Steven Hart missed "Star Wars'" most obvious antecedent, and one that George Lucas (at least in the past) has proudly pointed to: Akira Kurosawa's underappreciated 1958 samurai classic, "The Hidden Fortress."

The plot is almost identical to that of the first "Star Wars" movie: A willful and rather obnoxious princess must escape through enemy territory with a secret cargo that will restore her defeated clan to power. She is accompanied by her lone surviving general (Toshiro Mifune, handily doing the work of both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo), and a pair of bumbling, bickering sidekicks that clearly inspired C3PO and R2-D2.

Kurosawa hardly needed to read Joseph Campbell. Japan's Warring States period provided all the necessary political/historical context, as it did for so many of his films. The substance of the story itself, as with all great storytelling, is simply a matter of getting the protagonists into trouble and then thinking up ingenious ways of getting them out of it.

Lucas, like Sergio Leone, proved that you can't go far wrong borrowing from Akira Kurosawa. Lucas' mistake was not borrowing enough.

-- Eugene Woodbury

I am an ardent fan of Joseph Campbell's work and a fan of Lucas' "Star Wars" saga (or at least the first two movies in the series). Nevertheless, I found Steven Hart's article right on the mark.

While Hart stretches to make his point in some instances (carping about the useless nature of Obi Wan Kenobi's advice to Luke -- arguably, he could have acted differently, but his approach is not without some semblance of wisdom), he very accurately points up the difference between the superficial application of ideas after the fact and a true and tightly integrated intention to render those ideas.

J.R.R. Tolkien once characterized the difference between allegory and applicability, saying that allegory was fueled by the intention of the author and that applicability was the province of the reader.

Clearly, Lucas' work is not allegory based on mythic themes. What Hart has shown is that in many instances, Lucas has even failed to provide his viewers with the tools for useful applicability.

I'm only disappointed that I didn't recognize it sooner.

-- David Bringhurst

Steven Hart could have elaborated the many obvious influences on "Star Wars," such as Leigh Brackett's husband, pulp-era planet-smasher Edmond Hamilton. An extract from Hamilton's 1933 Weird Tales story "Kaldar, Planet of Antares," reprinted in a 1965 Ace paperback: "The sword seemed at first glance a simple long rapier of metal. But [the hero, Stuart Merrick] found that when his grip tightened on the hilt it pressed a catch which released a terrific force stored in the hilt into the blade, making it shine with light. When anything was touched by this shining blade, he found, the force of the blade annihilated it instantly. He learned that the weapon was called a lightsword."

Still, a litany of sources doesn't get at the magic of the phenomenon. Hart's point about Lucas' spotty record outside "Star Wars"/"Indiana Jones" could more justly apply to thousands of obscure creators who adapted Shakespeare, the Bible and, yes, Campbellian hero-myth, but got nowhere interesting. The sources aren't the creation; the map is not the territory. Regardless of where the lightning issued from, Lucas caught it and bottled it. That's hard, and few have done it as well as he has.

-- Allen Varney

Wow. False dichotomy city.

There's a phenomenon one may observe among science fiction fans: The person who believes they're well read because they've read a lot of science fiction. And pretty much only science fiction.

So, does "Star Wars" owe a lot to the pulps? Sure. Does that therefore necessarily mean it doesn't owe anything to the kind of story structures Campbell looked at? Only if one thinks science fiction was a-borne all on its own and isn't related to anything else.

Sure, Tattooine looks a lot like "Dune." Funny how "Dune" looks a lot like David Lean and Robert Bolt's "Lawrence of Arabia," or Lawrence's own "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," or any other Mad Prophet in the Desert myth of the last three millennia or so, eh?

Yes, Coruscant is an obvious ripoff of Trantor from the "Foundation" trilogy. But then, Trantor owes a lot to Imperial Rome, and Asimov pretty much 'fessed up as to how he was recycling Gibbon's "Decline and Fall."

And let's not even talk about H. Beam Piper, or James Blish's broad-canvas rework of Spengler in "Cities in Flight," or Lester Del Rey's "Lest Darkness Fall" or ...

Pulp science fiction pretty much falls into well-established Campbellian forms, Lucas or not. Whether Lucas knew this intellectually when he started, or whether he jumped onto the bandwagon later, is kind of beside the point.

It's not as if those structures don't exist. Hart asks the question, "If this is the level of analysis at work, then why should this myth-mongering stop with Lucas? The original 'Rocky,' released the year before 'Star Wars,' follows Campbell's mythic template much more closely than 'Star Wars.'" Hart means this pejoratively, but he's absolutely right. Why stop with science fiction?

Or, why with Campbell? Take a look at any of the template mongers in Hollywood, notably Syd Field. You've seen screenplays written to Field's templates dozens of times. He's not an academic like Campbell; he sells his methods purely on the basis of lucrative practicality. But those templates of his fall easily into Campbellian structures. And they make lots of money.

Hart reads to me like a guy who's noticed that "Star Wars" owes a lot to other science fiction without ever examining -- or knowing -- the debt science fiction owes to other genres.

-- Hal O'Brien

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