Ok, Lucas just doesn't do anything original
 

Alright....I'm reading the Foundation series. Its a Science Fiction series of three books that was published by Issac Asimov from 1951-1953. In it, it features a 'galactic empire that falls', starting with a world thatis 'completly developed by cities with buildings so high, many people living there never see their natural sun'. As time goes on, one sees the establishment of a 'galactic encyclopedia' which is a clever ruse to cover up the establishment for a 'second empire' which comes from a seriesof 'wars'. And later in the books are mentions of various 'space traders', 'religions of science', 'outer planets not under the control of the old empire' many other things.

If more than one of these things sounds familiar, it should. A great deal of them can be found in Star Wars, variation on a theme. But even more condemning is the names and situations the characters get in. A trader, by the name of Limmar Ponyets, traveling to the planet 'Korrelia' has to detour to risk his life and save his friend from the death sentance by bribing the regions controller with material wealth. Or just some of the names used that are very similar to the Star Wars 'style' of naming characters or straight just sound like a few well known characters from the movies. Lem Tarki. Poly Verisolf. And my favorite, someone who happens to have the last name 'Jutt'.

Now...I don't want to say Lucas outright copies everything....but between the confirmed Japanese Culture, Zen Bhuddism, Westerns, Serials, Flash Gordon, other Science Fiction series (including Star Trek I feel despite how he feels about it now), fantasy series such as LotR and many other things....to throw this into the pot doesn't take very much effort.

And Issac Asimov is a very well known Science Fiction author (who worked on many Science Fiction projects beyons his own, including Star Trek TOS and Next Generation). So I am led to believe Lucas used him as a model just as the others...

Especially since the whole Foundation series is building up towards 'two great powers who fight it out to establish a new galactic empire'...

Everything's been done before. Complete originality is impossible. The best anyone can accomplish in this age is to take what's already there and reorder it into a series of events that coincides with their own personal preferences.

Ever seen Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress? Lucas even personally attented the filming of some of Kurosawa's movies back in the day

I won't set out to defend Star Wars originality, but your demonstration fails to be convincing.

I haven't read the Foundation series (booooo!) but the concepts you enumerate all sound very basic, the notion of a Galactic Empire with a lawless fringe first among them.

Even then, there appears to be some crucial differences of theme or dynamic; you make Foundation sound more like Dune than Star Wars, which was modelled after ancient Roman history to a large degree (a succession of empires not being the focus that comes easily).

I'm not going to try to defend my views cuz I already said what I was gonna. But I'm reading the stories and from various names to various situations, it seems like Lucas just took some of these ideas and altered the slightly, replacing the 'religion of science' with 'the force' or even simple things as changing the name 'Korrelia' to 'Correlia'.

And complete originality was never possible. However, that is always the excuse given when someone takes stuff and uses it. There's a difference between using something someone else has in a new way and slightly altering or straight lifting those things and putting them in your story.

I'm mearly bringing up something else that it seems Lucas used. Because of Star Wars being one of the most popular things in Movie history, most people don't see a lot of these things. And for me, it always makes me feel a little less happy about Star Wars when I read something and yet again it seems something Lucas probably just took bitsand pieces of. And I'm not the only one who feels thisway. I bought the three booksas a recommendation of the store owner who he himself mentioned it was one of the better SciFi series. And he also mentioned how it featured some interesting similarities to Star Wars (not to get me to buy it but I think just like I'm doing now, to say it because it would be pretty crazy if these were mere coincidence).

In any event, the Foundation books are pretty good so far as I have read them.

Well first of all Asimov's Foundation series largely paralleled Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

However, that doesn't mean its not an excellent series of books (Actually seven books. More if you include the fact that later novels and prequels tied the series into [SPOILER] Asimov's Elijiah Bailey / R. Daneel Olivaw stories and through those in turn to the U.S. Robots Stories et al and onward to practicallyevery piece of fiction he wrote). Asimov added things which, of course, were not in the set of circumstances he borrowed. Just off the top of my head I think of psychohistory, the ongoing messages from Hari Seldon (That's the guys name, right? Haven't read those books in years. I really ought to pick them up again.), three-dimensional space battles and technology masquerading as religion.

Lucas in turn came up with some original stuff of his own. The Force and lightsabers being my favorite. Also, Asimov's antagonists were an opponent, but Lucas's were downright evil.

So what we have are two guys who bought their canvasses -- the background of an Imperial Decline and Fall much reminiscent of ancient Rome -- at the same place but then painted them with art of their own invention. And it's the tweaks and ingenuities that each has placed in his stories that set them apart from each other and from lesser storytellers.

Yeah. No doubt Azimov used a template for his books.

For the most part, because I don't want people to focus on 'the empire' which are sort of a backwards comparison from this book to Star Wars, I was mostly referring to the continual use of names, places and descriptions of different planets as being what I see the most similar to Star Wars. This is why I say it could easily have been a way for Lucas to have read these and barowed a few names or ideas for locations here and there. A crime boss who runs a system of planets taken here...a trader adventurer who puts his life on the lie for his friends whle still looking out for himself there....a few planets with similar names or descriptions.....

You see what I mean.

But I don't know if Azimov was the first to think of the 'entire planet is one big city' idea or anything. He probably wasn't, because I wouldn't put it past H.G. Wells to have done that first. But he WAS writing stories all the way in the 1940s so he might have been one of the earliest. And the very first chapter of the first Foundation book just seems SOOO Coruscant to me.

Also the 'Galactic Empire' in Foundation was suppose to have lasted thousands of years.... And we all remember how often they mentioned how long the 'Old Republic' was suppose to have lasted.

Oh wow...look what Wiki brought up when I looked up 'Coruscant':

"The concept of a city covering an entire planet is not entirely new. The planet Trantor in Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels is probably the first fictional planet to be totally urbanized, but it was not the last."

Interesting note. Trantor was totally urbanized and featured buildings over a mile high. But it only featured 45 Billion inhabitants. This is in contrast to Corscant's 1 Trillion (or more).

And if you want to see just how similar Courscant is to Trantor, take a gander at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trantor

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Edit: "There have been some serious attempts to illustrate a planet like Trantor in the Star Wars films by George Lucas, the first being the Death Star and the other being Coruscant (which was in some early sources called "Jhantor", in homage to Trantor)."

"It should be noted that there is a planet called Trantor in the Star Wars universe, and it is also an ecumenopolis.[1]"

There you have it for confirmation. Lucas has read and atleast was thinking about payinghomageto the Foundation series. Its not hard for me to think other things were used which have gone unmentioned.

Also there's a Shipping District in Star Wars named 'Terminus'.

I think the evidence is clear. -_-

Well I've always thought that Lucas was a douchebag. I mean, we're not talking about shitty prequels, I mean, always. My favorite example being, if you look at Star Wars: A New Hope, and watch closely, they claim that the Force and the Jedi/Sith were a religion.

I'm heavily speculating that, until he made the sequel to it, that Lucas never intended on the Jedi Order being "Force sensitive people", but rather being just a choice - You can be a jedi, or you could not. No 'chosen by the Force' required. Of course, he says he knew what he was doing for the prequels way back in 1970.

But that's just a personal thought.

Having said thus, I'm with Ken on this one - the similarities are entirely too obvious. I'll be fair and say that Star Wars really has that emphasis on importance of the Jedi and the Force, and Foundation doesn't have it even near to the same level, but Lucas' blatant theft is pretty obvious.

It's not really the fact that there are all these similarities - it's the fact that there are all of these similarities in one book alone. The charming rogue with a heart of gold isn't exactly copyrighted, but him in a galactic war against an Empire and such...etc etc etc.

Well, the base of Star Wars was just big generalizations. Big Empire falls to Underdog Rebels, no matter what. A few individuals make decisions that affect the lives of many. Magic and mysticism explain the rest.

Also, remember that it was intended for young audiences. Spealburg and Lucas actually invented PG-13. Before them, it went from PG straight to R. Their empires are founded on selling their stuff to the middle crowd, making it somewhat maliable to the largest age range possible: children to adults. Therein lies its popularity.

Another thing to consider is the fact that when it comes to universal scale it IS possible to actually have a civilization that HAPPENS to be from another series . . . I mean come on, if some one has thought of it, it might as well exist somewhere out there. Especially in a fictional world that you can happen to control.

I'm not really much of a Star Wars fanatic, I mean, I LIKE the movies, heh, even saw episode 1 10 times in theaters ... but I've never really paid much attention to names and such. The names you have talked about don't really seem all that similar to me, but like I said, I haven't paid attention. If when you talk about this Jutt character you are alluding to Jaba the Hutt, or maybe Boba Fett?

Anyway, I don't really see how George Lucas can be accused of being unoriginal when he actually pulled off putting ALL of those things that you talked about together successfully. Japanese culture and Foundation series and all.

If he had merely taken when Asimov had created, changed some names and changed the title don't you think people would have noticed? Especially Asimov himself?

They did. Azimov has made statements many times about how he has been one of the most copied writers in the 20th century (he used a much nicer word than copied that made it sound like an honor). Also all those links I showed you were obviously writen by people who either were large Science Fiction or Star Wars fans and they still point out the similarities to the Foundation series and Star Wars.

And Lucas himself has come out and said he barrowed or straight used a whole veriety of different things in his movies. Yet I don't even him mentioning what influenced him into making it Science Fiction (of a type) aside from 'I wanted to make a Fantasy movie that wasn't like the other Fantasy movies out at the time' and that he use to watch a lot of Flash Gordon Serials. But unless Lucas is some brilliant mind to the level of say...Azimov, then its hard to see him coming up with the range of ideas Star Wars created that aren't connected to the things I mentioned above (which I also forgot to add World War II as one of the biggest influences to his designs).

And I mean, we all have seen what happened when he took direct control of the movies. Didn't Episode I-III seem stifled in ideas, lacking in original concepts and all around less ground-breaking in the field of 'Science Fiction' ideas added than Episodes IV-VI, where he had a lot more outside help? In my opinion, I'd say there's more originality in Empire Strikes Back in the relm of Science Fiction or anything along those lines than in any of the movies I-III. And I can name from memory many of the items found in movies I-III which simply can be found somewhere in a science fiction or science fantasy novel or tv series or movie now.

I'll give Lucas props for being amazingly successful, for making Star Wars a household name and for bringing together an excellent staff which took a rather simple story and made it into a literal empire running on a galaxy far far away. But, he still seemed to barrow much much more than anything he created himself, creating a story which is pretty obviously a conglomerate of a whole range of other stories and pieces of stories strung together into a large canon which to us NOW seems like an original concept, simply because its one of the most famous movie series ever. But although it overtook many others....it doesn't mean its examples haven't been done before and that Star Wars did a good job covering up its use of the previous material.

To use a bad example. Blade has vampires, a story about bloodlines, genetic mutation and a half-vampire 'daywalker' who gets into Martial Arts fighting scenes and uses an arsenal of weapons. But at the same time, we don't go around saying it directly lifted how it is from Bram's Dracula (vampires), Castlevania (bloodlines), X-Men (genetic mutation) or the Matrix (martial arts fighting scenes and an arsenal of weapons). It did at least a somewhat good job of altering or tricking you it was doing something different in all those cases.

A lightsaber to replace a Katana or a Tie Fighter to replace a Spitfire do a pretty good job tricking you. But MANY things don't if you just look at them.