Two likable (and funny) robots escape from the rebel blockade runner battle, become lost in the Tatooine desert, and unwittingly become involved with the rescue of a princess and the exploits of a Jedi-Knight.

This familiar sequence of events is repeated with the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. They then became involved with the rescue of a Princess and the exploits of a General. That film also used “wipes” as visual transitions between scenes, but more importantly, involved two pseudo-comic individuals, Tahei and Mataschici, who escaped a pitched battle, wandered for a time in a wasteland, and were then captured and enslaved. Not incidentally, the screenplay seems to share his point of view, describing the light saber of the old Republic as an ' elegant' weapon for a more ' civilized time.' In other words, the past inside the Star Wars universe, and the past of Hollywood history outside Star Wars were both more elegant and civilized than the present of the Galactic Empire/anti-hero cinema.Īfter the opening crawl, Star Wars very much begins to deliberately ape elements and details from Akira Kurosawa’s film, The Hidden Fortress. Not coincidentally, the same decade was the age of growling, violent anti-heroes like Dirty Harry and Paul Kersey (of the Death Wish films).īy commencing Star Wars with a 1930s-era, serial-like crawl, George Lucas effectively renounced contemporary cinema, and reached back to an older tradition, a “golden age” of more innocent fantasy fare. In terms of the sci-fi genre, Dystopian-styled films dominated the landscape ( The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, and Damnation Alle y, for example.

The disco decade was an era when such swashbuckling adventure films were not in vogue. This was not a small detail in the 1970s.

Space by John Kenneth Muir