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Rescue Special Ooops

A network promo for Rescue Special Ops hijacks a concept used for Bear Grylls on the Discovery Channel.

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Nine’s Promo department was caught out yesterday by Media and Marketing website Mumbrella over a network promo for Rescue Special Ops that hijacks a concept for Bear Grylls on the Discovery Channel.

The Rescue team can be seen scaling huge walls which turns out to be a gigantic title version of the show.

You can compare them both below:

Nine has been guilty of this before.

Last year an Underbelly promo was a clone of Battlestar Galactica.

And then there was the Twenty20 Cricket ad that mirrored the Super Bowl.

There are more examples of network copycats on Dan Ilic’s blog.

Source: Mumbrella

22 Responses

  2. @jay jay, i’d say you are right. it seems to be widely reported. R:SO was a forgettable show and the ratings were pretty bad, people might actually realise it exists after this.

  4. Has anyone thought that this was done on purpose to get all this free publicity? It has kinda worked. Also – perhaps this is a little jibe at SBS as I have heard a rumour that 9 is going to poach Man vs Wild like they did Top Gear.

  5. David,
    Did you even bother to get comment from the Promo Department at Nine?
    I think you will find that Nine either A) Paid a license fee or B) Used the same Promo Producer or Outside Promotions company..

    1. Marc… I work much longer hours than the Promo Department. Somehow I doubt they would have answered my call when I filed the story last night. It’s all over the media today in any case, without any network comment. You should probably direct the question to the original source which was linked in the story.

  6. I don’t think there is anything legally Discovery Channel can do, this sort of thing goes on all the time and for the most part it’s in different countries so hard to prosecute unless they hold some copyright over the sequence.

    Since when have morals and ethics played a part in anything like this?

  7. I don’t think they literally ‘copied’ the Discovery promo, since it’s so alike that you’d think they Really thought their idea was somewhat original.

  8. While we’re on the topic of copycats, check out this comparison of NBC Today’s opening with the “new-look” Sunrise: youtube.com/watch?v=pT_ZYSdxC0g

  9. forget the helicopter crashes, it’s the 9 promo department that is in need of the rescue team.

    funny, that probably would have been 9’s best promo all year. they don’t seem to be going to the effort that 7&ten do with the launch ads. they obviously didn’t here either.

  10. surely there is some sort of law against this type of blatant intellectual theft. Have they at least heard of morals and ethics? The people working in the promo department must really hate their job! If you’re going to use someone else’s ideas as “inspiration” at least attempt to use your own brain as well!

  11. They copied the Filipino news with their stupid sound effects and “Live” wipes in their “news” programs. Now they’ve added full-screen watermarks copied from the Indian & Pakistani news networks. Very annoying and unnecessary.

  13. nice find, once again Ch9 can’t come up with anything original.. anyone remember the 9’s Summer of Cricket/Fox Sports (US) NFL?? David if its not too much to ask can you find those 2 and post Ch9’s previous copycat promo?

  15. LOL Wow they didn’t try to be different at all; they couldn’t even have just taken the idea and reimagined it; that said they’re still both good promos.

  16. Oh, there is absolutely no doubt that Nine’s promo team have copied the Discovery Channel promo almost frame-for-frame. It’s almost as though they have used it as a template. Absolutely shameful – Nine richly deserves the buckets of scorn and contempt that will no doubt be tipped all over them for this. One of their station promos from a couple of years ago copied a Michael Buble music video virtually frame-for-frame, and yeah, how can we forget the debacle of the plagiarised Twenty20 cricket promo? Has Nine had an original idea, apart from Underbelly, any time in the last two decades?

  17. Nine has no original ideas.

    Sea Patrol = Patrol Boat
    Top Gear on Nine aired as new even though they aired on SBS 2 years ago.
    and the Hey Hey revival…

    to name just 3.

  20. Lol, somehow I think people with academic dishonesty on their records are sought out by 9. Will there be a leaked memo where 9 directs it’s staff to troll the net and the airwaves looking for ideas, that would be truly shameful.

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