One of the most popular ways to make a quick buck in Hollywood is to rip off a hit.
And that practice has a long, sketchy history in the film industry around the world.
After the massive success of 1977's Star Wars, it seemed like everybody got caught in the
space-craze, and the result was an entire subgenre of mockbusters that obviously wanted
to be in a galaxy far, far away…but never quite got there.
Here are a few of the strangest attempts to rip-off Star Wars.
Message from Space
Everybody in the world made a Star Wars knockoff in 1978, and Japan's legendary Toei Company
was no exception.
Message from Space stole its look and characterizations from Star Wars, and mixed it with manga and
anime — to generally bizarre results.
The most striking thing about Message from Space is that despite only having half the
budget of A New Hope, the special effects are surprisingly competent.
Well, except for maybe this.
Still, it pretty much owes its life to George Lucas.
Most obviously lifted from Star Wars is a princess on the run, seeking help from wide-eyed
space jockeys, accompanied by a funny robot.
On the other hand, Message from Space also had its own dramatic Yoda death scene way
before Star Wars ever did.
Aside from that, Message from Space feels like the movie a person might make if they'd
heard vague descriptions of Star Wars, but hadn't actually seen it.
A comedian in drag plays an evil empress, and instead of the Force, there are space
walnuts that fly around choosing people to do…something?
Still beats midichlorians, though.
Starcrash
When most normal, well-adjusted humans watched Star Wars, they didn't come away thinking:
"That movie was pretty great, but it needed more weird swimsuits."
As it turned out, Italian director Luigi Cozzi wasn't a normal person.
He quickly whipped up the movie Starcrash by 1979, a shameless Star Wars ripoff that
was basically an excuse to get nearly naked women on camera.
Starcrash tells the story of a war between a galactic Empire and the evil Count Zarth
Arn, who has a superweapon that the heroes have to go blow up.
Characters use lightsabers and fight evil robotic minions, but once those similarities
are out of the way, Starcrash reaches a level of incredible ridiculousness that George Lucas
could only touch in fever dreams.
"We've just survived and attack of the most powerful weapon in the entire galaxy!"
"We have?"
Heroine Stella Star spends most of the movie in a bikini, gets captured by a tribe of scantily
clad Amazons, is chased around by a giant robot woman…
"Look!"
"Whoa!
Run for your lives!"
...gets frozen, and helps the Empire win their giant space battle.
Plus, as a bonus, a young and beautiful David Hasselhoff.
Luigi Cozzi maintains that he came up with the script before Star Wars came out, though,
so who knows?
Maybe George Lucas was the one making the rip-off.
Cozzi definitely beat him to when it came to making one of the heroes the bad guy's
son.
"Noooooo!!!"
Turkish Star Wars
Also known as…uh... words we can't hope to pronounce, this movie is unique among other
ripoffs, because it literally lifts footage straight from A New Hope and plops it into
the movie.
The Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, X-wings, TIE Fighters, and the Mos Eisley Cantina — all
of these things can be found in Turkish Star Wars.
And that isn't the craziest thing about the movie.
The film starts with two pilots, Murat and Ali, crashing on a desert planet during a
space battle.
Past that, there isn't really any hope following the plot.
Ali accidentally summons a skeleton army by whistling.
There's a planetary shield made of human brain molecules that looks suspiciously like the
Death Star.
Murat karate chops monsters in half.
Somewhere along the way, a story happens.
When the movie came out, 20th Century Fox was evidently so stumped by it that they didn't
even try to sue.
Even today, Disney-owned Lucasfilm still hasn't taken action.
It's so bad they don't even view it as threat.
But Star Wars probably would have been even cooler if Luke ripped the head off of a Wampa.
The Shape of Things to Come
In 1979, Canadian director George McCowen set out to make his own Star Wars knockoff,
buying the rights to H.G. Wells' 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come.
Since Canada isn't really known as a science fiction hotspot, it's easy to guess how things
turned out.
The film was already off to a rough start because H.G. Wells' book is actually a speculative
novel about the future of the world from 1933 to 2106, and it features a distinct lack of
robots.
Literally none of the things in the novel happen in the movie.
McCowen just shamelessly bought the rights just so he could use a title people might
know for his movie.
And like most movies of the era, The Shape of Things to Come had a pretty low-budget
look.
Plotwise, it's pretty much Star Wars, just set on Earth's moon after a "Robot War."
There's a bad guy who has a massive fortress, and a resistance movement trying to stop him.
McCowen thought if he made the bad guy use robot drones as his minions, nobody would
know it was a shameless ripoff.
He was wrong.
Yor: The Hunter from the Future
At first, Yor doesn't look much a Star Wars ripoff.
It starts as a barbarian sword-and-loincloth feature set to the sweet sounds of '80s hair
metal.
We've got a guy hunting dinosaurs, meeting magical people and seducing willing wenches.
Who could possibly hate that?
Then, suddenly, it's like the movie gets bored and goes full-on science fiction.
The second half of the movie is about an evil organization led by a guy dressed in black
robes that wouldn't look out of place in Knights of the Old Republic, evil minions who wear
knockoff Darth Vader masks, and laser battles.
Spoiler alert: turns out that Yor has actually been living on a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi
Earth.
With dinosaurs.
Which is pretty much every eight-year-old's dream.
This wasn't even just a case of the screenwriter mashing stuff together.
It's actually based off an Argentinian comic book of the same name, which was evidently
popular enough to bring to the big screen.
It's really not that bad an idea for a movie, but Yor deserves better.
Starchaser: The Legend of Orin
It's the story of a young miner who discovers a magic sword and embarks on an epic quest
to destroy an evil space empire with the help of robot sidekicks and a rogue criminal.
And it's not Star Wars.
Despite being an animated film, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin is waaay less kid-friendly
than Star Wars.
The characters swear a lot more and the violence is even worse.
And then there's the, erm, fembot.
The heroes pick up an oddly curvy, totally-not-C3PO lady-droid during their adventures.
Like C-3PO, she's pretty annoying.
So how do our heroes deal with it?
They stick probes in her robot butt to reprogram her.
Into a full-on sexbot.
Despite offering a terrifying view into the filmmaker's fantasies, Starchaser was pretty
groundbreaking.
It was one of the first 3D animated movies, and one of the first to combine computer graphics
with traditional hand-drawn animation.
Thankfully, those technologies were also used to make movies that weren't creepy Star Wars
ripoffs.
Space Mutiny
In 1978, Glen Larson managed to get Battlestar Galactica off the ground, after years of shopping
it around, because of the success of Star Wars.
Some might call it a total ripoff, but it found plenty of success in its own right.
Enough success that a South African production company wanted to cash in on it ten years
later.
The result was Space Mutiny.
Without the money for special effects, the production just decided to go the easy route
and steal effects shots from Galactica, use whatever office equipment they had around,
and film the thing in brick buildings, which were supposed to represent areas of a spaceship.
The story revolves around a mutiny on a colony ship, but the plot is skeletal at best.
Characters die, only to re-appear in the next scene, plot elements appear out of order,
and it feels like key pieces of dialogue were cut.
That doesn't mean the movie is without charm.
It has an awesome go-cart chase through the "engine room" of the ship, a cool hula-hoop
dance club, and B-movie icon Cameron Mitchell hanging around in a bathrobe.
The strangest element of the whole fiasco is that by 1988, ripoffs just weren't profitable
anymore, and the movie has too much stolen footage to stand on its own.
How they never got sued remains a space-mystery.
Battle Beyond the Stars
Schlock auteur Roger Corman threw his hat in the Star Wars ripoff ring with his 1980
film Battle Beyond the Stars.
For those who aren't familiar with Corman's body of work, the dude was well known for
making fast, cheap movies to capitalize on whatever craze was going on at the time.
He knew how to stretch a budget and made the most semi-competent movies he could, and Battle
Beyond the Stars was his most expensive movie to date, coming in at $2 million.
As a result, the film ended up being surprisingly competent.
It looked and felt just like Star Wars, but was more of a loose remake of Seven Samurai
in space.
Most importantly, the plot actually kinda makes sense.
Shockingly, it also had some future big names attached.
James Cameron was in charge of special effects and art direction.
James Horner wrote the score and liked it so much that he basically ripped himself off
and reused it for The Wrath of Khan.
"Khannnn!!!!"
All of that made Battle Beyond the Stars the most skillfully made ripoff from the era.
Even better, Corman, being the cheapskate he was, didn't break down the sets after filming
and just re-used them for yet another Star Wars ripoff, Space Raiders.
That guy knew how to get the biggest bang for his buck.
The Black Hole
Storywise, Disney's legendarily expensive The Black Hole actually has more in common
with Star Trek than Star Wars.
But with bumbling robot sidekicks, spaceships that look like Mos Eisley spaceport rejects,
and costumes that look like they're fresh out of the Death Star's supply closet, the
Star Wars connection is undeniable.
What makes this movie so bizarre is that it gets incredibly dark.
Robot villain Maximilian is a frightening cross between Darth Vader and a Cylon.
Biblical allusions and gruesome murder lurk around every plot point.
Humans get melded with robots.
And of course, we can't forget about the final scene, in which the characters are sucked
into the black hole only to find the most convincing interpretation of hell ever set
on film.
Sleep well, Mouseketeers!
There's arguably a good movie in the middle of The Black Hole, but Disney couldn't decide
whether to make it child-appropriate, or something more heady like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Disney would have to wait a few decades to make actual Star Wars films.
Amazingly, the studio has also started working on remaking The Black Hole.
No word yet on whether Satan will make an appearance this time.
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