Kitbashed - The Origins of Star Wars

Well here’s something I wasn’t expecting.

This snippet of an interview with George Lucas on comic books appears in one of two episodes of the program Camera Three on CBS, called The American Comic Strip, which aired in 1978.

“She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid.

Far from a hive of scum and villany, 2001: A Space Odyssey's Clavius Base might well have been the first visual reference for Mos Eisley.

The influence of European comicbook artists on the world of fantasy and sci-fi is incalculable, yet few reigned more so than Jean Giraud, also better known as Mœbius.

Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey rang in a new era for science fiction on the silver screen.

Between the French La Nouvelle Vague and the Italian Neorealismo, Europe had been undergoing a continuous cinema transformation since the 1950s, while the ailing American studio system groaned under its own weight and inertia.

Lucas convinced Coppola to let him shoot a cinema verité documentary on-the-road with Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969).

Thanks to an insightful interview with Colin Cantwell by Jason DeBord of the Original Prop Blog, we now not only have some long-wanted insights into Colin Cantwell's role on Star Wars, but to everyone's astonishment, also never before seen concept art!

I got to know Ed in 2012 when I reached out to him for an interview.

As powerful and memorable as the visuals are in Star Wars, it's impossible to imagine it without its groundbreaking score by John Williams.

I made this quick mashup from the feature-length Kitbashed video, featuring footage from the Flash Gordon serial, the Forbidden Planet trailer, music from Ivanhoe and Kings Row by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A video that has lingered behind the scenes for quite some time, awaiting my if-I'll-ever-get-around-to-it writeup on the role of comic books in the creation of Star Wars.

“[One] of the significant things that occurred to me is I saw the western die.

Future writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières first met each other when their respective families sought refuge in the same bomb shelter in Paris during World War II.

Widely considered one of the greatest film makers of all time, Akira Kurosawa is easily Japan’s most famous director, with a career stretching from the early 1940s to his death in 1998.

Mos Eisley is the nexus of Star Wars's western, middle-eastern and eastern influences.

It's the greatest love story of the silver screen, set in the city of the same name, gateway to Vichy-controlled Northern Africa of World War II.

In the slipstream of Lucas's THX 1138 4EB, John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon managed a similar trick, although they literally had to steal their short film, a hippie-style low-budget sendup of Kubrick's 2001, from the vaults of USC, and pad it out for a fea…

Above, a striking painting by John Berkey, the master of starships, which graced the 1976 hardback and 1978 softcover editions of “The Way Back” by A.