between the Happy Mondays and Jimi Hendrix's 'Crosstown Traffic'".
  • "I Believe" is such a clear Robert Wyatt homage that the band covered his track "Sea Song" for the B-side. The album's liner notes further lampshaded it by stating "Dedicated to Robert Wyatt (if he's listening)", referencing the song "Dedicated to You But You Weren't Listening" by Soft Machine, which Wyatt was previously a member of.
  • Orzabal admitted that he was listening to "too much Art of Noise" when "Empire Building" was recorded.
• Eminem:
  • Eminem stated in a 2009 interview that Survivor's "Eye Of The Tiger" was 'the original version of "Lose Yourself"'.
  • Averted with "Untouchable", which was widely interpreted as an attempt to rewrite Joyner Lucas's "I'm Not Racist", but Eminem had in fact written it before he heard "I'm Not Racist".

Professional Wrestling

• Ring of Honor and Chikara are completely open about the ideas they lifted from Mexican and Japanese promotions like Lucha Libre Internacional, All Japan and New Japan.
• SHIMMER was setup to increase the respect for women's pro wrestling on an international level. In 2011, a promotion calling itself GLAMOUR started up in Australia using the same style of font in their logo as SHIMMER^note this did not last, becoming Ladies of Australian Wrestling instead, then Glamour Championship Wrestling

Roleplay

• Dorf Quest has stated from the beginning that it was inspired by Ruby Quest and was an attempt at another sort of "quest".

Video Games

• Bioware has stated that the setting for Dragon Age was inspired by The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire.
• Hideki Kamiya, the director of Ōkami, said The Legend of Zelda franchise influenced his game. Although he thought The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess could have looked better, he admitted that "it's no overstatement to say that I created Okami because of Zelda."
• The creators of Dark Souls have freely admitted◊ to "taking notes from Nintendo-sensei for a long, long time," when fans compared some of the changes The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild made with Souls' own style.
• The makers of the Wii game The Conduit have stated they are taking tips from Halo, and trying to make the Wii's Halo.
  • They also said they would be glad if other Wii game developers did this to them; specifically their customizable FPS controls with the Wiimote.
• Ben Mattes, producer of Prince of Persia (2008), told MTV.com about the influences they used.
  "We've always been very open about the huge influences that ICO, SoTC and Ōkami had on us during our development."
• David Jaffe has gone on record saying both that God of War was heavily inspired by Devil May Cry and later on that he thinks Devil May Cry's fighting system is better. See for yourself.
  • Likewise, the developers of Dante's Inferno have happily stated they were just out to make a The Divine Comedy version of God of War, essentially.
• In an interview, the director of Xenogears was asked "You're a fan of Mobile Fighter G Gundam, aren't you?" His response was simply to smile.
• Many Ambrosia Software games are modernized remakes of classics. For instance, Maelstrom is Asteroids, Apeiron is Centipede, and Swoop is Galaxian.
• Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski frequently cited the game kill.switch as the inspiration for Gears of War's cover system. He also cited both Halo and Resident Evil 4 as gameplay inspirations, particularly their focus on creating "memorable moments".
  • He also revealed in a tweet that Sonic the Hedgehog inspired Jazz Jackrabbit.
• Around the late '90s a low-budget CD-ROM called "Pac Pack" could be found in many computer stores. While the cover has a decidedly more Pac-Man-ish design than the games contained, the blurb on the back touts plainly that "Pac Guy" is "a Pac-Man ripoff - but a ripoff with style." The various sequels were less audacious, recoloring the main character green and giving him the more lawyer-friendly moniker of "Pea Guy".
• The developers of Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion have admitted to being heavily influenced by Super Smash Bros.. They even had testers play both games one after another to make their own game feel like SSB as much as possible.
• Beenox, when making The Amazing Spider-Man, stated that they took inspiration from Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City when creating the game's combat.
• SuperBot confirmed that PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is (in part) inspired by Super Smash Bros..
• When Halo was first announced, many people were quick to point out the similarities between the eponymous celestial super-structure and Larry Niven's Ringworld. Bungie's public liaison actually went on record as saying that the fortress worlds in Halo have more in common with the orbitals in The Culture than they do with the Ringworld of Niven's Known Space. Granted, this statement may have been done to deliberately distance Bungie's creation from Niven's for legal reasons (a Ringworld game already exists under copyright) but the depiction of The Covenant in Halo partially mirroring the Idirans in Consider Phlebas seems to lend further credence to this particular inspiration.
• AirMech's developer Carbon Games have never been shy about their game being a tribute to Herzog Zwei. In addition, the Steam description of the game describes the gameplay as "DotA-style", acknowledging the game's other main influence.
• Masaki Tsuzuk, the creator and main writer of the Lyrical Nanoha franchise, confirms in an interview included in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Gears of Destiny strategy guide that the Wild ARMs elements in the plot of the game weren't coincidental, mentioning that they were done as a show of respect to Akifumi Kaneko and the franchise he made.
• Super Mario World ROM hack Super Mario Kollision actually says in the ending credits 'Level design inspired by Brutal Mario and VIP series', in case you didn't already figure out that much of it was ripping them off. Considering that the final level was literally an abridged carbon copy of Brutal Mario's Bowser's Castle level, this wasn't exactly hard to work out without the official statement.
• Songs of Conquest: The game's description admits to being inspired by '90s strategy games, but the developers specifically cite Heroes of Might and Magic 2 during the interviews. The similarities are apparent in design and gameplay.

Webcomics

• Comics that have the format of DM of the Rings usually state that is what inspired them, like Darths & Droids.
• The Long Lost Prologue of Our Little Adventure shows the Palm Tree Ghost saying the comic was inspired by The Order of the Stick.

Other

• Radio comedian Fred Allen paraphrased the above quote as "Imitation is the sincerest form of television." Mighty Mouse invokes it in the Bakshi-produced episode "Don't Touch That Dial."
• The team behind the French Video Review Show Joueur du Grenier never shied away from admitting their biggest inspiration originally was Angry Video Game Nerd, they even put it in the description of the first episode.

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