Inspired or stolen? Finding the real Nemo

By Shwetha Nair | First Published Jul 11, 2016, 12:36 PM IST

A product or brand becomes a big deal when a generic copy of the same starts showing up in the market. However, it turns out that many of the products or brands which have scored high in the market are actually stolen ideas.

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Here are three popular products which were knockoffs from million-dollar original products.

1. Oreo

Oreo, the favourite cookies of children, have become synonymous with sandwich cookies to the extent that you don't even realise that there are other sandwich cookies available in the market.

American's are in the habit of having sandwich cookies after dunking it in milk and with Oreo, this habit has been introduced among the children across the world. However, Oreo is actually a rip-off of another product called Hydrox. Hydrox made its first appearance in 1908 and was produced by Sunshine Biscuits.

The product became a hit and Nabisco developed their ripoff version. The popularity of Oreo made people believe that Hydrox is the copied version. The owners of Hydrox had to sell off their company, while Oreo went on to become a cultural icon.

2. LEGO

Building blocks of LEGO are one of the best-known toys in the world. It is a genius idea which helps kids to build their favourite play sets without rendering their toys unusable. It is indeed a wonderful idea, and everyone might have wondered how these guys come up with it before anyone else.

They didn't. Plastic building blocks that enabled kids to build their own toys was a concept developed by Hilary Fisher, a child psychologist in 1939. He made structures using hollow building blocks for Kiddicraft in 1947.

LEGO was a toy making company at that time. After seeing Kiddicraft play sets, they decided to copy the same. LEGO became so popular that it is not possible to find a single home without at least one of their products. Page, in turn, committed suicide in 1957 after his company went down the toilet.

3. Finding Nemo

Pixar's animation film Finding Nemo, a story of a clownfish, is one of the most beloved, commercially successful and critically acclaimed animation films of all the time.

However, Pixar copied the concept from a screenplay named Pierrot the Clownfish, written by Franck Le Calvez, a French children's author. Unfortunately, no filmmaker was interested in developing the idea and so Calvez published it as a book for children in 2002.

Finding Nemo was released in 2003. Though makers of the movie state that the similarity is just a coincidence we cannot ignore the similarities.

In both, the lead character loses a parent (Nemo loses mother while Pierrot loses his father) and gets separated from near ones. Both stories are about the reunion with loved ones. There are a cleaner shrimp and surgeon fish in both stories (surgeon fish appears in the movie Finding Dory).

Though Calvez took his case to court judge ruled in favour of Disney and said both characters are different shades of orange.

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