What I remember more of this period was the Warren Comic magazines ( CREEPY , EERIE and VAMPIRA ) dropped all their horror stories and did nothing , but science fiction stories , which caused their company's sales to drop. But Star Wars did help the struggling STARLOG. Until SW came out , they had nothing , but Star trek conventions to cover. But when SW came out Sci- Fi movies exploded on the scene and STARLOG sales shot through the roof. Star Wars affected more then just the movies , magazines and television ( most notably Battlestar Galatica ) had a flood of science fiction series and made for TV movies as well.
There was one story, from a magazine of horror, can't recall it's name - Fangoria or something like that, where you have a Minataur fighting a bad guy who eats bodies dressed up like suckling pigs and a finale where the hero, not the Minataur but someone who has a beautiful girlfriend who he saved, grows to the size of Galactus and crushes one of earth's 2 moons. At there end a prophecy is read saying he will come again to wipe out the evil. Miss magazines like that and comics too. Those of today don't care for.
So, just ANY movie other than frigging big-britched high and mighty Star Wars that happens to feature a robot or a laser or space craft or has anything to do with space must be an imitation or "rip off" of THAT movie? NO other flick is allowed to feature any of THOSE things without receiving THAT particular charge?
7:57 For Japan, that's different. Most of their spaceships, in particular the hero ships, usually look like the WWII battleship Yamamoto.... because... no "reason".
When 'The Force Awakens' came out, plenty of RU-vid vids popped up showing off various Star Wars ripoffs. So, I thought it would be fun to really delve into these movies and see what I could find. Thus far, my list of movies include rip offs, parodies, homages, and whatever other description you can think of. My list has gone well over 40 movies so far and continues to grow every time I find a new movie (one as recent as 2018!). I even started listing them on IMDB for others to enjoy :D
I love how Japan's message from space created a literal sea ship for space travel. That movie must have been what inspired Star Blazers, I series I grew up on as a kid. I loved that idea of turning a sea-bearing cruise ship into space travel worthy. That was great!
Happy to help man...I found out when I felt like examining Kinji Fukasaku's directed films and came across 'Message from Space', Like Sergio Leone's film 'A Fistful of Dollars' it was a ripoff or unofficial remake, in 'Message from Space' it's a ripoff, but in Leone's 'Fistful of Dollars' movie it's an unofficial remake according to him... In a way, everyone got away with it easily because it didn't make money or was too hot of a property to claim it was stolen...history is kind of funny and heartbreaking...sorry for the sudden burst of words...
Battle Beyond the Stars, Moonraker and The Black Hole are the ones I watched the most in my teens - good practical FX, nifty production design, evocative music, and appealing star power in all three. Exactly what you need to make a Star Wars rip-off work!
NOTHING can possibly live up to frickin Star Wars!! Star Wars is simply SUPERIOR to everything else and any OTHER movie that happens to feature lasers, robots and spaceships is a "rip off" of it!
I remember there being a film called The Shape of Things to Come, that looked like it was made to cash in on the Star Wars craze. I do remember that it starred Jack Palance.
So, just ANY movie other than frigging big-britched high and mighty Star Wars that happens to feature a robot or a laser or space craft or has anything to do with space must be an imitation or "rip off" of THAT movie? NO other flick is allowed to feature any of THOSE things without receiving THAT particular charge?
To be fair, Japan actually had a Star Wars ripoff from each of its four major tokusatsu studios. Toei - Message from Space (and it's TV spinoff) Toho - War in Space (a loose sequel to Gorath) Tsuburaya - Star Wolf (known in America as Fugitive Alien) Daiei - Gamera: Super Monster (because the bad guys had a Star Destroyer)
Star Wolf was based (fairly faithfully) on a trilogy of novels by Edmnond Hamilton, all of which predate Star Wars by years. The movies and the earlier TV series were pretty popular in Japan, and while they might have been made due to the success of Star Wars making scifi less of a risky bet for producers, they were very much their own thing.
@@philipmonihan8222 Closer to it than Star Wars, anyway. If anything, the first Star Wolf film is more faithful to the original source material than the (80s) Flash movie was. I'd read the books years before Star Wars came out and there's no real parallels between the two beyond both being scifi/space opera adventure stories. The films and TV show may very well have been, ah, financially enabled by Star Wars' success, but that doesn't really make them a ripoff. Lots of scifi films and shows rode that set of coattails.
@@philipmonihan8222 I don't hate the film, but it's not as good an adaptation as the serials were - if only because the format of a serial feels more like reading a comic, strip by strip. The 1979 animated series wasn't a bad attempt at the IP either, probably as close to the originals as you hope for at that point. Hard not to like that Queen theme song, though.
I saw The Black Hole on release. It's a strange movie; the heroes felt like they came from a 1960s movie, and it clearly wants to be dark and brooding, even a horror movie, but then had to have comedy cute robots in it. I'd love to see a remake with a more consistent tone. John Barry's score is lovely though.
Lucas had mentioned before Star chaser came out that he wanted to show Vader origin with him falling in lava in Empire Strike Back. I assumed that the creators of Star Chasers , read that issue of Star Log Magazine and used the idea in their rip off.
I think he was talking more about the protaganist holding on to the edge of a drop and then the baddie being cut in half and falling down the drop like in TPM
Moonraker is amazing, the best part is when they rape brazilian geography. I mean, James Bond dressed as a 'gaúcho' in Rio de Janeiro, navigating a amazon river that ends in the waterfalls of iguaçu to finally ending up in a mayan temple, wow. I am surprised they do not said that Brazil's capital is Buenos Aires.
Starcrash is utterly dire. I showed it to my 68 year-old dad recently and he pissed himself laughing, it was so bad. Daniel, I've got some shocking news for you: Starcrash is *very, very* bad.
Calling a ripoff creative is quite the oximoron, din't you think? Besides you're only calling them fun because you haven't seen them, once you do you'll be either bored out of your mind, or laugh at how bad it is, and let's not pretend that most movies didn't suck ass before, there are like a trillion garbage B monster movies from 50s to 70s.
Forgot I made this comment. To answer the critical twats who replied, I have infact watched most of them except for Turkish Star Wars and Starchaser (this goes for the time I wrote this comment) and yes I found them fun to watch, I have a sweet spot for cheesy b-flicks. You must be very hard to satisfy to not find a little enjoyment in them. Also calling something a ripoff creative isn't entirely an oxymoron*, especially when effort is still put into these films with their limited budgets at the time they were made in.
Spacehunter is the one 3-D movie from the '80s version of that craze I remember seeing in a theater, and there are two lines I particularly remember liking: "I lied." and "I'll take that bet."
Don't forget TV series(no not Battlestar Galactica), The Powers of Mathew Starr. Deathsport from 1978 was imitative of Star Wars, and not a sequel to Deathrace2000
I see where you're going with Krull and it probably getting some kind of mid-production "Star Wars" uplift to ride the wave, but it was an awesome movie and one of my all-time favorites from the fantasy genre.
And you never mention that the only one of two that Lucas had the balls to sue was "Message From Space"......the one that was only guilty of directly ripping off "Seven Samurai" instead of mostly ripping it off like he did..... He won and "Message From Space" was taken off the market for decades. The second one he tried to sue was Battlestar Galactica and Universal threatened to countersue over all of the serials and movies of their's that he ripped off to make SW and Indiana Jones.
Thank for your inclusion of Hawk the Slayer, as you promised! Sure, I'd love to see your full take on the movie. Moonraker was my very first Bond film, I had no idea it had some inspiration from Star Wars. Message From Space looks like something worth seeing too!! Thank you for the vid!
+Elvys Pena You're welcome - all of these are pretty watchable... maybe not Turkish Star Wars as I can't find an English dub or even one with subtitles.
+Dark Corners Reviews Not sure Turkish Star Wars exists with "official" subs. I've seen it at least 2x without them and it never stops being funny! I am going to look up a couple of the movies on this list I haven't seen.
I have every one of these movies and more. My current count stands at 28, spanning from '77 to today, all being ripoffs, inspirations and parodies of the entire Star Wars franchise. Some of the notable ones are Brazilian Star Wars, Space Balls, Masters of the Universe (the movie), Cell Wars, Hardware Wars, and the list goes on. This has been a fun adventure to find all these movies and I'm still looking for more!
Battle Beyond the Stars was actually pretty good. Starcrash was Luigi Cozzi's attempt to do what his scumbag producers wanted, instead of what he wanted, just to keep the money he'd been promised ( and the effects were done by high school kids, which explains why they look like garage kits made by kids with poor eye-hand co-ordination and too many old model kits ). I'd have you do MESSAGE FROM SPACE, just because it doesn't get enough love, and because it's just so damned enthusiastic.
I recently saw "Hawk The Slayer" and although I did enjoy it's B-movie charm, I think it would still to fun to see you guys make a full review of it. Jack Palance is always a good villain, even when he hams it up.
I agree with the last one on the list, the force awakens was the worst of the Star Wars ripoff movies. Almost the exact same plot, even got some of the same actors today come back. But it's a garbage ripoff derivative movie.
There was a extremely bad Italian Sci Fi movie called "War Of The Robots" from 1978. Not only did they rip off "Star Wars",but also American Sci Fi shows like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica,and Space 1999.
The Black Hole doesn't really deserve to be on this list. First of all, development started way before Star Wars. The success of Star Wars certainly helped it finally reaching the screen and the robots took some inspiration from R2-D2, but the film clearly has different aspirations than the swashbuckling space adventure of Star Wars.
I must admit that from the onset of this video I assumed all the films mentioned would be those coming shortly after Star Wars in 1977 and ripped off the first Star Wars film. But I see that several of them are from well into the 1980's and rips of elements not seen before The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I do wonder about some elements like in Hawk the Slayer we have the disfigured face revealed by removing the helmet and the emperor/wizard. These elements were in The Empire strikes back but not fully fleshed out before Return of the Jedi. But Hawk the Slayer was released in 1980, thus making it unsure if this was filmed for Hawk before or after the scenes for Empire strikes back was filmed. As we know, George Lucas wanted Darth Vader's costume to be inspired by samurai armor, especially his helmet. Then it is surprising that when the japanese made their rip off with "Message from Space" their villain was a clear imitation of Vader, but looking significantly less like samurai armor. And as Robin say "No body said Star Wars couldn't be improved." George Lucas picked up on that by the looks of it, since we got Leia in the gold bikini fighting Jabba and his thugs in Return of the Jedi. I guess Lucas watched both Starchasers and Starcrash and got ideas.
Here's a movie you forgot to mention: Spaceballs Spaceballs is a parody of Star Wars. It isn't a direct "rip off", but merely a funny parody of the Star Wars original trilogy. It is a pretty good movie, you should watch it. :)
How about being fair about this matter and calling big britched high and mighty SW out on some of the shit that IT had did it's OWN pinching from? .. . like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Dark Fortress, and the comics of Vaughn Bode?
+Rinoa Super-Genius We almost forgot too. I wrote this back in December and we were going to release it around the same time as the Force Awakens, but things got too hectic so we sat on it till May 4th.
The Force is with Starcrash and Starchaser, in particular, for me. The former, because it just has so much ENERGY in it. (Well, that, and Caroline Munro...) I just love Marjoe Gortner's lightsaber antics and space Karate! The latter, because while it has less shame about ripping-off "Star Wars", some of the character designs and ideas give me more of a "Heavy Metal" vibe to them. (Especially Dag's reprogrammed "secretary-bot".) Plus, it was the movie that introduced me to my best friend, and best man. Seriously, we talked this movie UP AND DOWN in First Grade! (We LOVED the Swamp Cyborgs!)
I saw all these: around half at the time they came out, the others by the early 1990s. 'Spacehunter' and 'Message from Space' were both pretty good compared to the rest. 'Spacehunter' had great actors/actresses, interesting sets and locations, passable f/x, and a story that had a LOT less in common with Star Wars than Star Wars did with any of the old serials it copied (sometimes shot by shot). That scene with the slimy white mutants sliding out of tubes haunted my nightmares for months. 😄 'Message from Space' had visually rich and interesting sets, passable to pretty-good fx (including good miniatures and fiery explosions), and several beautiful musical themes. It always felt like the poor man's Star Wars that an indie filmmaker could realistically dream about making on their own, without access to computers and a $10 million budget. To this day I love both films. They were certainly a LOT more imaginative, a LOT more inventive and original, and a LOT more entertaining than any of the crap in Disney's new trilogy - and neither had even 0.1% of Disney's budget...🤮
No easy way to explain it on here, basically a text layer tilted backwards and pulled away from. I'm sure there are some excellent how to videos on RU-vid.
DUDE WAS KICKING THE THE COMPUTER SETUP INSIDE A MINI MODEL OF THE CENTER DOME IN THE BLACK FORTRESS. WHICH BY THE WAY BELONGS TO THE BEAST FROM KRULL. YEAH, I NOTICED.
The only thing that the 1979 ''Moonraker'' film has in common with Ian Fleming's 1954 ''Bond novel''. Was the name of the main villain. And if I didn't know any better? I would think that the movie ''Starcrash'' 1978. May have been more inspired by the French science fantasy comics series ''Valérian and Laureline''. Which predates (Star Wars by 10 years). I could definitely see ''David Hasselhoff'' and ''Caroline Munro'' playing the lead roles in a late 1970s film adaptation of that.
No sci-fi movie has captured the magic of the original SW trilogy, not even newer ones. The galaxy of star wars feels real and lived in, which is an immense achievement as most old sci-fi movies looked like they were shot amongst carboard props. Original SW movies still look like they happen a real, lived in galaxy with a long history. It's a shame Disney pretty much destroyed the Star Wars franchise...
Moonraker... bonkers? No doubt. Worst Bond film? Not even close to the bottom of that barrel. I went into Moonraker with expectations of terribleness and came out entertained. I went into Man with the Golden Gun with expectations of entertainment and came out with leftover bits of Live and Let Die... not any of the good ones.. and a third nipple.
I remember feeling a little annoyed that every few minutes, Freddie Jones seemed to be pulling out some new legend or creature he'd heard of. I saw it and The Star Chamber on the same day.
Black Hole, Starhunter, and Krull I enjoy watching. Buck Rogers and 70s Batttelstar Galactica while not ripping off star wars were trying to jump on the band wagon
Have you done a special on the Mad Max/Road Warrior knockoffs? I just discovered "Warlords of the 21st Century," aka "Battletruck." And I've seen "Warriors of the Wasteland." I'll bet there are a few more post apocalyptic gladiator type movies with wild armored vehicles & SMB costumed maniacs. As bad as they tend to be, they sometimes have some underdog charm that appeals in limited doses, just like some of these "Star Wars" ripoffs.
Before i watched this vid, i thought "'Star Crash' and 'Battle Beyond the Stars' have to be in there". i have rewarded myself with the first of the drinks that i will need to watch 'Turkish Star Wars'. How have i gone through life unaware of that film?
It in falls into the catagory of so bad its bad. we saved you time by showing you the best bits. Also I could not find a subtitled version. So I have no idea what is being said.
Theres no denying it: Star Wars changed cinema as we know it. Most of the ripoffs might have been crap, but they r definitely entertaining! Been wanting to see Message from Space and Battle Beyond the Stars for years, I own a DVD of the first but its buried in storage and the second I can never seem to catch when it's on tv! Sighhh.
And I have watched almost every one of them at the theater, A few of them were okay, but others were OMG!! it's bad. I think you could do a good job with Starcrash. Message from space would be #2.
I vote for a full Dark Corners treatment of Starcrash! And I don't know if you can go so far as to say it is a Star Wars rip-off but I'm still waiting on a review of Corman's Galaxy of Terror.
Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam, translates to The Man Who Saves The World, is a disgrace to both Turkish cinema and the legendary actor (On Turkish cinema that is) Cuneyt Arkin. Though they made a sequel to it more than 30 or 40 years after the first one, and it was pretty much fucking hilarious xD. The name's The Son Of The Man Who Saved The World. Pretty straight forward.
