Thursday, November 01, 2018

Spaghetti space opera

The early 80s was a time of a lot of Star Wars knock-offs, given the enormous success of Star Wars.  Many of these were meant to be rather cheap-ish; I remember Roger Corman's 1980 Battle Beyond the Stars; another remake of The Seven Samurai in a post-Star Wars space opera setting.  1984's Ice Pirates is another one that sticks out in my mind, as does 1979's Buck Rogers and the two or three season TV show that followed the theatrical release of the pilot movie.  1980's Flash Gordon (with the Queen theme-song) maybe isn't strictly speaking a Star Wars pastiche, but in actuality it kinda is, and without Star Wars, it would almost certainly never have been made anyway.  Some other movies added twist of some kind; 1979's Alien was of course, slightly more serious science-fiction with the story structure of a horror movie, and weird movies like Mollie Ringwald's Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone from 1983 is a hybrid of Star Wars and Mad Max.  And 1979's Battlestar Galactica wasn't a movie, but a TV show with obvioulys a different format correspondingly, but the cylons were clearly robotic stormtroopers, and the Viper pilots similarity to X-wing hotshots, including Starbuck's Han Solo-ish attitude, were obviously heavily inspired by Star Wars.

There were some curious Italian b-movies thrown together in similar manner to the more famous spaghetti westerns.  Yor: The Hunter From the Future is a strange caveman and space opera hybrid.  It's one of the more infamous bad b-movies ever made (from 1983 also; it may well have required not only Star Wars to have been made to be greenlighted, but also 1982's Conan the Barbarian which spawned its own cottage industry of b-movie pastiches.)  No doubt, among the most infamous spaghetti star wars movies was 1978's Starcrash, quite possibly the very first Star Wars pastiche to be reasonably well known.  Here's a bunch of posters for it.








Why, yes!  That is a young David Hasselhoff holding a lightsaber there.

And I really love the notion behind this movie; that it's really "Sinbad (Harryhausen style) on Mars."

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