(Wait...is he about to do what I think he's about to do?)
(Oh my God, no! Oh please don't!)
(Please make it stop!)
(Don't hurt yourself, MatPat...)
*Dramatic, quiet grunt*
(Not even gonna lie, that was beautiful.)
You say "ripoff," I say "inspired by."
[Intro Music]
Hello, internet! Welcome to Film Theory.
Forever changing the way you look at all your favorite franchises.
And today, I have a particularly juicy little conspiracy for you on one of the most important, beloved franchises in Sci-Fi:
Valerian!
Oh, and also Star Wars. Maybe you've heard of that one. Maybe you've heard of them both!
So, I was fortunate enough to see a preview of the new movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
In part because they value high quality YouTube content,
but also in part because they hashtag sponsored this episode.
Thanks, guys! <3
[Shouts off-camera] Ronnie, an extra bread loaf tonight!
And if you're like me prior to researching this episode,
then you probably don't know too much about Valerian other than it's a new movie coming out starring
the Enchantress from Suicide Squad...only this time with fewer hula hoop hips and two times the bikini.
Yes, I counted while I was watching movie....
But here's a mind blow for ya:
You probably know more about Valerian than you think.
As it turns out, Valerian is actually an inspiration
for almost every other space-based, alien-battling, captain's-logging series you've ever seen!
And maybe even something a little bit more for your favorite "galaxy far far away," Star Wars.
Now, I can already hear you calling blasphemy, trying to "force choke" me through your computer monitors,
But set your phasers to "stun," *pew pew pew*
because you're never gonna look at George Lucas's space epic the same way again
after I show you how your favorite moments from Star Wars
may have just begun as you're favorite moments from Valerian.
Before I start preaching the galactic truth, here's a little history lesson for ya:
Valerian started as Valerian and Lauraline,
a French comic series from the year 1967.
Valerian and Lauraline follows a time-traveling Galaxy-hopping agent who spews sarcastic remarks, named fittingly enough, Valerian
and his partner, the equally kick-butt Lauraline.
You can kind of call them a regular Han and Leia.
They hop between planets, investigate alien species, and tackle all kinds of personal and intergalactic issues along the way.
Sound familiar?
Well, the only one to really beat them to the punch in this fictional space race was the original Star Trek,
which technically premiered one year earlier.
But the worlds and adventures created by Valerian were entirely unique at the time.
The series was a pioneer in space fiction.
One small step for man...
one giant leap for fan-kind.
Okay, this is all well and good, but that isn't why you clicked this video.
What would prompt me to make the EXTREME claim that Star Wars may have borrowed an idea or two from Valerian?
Well, you don't have to listen to me. Let me lay out the evidence so that you can judge for yourselves.
Let's start where Lucas's space odyssey starts:
Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine.
It's a desert wasteland, populated by a rag-tag alien population of traders,
and has the particular quirk of having two suns.
And remember, Tatooine originated in Star Wars: Episode IV in the year 1977.
May I now present to you the planet Syrte from Valerian's "Empire of a Thousand Planets."
Desert wasteland setting: check.
Lot of types of aliens who are on the planet to trade with each other: check.
Two suns, both showed AND referred to as "suns": check and check.
And Syrte made its first appearane back in 1971,
six year earlier than A New Hope.
But, okay. Obviously that's one small series of details.
That's a looong way from equating THE WHOLE of Star Wars to THE WHOLE of Valerian.
But HOLD ON all you Nerf herders, I'm just getting warmed up.
Next up on the chopping block is Return of the Jedi from 1983,
which came out 16 years after Valerian and Lauraline started.
Remember this scene?
Don't deny it! You watched it, like, 80 times between the ages of 12 and 15...
OBVIOUSLY to figure out why Luke doesn't walk into the scene with a lightsaber...
I don't know why else you would be watching it over and over again during your developmental years....(COUGH COUGH)
But if you can manage to pull your eyes away from Luke's lackluster rescue plan,
what you may have missed was this:
Princess Leia's new duds.
A metal bikini known as the Slave Leia outfit.
See! It pays to observe all corners of the frame.
This costume design in Return of the Jedi seems pretty memorable, right?
A brown and gold metal bikini. It's pretty unique.
Like, if you'd seen it before, you'd remember having seen it, even if it had been a few years earlier....
say...11 years earlier in 1972
in a graphic novel stand by, you guessed it, Valerian.
In Valerian's Land Without Stars, Lauraline is taken prisoner on a slaver ship by the evil emperor Alzafar,
who, no joke, has designed his empire so that women do all the work
while he relaxes at his palace of resplendent virility.
Compensatin' there much there buddy?
So Lauraline is in this slave ship as a part of the harem, but not just that,
she's wearing an outfit that maaaaaay remind you of something.
Which just begs the question, who wore it better?
(Seriously, comment down below your opinion.)
Outfit, materials it's made out of, setting...
It's funny isn't it? How interstellar female slave outfits share such common characteristics with each other
despite being in such vastly different parts of the Galaxy?
And again, in the interest of showing you the evidence and letting you be the judge,
here's Jabba the Hutt, and here's Emperor Alzafar.
Is it a coincidence that both rulers could stand for a solid juice cleanse?
And remember, the Valerian designs are coming a decade prior.
But, okay. All of that is still pretty minor stuff:
design aesthetics, setting details...
but here's one that might raise an eyebrow for ya.
One of the signature scenes of Empire Strikes Back is witnessing Han Solo getting frozen in carbonite.
To see one of the movie's most beloved heros wind up incapacitated like that is SHOCKING.
Almost as shocking as seeing Leia in the bikini.
No judgement...
Anyway, the whole thing feels very reminiscent of a moment in Valerian's Empire of a Thousand Planets
where Valerian is taken prisoner by a race know as The Enlightened
to be interrogated about Earth's secrets.
To do this, they encase him completely in a hard, rock substance
that looks and sounds an awful lot like the carbonite in Star Wars,
even showing him in an unfortunately familiar position
where he has to be rescused later by Lauraline.
Observe, if you will, the color of the rock, the thickness of the slab, the overall dimensions of the casing...
See any parallels?
Again, I'm not here to judge, I'm just a messenger of information.
The other detail here worth mentioning is that Valerian experiences memory loss after he comes out of his carbonite shell-
Uh....heh heh....huh, his, uh, rocky shell-
seeming to have what Star Wars later refers to as "carbonite sickness."
Hans Solo experiences this as temporary blindness, but one of the other canon symptoms of carbonite sickness is...
you guessed it, memory loss.
Okay, but Star Wars is filled with SO many other designs and moments.
Even if a few elements were maaaybe inspired by Valerian,
there are dozens of even more iconic things originated in this series.
What about the Jedi? The Death Star? Darth Vader?
Well, about our good buddy Darth....
You remember Valerian's Enlightens?
*record scratched* Well, I hope so. I literally mentioned them like thirty seconds ago.
If you can't remember 'em, either you need to be paying more attention, or you should probably get check out for anterograde amnesia!
Dory is also in that waiting room.
Anyway, in Valerian, Enlightens wear massive helmets that cover their whole face,
just like Darth Vader.
But, you're probably thinking that the Enlightened outfit looks pretty darn different from dear old Darth, right?
And they do, they do look different.
The Enlightens are very reminiscent of Samurai right? With the horns and the mask...
You're probably thinking to yourself, Darth Vader looks a little like them if you squint real hard,
but not nearly so Japanese. (可愛い)
Well, that's only because you're seeing his final design.
His original concept from George Lucas was specifically a malevolent figure in a cape with Samurai armor
The final design of Vader reflects the full face mask of the Enlightened combined with the base shape of a Samurai helmet.
But here's the clincher for this one.
In Return of the Jedi, when Luke removes Vader's mask, he reveals Vader's face,
a face that's all burnt and disfigured.
Well wouldn't you know it, but in the Valerian comics, we also see under the masks of the Enlightened
in Empire of a Thousand Planets. And what we see is THIS:
a burnt and disfigured face.
Enemy designs inspired by ancient Japanese aesthetics with helmets covering disfigured faces?
Again, I'll leave it up to you to decide what's going on here,
but even THE biggest Star Wars supporters out there can clearly see that there are some strong similarities between Valerian and Star Wars.
And the ones I pointed out don't even include more general examples.
Like the fact that both Star Wars: Episode II and Valerian have a clone army
or that the Millennium Falcon is the same nice, flat disc shape as Valerian's ship The Intruder.
The coloring, the shape, the texture, even the rear booster and ability to jump into hyperspace.
So then what is our conclusion here?
To say that Star Wars outright ripped off Valerian ignores all the innovative things unique to Star Wars.
The Force, lightsabers, Death Star, wookiees, ewoks, Yoda, and on and on and on.
Sure, the parallels don't make Star Wars look all that great,
but it's not as though it copied Valerian word-for-word, concept-for-concept.
It borrowed elements from other sources too.
Remember when Luke returns home in A New Hope to find his Aunt and Uncle's farm has been torched?
Yeah, well Lucas has gone on record to say that that was inspired by a John Wayne movie called The Searchers from 1956.
The attack on the Death Star at the end of A New Hope is even less ambiguously borrowed from a 1955 British World War II film called The Dam Busters.
Instead of an X-Wing squadron going into a trench to fire on the Death Star's single weak spot,
The Dam Busters has a squadron of fighter pilots flying low against a river bed to fire on a single weak spot of the Dam.
And while that may not sound too similar on paper, if there's any question about whether one influenced the other,
a side-by-side comparison shows that Lucas basically recreates the entire sequence shot-for-shot.
And I mean it. Look at this!
LOOK AT THIS! I mean, I'm trying to be as neutral as possible here, and I know the Valerian people want me to stay as neutral as possible,
but COME ON!
It is literally shot-for-shot, angle-for-angle, scene-by-scene.
[Movie footage:] All links report in.
Red 10, standing by.
I'm here leader.
Red 3, standing by.
Here, leader.
Red 6, standing by.
Here, leader.
Red 2, standing by.
Here, leader.
Red 5, standing by.
Here, leader.
I'm gonna cut across the axis and try and draw their fire!
I'll fly across the dam as you make your run and try and draw the flak off you!
Heck! There are even some who claim that Star Wars' overall plot is ripped off of a Samurai movie by, Akira Kurosawa called The Hidden Fortress.
One of the most important people who claim that is George Lucas himself
in the documentary The Making of Star Wars, when he says quote:
End quote.
Now, I understand that some on this evidence can be interpreted in multiple ways.
But when the founder of the franchise says he's trying to come up with a plot, remembers an old movie he saw, and then models the initial plot on that,
it's kinda hard to deny.
But hey, real talk here today, guys. I know that I gave Star Wars a really hard time in today's episode.
I am a long-term lover of Star Wars.
And I'm a new fan of Valerian.
Both of these franchises are great, and to say that there was only one original would be pretty unfair.
Sure, Star Wars may have borrowed from Valerian, but Valerian borrowed from Dune,
and The Samurai, even Buck Rogers.
The plots for Valerian are really cool,
but they're also the plots of stories like Doctor Who, which are also considered to be groundbreaking and original.
The cynical among us might just say that this shows that there's nothing new, and everything in sci-fi is ripping off somone else,
but I prefer a more optimistic view. An optimistic view presented by one of the creators of Valerian and Lauraline himself, Pierre Christin.
When he saw Star wars in 1977 and recognized, you know, a lot of the elements in it,
he didn't sue anybody or even get mad. According to an interview in 2015,
he said quote:
And you know what? That's a pretty cool way of approaching it,
because pretty much everything is a retelling of something.
Whether it's The Lion King retelling Kimba the White Lion which is retelling Hamlet
Or The Matrix being a futuristic retelling of the Bible,
or as Christin puts it in the same interview:
Star Wars may have carried a torch from Valerian, but that just means that there are now two sci-fi franchises that we can all enjoy.
BUT HEY, that's just a theory,
a Film Theory!
Aaaaaand, cut!
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And then bust the button you see on screen to check out the economic ramifications of blowing up the Death Star!
The Empire may not be as bad as you once thought.
Next week, it's Rick and Morty time, so prepare to get schwifty!