That and a mention in Pollock's biography notwithstanding, it seems Lucas is embarrassed of this pulpy source, and its rarely brought up. Of any of the sources mentioned herein, it is the only that can be seen in Lucas' shelf from footage of his writing of Episode I. Perhaps just as important as Flash is one of Star Wars most unsung sources: EE Smith's Galactic Patrol, a 1940s pulp novella that was enjoying renewed popularity in the early 1970s via a paperback rerelease. The connections are obvious, but through its other sources, Star Wars was shaped into a unique creation. It is important to stress that, in spite of this heavy debt to Flash, one can't just watch a 1940s Gordon serial and "see" Star Wars. Ultimately, Flash mostly provided the genre (space fantasy) trappings and the upbeat tone, as well as the initial impetus for the project: George Lucas only made Star Wars after a 1971 pitch of his to King Features to make a Flash Gordon feature film was denied. For one thing, only in that serial (notwithstanding a previous Buck Rogers serial that was effectivelly another Flash Gordon serial in drag) did the text crawl begin to resemble the one found in Lucas' films: the earlier serials had static text. Of the three Flash serials, the most influential seems to have been the last: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. There are character parallels: Luke to Flash (to some extent), Leia to Fria and Dale, and Tarkin and later the Emperor to Ming. 3 From here came many of the planet setting from his films: a city in the clouds and ice planet, a woodland planet: all appearing on the serial as different parts of the fictional planet Mongo. However, the main influence was the movie serials, which Lucas probably saw, age ten, retitled as "Space Soldiers" on Super Serial, airing at 6 on KTVU. 1 Flash Gordon started as a comic strip, and some visual designs like Luke's landspeeder derive directly from those, 2 but Lucas seems to have been exposed to it primarily on television: he could have seen the 1950 TV show, which was set in the 33rd century, the setting of Lucas first story treatment for the film. There's another kind of secondary source that falls outside the scope of this essay, which is autobiographical elements, which mostly come down to Han Solo being vaguely Coppola-like.Īlthough Lucas had tried to downplay the influence of Flash Gordon, he never denied it: perhaps he thought it was too obvious, and he was right. The rest are secondary sources, including a list of World War II movies, followed by some minor "scholarly" sources like a column by Bruno Bettelheim about fairytales. Well, I tried doing just that, and came up with the following sources, listed by order of significance: The most influential, I would say, is Flash Gordon, followed by EE Smith's Galactic Patrol, Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, Akira Kursawa's A Hidden Fortress and Frank Herbert's Dune. But can we try and more assiduously ascertain Lucas' sources and their concrete influence on Lucas film and subsequent sequels and prequels? If one so wished, one could read anything and everything into it see, for instance, Vincent Canby's review of it: " is nothing if not eclectic: Quo Vadis?, Buck Rogers, Ivanhoe, Superman, The Wizard of Oz, The Gospel According to St Matthew, the legends of King Arthur." Since 1980, director George Lucas has increasingly pointed his fan to high-brow sources like Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai as sources.
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