After reading an interesting writeup,
How Star Wars is based on the Third Reich I recalled how similar I had found the
Star Wars series to many of the older
Wild West movies that I've enjoyed. I think that this can be most easily seen in episode 4 -
A new hope.
This episode begins with a country boy working on his uncle's
farm on the planet
Tatooine. The environment of this area is visually similar to that in many wild west movies, with
deserts and
canyons and desolate rocky areas. Beyond the visual similarities we find that one is continually at risk, and cannot depend on outside authority for any help - this is quite clearly shown when
Luke gets into a situation with weird dudes only to be saved by
Obi-Wan Kenobi. The characters in this environment are similar to those in a Western too. The shifty
traders who sell the skywalker's some new
drones to work on the farm are treated similarly to the untrustworthy scoundrel's you'd find running a
trading post deep in the heart of
Texas. And Obi-Wan is an aging man who wants to lead a
quiet life in obscurity and beyond the reach of authority only to find that his past won't allow it.
It is interesting to note that the destruction of the skywalker farm and the brutal murder of his family breaks luke's ties to the land and makes him pursue his course of ultimately becoming a
jedi knight. Contrast this with
The Outlaw Josey Wales in which
Clint Eastwood suffers the same sort of treatment from american soldiers before engaging in the orgy of
gun shooting and
horse riding we were all waiting for.
The other thing that struck me upon watching
A new hope was the visual depiction of the frontier town our duo travel to in order to find a
rogue to fly them around the joint: The town is full of domed and spired lowrise buildings spaced at distances from each other, bordering a wide & dusty road. Very much like an islamic
Dodge City or
Tombstone. The imperial troops practically wear
sherrif stars. And where do they go to find someone to drive them around? The
bar of course! And this bar isn't a
pub, with people enjoying
draught beer and a game of
pool while eyeing the opposite sex and kicking back in the relaxed, uncaring ambience. Nor is it a
club, with people either
drugged up to their eyeballs, dancing or putting on a charade of coolness with varying degrees of success. Here we have a bar not from a postwar metropolis but the wild west, with raucous music and nervous tension filling the air as people speak in huddled groups or gamble over cards before a
fight finally erupts.
If anyone can think of other parallels I'd be interested to read them.