A look inside Hollywood and the movies : Chicken or the Egg? Zippy or the Coneheads?

It’s not unusual for voices outside the film industry to angrily say that their original idea was ripped off and made into a movie. Such charges rarely get anyone’s attention, perhaps because they’re so frequently made.

But San Francisco-based cartoonist Bill Griffith, the creator of the cult comic strip character Zippy the Pinhead, is venting his own annoyance--that Paramount’s “Coneheads,’ out Friday, is based on “a convoluted rip-off” of Zippy by the film’s star and writer, Dan Aykroyd--in a more noticeable way than most. And also funnier.

He’s making his case in three editions of his nationally syndicated “Zippy” strip--one has already appeared and two are yet to come.

In Tuesday’s strip, Zippy is told that people on the street are wearing Conehead headpieces due to merchandising efforts on behalf of the Paramount film. Shocked and dismayed, Zippy says “there’s only one thing to do--forgive them.”

In the Aug. 1 strip, Zippy and a coneheaded Aykroyd get into an argument and then a fistfight on the street over the alleged rip-off. Trying to refute Zippy’s claim, Aykroyd points to his conehead and says, “Look, no bow! No bow!”--a reference to Zippy’s trademark bow on top of his head, wrapped around a tuff of hair.

Aykroyd, in a released statement, through his publicist, Susan Patricola, denies Griffith’s suggestion.

“I’m not all that upset about this,” says Griffith, “but there’s a part of me that’s pissed. And I let that part out in the strip.”

Griffith’s complaint, which has been stewing since Aykroyd’s Conehead characters made their debut on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” in the mid-’70s, is based on several factors, he says. One is the obvious similarities between Zippy and the Coneheads--the extended craniums, the clownish outfits, their use of oddball non sequiturs (such as Zippy’s famous line, “Are we having fun yet?”), and their common passion for junk food. While the Coneheads are famous for consuming “mass quantities” of movie snacks, Zippy is known for preferring Ding-Dongs dipped in taco sauce.

Another is the fact that Zippy had become a well-known character among underground comic book aficionados by 1972, while the Coneheads didn’t appear on “SNL” until 1976 or thereabouts. One of Zippy’s biggest fans was “SNL” legend John Belushi, who wrote a letter to Griffith in the show’s early years and asked if Zippy could serve as a guest host.

“It’s my understanding that Aykroyd was turned on to Zippy by Belushi,” Griffith says. Aykroyd’s statement says that he “never saw ‘Zippy’ until Griffith made this claim years back.”

Another factor, says Griffith, is that “a major writer” who used to be with “Saturday Night Live” confided to a former colleague, New York-based publisher Jeff Rund--who in turn told Griffith--that Aykroyd “mainly got the idea for the Coneheads from Zippy.” Griffith adds that Aline Kominsky, the wife of famed underground cartoonist R. Crumb, relayed the same information from the same “SNL” writer.

In the June 28 strip, Griffith draws a conversation between himself and Zippy. In it, he tells Zippy, “I heard through a writer on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ back when the Coneheads began, that Aykroyd and Belushi were reading your comics.” Rund and Kominsky confirmed Griffith’s information in recent interviews. The “SNL” writer, who has asked not to be identified, argues with these recollections, saying now that if the Coneheads “was a rip-off, it was an unintentional and subconscious one. Everybody was so stoned in those days, who knows?” The inspiration for the Coneheads’ cranial dimensions, the writer adds, “could have been a crack in the ceiling of somebody’s dressing room.”

Former “SNL” writer Anne Beatts claims that the similarities between Zippy and the Coneheads are vague and that the rip-off issue is “goofy.”

The show’s performers and writers, she says, “didn’t have a collective unconscious--Dan and writer Tom Davis did the Coneheads, not Belushi.” Besides, says Beatts, “ideas are out there in the Zeitgeist , floating around like spores. Who knows how they travel from one mind to the other?”

Aykroyd’s statement says that “the idea for ‘Coneheads’ was predicated from my seeing daguerreotype plates of Circus Pinheads, made in France at the turn of the century.”

In the press notes for “Coneheads,” Aykroyd says that another inspiration was the stone figures on Easter Island, which he visited in 1976. Griffith says he was told that Aykroyd wanted to call the characters “pinhead lawyers” but was warned away from this by NBC lawyers, who feared lawsuits from real-life pinheads, whose condition is known as microcephaly.

Rund, who heard the “SNL” writer’s viewpoint during a dinner that he arranged in the mid-’70s between Aykroyd, Beatts, Crumb, Kominsky and himself, among others, says that he was told that evening that Aykroyd “had been influenced” by Zippy. “It was kind of obvious, I thought,” Rund says.

Kominsky, reached at her home in France, says that the Conehead-Zippy connection “is definitely true. It was common knowledge among ‘SNL’ writers that they were inspired by Zippy. Nobody cared back then, nobody thought a movie would come out of the Coneheads 15 years later.”

One reason that Griffith is adopting a humorous, rather than litigious, response to Paramount’s “Coneheads,” he says, is that “if it’s at all successful, it might help” his own project--”Zippyvision”--get made. Griffith and his wife, Diane Noomin, have written several drafts and have attracted the recent interest of Miramax Films production vice president Richard Gladstein. Brandon Tartikoff, who remains a fan of the script, developed it in 1986 and 1987 for NBC Productions.

Comic actor Michael Richards (“Seinfeld”) has been “letting us use his name” in connection with the Zippy project “for about six months now,” the cartoonist-screenwriter says. Griffith’s agent, Paul Yamamoto of Innovative Artists, says “the thing we’re going to have to do is go independent. . . .” He adds that the success or failure of “The Coneheads” “won’t matter to us either way.”

“If they can make more than one cop movie each year, why can’t we have more than one pinhead movie per year?” Tartikoff asks.