When I was a kid the only ‘new’ Star Wars material readily available
to excitement hungry fans was the Marvel comic book series. In between the 1977
film and the first sequel these comics told new tales of Han, Luke, Leia and
the droids that were thrilling to our young minds and allowed the collective
childhood imagination of what might be next to burst wide open. They were an amazing
window into the possibilities for further adventures and, even if they felt
slightly off sometime, we accepted these new stories like the starving devotees
we were.
Of course, we were far too youthfully inexperienced to spot
that the stories being told in these new SW comics were little more than direct
steals from earlier things. I guess that we were so stunned by the cobbled
together legends that Lucas stitched into his space opera script that it
shouldn’t have been a surprise that the creators of the Marvel series would expect
us to be clueless about their obvious plagiarism too. The first new Star Wars
storyline in these four-color pages so blatantly lifts the plot of THE SEVEN SAMURAI
(1954) by way of its western remake THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) that it’s
impossible to miss now. Han Solo is placed in the role of a man hired to help a
bandit troubled village fight off the pillaging bad guys. He recruits a band of
misfit drifters willing to do the job for minimal pay and then enacts the
aforementioned story. Since STAR WARS (1977) was mostly based on Kurasawa’s THE
HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958) I guess stealing from another Kurasawa films was
considered the safest way to get the series off to a solid start. Although this
multi-part comic book version might be the first adaptation of the SEVEN SAMURAI
story into science fiction it would be far from the last with the Roger Corman
production BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980) being the one that did the least to
hide its theft.
Rereading these old comics as an adult has been an
interesting experience. Now I can see how stilted they are and I’m amused by
the things that Marvel invented that subsequent movies swept away. They are of
their times in many ways that surprise me with some strange additions to the
central characters that might have been better than the ones the sequels
eventually employed. Overall, these comics are a fun sideroad that I suspect
fans of later generations would have trouble enjoying. I’m well aware that the
kick I get from them is largely based on nostalgia as I remember the ways these
issues spurred my imagination. They are a colorful window into a fanboy past
that allowed a young me to see possible futures spread out with near infinite opportunities
for star-spanning adventure. I suspect that the sadness I can sometimes feel
about the inept path down which Lucas eventually took the franchise is a sense
of loss about what could have been. As these flawed comic books show, there was
so much potential and it has (to my mind) been squandered. If only they had
used that seven foot tall green rabbit in the sequel films…..
1 comment:
The way jabba looked at the start was so crazy
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