Larson and Universal even hired Star Wars concept artist Ralph McQuarrie and visual effects whiz John Dykstra to work on the show, much to Lucas’ chagrin. Larson’s idea for the show predated Star Wars by several years, the series borrowed enough design and narrative elements and overall flavor from Star Wars for 20th Century Fox and George Lucas to sue Universal over Battlestar Galactica’s many similarities. Battlestar Galactica Its 21st century reboot may be better and more acclaimed, but the original ‘70s TV series is one of the earliest and best known knock-offs of Star Wars. Corman later reused the film’s sets for another Star Wars knock-off, Space Raiders. Battle Beyond the Stars also boasted two notable (but then-aspiring) creatives behind the scenes: Aliens’ James Horner did the score while James Cameron got his break handling the film’s visual effects. (Hollywood had already remade that film as The Magnificent Seven, and Corman even cast one of its stars, Robert Vaughn, in Battle Beyond the Stars.) The movie follows a farm boy out to destroy an evil empire’s planet-killing vessel. Just as George Lucas borrowed liberally from Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress for A New Hope, Corman retooled another Kurosawa classic, The Seven Samurai, for his film. Here then are the most infamous Star Wars rip-offs of all time, in alphabetical order: Battle Beyond the Stars Roger Corman, the legendary king of B-movies and exploitation flicks, cashed in on the Star Wars craze with this 1980 space opera, one of his more expensive undertakings. And Spaceballs doesn’t make this list because the film was openly parodying the Star Wars craze, right down to joking about cashing in on merchandise.

While Disney’s 1979 film The Black Hole has often been cited as a Star Wars knock-off, it owes more to the star-studded disaster films of the 1970s than it does to Lucas’ saga, its inclusion of droids aside. Even James Bond got in on the sci-fi craze with Moonraker (yes, 007 once fought in outer space laser battles). 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture saw the iconic TV series (which predates Star Wars by a decade) make the leap to the big screen as a ponderous epic that owed more to the heady 2001 than to the pulpy Star Wars. This era also gave us Alien and Blade Runner, neither of which bear any resemblance to Star Wars. There was the 1980 Flash Gordon movie and the TV series revival of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, but seeing as both were adaptations of space-faring comic strips and serials that had themselves influenced Star Wars, they’re not included on this list.

While Hollywood in the late 1970s to mid-1980s certainly embraced sci-fi in a major way, not every sci-fi film or show that was produced during that era was a knock-off of Star Wars so much as the entertainment industry’s reaction to obvious audience demand.

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