Star Wars

Vaughan has described Saga as the collision of Star Wars with Romeo and Juliet, and the Star Wars half supplies the universe: a galaxy at endless war between two blocs, a species-diverse cast where nobody comments on anyone's anatomy, bounty hunters as a recognised profession, and technology that is filthy and improvised. What Saga does with it is put a nursing infant at the centre and let the war be the thing interrupting a family, rather than the other way round.

Of everything Lucas has been accused of borrowing, this is the one he names himself, repeatedly and in detail. The graph already holds Flash Gordon and Barsoom as his acknowledged sources; Kurosawa is the third and the most structural of the three.

• The story is told from the point of view of the two lowliest characters, Tahei and Matashichi, who bicker their way across a war they do not understand. C-3PO and R2-D2 open Star Wars doing exactly that
• A princess is smuggled through enemy territory disguised as a commoner, escorted by a warrior of the old order, which is the shape of the whole rescue
• The gold hidden in firewood becomes the plans hidden in a droid
• The horizontal wipe between scenes is a Kurosawa signature, and Lucas kept it as the film's punctuation

George Lucas originally wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie in the 1970s. When he couldn't acquire the rights from King Features, he decided to write his own original space opera instead, directly resulting in Star Wars. Cloud City (inspired by the Hawkmen's Sky City) and the structural opening crawls are direct nods to Flash Gordon.

• Foundation : Barsoom was part of the pulp/planetary-romance tradition Lucas drew on when developing Star Wars. Most importantly, the earliest Journal of the Whills draft (which became Star Wars) directly parallels Burroughs's A Fighting Man of Mars.
• Genre : Barsoom helped establish the formula of science fiction + fantasy + swordplay + alien worlds + princesses + monsters + adventure that Star Wars adopted.
• Worldbuilding : Desert worlds, ancient civilizations, strange species, warrior cultures, exotic cities and a mixture of advanced technology with archaic societies are very Barsoomian.
• Narrative : The outsider hero entering an exotic planet, becoming a warrior, encountering alien cultures, rescuing/fighting for a princess, and participating in large-scale adventure are classic Barsoom patterns.

Documented parallel, not an acknowledged debt, and the difference is the whole reason this is LOW. The resemblances are extensive and often listed: a desert planet, a spice the galaxy depends on (Star Wars names the spice mines of Kessel), the hidden heir of a fallen noble house, a mystic order that bends minds with its voice, a galactic empire, desert natives, and a vast creature under the sand. What makes it worth recording is that Frank Herbert noticed. He is widely reported, in his son Brian's biography Dreamer of Dune, to have joked about founding a "We're Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society" with other science fiction writers. That is the author of the source registering the debt in public. Against that: Lucas has never named Dune. His stated sources are Flash Gordon, Burroughs, Kurosawa, Joseph Campbell and wartime aerial pictures, and the first two are already approved influences on this work here. Reject this if you want the map to carry only what a maker owned up to.

Han Solo is Rick Blaine in space: the cynic with a debt, a bar, and a refusal to pick a side that lasts exactly until the third act. Lucas has cited the film among his sources, and the cantina is the scene that makes the borrowing hard to miss.