I have no opinion on the Star Wars/Dune debate but that is one fantastic comment. Kudos to the author, brought me quite a smile.
The most funny thing about this is when Google AI will pick this as the true answer to the creation of Dune
My friend, who has never watched Star Trek, was convinced it was Star Wars ripoff.
My personal faves are the claims that the cybermen are ripping off the borg and that Pratchett’s Unseen University is a hogwarts copy.
Star Wars is a ripoff of some international (Italian? Japanese? I don’t know) movie.
Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa. It’s still enjoyable today IMO, and you can really see how some of the characters are a direct line to Star Wars characters.
Now this information makes “Star Wars Visions: Ronin” look like the the “back to the roots” material.
If you watch enough old scifi and adventure movies, you’ll learn to welcome the “so that’s where Lucas took that idea from” feeling as an old friend. He lifted a lot.
The sci-fi artists were really all copying each other and building off of one another anyways.
It’s the same with almost all art anyways, it’s “inspiration” by another word.
That just is what all storytelling is. You mix and match characters, tropes, settings, and such from other stories and irl and mix it all together to get something “original”
I also remember many designs and visual concepts were also based on a French scify graphic novel.
pretty much everything is a rip off of everything.
A fistful of dollars which has become the archetypal western is also just a rip off of yojimbo im addition to the magnificent seven being a rip off the seven samurai which was also directed by kurosawa the same guy who made the movie star wars ripped off.
Star Wars is the plot of Hidden Fortress, in a universe similar to Dune, in the style of Flash Gordon, but with genius special effects and Jaws level care for every aspect of the production of the film itself.
The music tends to be left off lists like this but without that fabulous score and the genius of John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra, Star Wars would not have had the same emotional impact.
Forget the music it’s the overall sound design, music is just a small part of it. Villeneuve’s vision for the whole thing was to make it sound like a documentary: The desert sounds like desert, not like music, the ornithopers sound like – erm, they sound like ornithopters, not helicopters or music, everything sounds natural. As if shot on location, on actual Dune, and that atmosphere is given plenty of screen time, no grand musical scores interrupting the immersion.
EDIT oh wait you were talking Star Wars, not Dune. Yep, completely different beast. Also the THX logo not just the 21st Century Fox fanfare is part of the score I’m ready to die on that hill.
The music of Holst’s “The Planets”, if we want to complete our list of things Star Wars superficially plagiarized.
For fun I put it into ChatGPT. Response is below.
That’s an insightful summary! George Lucas was indeed inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress” when developing the plot for “Star Wars,” particularly the perspective of the story being seen through the eyes of two lowly characters. The universe of “Star Wars” shares many thematic elements with Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” such as the desert planet of Tatooine resembling Dune’s Arrakis and the concept of a galactic empire. The stylistic influence of Flash Gordon can be seen in the serialized adventure feel and the distinctive, retro-futuristic aesthetics. Lastly, Lucas’s groundbreaking use of special effects and meticulous attention to detail in production set a new standard for filmmaking, much like “Jaws” did for the thriller genre.
Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress aren’t that similar. There’s some clear inspiration in some aspects, sure, particularly with the Droids, but the overall plot evolved into its own thing.
Right? I kept hearing this claim so I finally watched Hidden Fortress and now it pisses me off at how much of a huge fucking stretch has to be made. “Oh, two comic relief buddy characters in an otherwise mostly serious film? Must be a Hidden Fortress ripoff!”
Fuck off. You might as well say they’re similar because both movies use moving pictures and sound to tell a story.
I mean it’s been a hot minute since I watched hidden fortress but it’s definitely much more than the droids as far as influence goes, unless I’m completely misremembering it there’s also Kenobi, Luke, and Leia equivalents and Lucas hasnt even been coy about how it was a big influence on the original film as far as I know
Lol the real plagiarism is GW / Warhammer 40k ripping off Dune
Though you could do an identical meme with Games Workshop and Blizzard. There were so many people back in the day that didn’t know Warhammer 40k had been around for over a decade when StarCraft released.
And then the same thing happened again when Dawn of War was released.
To be fair, the original warcraft was supposed to be an rts using the Warhammer IP.
