# Kurosawa and Lucas



## Kzinti (Aug 12, 2014)

Lucas copied off Star Wars. Here's the proof:

1. Yojimbo -- That  whole arm-cutting scene was copied from when Yojimbo cuts off that  gangster's arm. The gangster even brags about his death sentence right  before he is attacked. 

2. Yojimbo -- Hans solo was a ripoff of  Yojimbo as well as most of Toshiro Mifune's characters. Most people  would say that the tough guy character is common, but why does the  public have such admiration for solo if he's common? For the record,  even when I was 4, I thought hans solo was boring and common. Yojimbo  was cooler, but that's probably because he didn't need a gun. 

3.  Samurai -- Darth Vader is obviously based on samurai armor. The jedi  are the same as the samurai even down to the names (obi-wen kenobi and  qui gon). It's also a reference to the Ronin, masterless samurai. 

THere's a bunch more, available on this site:

The Secret History of Star Wars

I'm  not trying to start a flame war, I'm just saying that I'm not  particularly impressed by Star Wars, never was. The only thing I liked  about it was the music, which Lucas did not create, and Vader's helmet. I  recently started watching Kurosawa, and I now know what real cinema is.


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## Jo Zebedee (Aug 12, 2014)

Does it matter? Lucas created a fun film and franchise with many, many derivative elements (sword and sorcery, character tropes etc etc) and blended them together into something fun, visually entertaining, with fun characters. Why not enjoy both for what they are? 

And, hey, dishing Han....? Horror.


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## Kzinti (Aug 12, 2014)

springs said:


> Does it matter? Lucas created a fun film and franchise with many, many derivative elements (sword and sorcery, character tropes etc etc) and blended them together into something fun, visually entertaining, with fun characters. Why not enjoy both for what they are?
> 
> And, hey, dishing Han....? Horror.



Han goes right next to mace windy as the most annoying character. Again, I'm not trying to sound whiny, but han solo is just so typical that even as a toddler, I found him annoying (especially since he magically managed to kill all those guys when there were a dozen of them shooting at him). Windu is annoying because samuel jackson does not have what it takes to play a tough guy. They should have cast the man who played Mr. Miyagi or Steven Seagal. 

No one can top Toshiro Mifune. Kurosawa's movies cost less than Star Wars and are vastly more entertaining. Ted Chiang's work is also better than Star Wars, and it costs only paper and ink to produce.


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## Brynn (Aug 12, 2014)

Well I'm glad we've got that sorted out.


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## Fishbowl Helmet (Aug 12, 2014)

Kzinti said:


> I'm not trying to start a flame war [but] I recently started watching Kurosawa, and I now know what real cinema is.



Nope. Clearly not trying to start a flame war.



Kzinti said:


> I'm not trying to sound whiny, but...



I'm sensing a pattern.

I'm not trying to X, but here's some X.


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## Bick (Aug 12, 2014)

Kzinti said:
			
		

> For the record,  even when I was 4, I thought hans solo was boring and common.





			
				Kzinti said:
			
		

> ...han solo is just so typical that even as a toddler, I found him annoying...


How about when you were a baby?


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## tinkerdan (Aug 12, 2014)

I'm confused about what the point is though:
If someone does great work and others emulate him that should be a good thing.
It happens all the time.
I'm not sure it happened here but that's because I don't know Kurosawa except by a couple movies he has done and I've not yet had a desire to go there.

But If in fact Star Wars emulates Kurosawa then I have by way seen some of what his work might be like. Is that such a bad thing. I think not. This type of thing happens all the time within many communities because they all learn and teach together to perfect the craft.

I chose to remain in my blissful ignorance that star wars came out of some totally left field out of nowhere place of brilliance. On the other hand if I found out tomorrow that everything came from Kurosawa I would not be crushed or changed. Ha; I'd probably still remain blissfully ignorant.


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## HareBrain (Aug 12, 2014)

Kurosawa was a great film-maker, and riffing off him was the most sensible thing George Lucas ever did. (Not just Lucas: famously, *The Magnificent Seven* was inspired by *The Seven Samurai*.)

But Kurosawa stole the plot of King Lear for his film *Ran*.


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## The Crawling Chaos (Aug 12, 2014)

As already stated in the other thread, this is a sad attempt at igniting a flame war and nothing else.

A two-second shot of somebody cutting an arm off, a stylistic element (I am a bit at a loss here, why is the thread titled "Lucas and Kurosawa" if you're going to refer to the Samurai influence in Vader's appearance? Does Kurosawa somehow hold the rights or pattern to that design because he made samurai films?), and an archetypal character that predates anything Kurosawa has ever made. Here are your three best examples to say that Star Wars was ripped off Kurosawa.

Three very minor details that have no bearing whatsoever on the plot or the most important elements of the story (the Force, the tyranny of the Empire vs the rebellion, growing up and becoming a man...)

You could have mentioned the plot elements from Throne of Blood along the way.

How about Star Wars was ripped off Greek mythology? How about Arthurian legends? Age old myths? Religious texts? There are far more elements from these in Star Wars than there are references and homages to Kurosawa (the belly of the beast, the old mentor, the initiations, trials and tribulations of the young fool becoming a man, the quest for peace on a universal and personal level, the damsel in distress, knighthood, the rogue, the...).

How about Star Wars ripped off History? Most of the shots involving one or more imperials reference Nazism in one way or another (policies, uniforms, organization...) and the final space battle was entirely copied from WW2 dogfights footage. 

If you want to say that Star Wars was't really original and was just a mixed bag of references including mythology, history, Oriental philosophies and religions, why not?

The "genius" of Lucas was to be able to borrow frely from so many different sources and to rearrange and reinvent these elements into a new narrative, crafting an entire universe along the way.

In the worst of cases, this is what any other artist aspires to do with their work.

Everybody is inspired, influenced by everybody else. You can never hope to be truly original and tell a brand new story. Artists and creators are influenced by holy books, myths and legends that are millennia old. They have always been and always will be. Kurosawa himself is guilty of the same sin.

If you don't like homages and references, I suggest you retreat to a cave and never read another book, watch another film, hear another song. Although you'd be running the risk of finding cave paintings that would remind you of something else and bother you to no end.

To conclude, I watched Star Wars when I was six. About five years later, i read a quote from Lucas mentioning Kurosawa and the influence he had had on Star Wars. I asked my father to take me to the local library, where I rented VHS of some of Kurosawa's films, and discovered them at the tender age of 10, long before a lot of other occidental kids had even heard the name. I owe Lucas and Star Wars my discovery, and appreciation of Kurosawa.

So stop trying to diss the man for freely borrowing very minor elements off his movies to craft his own saga, and be happy that he spread the good word and educated hundreds or even thousands of people instead.

Lucas always admitted to being influenced by others (the writings of Joseph Campbell would be his main influence, NOT Kurosawa), and has allowed their names to keep on living and reach a brand new audience in the process.

If anything, you should thank him.


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## Groot (Aug 12, 2014)

This is well known the Lucas copied Kurosawa, he re-wrote the whole story again, from the point of view of the droids, after seeing the Hidden Fortress, as it tells the story from the lowliest possible character.


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## Randy M. (Aug 12, 2014)

Kzinti said:


> Lucas copied off Star Wars. Here's the proof:
> 
> 1. Yojimbo -- That  whole arm-cutting scene was copied from when Yojimbo cuts off that  gangster's arm. The gangster even brags about his death sentence right  before he is attacked.
> 
> ...



Possibly because he was played by an actor who made it seem fun. Honestly, the first movie in particular has the feel of the kids dressing up and play acting, and so for a lot of us its just fun without necessarily having any of the intellectual/thematic clout of Kurosawa.

I had to do a bit of looking around to confirm my memory, but apparently Kurosawa said he used the plot of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key as a template for _Yojimbo_. Critics have suggested Hammett's Red Harvest as even more likely.

Artists borrow (plagarize, steal, imitate, draw inspiration from, re-invent and make a nod to) the work of other artists all the time: _Apocalypse Now_ drew from Heart of Darkness among other sources. The question isn't whether or not they do it, the questions are, did they take too much or just copy? Did they do it well? Do you like it?

For a lot of us, Lucus did it well enough and we like it. The first three _Star Wars _movies remain among my favorite s.f., clunky as some of the exposition and acting is. The next three ... well, I enjoyed _Serenity_ a lot more. But even about the first three I agree they are not perfect and certainly not criticism-proof. Your reasons for not liking SW are legit, but not necessarily transmittable to others as justification for their not liking SW. 

Randy M.


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## ratsy (Aug 12, 2014)

I think Kermit the frog is a rip off of Howdy Doodie...and Kermit is so generic. Couldn't they have made him...I dunno, a toad?


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## TheDustyZebra (Aug 12, 2014)

I've moved this thread to General Film Discussion, as it doesn't seem to involve books.


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## Kzinti (Aug 12, 2014)

HareBrain said:


> Kurosawa was a great film-maker, and riffing off him was the most sensible thing George Lucas ever did. (Not just Lucas: famously, *The Magnificent Seven* was inspired by *The Seven Samurai*.)
> 
> But Kurosawa stole the plot of King Lear for his film *Ran*.



Yeah, but Ran was the only Kurosawa film that may have been ripped. I've not seen Ran yet, ergo I cannot confirm or deny that it was taken from Lear. However, Kurosawa's other films were completely original.


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## Vertigo (Aug 12, 2014)

No artist works in isolation. As Randy commented above Kurosawa has his own influences and inspirations for his work.


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## JoanDrake (Aug 13, 2014)

Regular artists copy, geniuses steal. Kurosawa must have singlehandedly reinvented filmmaking if you go by the number of movies he is said to have influenced.


And to be honest I never much liked Star Wars either, but not because it ripped off Kurosawa but Flash Gordon


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## Bick (Aug 13, 2014)

Kzinti said:


> Yeah, but Ran was the only Kurosawa film that may have been ripped.


No. (And 'ripped' is clearly the wrong term). 
Kurosawa based many of his films on prior works:

- Ran was based on Shakespeare's 'King Lear'.
- For 'Throne of Blood', he transposed Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' to 16th century Japan.  
- 'Sanjuro' is an adaptation of a Shūgorō Yamamoto story 'Hibi Heian'
- The film 'Rashomon' was in fact created by combining two previously published stories, "Rashomon" and "In a Grove", both by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.
- In making 'Seven Samurai', Kurosawa acknowledged he was heavily influenced by the 1940's Westerns of John Ford.  His aim was to make a Japanese Western.  Ironically, it was then remade in the US as a Western itself.
- Kurosawa readily acknowledged the heavy influence on his work of both Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky.  He was proud of these influences.
- In 'Red Beard', Dostoevsky's novel 'The Insulted and the Injured' provided the source for a subplot about the young girl
- Kurosawa remade a version of Gorky's 'The Lower Depths', shifting the location and time to Edo-era Japan. 

There are numerous other examples one could come up with.


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## clovis-man (Aug 13, 2014)

Kzinti said:


> Windu is annoying because samuel jackson does not have what it takes to play a tough guy.


 
So I guess you haven't seen *Pulp Fiction* or *Jackie Brown*.


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## Kzinti (Aug 13, 2014)

clovis-man said:


> So I guess you haven't seen *Pulp Fiction* or *Jackie Brown*.



Actually, I have. That is why I believe that samuel jackson is not a frightening man. They should have cast Yao Ming or Jeremy Lin if they want a tough guy. Tim Kang would also have been great, but he was probably too young when the Star Wars movie with the clones came out to play the Windu character. 

But that's my opinion. Feel free to disagree.


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## tinkerdan (Aug 14, 2014)

Have you watched American Graffiti?

I would suggest there is more in AG that helps define Star Wars than anything else.

Yeah so so much for opinions.


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## Foxbat (Aug 15, 2014)

Kzinti said:


> 3.  Samurai -- Darth Vader is obviously based on samurai armor. The jedi  are the same as the samurai even down to the names (obi-wen kenobi and  qui gon). It's also a reference to the Ronin, masterless samurai.


 
There are many who believe that Darth Vader is based on the villain The Lightning from the 1938 serial _The Fighting Devil Dogs._ Star Wars itself is obviously an homage to those old serials so it would make sense for Lucas to draw inspiration from them for his characters. 

Apparently Darth Vader is 'Dark Father' in Dutch (the truth was there from minute one) so perhaps Lucas stole the X-Wing design from all those windmills in Holland?


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## HareBrain (Aug 15, 2014)

And isn't Leia's hairstyle like two Danish pastries stuck to her head? (Not quite Holland but close.)


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## Jo Zebedee (Aug 15, 2014)

And Han -Hans - has a distinctly dutch sound. Is there a dutch film making genius we're missing in Lucas' cultural referencing background.


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## soulsinging (Aug 15, 2014)

*edit* combining my responses


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## soulsinging (Aug 15, 2014)

Kzinti said:


> Han goes right next to mace windy as the most annoying character. Again, I'm not trying to sound whiny, but han solo is just so typical that even as a toddler, I found him annoying (especially since he magically managed to kill all those guys when there were a dozen of them shooting at him). Windu is annoying because samuel jackson does not have what it takes to play a tough guy. They should have cast the man who played Mr. Miyagi or Steven Seagal.
> 
> No one can top Toshiro Mifune. Kurosawa's movies cost less than Star Wars and are vastly more entertaining. Ted Chiang's work is also better than Star Wars, and it costs only paper and ink to produce.



Steven Seagal? I'm not usually one to criticize someone for personal taste/preference, but he has got to be one of the worst actors of the last 30 years. I don't like Mace Windu much, but I didn't like ANY of those movies much. The original Star Wars is still awesome.

Originality is the most overrated trait in all the arts. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and just because Lucas borrowed styles from his influences doesn't make the outcome any less engaging.



Kzinti said:


> Actually, I have. That is why I believe that samuel jackson is not a frightening man. They should have cast Yao Ming or Jeremy Lin if they want a tough guy. Tim Kang would also have been great, but he was probably too young when the Star Wars movie with the clones came out to play the Windu character.
> 
> But that's my opinion. Feel free to disagree.



Yao Ming or Jeremy Lin? Basketball players? Are we now just picking the first big guy you can think of? This seems like a desperate attempt to find the biggest Asian you can think of just to claim SOMEONE is a better actor than one of the most successful actors of our generation. Either we're being punked/trolled here, or there's some serious ethnocentrism going on here... because there is no grounds to suggest Jeremy Lin is a better actor than Samuel L Jackson other than some sort of nationalist/racial bias.

Name me one movie Jeremy Lin or Yao Ming has done that has been worth watching...


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## Kzinti (Aug 15, 2014)

Foxbat said:


> There are many who believe that Darth Vader is based on the villain The Lightning from the 1938 serial _The Fighting Devil Dogs._ Star Wars itself is obviously an homage to those old serials so it would make sense for Lucas to draw inspiration from them for his characters.
> 
> Apparently Darth Vader is 'Dark Father' in Dutch (the truth was there from minute one) so perhaps Lucas stole the X-Wing design from all those windmills in Holland?



I disagree. Darth Vader's helmet and costume are virtually identical to a samurai kabuto. I'm a martial arts practicioner (or was when I was younger), and I know my armors.


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## Kzinti (Aug 15, 2014)

soulsinging said:


> Steven Seagal? I'm not usually one to criticize someone for personal taste/preference, but he has got to be one of the worst actors of the last 30 years. I don't like Mace Windu much, but I didn't like ANY of those movies much. The original Star Wars is still awesome.
> 
> Originality is the most overrated trait in all the arts. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and just because Lucas borrowed styles from his influences doesn't make the outcome any less engaging.
> 
> ...



I could argue that you're being ethnocentric by choosing black actors over Asian actors. Lucas is ethnocentric because there are no Asians in Star Wars. 

I just happen to be a fan of Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming. I've also heard their voices, and they're really manly. If jackson pulled a knife on me, I would probably laugh. 

Seagal has a black belt in Aikido and a great voice.


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## soulsinging (Aug 15, 2014)

Kzinti said:


> I could argue that you're being ethnocentric by choosing black actors over Asian actors. Lucas is ethnocentric because there are no Asians in Star Wars.
> 
> I just happen to be a fan of Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming. I've also heard their voices, and they're really manly. If jackson pulled a knife on me, I would probably laugh.
> 
> Seagal has a black belt in Aikido and a great voice.



I am not black though, so I'm not just stumping for my favored race. I also didn't say Samuel L Jackson is the best, just that he's better than two random basketball players that have never acted a day in their lives. I'd have also said Jason Statham or Chow Yun Fat are better choices than Lin or Ming. The point being... I'm judging them based on ability to ACT, not their race. You don't seem to care if they can act or not, you label Lin and Ming as superior solely because they are Asian and you prefer Asians. I have no preference for whites, blacks, or Asians... I have preference for REAL ACTORS.

I'm aware that Seagal has real martial arts talent. What he lacks is acting talent. You seem pretty focused on shallow cosmetic things in your actors... that they be big and have macho/cool voices. I happen to think their ability to actually act is more important. In a weird way, your preference for style over substance in actors is the opposite of what you claim to like in directors, as far as preferring to substance of Kurosawa to the style of Lucas.


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## merritt (Aug 26, 2014)

RAN is an awesome movie, the color, the clashing, absolutely gorgeous film making!
Steven Seagal! 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





  Hilarious!


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