How Italy’s Spaghetti Western Studios Rushed Out Low-Budget ‘Star Wars’ Imitations in the Late 1970s
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Evan Puschak of The Nerdwriter explored how, following the massive success of Star Wars, the Italian film industry at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, home of the storied Spaghetti Western, quickly churned out low-budget science fiction imitations in the late 1970s.
It’s no surprise that in the months and years after the gargantuan success of Star Wars, a wave of space operas flooded the global film market.
One of the more amusing knockoffs Puschak highlights is Starcrash (1978), which features a young David Hasselhoff, then a soap opera actor. He calls The Humanoid (1979) perhaps the most flagrant of the knockoffs, right down to crediting its director, Aldo Lado, as “George B. Lewis”.
Puschak further explained how Cinecittà cashed in on Hollywood hits on the cheap by sharing sets and even footage between productions and dubbing dialogue instead of recording sound live, highlighting the stark contrast between high-budget spectacles and quick genre copies.
In some ways, I think Star Wars and the blockbuster era it helped to inaugurate represented an existential threat to the Italian model of quick and dirty imitations, to the system that produced those visionary genre movies. Because the truth is that you can’t imitate Star Wars with a low budget. The spectacle, the immersion induced by its groundbreaking special effects, was just as vital to the experience as the story and the characters.
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