Supposedly, one of Lucas' concepts for the Imperial capital involved towering buildings, with aerial vehicles moving between them, inspired by scenes in Metropolis.  Fritz Lang's inspiration for the look of Metropolis came from a visit to New York City and seeing the skyline, from a ship, coming into port.  Metropolis was a big influence on sci-fi illustrators of the era, as well as matching the thinking of futurists, of the period.  Le Corbusier wrote a whole book about urban planning and buildings and you have the whole International movement, in architecture, which can be seen in his work and several other architects and designers of the period, including the Bauhaus, in Germany, architecture in London and other parts of the UK, and in later architects, like Saarinen, Neutra, Mies Van der Roe and others.

One of the things that gets brought up is a costume that Laureline wears in one album (I think it was Welcome to Alflolol) and Leia's slave girl costume, but I have seen Frazetta designs that also looked similar and costumes from sword & sandal epics, so you could take tour pick where that idea originated.

The similarities of Valerian's ship and the Millennium Falcon are another; but, you could just point to sci-fi spaceship concepts, post WW2 for that.  Empire of a Thousand Planets is one of the main ones that gets cited, but the story is not that similar and the scarred figure, who is revealed when he removes his helmet, is not unique to that work..  Darth Vader's armor developed over time, but one of Lucas' inspirations was The Lightning, the villain from the Republic serial Fighting Devil Dogs......



It morphed as development progressed, incorporating samurai armor elements and German stahlhelms.  In the earlier drafts, Darth Vader was the name of a sadistic, but cowardly Imperial general, who tortures Deak Starkiller (at least, I think it was Deak).  There were also the Knights of the Sith, plural, led by Prince Valorum.  There are early armor designs that are attributed to vader, by fans, that were actually for Valorum.  The Sith Knights wore black space armor and the early drafts had them enter the Rebel ship (carrying Deak Starkiller) from the void of space, with the armor being pressure suits, like an astronaut.  They cut their way into the hull and board, then battle with the crew.  There is an image of what looks like Darth Vader fighting someone in scuba gear, which is Deak, in breathing gear, using his own "laser sword".  Later, in the story, Valorum witnesses Vader committing torture, out of sadistic pleasure and ends up turning on the Empire because of their lack of honor.  Some of that is present in Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, where Toshiro Mifune confronts a former subordinate, for siding with the enemy forces.  That confrontation, leading to battling on horseback, with lances, informed the later battle between Vader and Obi-Wan.

Similarly, the concepts of the Jedi changed a bit in drafts and they reflect a blending of influences.  One of them was EE Smith's Lensman Series.  The book the Galactic Patrol has a section that is beat for beat the same as the attack on the Tantive IV.  The hero, Kim Kinnison, is a new Lensman.  The Galactic Patrol is an intergalactic peace force, with the Lensmen being special agents, who have a lends, bonded to their hands, which give them some telepathic abilities and which magnffy their physical abilities.  Only a select few become Lensmen and even fewer become Grey Lensmen, the highest rank.  That influenced the ideas of the Jedi as peace keepers and some of the more militaristic aspects, as do the martial aspects of the samurai and the code of bushido.  The more spiritual style reflects the interest in Zen buddhism, which was prominent in the counter-culture, in Lucas' college days and soon after.  That said, if you look at Star Wars, without anything that followed, Ben Kenobis robes are just the local desert attire:  loose fitting, designed to protect against the sun, and hard wearing.  Just like bedouin tribes.  It is only later, when we see Ben, Anakin and Yoda together, all dressed like Ben, does it become a Jedi's robe.  Even in the Marvel comics, there is a story where ben, in his younger days, is in a uniform (either black or midnight blue), suggesting that what he wore later was not a sign of being a Jedi.  When Luke appears in Return of the Jedi, he is not dressed in those same kind of robes; he wears a black uniform, which reflects that earlier image of Ben, from the flashback story, at Marvel.  The idea of robes doesn't come up until the ending celebration and I think it was just a visual way to link the three and that was then taken as the Jedi look, for the prequels.

The epic space battles of the Lensman Saga (influenced by naval battles, I am sure) influenced how those were conceptualized, in Star Wars.  You had whole planets destroyed, which matches with the Death Star destroying Alderaan.  You could link that to the sheer destructive force of a naval bombardment, in preparation for amphibious landings.

Edward Elmer Smith was the granddaddy of space opera, creating both the Skylark series and the Lensman Saga, both of which were hugely influential.  Lucas pulled a lot of elements from those works and other space opera and they in turn influenced things like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, which also inspired him.  One of the reasons he approached Leigh Brackett, to write the script for Empire, was her planetary romances, in the pulp magazines.  At the time, he didn't realize that she had co-written the scripts for The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, thinking that was just a coincidence of names.  He didn't find out until he talked to her about writing the screenplay, asking if she had written any screenplays, when she listed her credits.  He replied, "You're THAT Leigh Brackett?"  He though it was a man, with a similar name.  That's another point in how things evolved.

In Brackett's first draft for Star Wars II, as it was titled, Luke meets the ghost of his father on Dagobah and Ben Kenobi is only a minor element.  Darth Vader is treated as a separate character.  Brackett was suffering from cancer and her health got worse and she was unable to work on a second draft.  Lucas had issues with her draft and ended up bringing Lawrence Kasdan in to rewrite it, with himself.  They had problems with the parallel stories of Han and Leia in one place and Luke in another and they eventually hit upon the idea of combining Darth Vader and Luke's father into one character.  Suddenly, the narrative possibilities stated falling into place.  Father Skywalker's role got shifted to Ben, expanding his part and then you get a surprise that takes you into the next film.  That change is where things turned from a sequel to a popular movie into a narrative saga.  Everything that contradicts Star wars originates in that change and the decisions from then on.  By the Prequels, you now have Lucas trying to reconcile some of those contradictions, while also tapping discarded scripts for ideas, leading to the similar plots and story structure.

I've always felt Lensman was more Green Lantern than Star Wars, but I can see it. Just goes to show how concepts build over time to be tropes and then get spun in new ways. Very interesting stuff!

Back in 1983, when ROTJ came out, both Lucas and Carrie Fisher spoke in the press about Raquel Welch's fur bikini from One Million Years B.C. being an inspiration for Leia's slave girl outfit. That's not something that I've seen repeated much in the four decades since, but that was definitely what they were saying while they were on the media rounds to promote ROTJ.




Absolutely spot on. I was actually having a conversation about this with a friend just the other day. Old Ben from beyond the Dune Sea was simply wearing the garb of a desert hermit in the first Star Wars film, which, as you say, was very similar to the attire that other residents of Tatooine wore. The hilarious thing about these bedouin-style clothes morphing into the official Jedi robes over subsequent films is that, when you watch Star Wars now, even Uncle Owen is dressed in Jedi robes!

The Kaiburr Crystal (or crystals, plural) originated in an early script draft as a maguffin, to help drive the plot, as they have to search for it. It was supposed to control or magnify the Force, so it was sought by both sides. It got discarded in redrafting; but, Alan Dean Foster used it for his literary sequel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, as an old woman makes a bargain with Luke and Leia to help get them off a planet, in exchange for helping her find the crystal. She has a sliver from the crystal (the "splinter") and when Luke touched it, he could feel its power). I haven't read many of the later novels (the Zahna books, The Courtship of Princess Leia, Truce at Bakura, Jedi Search) and have no idea if they messed around with it; but, Rogue One made it the necessary element for the lightsaber. That was not in Lucas' original. In his telling, especially at the beginning, the "laser sword" was used all over the galaxy and it was specifically a weapon for fighting aboard spaceships, much like a cutlass, in a pirate movie (one of Lucas' genre inspirations).

An early draft went into more detail about the Force, There was Ashla, the Good side, and Bogan, the Bad side, which indicates influence from the Lensman Saga. There, the two races who have manipulated genetic development in the galaxy are the Arisians, who set in motion human development, leading to the Galactic Patrol and the Lensmen. The Eddorians oppose them and they are behind the evolution of the Boskone, the enemy of the Galactic Patrol. The novel Triplanetary, which was retrofitted as an origin of the Lensmen (a couple of parts were published before The Galactic Patrol, but were not directly related to that story and were inserted into the saga when they were expanded into the novel, with another book bridging the gap). This was also influential on the back history of Babylon 5, with the Shadows and Vorlons manipulating lesser species, as part of their conflict (as well as the Rangers, right down to their badge). Lucas' main inspiration was the work of Carlos Castaneda and his talk of the "force of others." Castaneda was big with the counter-culture of the 60s and early 70s, though he was primarily a BS artist, who claimed he got these secrets from an old Yaqui shaman, Don Juan Matus. You can pretty much file his books with the writings of the Theosophists, like Madame Blavatsky and Talbot Mundy (though Mundy used that mumbo jumbo well for some pulp adventure novels) and Scientology.

The Green Lantern Corps is definitely swiped from the Lensman Saga, though not as directly as you might think. There was a Japanese anime adaptation, which features young Kim Kinnison obtaining his lens from a dying Lensman, who came to his planet, seeking his father. Kim takes up the mission and meets another, more alien Lensman. In the Galactic Patrol, he graduates from the Patrol Academy and is then made a Lensman, in a ritual, where the lens bonds to his hand. There is no dying alien passing it to him. He does later meet an alien Lensman. There also isn't the ship battle that leads to Kim ejecting, with the Boskone raider schematic, as in the novel. It appears the Japanese team decided to make it more directly resemble Green Lantern, with the scene mimicking Abin Sur passing on his power ring to Hal Jordan.

Mike Barr brought out the Lensman connection by introducing the characters Arisia and Eddore.

Starlog was the main source I saw for discussion about the influences of Star Wars, as they tried to fill the magazine with copy, other than Star Trek and 50s sci-fi movies that weren't that good, even then. You'd see mentions of things like "bantha" originating in the John Carter of Mars stories and of The Hidden Fortress and the Dam Busters, as movie inspirations and then people would bring up other sci-fi works. There was a story I read, about World Con or San Diego, where either Phil Lippincott was describing the plot of Star Wars, to fans, and a noted sci-fi writer (I wanna say Poul Anderson, but I am not sure) heckled that that was just "space opera" and not "science fiction," which is an old battle in the sci-fi world, in efforts to have the genre taken seriously. Harlan Ellison made some criticisms, more about fans who worshipped the film, rather than the film itself, that led to back and forth between fans, in their letters column. He also lobbed some criticisms at Star Trek, which got Trekkies going. From what I recall, they were valid criticisms and he was basically telling them they needed to take a larger view, to see this wasn't some grand revelation, but a mixture of previous (and in his opinion, better) writings and films.

I miss those days, because you had to put more thought into a letter to a magazine, to get it published, rather than a knee-jerk rant and click on "send." It also seemed a bit more magical, as bits of information came out, about the back story or the production and the photos from the sets. I still recall seeing the teaser trailer, in 1976 and totally getting the wrong idea of the story. I thought it was taking place in some weird city and Vader grew into giant size (the part where he is shot from below, in Lei's cell, made him look like he was a giant). Part of that was that the only thing I had to compare to what we saw in the trailer was the Sinbad films of Ray Harryhausen. The Marvel adaptation was my first real glimpse at the actual story (and that was only the first three issues). I didn't know that Biggs was cut out of the film (apart from a few shots in the dogfights) or that Vader doesn't have a cup of coffee, or that Jabba didn't appear and have whiskers. A friend had the novelization and the copy on the back, with talk of Luke taking up his father's "laser sword" had me thinking of The Mark of Zorro (tv version) where Diego takes his father's sword off the wall and slashes a Z in the dust on a mirror. The Making of special, on ABC, was my first real glimpse of the film, but it had been out for a couple of months before my siblings and I got to see it. That was excrutiating, as everyone was talking about it at school and I was about the only one who hadn't seen it....even the girls had mostly seen it!

really? That's interesting... I had no idea!

I kinda remember the Crystals from Splinter in the Mind's Eye, but it's been a LONG time since I thought about that one.. even though that was sort of the first EU book (or were the Han Solo novels first... those were fun).

I think I would have liked NOT Fett to be there.. save him for later. Why would he want to work for the Hutts again anyway? Dengar, Bossk and IG-88? That would make sense to me. Or go crazy and make up some new characters.. it's been six years, after all... maybe some of the old folks are dead, reformed, or hit a big score and retired to Navarro .

I definitely prefer lightsabers just as a weapon you build...I feel like it's just a bit too much to have them be magic soul crystals or whatever it is now. Let the color be just a personal preference, nothing more. It's fun everyone has to build their own.. makes the Jedi feel more than just warriors or 'wizards' but it feels less like that when they have to like 'speak' to them.

I might have to read some Lensmen books again too... I have I think two collected old sci fi book club volumes but when I first read them I really knew very little of the genre so I bet I would pick up alot of interesting things now. Another one for the list!

That's interesting about the guards... I definitely thought they weren't very Ralph McQuarrie-ish, so I assumed they were just created for the series. I do love it when no good idea goes unused!

I think the two concepts can be complementary. A Force-user constructs their own lightsaber, which is powered by a living crystal. The crystal has a will of its own and won't just let anyone use it as if it were a battery, so the Force-user has to meditate over the crystal to make it cooperate. A lightsider will spend days or even weeks communing with the crystal to form a rapport with it, while a darksider will just use the Force to dominate the crystal. At the end of the process, the crystal takes on a hue influenced by the Force-user's psyche/preferences.

I'm not sure you are in a minority .... at least, not among those of us who think about such minutia, I mean. I too prefer the idea of lightsabers just being an out-dated weapon that uses a crystal to create the beam/blade. That's all they need to be and, let's be honest, all they were ever intended to be by George Lucas back in the '70s and '80s.