Sholay a bollycat of The Magnificient Seven

Not satisfied with copying straight up from just one Hollywood movie, director Ramesh Sippy chose to remix several of them together to create his own magnus opus, "Sholay" (Sparks). As our first submitter Pankaz notes, it's a borrowed cocktail. But we guess the "credit" should actually go to screenwriter Javed Akhtar, who's responsible for "coming up with" stories for more than one BollyCat.

Combining all the submissions we've received for this BollyCat, we've come up with six movies: "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "Once Upon a time in the west", "Magnificient Seven", "The Wild Bunch" & "The Seven Samurai". It'd be a kill not to note that "The Magnificient Seven" was actually based on Akira Kurosawa's Japanese classic, "The Seven Samurai" but, based on the fact that western themes are followed throughout "Sholay", we believe Mr. Sippy focused on the Hollywood version instead of the Japanese one.

Whereas "The Magnificient Seven" had seven badasses hired to do a good dead, our BollyCat had just two, because seven protagonists in Bollywood would need as many love interests, and three hours just isn't enough time for all that. Focus here is on how these two guys, recruited by a victim to seek vengeance for his suffering, slowly morph into good guys as the movie progresses. The bad guy has his very own army of bandits, who loot the villagers in a routine basis in return for sparing their lives (talk about catch 22s!).

The movie also borrows heavily from other 60s westerns. Rajkeshar Singh pointed us to the fact that many memorable moments from "Once Upon a Time in the West" have been copid "scene by scene", like the one where the family of the victim is killed off by the bandits. There's also this "train scene" lifted from "The Wild Bunch".

Kedar noted in his submission that "'Sholay' is the best Indianization of a foreign theme", and we agree. Thanks to Anyway, Shad, Vinod, Anonymous, Pakistani, Rajeev Sharma, Suhail and Kolkatar Jeeshu for also submitting this.

On a side note, the movie's two famous Hindi songs were also results of blunt plagiarism. Demis Roussous's tenderly sung "Love You Love You" was turned into "Mehbooba" and "O Jab Tak Hai Jaan" was inspired by Iranian singer Googoosh's "Jomeh".