Now, I'm just as crazy about Star Wars as the next geek, and no matter what George Lucas does next to deface his once-great vision, I'll keep loving the original trilogy, flawed as it was from the start. In that it's like Star Trek, no matter how stinky it gets in places, it'll always have a special place in my heart.
But I do enjoy nitpicking them, especially trying to identify scenes or lines that may have been, let's say, heavily inspired by previous work. Lucas' work is often criticized for being plainly derivative -- that there's very little originality in the plot, characters or situations. Perhaps that's true, although in my eyes using clichés is far more benign than, say, Jar-Jar Binks or midichlorians (also, Han shot first). It doesn't nullify the true "genius" of the original trilogy, which was to take all those cheesy clichés and whip them into something that somehow just works, and beautifully so. Ah, I'm advised not to wax too nerdily poetic. Sorry about that. Stopping now.
So anyway, tonight as I was brushing up on my classics, I noticed a striking resemblance between a shot of Greta Garbo in Mata Hari (for the record, that dates back to 1931) and one of the iconic scenes of the Star Wars franchise, i. e. Princess Leia in a gold bikini playing slave to Jabba the Hut in Return of the Jedi.
Is this a crazy coincidence or what?

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