Fotografias

When George Lucas needed some ideas for his first major sci-fi adventure (THX1138 doesn’t count) he really wanted to create a movie that was unique to everything that came before it. But the reality is that like most movie makers George Lucas had to rely on a wide variety of resources and influence for his movie. A very heavy and very obvious influence in the Star Wars galaxy were the Samurai from Kurosawas Seven Samurai and Yojimbo – Lucas avoided the swashbuckling pirate idea and went more for the noble warrior idea of the Samurai but using that idea in the vacuum of space. At the time Star Wars was made sci-fi movies were mostly low budget events that performed really poorly at the box office so Warner Bros had pretty much no real interest or hope in the Star Wars movie – they thought it was going to die at the box office. In its place the studio invested greatly in a separate movie called Damnation Alley which, ironically enough, did actually bomb at the box office. Star Wars became an institution and Damnation Alley became a joke.

But Lucas persisted with his King Arthur in outerspace sci-fi opera epic and thus the lightsaber was born and in turn a few decades later the Force FX lightsabers made their first appearance on the market thanks to the craftsmen at Master Replicas. Since then Hasbro have taken over production of the FX lightsabers range since then but the quality of the this range of real lightsabers has remained exceptionally high so they’ll always hit the spot.

The Samurai movies of Kurosawa were not the only movies that Lucas used for inspiration on when it came to making these movies he also drew heavily on Arthurian legends and even on the dialogue from Word War II movies – this dialogue was used in the famous Death Star trench run in Star Wars Episode IV – A New Hope. All you need to do is watch 633 squadron and listen really carefully to the dialogue used during the bombing run on the German dams towards the very end of the movie.