The Guardian take a look at The Man Who Saves the World, otherwise known as Turkish Star Wars, an 80’s oddity that brazenly used footage from A New Hope as the backdrop to a very unique adventure.
(T)he real mark of distinction, and the audacious touch that has ensured the film’s notoriety since its release in 1982, is that the makers blithely used shots, music and sound effects from other movies.
With a budget of $300,000, and with many of his original spaceship sets having been destroyed in a freak storm, the director, Çetin Inanç, opted instead to simply steal footage from a print of Star Wars, which he projected behind his actors as they sat in their cockpits wearing motorcycle helmets and swaying this way and that to mimic the motion of intergalactic flight. Behind them the Death Star looms, and the Millennium Falcon whizzes past; at one point, the back-projection footage even cuts from one shot to another while the actor in the foreground remains unchanged.
Star Wars rip-offs are as numerous as Ewoks, but none has been so cheekily, charmingly brazen.
