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The Terminator, which turns 40 years old this year, is one of the seminal science fiction/action films of the 1980s, spawning a franchise that has included five additional movies, two TV shows, and other associated media. Written and directed by James Cameron, it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in his breakout performance as the T-800, a cyborg sent back to our time by the AI defense system controlling the Earth in the future, so as to exterminate the mother of a yet-to-be-born human resistance leader.
Initially a sleeper hit with all the makings of a cult classic, The Terminator is now recognized as one of the signature genre franchises of the past four decades. And while time travel, androids, and power-mad computers were hardly original ideas on Cameron’s part, he remixed them into the pulpy, relentless framework of a slasher movie with bracing results. Yet right around its release, Cameron also found himself and his film targeted for possible legal action by one of science fiction’s most outspoken writers—and all over an obscure episode of a sci-fi anthology TV series that was 20 years in the rearview when Cameron’s movie came out.
Enter Harlan Ellison. A legendary author in the genre, Ellison was famous for his vast bibliography of hundreds of short stories, including “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said The Tick Tock Man,” “The Deathbird,” “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” and “A Boy and his Dog.” He also held the editorship on the landmark anthology Dangerous Visions and penned the revered Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Ellison was also known for his brash personality and his tendency to quickly take legal action against those who he felt wronged him creatively or financially, which is how he ended up threatening to sue James Cameron and the companies behind The Terminator, Hemdale Productions and Orion Pictures.
‘Name’s Qarlo Clobregnny’
Although it only lasted for 49 episodes across less than two seasons, the 1963-65 sci-fi anthology series, The Outer Limits, has proven to be one of the most influential TV shows of its time, often spoken on in the same revered tones as The Twilight Zone. While The Outer Limits did not regularly employ sci-fi writers as often as Rod Serling’s series, or later Star Trek, second season Outer Limits producer Ben Brady did accept two scripts from Harlan Ellison: the acclaimed season opener “Soldier” and what is widely considered the finest installment of the entire series, “Demon with a Glass Hand.”
“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.”
One person who was left incensed by the entire situation, though, is James Cameron. Although Cameron had grown up reading stories by Ellison and many other sci-fi authors, he labeled Ellison a “parasite” with regard to the settlement, which he described as “a nuisance suit that could easily have been fought.” According to Cameron, Hemdale was willing to go to court, but if the company lost, it would then have sued Cameron personally for the money—which could have been substantially more in a trial. “Having no money at the time, I had no choice but to agree to the settlement,” Cameron said. He then added a gag order kept him from speaking about the case for years.
‘I Came Across Time For You’
When Ellison, who died in 2018, said that the first three minutes of “Soldier” and the first three minutes of The Terminator were “exact,” he wasn’t far off the mark. The opening scenes that begin in the future with the titular character, traveling through time to arrive in the present, are eerily similar. Albeit, in one version that character is the hero, and the other the villain.
But that’s really where it ends. In “Soldier,” Qarlo is captured and locked up until he is brought to live with Kagan and his family; he only battles his enemy again in the final scene of the show, which is more about whether a person bred to be an emotionless killer can rediscover his humanity. In The Terminator, the T-800’s arrival is followed closely by that of Kyle Reese, whose job is to find and protect Sarah Connor; they end up falling in love, which is how Sarah gets pregnant with her son John in the first place, as the T-800 relentlessly stalks them.
Strangely enough, the idea of the killing machine without any emotions coming back through time and learning to be human was utilized in 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, although Ellison by that time apparently had no desire to go after Cameron again. By the same token, Ellison’s other 1964 script for The Outer Limits, “Demon with a Glass Hand,” also dealt with an android (Robert Culp) who is sent backward in time from the future, this time to protect humanity from an alien invasion. In fact, many fans over the years believed that Ellison went after The Terminator for lifting from “Demon,” a mistaken assumption that he himself confirmed wasn’t the case.
Was Harlan Ellison right to threaten legal action over what appeared to be, in the end, relatively minor similarities between “Soldier” and The Terminator? Did James Cameron leave himself open to litigation when he cited those Outer Limits episodes in print for Starlog? Ellison certainly thought he had a case, and once his personal and legal wrath was unleashed, well… in the words of Kyle Reese, “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead.”
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