Yojimbo, But With Lasers
As usual, Warren Ellis is on to something:
I’ve long been interested in the chambara form, the Japanese stories of wandering heroic swordsmen. Chambara is a subset of what the Japanese called jidai geki, period drama. I bet you’ve all seen one of them — YOJIMBO, SEVEN SAMURAI, RAN. And you’ve all seen THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, though you know it better as the first STAR WARS film. George Lucas was, of course, a huge fan of Kurosawa.
It didn’t occur to me until I read this tidbit the other day that Lucas, […] in looking for his faded knights of dynasty, would have coughed and California-mispronounced jidai into Jedi…
This is hardly surprising. When not ripping off Kurosawa, Lucas was lifting straight out of John Ford’s films. But with every passing year another tidbit makes it into the stratosphere (and by stratosphere, I mean these here Internets) that Lucas was also padding his script with Jidaigeki tropes and Oh yeah, Joseph Campbell, too (wink). It’s only too bad he didn’t stick to ripping off Kurosawa and japanese mythology. Maybe then the prequels wouldn’t have sucked so bad. *
I’m still looking forward to the September release of the Un-Special Editions, maybe even more so, now that we know that Lucas had even less to do with them then we originally thought.
June 13th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Kurosawa was also ripped off for spaghetti Westerns and The Magnificent Seven [Samurai].
One of the few benefits of living in Southern California was the Asian channel that ran “period dramas” from Japan, Korea, and China.
June 13th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Yep, Kurasawa got ot from both ends. And his movies are better than anything that was based on them.