Sons of the Star Wars Age: Rip-Offs and Beneficiaries, 1977-1987

feel like heavy metal and dune don't relaly belong here, but the black hole certainly does, and I loved that movie when I was a kid. also buck rogers but mainly because of erin grey.

"message from space" is my instinctive pick

To be clear, my rationale with some of these was: would they exist in a world where Star Wars wasn't a massive success?

voted for star trek tmp

Clearly Star Trek and Dune and Heavy Metal were their own, different things prior to the existence of Star Wars, but the success of the latter almost certainly facilitated the film adaptations of the former, and they've all arguably been touched up with a patina of Star Wars gloss (Jorodowsky's pre-SW Dune would have been quite a different thing, for reasons beyond Jorodowsky).

xpost I watched Star Trek last night! Still think it might be my favorite of the series. Would love to see big franchise entries today have the guts to be slow, meditative Trumbull effects reels.

I’ve actually heard goodish things about Battle Beyond The Stars (mostly via the 80s All Over podcast). Anyone seen it?

I haven't yet but it's in the stack I've been working my way through. I've seen Starcrash and Flash Gordon for the first time over the past couple of weeks. Both so bad but also...fantastic?

(This current fascination overlaps on several fronts with my other current fascination with Corman/AIP stuff.)

I found Starcrash to be a gruelling watch even with MST3K accompaniment.

A lot of contenders on this list. I saw Ice Pirates and Krull a bunch as a kid, but have basically no recollection of them. Black Hole, Flash Gordon, Dune, and Spaceballs are all great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t7z_44nGio

“Yor” was much more a Conan(and Gor) thing than a Star Wars thing, wasn’t it

And Krull was like more post-Excalibur/Dragonslayer fantasy

Anyway, voted Battle Beyond the Planets. Or Space Balls.

does "the martian chronicles" belong here?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/25/The_Martian_Chronicles_%28TV_miniseries%29.jpg

Oh man, those some dope-ass 70s on that poster

70s fonts, that is

Spaceballs, always Spaceballs

I really loved Battle Beyond the Stars as a kid. An omission you might enjoy is Aldo Lado's The Humanoid from 1979, riding a solid 3.8/10 on IMDB currently. Cheapo Italian rip-off, with Richard Kiel in a starring role and some wonderfully ropey costumes:

https://youtu.be/29vOx8ugT0c

great idea for a thread

star trek tmp def the most accomplished and def the one i'd most happily rewatch but flash gordon is probably the most outright goofy fun

i feel like tron might belong here too although it's a bit more of a stretch

I was going to suggest Blake's 7, but it looks like that had already been commissioned and was in production by 1976, so maybe more of a beneficiary than a rip-off, though I'm sure it had some influence over what eventually ended up on screen

Aware that Star Wars would be released in United Kingdom cinemas around the time of Blake's 7's planned television debut, Scoones spent the budget he had been allocated for the entire series on Space Fall, the first episode to be recorded. The model filming for this episode, the first piece of filming for the series, took place at Bray Studios on 15 August 1977.[9] Live action filming of Blake's 7 began on Monday, 26 September 1977 at Ealing film studios with scenes set on the spacecraft London for Space Fall.

Star Wars was released in the UK on 27 December 1977, but was obviously already a phenomenon in the US by that point

I'm a bit uncomfortable with ST TMP revisionism - my recollection is that even when not compared to the Wrath of Khan it's a lumpy dull film with a hilariously terrible 'twist'.

cool poll idea! i got into this a few years ago and tried tracking down all the circa SW ripoffs i could find. ended up realizing that Mad Max was probably a much bigger influence on films in general. rather than chasing SFX laden space opera it's just way more cheap to buy a bunch of old cars, glue stuff to them, and drive them around in the desert.

Starcrash is really up there for me. the John Barry soundtrack is wonderful. the sets are gorgeous. everything is just so colorful, from the rainbow spray-painted space "city" to the stars backdrop themselves. Bond girl/b-movie queen Caroline Munroe is a lot of fun to watch in those sexy space disco costumes, a welcome lead in a genre sorely lacking in sex appeal. there is the cowboy robot mashup of Darth Vader & Chewie. they have the esteemed older actor (Christopher Plummer) lending a weirdly genuine gravitas to the silliest moments. "Computer, halt the flow of time!" the stop motion is half finished but it's still fun to watch David Hasslehoff lightsaber battle awkward robots made by a weekend Harryhausen. so many crazy things in this. a death star shaped like a giant hand. missiles that crash through windows and open up to reveal soldiers hiding inside. there is a longer cut than the one seen on MST3K which has lots of goofy lines edited out, it is hilarious.

Battle Beyond the Stars was pretty good too. much higher production quality. but not as fun. there is a race of aliens that share a single consciousness (when one of them eats food they all pretend to chew). hot space Valkyrie played by Sybil Danning (a veteran of these sort of movies, she's great in the Star Wars-y Hercules, from the creator of Starcrash. don't remember much of the plot tho. one of James Cameron's first jobs, he created a spaceship with boobs.

Message From Space is a wonderful Japanese take on the idea. i recall spaceships that look like actual ships, giving it a slight Martian Chronicles quality. the main bad guy is a Darth Vader alike if Darth Vader was more Evil Samurai. which works extremely well since that's where the idea for Vader originally came from.

Star Trek is fine but closer to 2001 or something. i far prefer The Wrath of Khan, which towers over most movies tbh.

have't seen most of these though. The Ice Pirates i have seen several times (often on OTA TV broadcasts) but barely remember a thing. just a silly low budget romp. Masters of the Universe was pretty decent. i saw that in a theater (there was someone dressed as skeletor doing promotion at the theater, he scared the crap out of me) but i was a big He-Man fan when i was a kid and that effectively killed it for me. on rewatch it's a lot of fun. the bald cop who was the principle in Back to the Future is great in this.

Spaceballs is just amazing. i've completely given up on SW but if they ever get around to Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money it would make my day. "Merchandising! Merchandising! Merchandising!"

Classic nonexistent mashup “One night in Bangkok with a Starship Trooper” is stuck in my head again, thanks, Lunch

my recollection is that even when not compared to the Wrath of Khan it's a lumpy dull film with a hilariously terrible 'twist'.

it's v far from perfect for sure but it's got a really cool air of wonder and it's celebration of both star trek and spacefaring in general and i am 100% down with both of those things

Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (Charles Band, 1983)
Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (Lamont Johnson, 1983)

I saw these both in the theatre, in shitty 1983 3D. One had Molly Ringwald as the spunky sidekick. I seem to recall both having more in common with Mad Max than Star Wars, but I was only 8.

Huh, wikipedia describes both more or less as "space westerns." "Spacehunter" even has some A-listers involved, like a score from Elmer Bernstein, as well as some A-list b-listers, like Ringwald, Michael Ironside and Ernie Hudson.

Also: some pretty porny titles.

I described Starcrash elsewhere on the board as basically a Star Wars porno with the sex scenes cut out. I have a feeling that will hold true for a number of these.

There are a lot of these I love unconditionally, but TBH wins for being FAUST IN SPACE, having the best robots of all these, goofy blasters that only shoot two-at-a-time, being actually spooky (there’s a jump scare or two iirc), another terrific John Barry score, and for turning completely into a fucked up head movie at the end.

I remember my dad and I going to see The Shape of Things to Come when it ran at the base theater at Ft. Leonard Wood (which only ever seemed to book B- and second-run movies) and being SO bored. To have a movie full of spaceships and lasers and robots that bores a ten-year-old is a real accomplishment.

xp Barry's TBH score is one of my favorite sci-fi movie scores of all times, right there with several of the Williams scores and Goldsmith's Alien score.

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

i forgot about this once! i saw this and recall it was decent but forgettable. Molly Ringwald in a post apocalypse. like a lot of these, felt more Mad Max-inspired than Star Wars. tho i guess SW had lots of dusty desert vehicles too

it is kind of cool to see all the variations on the formula. some go for more fantasy (the budget approach being swords and sandals w some sfx) some go for more sci fi (budget approach being dusty desert vehicles)

Yeah, I felt that I had to rein it in a bit, as my first impulse was to include a bunch of fantasy stuff that arguably became more marketable after SW but wasn't quite as thematically related.

Seems like the non-SW strains of sci-fi during this era were mostly post-apocalypse (understandably) or sci-fi/horror in the vein of Alien (or just straight-up Alien rip-offs).

Fantasy movies from this era, though, would make for a pretty great poll on its own.

It's instructive to look at the kinds of sci-fi and fantasy films that were being made prior to '77. Lots of Crichton and Crichton-esque small-scale stuff, Disney-fied kiddie fluff. Not a lot of sweeping epics full of pomp and grandeur (or at least feeble efforts in that direction). So, yeah, even though they feel really tangential, stuff like The Dark Crystal and Buckaroo Banzai and The Beastmaster probably could only existed as they were in a post-SW world.

(This is all relatively value-free observation, btw, as I certainly recognize the downside of the new cinematic landscape that Lucas and Spielberg kicked off.)

'could only have existed'

Working and message boarding do not mix, kids.

just saw a clip of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, looks v enjoyable:

https://www.facebook.com/remakesploitation/videos/1614626938655051/

The bits and pieces I've seen are truly astonishing. Full-bore batshittery.

It's instructive to look at the kinds of sci-fi and fantasy films that were being made prior to '77

a lot of it was pessimistic or paranoid about the future; Silent Running, Logan's Run, Dark Star, etc. SW seemed to point to a more optimistic, less critical future, thematically at least. at the heart of the OT was still the man-vs-machine sci fi struggle but more about the spectacle/romance of it all. to that extent i don't think SW was as thematically important as it was industrially -- more money for effects, more money for anything w "space" in it, more money for b-movies, and companies chasing that Jaw/SW blockbuster dragon, etc.

one movie that could def fit on this list is the hilariously titled Solarbabies

like Yoda was probably super important as a proof of concept. you can have a huge movie where a lead character is a puppet. cue the Dark Crystal/Legend/etc.

How did I never realize that The Last Starfighter was directed by the guy who played Michael Myers in Halloween?

wait waht

Huh. And here I thought he only ever directed Star Trek 5.

voted last starfighter because i like it

No Laserblast, no credibility:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZI96rOPAA

First season of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century rules.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Dammit, I opened this topic wanting to vote for Spaceballs and got caught up reading the discussion, not realizing the poll had closed in the meantime.

Oh well. I would've voted for Spaceballs.

This scene still tickles me:
https://i.imgur.com/ndy0eeR.png

Okay, it's a bit of a stretch but I think I have to add Deathsport to this list. It's completely earthbound and replaces the spaceships with motorcycles–sorry, 'death machines'–but it's ultimately just the cheapest of Corman's SW rip-offs (although more successful on that front and way more entertaining than the tepid Battle Beyond the Stars). I mean, a chopper tearing through a tunnel literally makes a tie-fighter sound at one point. And they were prescient enough to kick off the post-apocalypse craze a year before Mad Max was released!

Highly recommended if you like your sci-fi with a ton of extra cheese, a la Starcrash or Flash Gordon. Totally the kind of thing I would've sat through dozens of times as a kid (for reasons beyond the copious full-frontal nudity).

Was very disappointed to find out that Enemy Mine actually sucks.

The ship from The Black Hole was really amazing. I had a comic book adaption and used to trip on the artwork of the ship. It definitely was a Disney movie, almost steam punk/Captain Nemo in space.

I remember Saturn 3 from late night HBO as a kid. I remember it being a bit of a T'N'A film with Kirk Douglas getting some strange from Farah Fawcett. I know there was a killer robot in the movie. I kinda remember it being more like Logan's Run than Star Wars. I'd say this and The Fury were a couple of Kirk Douglas' last old-man bad ass movies.

Looking it up on WIKI - did not realize this...Screenplay by Martin Amis

Battle Beyond the Stars and Ice Pirates were both cheezy fun that I loved as a kid. Really I think Spaceballs are almost a take on it, especially with the space trucker characters.

Krull I saw in the theatre and they had these handouts to explain what was going on when you went into the theatre (which they also had on Dune too). What was going on was a pretty f'n dumb movie - I remember going into full MSK3000 mode with my buddy in the theatre as a 13 year old before I knew what that meant. That thing they threw around like a ninja star was pretty boss.

That's so totally weird and don't remember Harvey Keitel being in it either.

Keitel being in Saturn 3.

I'm gonna give Krull another shot soon. I started it a while back and was perplexed that it was so utterly boring. But maybe that's just the way it is. I remember them trying pretty hard to make Krull a thing bit I also don't remember any kids on the playground ever saying a word about Krull.

Like sorry, if you're working in this milieu, the worst crime you can commit is to make it boring.

Krull is a weird, stately thing in terms of pace and execution, and such a retrospectively odd cast too. When it was all over HBO on the initial run here, it was definitely the first time I saw Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane in anything, as well as the (comparatively much lesser known in the US) Alum Armstrong. (Pretty sure that's also the first time I saw Freddie Jones as well -- Francesca Annis I would have seen in TV repeats of Cleopatra, not that I knew to look for her then, and maybe the Partners in Crime series had started showing here too; in any event by the time they were in Lynch's Dune I knew them both.) At the time I was more interested in Ken Marshall simply because I had really enjoyed him in the Marco Polo miniseries, go figure. And I had absolutely no idea it was a Peter Yates film until much later! I have the DVD which has interesting-enough commentary from Marshall, Yates and Lysette Anthony; strangely enough the recentish Blu-ray doesn't include that, which seems like a botch.

Alun, not Alum. He is not a cartoon element to pucker lips, I gather.

Yeah, I was surprised at least that what little I watched struck me as more reminiscent of Excalibur than something SW-esque.

"Captain Nemo in space" is pretty on point for Black Hole. Very much worth watching for the models/paintings/effects, and Barry's maximally pompy score. Story's limp and the gimmicky things (robot sidekicks with psychic link to Yvette Mimieux) feel really bolted-on. But def high in this whole category for me - would have voted that, Trek or Dune probably.

Then there's a big jump down to the B pictures that are fun and worth watching (or at least have some charming aspects) and a muuuuch bigger jump down to the ones that are just dross. For whatever reason I actually have an easier time getting thru cheap shitty 80 minute Mad Max ripoffs than slightly less cheap but kinda episodic and slow 100 minute Star Wars ripoffs. Basically I wish I liked BBTS and Starcrash more than I do.

"Turkish Star Wars" is DEFINITELY worth seeing as an artifact of the times... and of, iirc, a lot of the footage they'd shot getting accidentally destroyed or something? What survives is more of a "martial arts in the desert" movie with a bunch of unauthorized Star Wars footage and Indiana Jones music simply spliced in to pep things up periodically. The lead is a big star in Turkey, so it's not nearly as unknown there as most of these films are in the US.

Highly recommend this documentary on the Turkish cinema scene of that time; sadly not aware of it being available to stream anywhere, dunno if it's about rights or what. https://www.remakeremixripoff.com/

Whoa, I'm gonna have to check that out for sure.

Dr. C, blu-ray seems the key to enjoying Starcrash. It's undeniable trash but also kind of gorgeous when it's all cleaned up.

interesting! maybe someday down the line.

I remember my dad and I going to see The Shape of Things to Come when it ran at the base theater at Ft. Leonard Wood (which only ever seemed to book B- and second-run movies) and being SO bored. To have a movie full of spaceships and lasers and robots that bores a ten-year-old is a real accomplishment.

― Millennial Whoop, wanna fight about it? (Phil D.), Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Yeah don't go anywhere near this movie, it's insultingly bad. I felt sorry for Jack Palance, whose career low this must be.

I had considered this before but I think I really need to go through the worst of these things and assemble a supercut of the shots and sequences of merit. Because they all have them. The Shape of Things to Come is not great by any stretch but it contains some visual elements that I appreciate a great deal.

“The Black Hole” has one of those endings where you honestly can’t believe Disney put it out.

It was the Ron Miller era, lots of things that never before were and have never since been acceptably 'Disney-esque' went down during that handful of years (see also: Watcher in the Woods).

I remember them trying pretty hard to make Krull a thing bit I also don't remember any kids on the playground ever saying a word about Krull.

Krull was a thing at my school. The glaive was considered a badass weapon and there was an arcade game too, and perhaps most importantly it was shown on cable continuously for years. Like Superfuzz or Two Moon Junction or Turk 182, it didn't even matter if it was good... it was on.

Has there been an adequate explanation as to why ST TMP is so dull and boring? I've seen tons of stuff about why Khan was such an improvement; the process of redrafts and rewrites explained in great detail etc, but never how TMP ended up so grim. Even back in the day i had the feelng ny Dad who loved the original ST far more than i did was (very) quietly extremely disappointed.

The only explanation I can think of is that it isn't dull and boring and you're wrong. If that makes sense?

In seriousness, though, it feels a bit like they wanted to get their money's worth out of Trumbull so they steered toward 2001-ville at a point.

Someone better steeped in Trek lore could flesh out the lay of the land but I know that what ultimately became TMP started out as a pitch for a new ST TV series, so I believe some of the story and characters were reconfigured for a feature. I'm sure the fact that it didn't start out as a film project had some impact on the tone.

Not to change topic but have you guys seen Empire of Dreams? Just heard about it last night

“The Black Hole” has one of those endings where you honestly can’t believe Disney put it out.

been hearing about how weird this ending is my whole life and when i finally watched last year it did NOT disappoint. the descent into hell(?) is one of the most truly unforgettable bonkers cinema images ive seen by any standard, but the fact that its a disney film just sends it off the charts

Watcher in the Woods also has a classic bonkers ending

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkpf2IzmMVg

^ The alternate ending of another Disney movie from that same era

xpost lol

Not to change topic but have you guys seen Empire of Dreams? Just heard about it last night

That's interesting about the pitch for a new Star Trek tv series; totally makes sense, it feels a lot like 70s telly with a big budget.

xxp Empire Of Dreams the documentary? If so yeah it's really good. Bafflingly left off the Blu Ray box sets, used to be part of the 2004 DVD set

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB1DA5jZdIQ

.. i mean YMMV obvs.

I do think maybe I'd just seen it before. I was just expecting to learn and see new things and I did not and that's probably why.

The b-reel stuff looks like fun

Trumbull was brought onto Star Trek: TMP late as a salvage job; apparently they weren't satisfied with whatever they were getting from the original team. The best explanation for the film's ponderousness is that Robert Wise's idea of a sci-fi film was 2001, and then that combines with some degree of basically fan-service: if we're gonna finally see the Enterprise on the big screen, and it's gonna be this great, enormous model, then by god we're going to see it! Obviously the film happens, at this budget, because of Star Wars, but that doesn't mean anybody else involved actually really modeled what they were doing on that film. (Warning, I listened to the Blank Check bonus episode on this movie recently and might just be regurgitating their POV, but I think it lines up with things I've thought about it since seeing it on the big screen a couple years back.)

I like the movie a lot, but I do think it could be all the things that it is and have a more compelling and character-driven script. Just cut Ilia and whatsisface right out of there and come up with something for the TV cast to do. Even if you left all the effects sequences exactly as they are, its reputation would be increased tremendously. People would just joke about getting up to make popcorn while Spock gets into his spacesuit.

"Has there been an adequate explanation as to why ST TMP is so dull and boring?"

It was slow as hell after seeing Star Wars. The big long panning sequence when they show the ship in the dock is cool, but later on there are some long sequences that just drag like when they finally get to the 'alien' VGER. I think they were going for a Close Encounters of the Third Kind kind of vibe in that sequence.

It is kinda got that utopian thing going on that I kinda like but it does have some serious 80s funky style choices. It definitely is not Blade Runner.

I think the best thing Star Wars probably did was make it so that Alien could get made and that scifi movie opened up some different things.

I always have loved Sean Connery's High Noon in space "Outland".

I just got curious to see what sci-fi cinema was like immediately before SW and...how did I not realize Logan's Run was released just one year prior?! It seems like an artifact from an entirely different era.

But yeah, maybe I should poll that stuff. Rollerball, Death Race 2000, Futureworld...I don't see most of the stuff itt (let alone Alien or its ilk) existing in its current form without the mad success of SW. It changed the landscape. I guess Close Encounters being released in'77 may have helped, as well, because otherwise even that year is a wash (Capricorn One fans, please feel free to knock me down a peg).

Reading the wiki on ST:TMP, apparently it was the success of Close Encounters that was the impetus for making the Star Trek movie as it showed that Star Wars wasn't a fluke one-off.

There was this old thread:

The 1970's Science Fiction Movie Poll

Could have used more votes!

Want to plump for Galaxy of Terror, which feels like an immediate predecessor to Alien (Giger even did a bunch of the artwork/set design). If you haven’t seen it and like b-movies, it’s a gooder.

Huh? It's a low-budget Alien knockoff that came out two years later.

What? Aw, crap. I enjoyed it when I thought it was a precursor.

Print the legend imo.

I admit it would be massively improved just by being the precursor! True of many knock-offs, though not all I'd guess.

I do believe that Capricorn One was a fairly popular movie. It also fits in with your 70s government paranoia flicks and it's got OJ.

There's a good 88-minute paranoid conspiracy thriller in Capricorn One's 124 minutes

more than once ive tried to tell people theres a movie about faking a mars landing starring OJ, sam waterston and james brolin and had them not believe me

lol / collar tug

"O.J. Simpson was in it, and Robert Blake was in (director Peter Hyams' first feature) Busting. I’ve said many times: Some people have AFI Lifetime Achievement awards, some people have multiple Oscars, my bit of trivia is that I’ve made films with two leading men who were subsequently tried for the first-degree murder of their wives."

must be when Moira from schitt’s creek had those pictures taken

XP ...and in between those he made Peeper w/Natalie Wood, allegedly murdered by her famous husband.

yikes / eeesh