Homages in Star Wars
In a column headlined “Originality,” first published in the April 1986 issue of his Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, the legendary SF author conceded that “total originality is just about impossible.” Asimov elaborated on this point in a subsequent column, arguing that a story could be considered original even if many of its constituent parts were borrowed from earlier works—so long as those pieces were assembled in a new, inventive configuration. To prove his point he cited George Lucas’ adventure serial pastiche Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Asimov might as accurately have selected Star Wars as his example.
Chapter 3 of this book outlined the most significant books and movies that inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars. While Flash Gordon and The Hidden Fortress are its two clearest cinematic ancestors, Star Wars reflects a wide variety of other film influences, including the classic Westerns, war films, serials, and melodramas that Lucas soaked up in his youth, as well as the art films he discovered at USC.
In many cases the similarities are purely visual. Darth Vader looks remarkably like the Lightning, a villain from the Republic Pictures serial Fighting Devil Dogs (1938). C-3PO could be a sibling of Maria, the feminine robot from Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis (1927), while R2-D2 owes something to the cute, stubby robots that appeared alongside Bruce Dern in Silent Running (1972). Movies like The Searchers (1956), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) shaped Lucas’ pictorial approach. He composed the Tatooine sequences, especially establishing shots of various locales on the parched planet, the same way director David Lean shot the Arabian Desert—as if it were an ocean panorama, using the endless expanse of sand to dwarf the characters. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 provided a similar model for Lucas’ handling of scenes set in outer space. Director John Carpenter’s Dark Star—the earliest movie to depict a lived-in, even drab, future universe—may also have influenced Lucas’ visual style.
But Star Wars also contains very specific references to earlier works. Viewers with a working knowledge of classic cinema can point to Star Wars and say, “Hey, that (shot/line of dialogue) is straight out of (insert name of movie here).” Lucas has acknowledged some of these moments as “homages” to his cinematic inspirations. In other cases, the director may have unintentionally quoted from an earlier film. While trying to work out a given shot, perhaps an idea rose to the surface from the stew of childhood movie memories. And some of these apparent links may be purely coincidental. In any case, however, the similarities are many and often striking.
The Tantive IV
Lucas’ homages begin at the very beginning, even before viewers meet a single character. The rolling narrative scroll that opens Star Wars (especially with the “Episode IV—A New Hope” subtitle, which was added in 1981) is one of Lucas’ most overt tributes. It’s nearly identical to the opening summaries used for Chapters 2 through 12 of the Universal Pictures serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1938), one of Lucas’ primary inspirations.
Immediately following the scroll, an imperial Star Destroyer, chasing Princess Leia’s ship, rumbles across the screen. This jaw-dropping shot ends with a close-up of the ship’s giant thrusters. Then we get a reverse angle showing the front of the Destroyer firing at Leia’s ship, the Tantive IV. This astonishing shot would be copied by many later—and lesser—sci-fi movies (see Chapter 13). Yet, as influential as this shot was, it may have been borrowed, or at least adapted, from 2001. About fifty-four minutes into 2001, at the beginning of the “Jupiter Mission” sequence, the massive Discovery One spacecraft glides across the screen. The ship is photographed from below, and the shot ends with a view of the Discovery One’s giant thrusters. Kubrick then immediately cuts to a reverse angle that shows the front of the spacecraft. While the angle of the shot and the pace of the ship’s movement are different in Star Wars, the basic idea of indicating the size of a large vessel by watching it pass in front of the camera for several seconds is the same. In both cases it’s remarkably effective. At the conclusion of its opening sequence, Star Wars quotes a second 2001 moment. The shot of a life pod tumbling toward Tatooine rhymes with a shot of the Pan Am lunar lander falling toward the surface of the moon in 2001’s earlier “TMA-1” sequence. Look for it at the thirty-seven-minute mark of the Kubrick film.
The Lars Homestead
In one of Star Wars’ most searing moments, Luke Skywalker realizes that the imperial stormtroopers who have massacred Jawas in search of C-3PO and R2-D2 may have also attacked his aunt and uncle’s farm. Luke climbs into his landspeeder and rushes home, only to find the Lars homestead a smoking ruin, and to discover the charred skeletons of his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Lucas readily acknowledges drawing on director John Ford’s The Searchers while designing this sequence. In that Western classic, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) joins a group of Texas Rangers searching for rustled cattle. When they find that the cattle have been killed, Edwards realizes that the missing livestock was a diversion to draw the Rangers away and set the stage for an Indian attack. He climbs onto his horse and races home, only to find his brother’s homestead a smoking ruin. About twenty-one minutes into the film, Ethan discovers that his brother and most of his brother’s family have been wiped out by raiding Comanches. Like the Lars homestead, the Edwards’ burning home was dug out of a desert hillside. Black smoke curls away from the ruined home as Edwards finds the body of his beloved sister-in-law, Martha. Both of these emotionally powerful scenes provide tremendous narrative thrust, compelling the hero (Luke/Ethan) to take up the quest that will consume the remainder of the story.
Luke’s discovery of his parents’ charred bodies at the burned-out Skywalker homestead was an homage to a famous sequence from director John Ford’s epic Western The Searchers, starring (foreground) Jeffrey Hunter, left, and John Wayne.
The Mos Eisley Cantina
The Mos Eisley Cantina sequence practically oozes with elements traceable to earlier works. In general terms, Lucas films the cantina the same way director Michael Curtiz shot the Rick’s Café scenes from Casablanca (1942)—as a steamy, shadowy place full of sketchy characters, all of whom seem to be scanning the room out of the corners of their eyes. If Casablanca provides the setting, then Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) and Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) supply the action.
At the bar, Luke is accosted by a drunken fugitive who brags about being marked for death in twelve systems. Ben Kenobi tries to intervene on Skywalker’s behalf, but a fight ensues and Kenobi slices off the criminal’s arm below the elbow. This passage ends with a shot of the thug’s severed arm, still holding his blaster. About eighteen minutes into Yojimbo, the masterless samurai played by Toshiro Mifune demonstrates his skills by baiting a trio of unscrupulous, loud-mouthed swordsmen into a duel. One of them brags that “I’m a wanted fugitive. They’ll crucify me if I’m caught.” During the ensuing fight, Mifune’s character slices off one of the bandits’ arms. The sequence concludes with a shot of the thug’s severed arm, still holding a katana sword.
Later, Jabba’s henchman Greedo confronts Han over a table in his booth. Greedo demands the money Solo owes Jabba. When Han tells him he has a profitable new fare lined up, Greedo tries to extort money from Solo. Ultimately Han blasts Greedo, firing his hidden blaster from under the table. (For now, we will set aside the sticky issue of who shoots first.) In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (at about the ten-minute mark) the roles are reversed but the action is similar. Across a dinner table, a man Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) has been hired to kill tries to bribe the bounty hunter to set him free, but Angel Eyes blasts him with a pistol hidden beneath the table. For the record, Angel Eyes—aka “the Bad”—shoots first. The cantina sequence concludes with Han dropping a coin onto the bar and apologizing to the bartender for the mess. In the classic Western The Magnificent Seven (1960, adapted from a Kurosawa film), a barroom confrontation concludes (about thirty-nine minutes into the film) with star Yul Brynner flinging a coin onto the bar and issuing a similar apology to the barkeep.
The Death Star
Lucas’ tributes to Kurosawa and others continue when Luke, Han, Kenobi, and the droids are taken aboard the Death Star. In one memorable scene, stormtroopers search the captured Millennium Falcon but find no sign of the crew. Once they leave, the camera pans down to the ship’s deck plates, which move aside and reveal our heroes, hidden underneath in secret compartments. Their heads pop into view from below. This moment is staged almost identically to a scene from Kurosawa’s Sanjuro (1962, a sequel to Yojimbo). Mifune’s ronin helps a group of rebel samurai hide to evade capture. Once the enemy leaves (at about the twelve-minute mark of the film), the camera pans down the floorboards of the house, which move aside to reveal the conspirators hidden underneath. Their heads pop into view from below.
When Kenobi disables the Death Star’s tractor beam, he traverses a narrow catwalk across a metallic abyss. This scene strongly recalls a sequence from Forbidden Planet (1956) in which Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) leads Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and Dr. Ostrow (Warren Stevens) on a tour of the massive underground facilities left behind by the extinct Krell species on planet Altair 4. The Death Star power terminal closely resembles the miles-deep Krell ventilator shaft seen at the sixty-minute mark of Forbidden Planet.
Perhaps the most iconic moment of our heroes’ adventures aboard the Death Star arrives when Luke and Leia, trapped by stormtroopers at the edge of another cavernous gulf, use a rope and grappling hook to swing across the chasm. This may have derived from an unforgettable sequence in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958). Near the climax of that film (eighty minutes along), while fleeing the cave of the evil sorcerer Sokurah (Torin Thatcher), Sinbad (Kerwin Matthews) and Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant) are trapped by a broken rock bridge at the edge of a stony crevasse with flowing lava at the bottom. With the help of a friendly genie (Richard Eyer), who produces a magic rope, Sinbad and the princess swing across the abyss.
Luke and Leia’s breathless swing to safety across a chasm in the Death Star recalls a similar sequence from the classic fantasy film The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, which featured stop-motion animation by the legendary Ray Harryhausen (including a climactic battle between a dragon and a Cyclops).
Space Battles
Lucas’ cinematic inspirations are most obvious in Star Wars’ space battles. He used footage from old war movies to demonstrate to the staff at Industrial Light & Magic the kind of movements he wanted to see executed by X-wings, TIE fighters, and other spacecraft. In the rough cut of Star Wars, he used this same footage to substitute for unfinished visual effects. In numerous interviews, Lucas has stated that these scenes provided much of the impetus behind the entire movie. The fact that he personally edited the Millennium Falcon’s battle with attacking TIE fighters also demonstrates the importance the director placed on these scenes. This interlude was clearly modeled on a similar sequence from director Howard Hawks’ classic World War II film Air Force (1943), in which turret gunners aboard an American B-17 “Flying Fortress” fend off an attack by Japanese A6M “Zero” fighter planes. This pulse-quickening scene begins at the eighty-minute mark of Air Force and will seem uncannily familiar to anyone who has seen Star Wars.
For the climactic attack on the Death Star, Lucas appropriated shots from numerous other classic WWII films. The preflight briefing, in which General Dodonna explains the tricky plan to attack the space station, recalls a similar scene in 633 Squadron (1964), a British film about an airstrike on a German V-2 rocket fuel refinery. Shots of imperial troops manning the Death Star’s giant laser resemble the Nazis manning the titular weapons from The Guns of Navarone (1961). The battle itself is shot in the same fashion as the aerial conflicts depicted in 633 Squadron, The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), Battle of Britain (1969), and especially The Dam Busters, a 1955 British film based on an actual mission to destroy three German dams that provided the hydroelectric power behind the Nazi war industry. The Dam Busters connection is another one that Lucas has readily acknowledged. He could hardly do otherwise. Not only are individual shots duplicated from the earlier film, but so is the general plan of attack, with craft flying low along a narrow trench guarded by heavy weapons. In both films, an initial attempt to destroy the target fails, and a second attack run must be undertaken. Some of the chatter between pilots is almost identical. And both films climax with a massive explosion.
The thrilling space battle finale of Star Wars was patterned after the climax of the British World War II drama The Dam Busters.
The Medal Ceremony
One possible homage Lucas has always denied—for obvious reasons—is to Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). The triumphant medal ceremony that concludes Star Wars is staged and photographed in a manner eerily similar to the way Riefenstahl filmed the 1934 Nuremberg rallies. Lucas has always insisted the similarity is coincidental. His argument is, basically, how many ways are there to film such an event? However, in his book Star Wars: The Art of Ralph McQuarrie, the production illustrator recalls that Lucas instructed him to paint “something akin to a Nazi rally with hundreds of troops lined up and huge banners on display.” In any event, when viewed side by side, Luke, Han, and Chewie’s walk through the assembled troops toward the medal dais and Hitler’s march through the assembled, cheering brownshirts on his way to his speaking platform (about ninety minutes into Triumph of the Will) are so much alike that it’s squirm-inducing.
“Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.”
—Salvador Dali
None of these similarities, as Dali (or Asimov) might argue, should suggest that Star Wars was unoriginal. Even if you string together clips from Flash Gordon, 2001, Casablanca, Air Force, The Dam Busters, and all the other movies Lucas borrowed from while making Star Wars, you still wouldn’t have Star Wars. (It’s been tried; check YouTube.) Lucas’ love of vintage war movies, Westerns, serials, and other classic films was creative fuel that provided the imaginative thrust for Star Wars. It was only natural for him to tip his hat to those pictures. More importantly, while some of the individual building blocks were derived from earlier works, Lucas rearranged those pieces to construct something very different from anything viewers had seen before—a mash-up of cowboys, pirates, princesses, sorcerers, and Nazis splashed across a galaxy-wide canvas. The components that were recognizable to audiences only served to make a scenario unlike anything audiences had experienced before, and which was in some respects bizarre, somehow seem relatable, even comforting. Lucas had taken a different course with his first foray into science fiction, THX 1138. Although intended as a commentary on the state of American culture, viewers rejected that film’s sterile dystopia. THX 1138 remained icy and aloof. With Star Wars, Lucas was able to create something paradoxically fresh yet familiar, innovative but approachable.