The Terminator: Hasta la lawsuit, baby… movie inspired by the Outer Limits? (video)

Here’s a plot twist worthy of Skynet itself. Does James Cameron’s iconic 1984 sci-fi thriller The Terminator owe its legendary cyborg assassin shtick to something a bit older—and we’re not talking about Arnie’s acting? The culprit? None other than Harlan Ellison’s 1964 The Outer Limits episode, Demon with a Glass Hand, featuring a chap pursued by shadowy villains while guarding a cybernetic secret that could decide humanity’s fate. Sounds familiar, right?

In fact, the parallels were so blatant that Ellison himself slapped Cameron with a lawsuit, fighting to nab credit for influencing everyone’s favourite unstoppable killing machine. Proof, perhaps, that even original ideas sometimes need a handy bit of time-travel theft to become classics. Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we love it when history, Hollywood, and speculative fiction collide—especially with lawyers involved.