The clip was used as a model for the memorable shot of Rebel craft diving to attack the Death Star. One such shot, according to National WWII Museum and Memorial curator Corey Graff, “showed aircraft peeling out of formation and dropping from sight. Though the b-roll was eventually edited out, the aerial tactics established in World War II remain visible. “So one second you’re with the Wookiee in the spaceship and the next you’re in ‘The Bridges at Toko-Ri.’ It was like, ‘George, what is going?'” Willard Huyck, a screenwriter and personal friend of Lucas’s stated in a 1997 interview. “Star Wars” creator George Lucas famously studied over 25 hours of footage from World War II dogfights and jittery newsreel imagery while doing research for the films - even using the footage as placeholders in the film before the special effects were edition. Today, as fans celebrate May the Fourth (be with you), one does not have to stray far to glean that the galaxy of “Star Wars” is rife with WWII-based allegories - and its fan base might equal, if not rival, Tolkien’s.

Tolkien, however, was not the first nor the last to draw inspiration from the cataclysmic bloodletting that was the Second World War. Rather than singularly weaving a mythopoeic fantasy world, Allport contended, Tolkien’s future audience “was going to see associations between events in Middle Earth and those in their own world.” A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY “The Shire standing for England, Rohan for France, Gondor the Germany of the future, Sauron for Stalin.”Īnd while Tolkien later explicitly rejected the idea that his “story was an allegory of any historical event, most of all the recent war against Nazism … for all such protestations, Lewis had clearly been on to something back in 1949,” historian Alan Allport wrote in his 2020 book about the social and military history of the U.K.

Lewis, wrote in possibly the first ever review of the novel in 1949. “By accident, a great deal can be read topically,” Maj. May the Fourth Be With You: How WWII Inspired 'Star Wars' Close

May the fourth be with you