The idea for this came from here (interesting interview, by the way):
"For Kurtz, the popular notion that “Star Wars” was always planned as a multi-film epic is laughable. He says that he and Lucas, both USC film school grads who met through mutual friend Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1960s, first sought to do a simple adaptation of “Flash Gordon,” the comic-strip hero who had been featured in movie serials that both filmmakers found charming.
“We tried to buy the rights to ‘Flash Gordon’ from King Features but the deal would have been prohibitive,” Kurtz said. “They wanted too much money, too much control, so starting over and creating from scratch was the answer.”"
So...what if King Features hadn't been quite so unrelenting and had decided to let Lucas play in the Flash Gordon universe? He never writes Star Wars, instead he just does the Flash Gordon flick he & Kurtz originally wanted and then of course the inevitable sequel. Would it have been as big a hit as SW was in our universe? Certainly it would have been a far cry from the Flash Gordon film we got, and sadly I seriously doubt that Queen would have been on the soundtrack. What effect would all of this have had on the ATL pop culture - instead of the then-new SW mythology we get an updating of the venerable Alex Raymond character. It would be even more interesting if Lucas had simply taken his story for A New Hope and inserted the FG characters into it...
"For Kurtz, the popular notion that “Star Wars” was always planned as a multi-film epic is laughable. He says that he and Lucas, both USC film school grads who met through mutual friend Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1960s, first sought to do a simple adaptation of “Flash Gordon,” the comic-strip hero who had been featured in movie serials that both filmmakers found charming.
“We tried to buy the rights to ‘Flash Gordon’ from King Features but the deal would have been prohibitive,” Kurtz said. “They wanted too much money, too much control, so starting over and creating from scratch was the answer.”"
So...what if King Features hadn't been quite so unrelenting and had decided to let Lucas play in the Flash Gordon universe? He never writes Star Wars, instead he just does the Flash Gordon flick he & Kurtz originally wanted and then of course the inevitable sequel. Would it have been as big a hit as SW was in our universe? Certainly it would have been a far cry from the Flash Gordon film we got, and sadly I seriously doubt that Queen would have been on the soundtrack. What effect would all of this have had on the ATL pop culture - instead of the then-new SW mythology we get an updating of the venerable Alex Raymond character. It would be even more interesting if Lucas had simply taken his story for A New Hope and inserted the FG characters into it...
SWEET!