Inspiration for 'Under the Dome'

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Alkina

New Member
Nov 23, 2016
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I'm quite curious where Mr. King his inspiration came from for writing this story.
I just finished watching the first season and it's very familiair.
I wonder if i'm going to see a scene where the town gets flooded with mud. Or did Mister King left out that particular detail? The pink stars aren't that bright either. But more a softer kind of pink. Charged electrically.
Anyway, it would be nice to know who or what inspired him to write this.
 

carrie's younger brother

Well-Known Member
Mar 8, 2012
5,428
25,651
NJ
I'm quite curious where Mr. King his inspiration came from for writing this story.
I just finished watching the first season and it's very familiair.
I wonder if i'm going to see a scene where the town gets flooded with mud. Or did Mister King left out that particular detail? The pink stars aren't that bright either. But more a softer kind of pink. Charged electrically.
Anyway, it would be nice to know who or what inspired him to write this.
He wrote the book, not the TV series. The TV series is very loosely based on the book. This entry from Wikipedia regarding the book may shed some light on your question:

Under the Dome is a partial rewrite of a novel King attempted to write first in 1972 under the same title and then a second time in 1982 as The Cannibals.[10] As King stated on his official site, these two unfinished works "were two very different attempts to utilize the same idea, which concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to. Also, my memory of The Cannibals is that it, like Needful Things, was a kind of social comedy. The new Under the Dome is played dead straight."[11] From the material originally written, only the first chapter is included in the new novel.[12]

According to Stephen J. Spignesi's 1998 book The Lost Work of Stephen King,[13] The Cannibals (originally titled Under the Dome) is an unpublished unfinished 450-page handwritten novel written in 1982, while King was filming Creepshow. This work later served as inspiration to King's new novel Under the Dome. In 1982, King said: "I've got about four-hundred-and-fifty pages done and it is all about these people who are trapped in an apartment building. Worst thing I could think of. And I thought, wouldn't it be funny if they all ended up eating each other? It's very, very bizarre because it's all on one note. And who knows whether it will be published or not?" In Douglas E. Winter's book The Art of Darkness, Stephen King is also quoted, talking around the time of Creepshow, about the origins of Under the Dome: "I worked on a book called The Cannibals—I had started it five years before, but it was called Under the Dome then. It didn't get finished either time."[14]

On September 15, 2009, Stephen King's official site posted a 61-page facsimile excerpt from King's original novel The Cannibals, consisting of the first four chapters of the original typescript.[15] A further 63 pages were posted on October 4. The excerpts served to also document how long ago King had had the idea of being under a dome:

Several Internet writers have speculated on a perceived similarity between Under the Dome and The Simpsons Movie, where, [...] Springfield is isolated inside a large glass dome [...]. I can’t speak personally to this, because I have never seen the movie, and the similarity came as a complete surprise to me...although I know, from personal experience, that the similarity will turn out to be casual. For the doubters, this excerpt [from The Cannibals] should demonstrate that I was thinking dome and isolation long before Homer, Marge, and their amusing brood came on the scene."[16]