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Was the Death Star assault scene in the original Star Wars based on a true story

11 points by fifteenth ↗ HN
Perhaps you remember the final scene from the 1977 blockbuster "Star Wars: A New Hope", expertly crafted by director George Lucas and his film editor wife Marcia Lou Griffin. Three aircraft break off from the main group for an improvised attack run on the huge enemy vessel. A "one in a million shot" cause the enormous craft to self-destruct.

My claim is that the real-life inspiration for Luke Skywalker in this scene was a man named Lieutenant Richard Halsley Best who, with his two wingman, attacked and destroyed the huge Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi with a single well-placed bomb during the Battle of Midway. Americans should temper their pride in this incredible feat by looking up the origin of the word "snafu". One snafu was that all the other dive bombers in Best's group attacked the wrong carrier, another was that dozens of US torpedo attacks failed during the battle because of the infamous Mark 6 dud torpedoes.

As more evidence that the the Battle of Midway inspired Lucas, consider that the the whole plot of Star Wars revolves around the stolen plans for the Death Star, analogous to the intercepted Japanese battle plans in the case of Midway.

9 comments

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Spooky23
Star Wars is like a mashup of the Hidden Fortress and Midway. I found the fighter sequences similar to Midway as well.
fifteenth
And those Star Destroyers sure look like aircraft carriers.
fifteenth
So the original Star Wars, which has spawned so many copycat movies, is itself a copycat movie? Let's see. The formula seems to be: take two successful old movies, such as Battle of Midway and Hidden Fortress, and create a mashup set in a different genre to make it seem new. Has someone created a machine learning application that applies this mashup/genre switch on old movie scripts to make new ones?
krapp
To be fair, Akira Kurosawa was influenced by spaghetti westerns[0] and one of his films (Throne of Blood) is just Macbeth in feudal Japan, so the copying goes both ways.

[0]https://www.thebubble.org.uk/culture/film/kurosawa-and-the-w...

Spooky23
Star Wars is a little closer IMO.

The Tahei and Matashichi sequences towards the beginning when they split up are basically exactly the same and R2D2 and C3PO in the desert. Even the musical score is very close. Ditto on the space scenes and Midway.

Personally, I didn't have a problem with it -- many of the themes are universal and influence is fine... if anything adding the SFX and different storyline really honors the influencing films. I did get a little jaded when I saw a George Lucas interview on one of the DVD releases where he downplayed the similarities in what was in my opinion a disingenuous way.

yesenadam
Also, I've never read mention of this, but Yoda seems to me in many ways like Dersu Uzala from...Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala! (I think my favourite K movie) - e.g. forest-dwelling, short, benevolent, wise, and they speak similarly.

I believe Lucas helped with the financing of several of K's later films.

krapp
The Death Star sequence (specifically the trench run) was based on, and sometimes lifted scene for scene from the 1955 movie "The Dam Busters." [0,1].

Substitute these experimental "bouncing bombs"[2] for Luke force-bending proton torpedoes and you have the end of Star Wars.

[0]https://www.starwars.com/news/the-cinema-behind-star-wars-th...

[1]https://youtu.be/lNdb03Hw18M

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb

fifteenth
It's noteworthy that two people who worked on Dam Busters also worked on Star Wars 20 years later, as described in link [0] above.
mcswell
It's possible that one or two of the torpedoes hit and was a dud at Midway, but the real problems were the slow speed of the torpedo planes, the need to drop the torpedoes at an even slower speed, the maneuverability of the Japanese carriers, and most of all the lack of fighter cover, which left the torpedo planes sitting ducks. The evidence seems to imply that none of the torpedoes hit at all.