Is Star Wars just a rip off of John Carter/Barsoom?

Yes.

>>15580346

It takes more from and is more akin to Flash Gordon. Which isn't surprising seeing as how Star Wars literally started out as Lucas writing a prospective Flash Gordon movie while trying to get the license since he had loved the movies as a kid. He failed though, and just decided to make the movie as it's own original thing anyway, incorporating some other stuff he loved in to the DNA of the film while he was at it.

>>15580346
In the way that everything is a ripoff of at least one other thing, yes.

>>15580346
it's only a rip-off if the prequels did it.

seriously.

point out all the stuff in the original trilogy that copied/borrowed/plagiarized and people would say it's an homage.

when you point out all the sci-fi/film homages in the prequels, people will say those are rip-offs.

I feel like the force awakens was the trash that it was because it had no other base of reference or influences outside of Star Wars itself.

>>15580346
of the old shit that Star Wars lifts from I'm hard-pressed to think of what's lifted from Barsoom

is Princess of Mars worth reading in this day and age? I enjoyed the Disney movie

>>15580346
You really could come with better examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx15aXjcDZg
>>15580421
That's my opinion too. While original Star Wars was a interesting and entertaining mix of a bunch of things (Western's, Chambara, Swashbuckler, early sci-fi's, war movies) the new movie seemed like a retarded offspring of a incestuous relation.

>>15580543
I enjoyed reading the first few Barsoom books a couple of years ago.

>>15580543
I read them for the first time not too long ago, and they were some pretty good shit.

>>15580437
Jabba the Hutt is almost completely Tal Hajus with his name changed. They even changed Tal Hajus in the John Carter movie to be unlike his book counterpart to avoid the comparison. Even the famous image of Slave Leia in her bikini at the foot of his throne is lifted from interior art in the original book

The whole sequence at the opening of Return of the Jedi is very Burroughs, down to disguises and people getting thrown in pits to fight totally-not-a-white-ape. Seriously, how many times does John Carter disguise himself as a bad guy to sneak around? It's at least twice per book, and he's not even the only Burroughs character to do it.

At the end of the day, if it looks like it came from John Carter then it probably did. Lucas has gone on record citing it and Flash Gordon as the inspirations for Star Wars. He does take stuff from them and go in a different direction. The Force Jump was probably inspired by John Carter's leaping ability, for instance, but the force powers don't map 1-to-1 with John Carter's abilities. Carter could jump high read minds (sometimes, when Burroughs remembered that he introduced that), but he couldn't see the future or move objects with his mind. When you KNOW the inspiration, and we do, then it's easy to see what he lifted from Burroughs, but Lucas does generally reinterpret it in at least novel ways.

>>15580543
They're super over-the-top so buckle up for some crazy pulp action. Just also bear in mind that after the first book I think they have the most shameless cliffhanger endings you've ever seen because that's how Burroughs rolls.

>>15580650
Yeah, there's some other stuff too. Seeing the future might be thanks to Dune, same with the spice drug and Jabba being a big fat slug on a floating throne.

>>15580650

For all the flack people give him Lucas is one of the most open creators about acknowledging his influences publicly. He's met and talked with a few of them too, including Akira Kurosawa and Joseph Campbell, though he was to young to meet Edgar Rice Burroughs or Alex Raymond.

>>15580386

The difference between rip-off and homage is generally the amount of cynicism. But legally there is a difference, and Seven Samurai is the easiest example.

An “idea” is essentially unprotectable, so seven guys defending a village can be done any number of times without owing a dime (or a tip of the hat) to Mr. Kurosawa. What is protectable is the execution: the plot, the characters and all of the details. The Magnificent Seven is a remake in that it took all of these elements fairly directly. The others are appropriating only the basic idea, or small details, and are thus labelled “homage.”

>>15580713
oh I know.

one can do the barest of references but can be called a rip-off while another is copied 99% but be called a homage.

it all depends on the person.

>>15580722

There's also the fact that let's face it, people don't care as long as the movie is good.

Magnificent Seven is a direct 1:1 cowboy remake of SS, but no one minds because MS is one of the greatest films in history, on par with SS.

>>15580729
Plus some cowboy films are essentially Westernized samurai adaptations anyway (see A Fistful of Dollars being like Yojimbo).

>>15580650
oh okay yeah I can see it in RotJ

but yeah Dune's a big one too

>>15580348
No. A Princess of Mars is a terrible Isekai featuring an unremarkable dude from a sexually repressed country being dropped into a place where sexy women bare it all and he's basically a demi-god.

>>15580746
Is a fair trade, as many Kurosawa films are inspired by John Ford westerns, and others are pretty much just Shakespeare plays set in medieval Japan.

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It took equal parts from Barsoom Lensman and Flash

>>15580845
He was basically a demigod on Earth. Why are you shitting on books that you clearly didn't read?
Literally the very first paragraph of the first book:

>I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.

>>15580421
That's a great way of expressingvthat, thanks, imma steal it.

>>15580421
>no other base of reference or influences outside of Star Wars itself.
Much like Modern anime compared to classic anime. I think Anno or somebody has complained about this

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I always wondered if Leia's slave bikini outfit was George's nod to Dejah Thoris

>>15580421
That's kinda the point, it comes off as a retrospective of itself with a dash of 21st century zeitgeist, as opposed to the George Lucas Top 10 Cool Things playlist with a dash of 20th century zeitgeist.

But this is why as a pretentious reads-into-shit-too-deeply type I swear by only watching Star Wars for the effects porn and blowing off the plot as much as possible.

Come for the ILM and nothing else.

>>15581164
That's fair, ILM's excellent.

There's also Valerian, a French graphic novel froms the 60s.

>>15581296
Is that the one with an adaptation coming out this summer? I think it has that one Tumblrina slut who was also in Suicide Squad.

>>15581296

Someone at ILM may have known about and liked it, but Lucas probably didn't. The usual similarity people point out is the Millennium Falcon resembling the ship from Valerian, but that was a last minute design someone at ILM did with no real supervision when Lucas realised the original design, what became the Tantive IV, was too similar to an existing design from some other movie (can't recall which off hand).

>>15581388
>too similar to an existing design from some other movie (can't recall which off hand).

The Eagle from the tv show Space 1999

>>15581388
Not just the Millennium Falcon.

Mezieres (Valerian's artist) wrote a few letters to Lucas after he saw the first Star Wars, since he noticed a lot of similarities to Valerian. Lucas to this day has yet to reply back to him

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>>15581388
>>15581447
Forgot image.

>>15581448

Half of those aren't even from the original trilogy, several of them are just common design elements (helmeted presumably bad guy who has scarred face) and beyond their being a mask on the 4th image there's no similarity. Does the character involved go through a similar arc or something that just isn't conveyed in the image? Also, considering how open Lucas is with the inspirations for and history of the movie throughout the decades, naming Flash Gordon, Dune, Akira Kurosawa, Joseph Campbell etc. I can't see why he'd hide from one creator that inspired him if he was actually inspired by him. Not replying is rude, but Lucas was also pretty busy and famous by then presumably (literally over night on Star Wars release he became so), so it's entirely possible he's just never gotten that letter for several reasons (like it just being drowned by other letters or sorters throwing it out).

>>15580346
Lucas ripped off Flash Gordon, the Lensman series, Valerian comic.
Lucas ripped off so many things and got away with it.

>>15581490
>I can't see why he'd hide from one creator that inspired him if he was actually inspired by him
Those are my same exact thoughts.
Apparently Lucas had some French artists working for him during the production of Star Wars, so maybe they had some of the graphic novels with them when they needed some "ideas".

https://nothingbutcomics.net/2015/12/14/valerian/

>>15581490
>>15581627
There's an interview at the bottom of the page with with the writer of Valerian.

https://kitbashed.com/blog/valerian-and-laureline

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Yes. No. Maybe. Can you repeat the question?

>>15580421
But that's the best part of vii.

>>15581490
The two Revenge of the Sith ones are in Return of the Jedi. No idea why the guy decided to use pics and cite from RotS.

John Carter was a fun movie. Wish they made a sequel

>>15581574
If George Lucas ripped them off, why didn't they take him to court?

Pissing and moaning that you have been ripped off is super easy. But the fact is, art of every genre is inspired by and borrows from other art.

If a creator truly feels he has been ripped off, where something has been stolen from one work and put into another work with no changes, they have to take them to court. But when you get into area that Star Wars is in, or hundreds of other sci-fi, fantasy or action stories are in, where things are "ehhh...kinda similar", then you open the flood gates for literally thousands of stories. "THE SHIP I DESIGNED IN 1993 HAS 3 WINGS WITH ONE RED STRIPE ON EACH WING, JUST LIKE THIS SHIP FROM THIS VIDEO GAME MADE IN 2015 THAT HAS...WAIT FOR IT....3 WINGS WITH ONE RED STRIPE!!! I DESERVE 40 MILLION DOLLARS FROM THIS HIT VIDEO GAME!"
Fuck that bullshit clogging up courtrooms.

>>15580543
They're pretty great until John Carter stops being the protagonist and the narrative style switches from first person to third. That's like, six books in, though.

>>15585046
Only Harlan Ellison is enough of a cunt to still actively sue every single thing he claims to "invented".

If George Lucas were alive today, do you think he would make a Howard the Duck prequel?

>>15585433
Fuck you, you made me google it

>>15585443

No, because the rights have reverted back to Marvel, he doesn't work for Disney and he wants to make his own stuff.

>>15585485
>December 24, 2015, Lucas likened his decision to sell Lucasfilm to Disney to a "divorce" and outlined the creative differences between him and the producers of The Force Awakens. Lucas described the previous six Star Wars films as his "children" and defended his vision for them, while criticizing The Force Awakens for having a "retro feel", saying: “I worked very hard to make them completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships – you know, to make it new”. Lucas also drew some criticism and subsequently apologized for his remark likening Disney to "white slavers"

>>15585583
>his remark likening Disney to "white slavers"
Yet Jar Jar Binks was one "of his children" that he "defends".

>>15584978
It was the best He-Man movie, yes.

>>15580346
Star Wars is a very good pastiche of many different things. It's like saying Bubblegum Crisis is a rip off of Blade Runner/Streets of Fire. It's true to some extent, but the work isn't just copying them.

>>15585623
Wow, someone on /m/ actually understands how rip offs work instead of claiming "inspired by=ripped off"

>>15585636
He created an amalgam of scenes/plot-points taken from different works, watch Lucas' forward to the Criterion Collection Edition of Hidden Fortress where he literally says it was ok for him to adapt the chase between horses into a chase between landspeeders (plus the whole rebels versus the empire thing that literally encompassed 99% of that movie) because there's apparently according to him only a preset number of plots anyway. I know a plot-point/jedi-mind-tricks/deathstar were homaged from Lensmen, though I cannot vouch for any "similar" or "looks-like" claims outside of that.

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>Let's crucify George Lucas for taking some obscure pulp garbage nobody would've known about otherwise and actually making palatable for the time

sausga /m/

>>15585664
>because there's apparently according to him only a preset number of plots anyway
He has a point. Every work of fiction, without exception, draws inspiration from what came before it; there hasn't been a truly original story since the epic of Gilgamesh (and even that almost certainly borrowed from earlier stories, we just don't know about them). Whining about "originality" or the lack thereof has always seemed pointless to me. The execution is what matters.

>>15580346
Lucas was the Gainax/Trigger of his time.

>>15585636
They're one in the same.

>>15585753
You're retarded.

>>15585760
That's giving both of them way too much credit.

>>15585753
Sure, and he wasn't the only one I've heard say something similar. I believe he said something like a hundred and something, but iirc there's older theories of like 14ish and 20something-ish. If anything, it's more telling that he manned up and even did the intro to a movie that clearly held meaning for him regardless of how it'd make him look.

>>15580346
No, lucas used a basic story structure.

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>>15580346
Love John Carter, Almuric, Michael Kane, but Gor is the best.

>>15580543
Is it bad that I enjoyed the disney movie?

>>15581152

But Deja Thoris is supposed to be attractive.

>>15590038
The movie was fine considering the universe was determined to make it shit.

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Lots of fictional work recycles old mythology. If we did not do it we would have idea what is going on (the reliance on the shorthand of mythology) and it there be be no content because every work of fiction builds on the knowledge of the writer.

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How the fuck is some prehistoric pulp shit only old white people care about /m/?

>>15590582
Like Looney Tunes ripping the marx brothers and the Flinstones ripping the honeymooners, huh.

>>15590582
It makes me wonder how many people even realise that Cutie Honey's signature pre-fight speech is actually based on Tarao Bannai.

>>15588993
Gor is great. Goreans are psychopaths.

>gor
lol
did the author ever say if the space mantises that secretly ran rape world were stand-ins for the reptiloids or the jews

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>>15590597
>prehistoric pulp shit only old white people care about
>not /m/

>>15581083
I think it was miyazaki

>>15581164
Thank you. Star Wars has a viscerally and visually cool world and occasionally good character moments, but these people who say it has some sort of profound narrative... Come on.

Also, to piss off the nerds even more, reminder that Obi-wan vs Jango is the best fight in the series and better than literally every lightsaber duel.

>>15581650
FUCK YOU YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME! NO!