The Puppet Masters - Film, TV or Theatrical Adaptations

Film, TV or Theatrical Adaptations

The Brain Eaters, a 1958 film directed by Bruno VeSota, bore a number of similarities to Heinlein's novel. Heinlein sued the producers for plagiarism. The case was settled out of court.

The theme of the novel is echoed in "The Invisibles", an episode of The Outer Limits aired in 1964, and also in "Operation: Annihilate!", the last episode of the first season of Star Trek in 1967. Similarly, in the story line begun in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Coming of Age" and completed in "Conspiracy", aliens from a faraway sector invade the bodies of high-ranking Starfleet admirals in an attempt to compromise the command structure and spearhead an invasion of Earth.

The novel was adapted, with some plot and character changes, into the screenplay for a 1994 film of the same name starring Donald Sutherland. Although the film followed the story rather closely (except for the lack of references to Venus, Titan, flying cars, skull phones, temporary marriages, time-distortion drugs, nuclear wars and governmental "Schedules") it was not successful with either the critics or the public. (Sutherland also starred in the remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another tale of aliens taking over humans.)

The 1998 film The Faculty, directed by Robert Rodriguez from a Kevin Williamson screenplay, is about a fictional high school at which the faculty and staff become taken over by alien parasites. In the film one of the characters mumbles that Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers is "a blatant rip off" of Heinlein's novel. In turn, the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is based on that novel.

Kenneth Von Gunden's 1990 novel Starspawn takes the same basic premise into a Medieval setting: England in the time of the Third Crusade is secretly invaded by parasites from space who attach themselves to knights and gain control of castles, and whose plot is eventually foiled by a wise and dedicated monk.