I am a Star Trek fan (not the new stuff) and I always heard Deep Space 9 is a ripoff of Babylon 5. Have the DS9 writers ever admitted as much or acknowledged an influence? I’m 19 episodes in and I’m liking it. I can see the concept for sure that DS9 uses.
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They both kind of came out at the same time. Neither ripped the other off, it was just a matter of two shows about space stations happening to drop simultaneously. If anything, it'd be B5 that "copied", since it and other sci-fi at the time were riding high on ST:TNG good-will. But it's definitely it's own thing, and not "Star Trek Wannabe". For one thing, look at its VASTLY different attitude towards, say, religion.
Although that "no one is pure human" still gets me every time. What a load of hilarity. I don't think they realized what he said when they wrote that. (So, some humans are a little bit more chimpy or orangy-tangy, then? rofl.)
JMS literally went to Paramount, Paramount said "Nah", and then immediately Rick Berman came out with DS9.
This is apparently somewhat well documented:
https://archive.vn/jG1F5
OK, well, I doubt many people knew or cared at the time. The arguments on the BBSes were mostly just nerdwanking about which show was "better".
And they were still more or less different enough that arguments of being "ripoffs" didn't go very far.
Also, this was an era where you didn't get one movie about asteroids, or dinosaurs, or whatever thing of the week there was - you got multiples of it. So more than one show about space stations wasn't that out of place in an early version of CopyCat Hollywood.