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It seems incredible, but it was not a surreal inspiration that shaped the rebel alliance, from Star wars. George Lucas, in dialogue with the filmmaker James Cameron in his series “Story of Science Fiction”, revealed that it was the struggle of the Vietcong guerrillas (or the National Liberation Front of Vietnam) against the United States that gave him the idea.
“We are fighting against the largest empire in the world, and we are only a bunch of hay seeds with goatskin hats that know nothing,” Lucas said on the occasion. And then, he compared the United States with “the Empire” and the Vietcong with “The Resistance”. This, in reference to the conflict that faced the northern country with the Asians between 1955 and 1975.
Lucas pointed out that the characters of the universe Star wars they are not based on supernatural things: “It is not science, aliens and all those kinds of things that I focus on. This is how people react to all those things, “he noted.
Even Lucas allowed himself to compare both cases, the real and the fictitious. “The irony is that, in both cases, the little ones won. The highly technical empire, the English Empire, the American Empire, lost. That was the whole point, ”said Lucas.
Now how in the universe Star wars Can you see this “inequality” manifested between the guerrillas against a powerful empire? The writer Francisco Ortega responds to Cult: “This is clear in the disparity of forces in the conflict. The Empire is militarily much superior and much more organized than the Rebels. It has a military fleet, while the Rebels face old cargo ships and planes against the technological supremacy of the Empire. ”
“It is the same as the Vietcong that approached the destroyers of the US Navy with fishing boats or that used old MiG-15 (from the 1950s) against the Phantoms and B-52, in suicide attacks against imperial superiority of the Yankis. In the Vietnam metaphor, the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise is the death star, while the Rebel Alliance are these Cong fishing boats armed with mines and machine guns, “adds the author of We are not alone (Planet, 2020).
But not only the rebel alliance was inspired by the Vietnamese. In 2004, for the relaunch of Return of the JediLucas said that the Ewoks also had their reference in Asians. “They used their primitive weapons to defeat the invaders,” he noted that time.
George Lucas has always been critical of the United States’ intervention in Vietnam. Even – according to the site nextshark.com – before starting work on Star wars I wanted to make an anti-war movie called “Apocalypse Now”. But it was finally Francis Ford Coppola who produced and directed the film in 1979 (with an outstanding performance by Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz).
The Californian filmmaker also took other historical bases to create characters. Namely: Japanese samurai and Shaolin monks for Jedi fighters; the Nazis and other authoritarian regimes for Stormtroopers; Richard Nixon for Emperor Palpatine and Ancient Rome for political institutions.
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