13 Comments
May 17, 2023Liked by John Birmingham

You may be cancelled for saying Spielberg lol

Yeah Lucas used a lot of old movies for inspiration - some of the dog fights come from another movie almost frame for frame and you get the references to gunslingers, spaghetti westerns and some of those old samurai movies dueling it out (with laser swords). All the recent starwars stuff riffs on the same theory of story telling like the mandalorian being a direct rip off (sorry, i mean tribute) of Lone Wolf and Cub. I still have fond memories of seeing the blades pop out of the prams wheels . . . . or is that something i've imagined? What is it called? Munchhausen effect?

You could argue it all fits into the heroes journey narrative and that we only have seven stories (or whatever it is). Tarantino obviously is the modern equivalent of someone who loves cinema of old and puts his creative spin on it. Edgar Wright is a bit more subtle with his love of cinema tropes. It's probably hard to make a tribute to something without giving away the ending and people getting bored.

Expand full comment

i found the blades in the baby cart wheels - it was shogun assassin

Expand full comment
May 22, 2023Liked by John Birmingham

I was hoping it was Sweeny Toddler from Whizzer and Chips.

Expand full comment
May 17, 2023Liked by John Birmingham

*cough* Lucas *cough*

Expand full comment
author

Yeah. of course.

Expand full comment

Is this the time to say there are no new stories?

Expand full comment

Lucas also famously borrowed from Dune . Borrowed is being kind. Cool vid though .

Expand full comment

Loving pastiche and homage to cinema. Those 70s hollywood guys were essentially students of film. Everything they did had a reference , sometimes it was obvious and sometimes subtle. But like all good university papers you can easily check their references. You can check the references of other artists in a similar way, Manet is the main one you get taught about in art school. But you can do the same with other artists from Jack Kirby to Roy Lichtenstein, maybe not Pollock or Rothko. Douglas Adams Hitchhikers guide is essentially a primer on Plato's Republic and Aristotle's The Nicomachean Ethics which made learning Jurisprudence a lot easier for me at Uni.

Expand full comment

on the subject of the raids: the We have ways of making you talk Podcast (https://wehavewayspod.com/) has a series on the raids. The boys drove into the Ruhr for that one.

Expand full comment

and wasn't it the great Tom Lehrer who in his song Lobachevsky sang

Plagiarize,

Let no one else's work evade your eyes,

Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,

So don't shade your eyes,

But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...

Only be sure always to call it please, "research".

Expand full comment

Before the advent of the interwebs, there used to be an endless stream of copying in Australian art and music, and the artists would always pretend that they were super original. Tasmania was terrible for it, shouting choir , Amsterdam, never heard of it. Big red words saying tree in a field , Berlin doesn't exist. Arts grants for the same old shit, hand it over buddy. Now they don't know what to do, with everything a first result google search away

Expand full comment

or 'homage', of course.

Expand full comment

I don't know if this recent article was your entry point this, it's the 80 year anniversary of the raid. The original scale models of the dams that were used to brief the crews is going to be on display at the Australian War Memorial once the refurb is complete:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-16/act-world-war-two-dambusters-raid-eightieth-anniversary/102348188

Expand full comment