Non-Trek Worldbuilding. Part 3: Early Star Wars.

[David Flin]

@Thande has another article on SF worldbuilding that is Star Trek-adjacent, which you can read Here.

Discuss this article Here.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Why  did the Skywalker family, who we're meant to see as regular good folk, get a scene modelled on slave auctions? It's a really odd choice in the year 2024 when "droids are slaves" isn't an intended plot.

 

[Coiler]

Didn't mention what I think is the biggest (pun partially intended) Dune inspiration for Star Wars: Vladimir Harkonnen to Jabba the Hutt as a big fat blob villain.

 

[Thande]

Didn't mention what I think is the biggest (pun partially intended) Dune inspiration for Star Wars: Vladimir Harkonnen to Jabba the Hutt as a big fat blob villain.

Interesting point. There may well be a connection, but the original conception of Jabba was quite different IIRC (the human mobster who later got overlaid with CGI Jabba in that one deleted scene added back into the special edition of ANH).

 

[Ncw8]

The Journal of the Whills might have vanished from the film, but it did survive long enough to appear on the title page of the original novelization of the movie. So well before most of the Extended Universe.

The idea of hyperdrive not working in a gravity well had already appeared in written SF back in the Sixties. Larry Niven used it in his Known Space stories. There ships had to move to distances equivalent to Neptune’s orbit before engaging hyperdrive.

A negative influence on Star Wars was Space 1999. The original design of the Millennium Falcon was considered too close to the Eagles of Moonbase Alpha and so was changed.

 

[Hendryk]

Yoda, in particular, is a curious combination of the characters of Gollum and Tom Bombadil in many ways.

Now I'm not the most well-versed person in Middle Earth lore, but I don't think that's where the inspiration for Yoda comes from. To me he looks like he was inspired by the same Japanese swashbuckler movies that Lucas took many other plot hooks from (The Hidden Fortress etc.)--he's the wise old sensei who has taken on the life of a hermit and likes to assume the appearance of a doddering fool so that he'll be left alone. The same character type would show up again in US pop culture with Mr. Miyagi.

 

[Thande]

Now I'm not the most well-versed person in Middle Earth lore, but I don't think that's where the inspiration for Yoda comes from. To me he looks like he was inspired by the same Japanese swashbuckler movies that Lucas took many other plot hooks from (The Hidden Fortress etc.)--he's the wise old sensei who has taken on the life of a hermit and likes to assume the appearance of a doddering fool so that he'll be left alone. The same character type would show up again in US pop culture with Mr. Miyagi.

The sensei archetype is definitely a big part of it as well, but his distinctive diction seems a hybrid of those two characters - which I didn't notice until I watched the two film trilogies back to back (though obviously SW was inspired by the book not the Jackson trilogy!)

It's also more noticeable if you read the novelisation of "The Empire Strikes Back", which was based on an earlier draft and preserves a lot more dialogue between Luke and Yoda.

 

[Hendryk]

Where Star Wars blasters do take inspiration from Star Trek is in the concept of them having stun and kill settings, one of many elements of the original Star Trek which entered pop culture early on. When a stormtrooper stuns Princess Leia near the beginning of the first film, the stun setting is shown with a visually different effect, a series of collapsing blue rings.

Indeed, the "set your blasters on stun" thing is probably one of the most overt Star Trek references in the Star Wars universe, and I'm not aware of the "stun setting" on blasters showing up ever again (how can a bolt of energy be set to stun anyway?). This begs the question, can the Force deflect stun shots the way it can regular ones?

The Star Wars Expanded Universe occasionally introduced the idea of distinct alien threat forces like the Ssi-ruuk or the Yevetha, but these always felt unfitting (perhaps deliberately so, to shake things up).

One reason why the whole Yuuzhan Vong story arc feels so un-Star Wars like is that a race of extra-galactic invaders who are just rubber forehead aliens looks so much like early, low-budget Star Trek. The Yuuzhan Vong could have been anything, a silicon-based lifeform, sentient gas clouds, unfathomable Lovecraftian horrors, but no, they were just humanoids in spiky armor. (The Ssi-ruuk, for their part, were space velociraptors, and it's certainly no coincidence that the book they show up in was published the same year that Jurassic Park was adapted into a movie).

 

[Hendryk]

Nonetheless, the point is that history in Star Wars – like China and late Rome – seems to assume that the galaxy is “naturally” united by a single government, and all the titular star wars are ‘civil’ wars spent fighting over who controls this government.

One clever way in which the dichotomy between the imperial core and the periphery is rendered is wear and tear. The core gets the shiny, pristine, "classically SF" looking technology, while in the periphery people make do with secondhand or jury-rigged equipment. Luke needn't have said "If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from", because one could tell right away from the contrast between the clean white ship where the story begins, and the dirty, creaking gear on Tatooine.

Interestingly, in Andor, this dichotomy is also expressed vertically, and there one is reminded of Metropolis and cyberpunk settings. On Coruscant itself, the ruling class lives in stylish Art Deco apartments atop soaring high-rises, while the masses are crammed in dimly-lit Brutalist warrens.