Did The Terminator Rip Off an Obscure 1960s TV Show?

“Soldier” stars Michael Ansara (best known to fans for playing Klingon commander Kang on three different Star Trek series) as just what the title says: a soldier, only one from a distant future who is hurtled back to 1964 in a time vortex created by an energy weapon. He’s soon captured, but his language sounds like gibberish, so the authorities bring in linguist Tom Kagan (Lloyd Nolan) to decipher the one phrase the soldier keeps repeating: “Nims qarlo clobregnny prite arem aean teaan deao,” which Kagan translates to “Name’s Qarlo Clobregnny, private, RM EN TN DO:” name, rank, and serial letters.

Qarlo is a clone, trained literally since birth to be a perfect killing machine in an unimaginable hellscape of endless war. But even as Kagan and his family take him in and earn his trust in spite of his violent tendencies, an enemy trooper eventually comes through the same rip in time and tracks him down to the Kagan home, where they kill each other. The question of whether Qarlo just did his job or had developed feelings for the Kagans and wanted to protect them remains unanswered. Ellison based the script on his own 1957 short story, “Soldier from Tomorrow,” and it’s generally considered one of the better episodes from the show’s otherwise mediocre second season, with a terrific, compelling central performance by Ansara.

‘I’ll Be Back’

Two decades later, according to apocryphal reports and as how Ellison told it, word reached the author that a new film called The Terminator seemed to share some distinct similarities with “Soldier,” particularly in the opening scenes where the T-800 arrives in the past, followed in short order by future soldier Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). The latter is determined to protect Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), mother-to-be of future human messiah John Connor, from the robot. Writer Tracy Torme, a friend of Ellison’s, even told the latter that Cameron said he “ripped off a couple of Harlan Ellison stories” for his film.

Ellison apparently asked to see the script for The Terminator but was refused by Hemdale, and was also conspicuously not invited to any press screenings for the film. He eventually sneaked into one and was disheartened by what he saw. “If you took the first three minutes of my ‘Soldier’ episode and the first three minutes of The Terminator, they are not only similar but exact,” he reportedly said at the time. “By the time I left the theater, I knew I had a case against someone who plagiarized my work.”

So Ellison, who had previously sued publisher Fantagraphics for defamation and ABC-TV for plagiarism and won against both, and who also threatened legal action against Marvel Comics (for a 1983 Incredible Hulk story that, coincidentally, lifted directly from “Soldier”), had his lawyers contact Hemdale and Orion, looking for a financial settlement and additional relief lest they be taken to court. According to Ellison, the “smoking gun” in the case was an interview that Cameron had given to Starlog magazine in which he allegedly said that the story for The Terminator came from “a couple of Outer Limits segments.”

That was reportedly all the incentive the two companies needed to settle. Ellison was paid a certain amount of money—somewhere between $75,000 and $400,000, with the exact figure never being confirmed. And while it was too late to do anything about the original theatrical release of the movie, all future releases of the film on home video included a credit at the end which read, “With acknowledgement to the works of Harlan Ellison.”

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