Suggested By

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A work lightly kissed by the original may credit it as "suggested by." This adaptation credit is used for Derivative Works which depart massively from the original.

Just to be clear, this page is only for works that outright state they have been "suggested by" some earlier work, or have explicit Word of God saying so.

Compare Inspired By. Arguably a sort of lampshaded In Name Only, for better or worse.

Examples of Suggested By include:
  • Scrooged, the modern day retelling of A Christmas Carol.
  • A Little Night Music is "suggested by a film by Ingmar Bergman," i.e. Smiles of a Summer Night.
  • The movie I Robot was "suggested by Isaac Asimov's book," which in this case hints that the adaptation was In Name Only.
    • It included several of the themes and even character names from the original collection of short stories, but was a completely different plot that contradicted some of the basic aspects of the setting (like Robots being common and legal on Earth outside of U.S. Robotics facilities, instead of restricted to off-planet use)
  • Children of Men, mixed with Adaptation Distillation for a change.
  • John Irving demanded and got Suggested By credit for Simon Birch, the Glurgey Adaptation Decayed movie version of A Prayer for Owen Meany.
  • The Sound of Music was "suggested by The Trapp Family Singers," meaning that it was Very Loosely Based on a True Story.
  • The Princess and the Frog's tale of what happens when a girl tries to save an enchanted prince with a kiss and winds up turned into a frog herself was inspired by E.D. Baker's novel The Frog Princess, which is the first in a whole series of original fantasies.
  • The Terminator ends with "acknowledgment to the works of Harlan Ellison" in TV airings and video releases - James Cameron admitted he got inspiration from The Outer Limits episodes Ellison wrote, and following a lawsuit, that disclaimer was created.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is officially "suggested by" the novel On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers.
  • What's Happening was Suggested by the film Cooley High. Eric Monte, who created the show, was the writer for Cooley High.
  • Sergey Lukyanenko's novel Line of Delirium uses race and planet names from the game Master of Orion, but this has absolutely no bearing on the storyline. In fact, the author takes plenty of liberties with the racial descriptions and changes the nature of some outright (the Darlock turns out to be not shapeshifters but snake-like symbiotes, and the Mrrshan are foxes not Cat People). The first book doesn't even bother giving a nod to the game. The sequel, Emperors of Illisons has a small blurb at the end to that effect. Really, the author could've easily changed the race and planet names in the final draft, and the novel would lose absolutely nothing.
    • Additionally, the Meklar (of planet Meklon) are simply called Meklons.