Bilbo is Frodo’s third and fourth cousin, once removed either way, not his uncle. And for that matter, Owen is Luke’s step-uncle.
Every fantasy story ever written has at least one heirloom sword. Nothing special about these two.
And Frodo isn’t secretly related to anyone… He’s related to Merry and Pippen, but that’s well known, and not much of a plot point. Now, Aragorn and Arwen are related, but distantly enough that it doesn’t matter (first cousins forty-three times removed, if I recall correctly).
You may now take one smackie from petty cash, and apply it swiftly to my forehead. I have no idea where that bit came from. Chalk this one up to my posting while medicated. Damn.
[sub]No, really… I’m not normally this much of an idiot.[/sub]
-Hero mysteriously attacked by water-dwelling critter (the Watcher in the Water in front of Mordor/that thing in the Death Star’s trash compactor)
-Hero and sidekick(s) disguise selves in enemy uniforms (Frodo & Sam wear orc outifts in Mordor/Luke & Han wear stormtrooper uniforms to rescue Princess Leia)
Of course, you could come up with an equally large number of blatant non-parallels:
SW: Hero discovers he’s the son of the villian
LOTR: Hero no relation to villain
SW: Hero discovers he’s brother to the princess.
LOTR: Hero no realtion to princess
LOTR: Mysterious figure who joins quest after meeting in bar turns out to be heir to a kingdom.
SW: Mysterious figure who joins quest after meeting in bar turns out to be smuggler with price on head.
LOTR: Enemy defeated by destruction of powerful relic.
SW: Enemy defeated by hero appealing to villain’s remnants of good.
SW: Hero twice confronts villian.
LOTR: No face-to-face between hero and villain
LOTR: Villain is a disembodied*, flaming eye.
SW: Villian very corporeal.
(*OK, technically, that applies only to the movie version)
SW: Villain’s hemchmen who fail in tasks get executed.
LOTR: Nazgul survive despite letting Frodo escape to Rivendell.
LOTR: Hero leaves fellowship due to act of betrayal by a fellowship member.
SW: Hero leaves rebels due to vision from dead jedi mentor.
LOTR: Heroes on the run seek refuge in Lothlorien; find it.
SW: Heroes on the run seek refuge in Cloud City; are betrayed.
I don’t mean to scoff, but it’s easy to find parellels when it comes to “little things” precisely because they are little things. There are tons of “little things” in any lengthy work, and it’s easy to pick, choose, and interpret them any way you like.
Many of your examples are also so general as to be essentially meaningless. Two guys meet in a bar? That’s not exactly a smoking gun. The orphaned princess is a stock character found throughout myth, legend, and fantasy. So is the orphaned hero raised by relatives. And stuff like “The good guys prepare for the final battle against the dread enemy. Some of our heroes are indeed deep in enemy territory. The setup finally pays off, and the climactic fight is a real knockdown-dragout, and it’s questionable as to who will win the day.” could apply to any number of war movies, including ones based on historic events.
No, no, no. The first Star Wars movie is based on “The Wizard of Oz.” (Well, maybe not really, but . . …)
Luke is Dorothy. (I have read two different articles which said this character was originally female. One was many years ago, in Time Magazine, I think, and the other was an interview with Mark Hamill, IIRC, in a recent magazine (Star Log?).) Luke lives with his aunt and uncle on a farm, just like Dorothy.
R2-D2 is Toto. (The names even sound the same, and neither one speaks English.)
C-3P0 is the Tin Man.
Chewbacca is the Cowardly Lion.
Han Solo is the Scarecrow.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is the Wizard.
Darth Vader is the Wicked Witch of the West.
The tie fighters and their pilots are the flying monkeys.
The other storm troopers are the witch’s castle guards (the guys with the long tails).
[quick hijack]
I have the LOTR BBC radio version on CD. It’s 14 CD’s. Running time = 13hrs, 20min. And even at that, it cuts out some stuff.
[/quick hijack]
I think that people are being too dismissive of some of the parallels betweens the various stories. Go back and read the reviews that are linked to in my first post. Lucas did indeed read many of the stories that have parallels to his movies: The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, and probably The Chronicles of Prydain, the Earthsea series, the King Arthur stories in some version, and the Ring cycle. He knew perfectly well that he was imitating these stories (which might be called Archetypal Quest Stories). He’s talked about the fact that he was using the monomyth from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. (There are also things in Star Wars which don’t come from these archetypal sources, but from other films. Star Wars at times seems to be trying to be a Howard Hawks film about World War II. It contains references to The Dam Busters, Triumph of the Will, The Searchers, and The Hidden Fortress.)
Of course, many of the smaller parallels are just coincidences, but the fact that the larger structure of the story came from these sources is pretty clear. Furthermore, I think that what Lucas is best at is the overall story structure. Sometimes he’s weak at smaller details, and he’s not really a good dialogue writer.
It’s not easy to explain why some writers are good at writing books or films that imitate other books or films and some aren’t. I think it’s because there’s no point taking a plot point from another story unless you understand what it’s being used for in that story. This is why Lucas, in taking the archetypal plot from Tolkien (and various other things), has created a great movie, while most of the huge fantasy series cloned from Tolkien were mediocre.
Rilch: Gollum, actually. I was thinking of that whole bit with him leading Frodo and Sam through hell and back, to get to Mt. Doom.
Looking back at the OP, I guess that one does fall into the framework I was thinking at the time. Frodo and Sam pick up Gollum in Two Towers, and Luke and R2 meet Yoda in Ep. 5. And the little green guy talks funny in both of 'em, too. I love it.
I tend to favor the idea of Lucas drawing from Campbell’s monomyth, as I suspect countless other storytellers have done down the ages. However, I also suspect his success with this was helped in large part by the fact that he wasn’t aware that he was doing it until he had the story arc at least mapped out in his head (I’m not aware if he had any contact with Joseph Campbell before finishing ROTJ).
Once Lucas had been infected with awareness of the monomyth, how could the resulting self-consciousness not creep into the way the story and the way he unfolded it?
