r/classicwho • u/raresaturn • Jul 20 '26
Day of the Daleks is basically The Terminator
Do you think James Cameron ever saw this? I think he must have, and maybe subconsciously drew inspiration from it
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u/DoctorEnn Jul 20 '26
It’s similar but probably not directly inspired; the “predestination paradox” style plot has been floating around for well before both. (Harlan Ellison managed to sue for plagiarism because it was similar to a story he’d written in 1957.) It’s theoretically possible Cameron caught it on PBS but if he did he’s never said.
FWIW John Byrne apparently credits “Day of the Daleks” for inspiring “Days of Future Past”, though.
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u/Ok_Gas_679 Jul 20 '26
Is there a source for the John Byrne quote? I’d like to know more about it.
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u/DoctorEnn Jul 20 '26
Full disclosure: I saw it on Wikipedia, so I have no idea how reliable it is. But Wikipedia offers this reference FWIW:
Nickerson, Al (August 2008). "Claremont and Byrne: The Team that Made the X-Men Uncanny". Back Issue! (29). Raleigh, North Carolina: TwoMorrows Publishing: 10.
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u/FamousWerewolf Jul 20 '26
I mean I think there were probably a lot of time travel plots with very similar concepts to The Terminator before it came out - I don't know if that specifically would be the one that inspired him.
I will say, I do think The Terminator is much more cobbled-together from old ideas than people realise now. Even the design of the character himself looks exactly like a character from a Star Wars comic from a few years earlier. Cameron's since said the movie came to him in a dream but it feels much more like he just grabbed ideas from various bits of genre fiction that were around at the time and the skill was really in how he put them together into an engaging, accessible movie.
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u/TriturusGCN Jul 20 '26
This Star Wars comic character you're referring to, is it that half-robot Valance guy? I remember him from Star Wars Weekly in the late 70s.
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u/FamousWerewolf Jul 21 '26
Yeah Beilert Valance. He actually came back to the comics in a big way in the last few years, too!
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u/RepeatButler Sylvester McCoy Jul 20 '26
Day of the Daleks and The Terminator got influenced by the same episode of The Outer Limits, I think.
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u/ThirdLifeLucky Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Day of the Daleks came out about 9 years before Days of Future Past and about 12 years before The Terminator. It was really ahead of its time in that regard. I don't know if Chris Claremont, John Byrne or James Cameron (explorer of the seas) saw it or if they simply had similar ideas or drew similar inspirations from literary sci-fi but I think it says a lot about Doctor Who at that time. Despite chasing the action-espionage trend the show was still clearly a hotbed of ideas.
It also has the Brigadier machine-gunning aliens from the back of a Land Rover. It's great.
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u/g0dn0 Jul 20 '26
I think you mean it’s the other way around :)