Waver Boy, you lack the proper context to fully appreciate how MESSAGE FROM SPACE came about, because you suffer from STAR WARS blindness. Uchujin65 pretty much hits it on the nose — SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO was first broadcast in 1974 and became a hit feature film in 1977 — breaking all previous box-office records a year before STAR WARS was released in Japan (July, 1978) — and the Japanese were, at that time, producing tons of science fantasy television shows (at an unprecedented rate that has never been duplicated before or since), over sixty of them between 1971 and 1979, alone. Many of these shows had plenty of the trappings of things you would see in STAR WARS — from funny little comedic robots, to masked villains, armored henchmen, and spaceship-flying superheroes.

Speaking of STAR WARS, we have to remember that Lucas borrowed liberally from Japanese fantasy films (including YAMATO), which he viewed while he was in Japan soliciting companies there to produce visual effects for his space picture. In the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS issue of Cinefantastique magazine, there was an article/review of MESSAGE in which one of the producers claims that Lucas got the design idea for Darth Vader from one of their television characters — Musha Kamen from an early episode of SECRET TASK FORCE: GORANGER (1975-77). Lucas was also well aware of SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO.

Gordon Romstar said, "I swear George Lucas came home from a college party hammered ,caught the Magic Serpent on late night TV and then the Star War "mythology" was born."

I've been telling people that for years! I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and THE MAGIC SERPENT played many, many times on local television in the late 1960s/early 1980s... George had to have seen it at some point. Still, MESSAGE FROM SPACE owes more to the literary origins of the long-novel, Satomi Hakkenden and Toei's own television history that featured masked fedual, and super-scientific, heroes — than it does to STAR WARS. Plus, the Japanese had the same access to science fiction novels and other stories, which were also inspirations to George in creating STAR WARS, such as The Lensman series, which we can find the origin of the Death Star — Free Planets. And so, on...

I'm not saying that MESSAGE FROM SPACE is the greatest film, ever (Variety's lengthy, and positive, 1978 review opened, "If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the makers of STAR WARS should be highly flattered"), but any space opera in which Sonny Chiba plays a sword-weilding intergalactic knight in shining armor, is good by me!