A Cheatsheet to Creating Star Wars

Surprisingly, Star Wars in fact did not simply invent itself into existence.  George Lucas worked on a number of drafts (eventually adapted into an excellent comic book entitled The Star Wars by Jonathan Rinzler and Mike Mayhew) before settling on the story and elements as they first appeared in theaters in 1977.  For the purposes of this article, I am confining myself to inspiration Lucas himself would have had, and not more familiar anecdotes like where John Williams adapted previous film scores for his famous fanfares.  Incredibly, some of this does not seem to have been part of the lore, or at least widely speculated.  

Let's get some of the obvious ingredients out of the way.  Frank Herbert claimed Lucas stole Dune (originally published in 1965) wholesale.  There's certainly some merit, insofar as a desert planet and an upstart hero with budding special abilities from an old society and an empire in the mix goes, but otherwise, in terms of what Star Wars (which is what Star Wars was in 1977, not Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope) was on release, it's kind of a stretch.

Lucas himself always said he originally envisioned Flash Gordon, and only settled on original creations later.  The particular Flash Gordon he had in mind, although it's often said he was inspired by the theatrical serials, was probably the 1954-1955 TV series.  

George Lucas was born on May 14, 1944.  He would have been an ideal kid audience for the series, which was adapted from the comic strip begun in 1934 and first filmed in three movie serials from 1936 to 1940, all before his birth.  

Another avowed source of inspiration for Lucas was The Hidden Fortress, released in 1958, as well as the less well-known The Dam Busters, from 1955, which helped inform the end sequence trench run on the Death Star.

All this is well and good, and well-documented.  Here's where we perhaps find fresh material.

I only read Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy a few years back.  Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953) are certainly well-known to genre fans, but are seldom, if ever, talked about in conjunction with Star Wars, and yet, once past the intellectual exercise that is the first book, I found an astounding number of parallels, both in plot and dialogue (just pointing them all out would require a reread and its own article), from throughout the Star Wars saga (one of the more obvious ones being the Mutant being a precursor to the Emperor).

Watching Ben-Hur (1959) as an adult (I only remember watching it as a kid because the climactic chariot race has a few memorable beats that stuck in latent memory) it was impossible not to hear parallels between the British-sounding characters talking about the (Roman) empire in it and the British-sounding characters in Star Wars talking about the Empire, including frequent references to "the emperor" (when in more recent years it's not often you think of the caesars under that term).  It becomes all the more obvious Lucas had Ben-Hur on the brain when he circles around to the prequels later and focuses them on the conflict between adoptive brothers Anakin and Obi-Wan, just as Ben-Hur does with the title character and Messala, who engage in the climactic race after an equally dramatic falling out.

Now, here's where I include some interesting casting choices as part of the mix.

The voice of Darth Vader is one of the signature elements of all Star Wars lore, and here I'm talking about James Earl Jones, and you have surely heard plenty about how that happened.  But what about why?  I happened to be watching old Sherlock Holmes material during the pandemic, when I came upon this scene:

That's the voice of Dr. Watson as portrayed by Howard Marion-Crawford in the 1955 episode "The Case of the Reluctant Carpenter" of the US Sherlock Holmes TV series.  I think you'll agree that it sounds uncannily like Jones, especially as he sounds in the first Star Wars film.  Here's where my point about all the 1950s material the young George Lucas absorbed comes into play.  Whether it was a conscious decision or not, it seems probable to suggest that the future filmmaker heard that voice and filed it away.

The actor himself would have been unavailable when Lucas began filming, having passed away in 1969.  Watching much more of the series you would no doubt be aware that his voice was hardly consistent in its delivery, so that you might never suspect upon watching just any episode.  But to my ear it was unmistakable, and it caused me to take immediate notice.

I previously wrote about Harrison Ford appearing in Gunsmoke (he made two appearances, but the relevant episode is "Whelan's Men" in which he portrays a character named Hobey) in 1973, featuring a scene that nearly exactly parallels the infamous "Han shot first" cantina sequence, a clip I was previously able to include in a post centering on the parallels but now seems unavailable.  But if you happen to be keeping score, it's the twentieth episode of Gunsmoke's eighteenth season.  (If for some reason I had previously misidentified the role, then it's his other appearance, in a different role.)  It's very likely that this was no coincidence.

In the years since Lucas directed the prequels, it's become fashionable to doubt his creative abilities, and even to suggest that the genius of the original films derives from editing.  Pointing out where he came up with various elements isn't to take away from Lucas as the creator of Star Wars, but rather the genius it took to synthesize not only all that material but reconcile it with the ideas he'd already toyed with in order to create a filmable concept.

It may be a saga set in a galaxy far, far away, but for Lucas "long ago" was his childhood, as it often is.