WaverBoy wrote:
Hachigatsu wrote:
And STAR WARS was "original"?

You know what I'm talking about.  STAR WARS took inspiration from various sources and whipped them up into something that seemed new and fresh at the time; it didn't carbon copy one staggeringly popular film that was released a year before it for the sole purpose of cashing in on its success.  There's no comparison.  I very much like MESSAGE FROM SPACE for what it is: an extremely entertaining, enthusiastically directed, badly acted (by the American cast), amazingly boldfaced ripoff of STAR WARS.  And it's better than STARCRASH.  
Message From Space does have its obviously Star Wars inspired elements, but as August says, it also has a lot of jidai-geki (sound like the word "Jedi"?) inspiration with a story culled from Satomi Hakkenden. Also Space Battleship Yamato was just as popular in Japan as Star Wars at that time and Toei's desire to make a space movie came out of both Star Wars and Yamato's popularity. So the bottom line is that it's something of a Star Wars "ripoff" but to write it off entirely as one I think does a very entertaining Japanese fantasy flick a huge disservice. It's one of my favorite tokusatsu productions of the 70s, bar none.

The Star Wars saga also borrowed from Message From Space I think. I'm certain George Lucas saw it and the Death Star II runthrough in Return of the Jedi bears an almost shot-for-shot resemblance to the attack and maneuver through the Gavanas' castle. George Lucas has never acknowledged it, but he did like Japanese cinema and all so I think he'd have been interested in seeing a Japanese film inspired by his work and sometimes this stuff, with filmmakers, is just subconscious.