It was all so similar that, according to Howard Ziehm’s DVD audio commentary, Universal Studios actually planned to sue his production company, Graffiti Productions, for plagiarism. The planet Porno is, of course, Mongo Dale Ardor is Dale Arden Wang the Perverted is Ming the Merciless Dr Flexi Jerkoff is Dr Alexi Zarkov Wang’s daughter Amora is Ming’s daughter Aura and Prince Precious is Prince Barin.
While Lucas made sure to scratch the Flash Gordon serial numbers off, to make Star Wars its own entity with its own distinct characters, the makers of Flesh Gordon blatantly lifted the plot, characters, and a number of scenes and shots from Universal’s original 1936 Flash Gordon serial, simply giving the existing work a porn paintjob. They just got there three years earlier, and they weren’t as subtle about it. Cichy and Bill Osco - saw Flash Gordon as being emblematic of a type of adventure story that just wasn’t being told anymore as an antidote, of sorts, for a cynical society.
Like Lucas, the makers of Flesh Gordon - director and producer Howard Ziehm, with co-director Michael Benveniste and co-producers Walter R.
We’ve just begun to take the first step and can say, ‘Look! It goes on for a zillion miles out there.’ You can go anywhere and land on any planet.” “But there is a bigger, mysterious world in space that is more interesting than anything around here. We no longer have the Mysterious East or treasure islands or going on strange adventures. One of the criteria of the mythical fairy tale situation is an exotic, faraway land, but we’ve lost all the fairy tale lands on this planet. “I wanted to do a modern fairy tale, a myth. “You just don’t get them anymore, and that’s the best stuff in the world - adventures in far-off lands. “It struck me that we had lost all that - a whole generation was growing up without fairy tales,” he told American Film. Lucas saw Star Wars as a return to the optimistic adventure fiction of his youth. I realised that what I really wanted to do was a contemporary action fantasy.” It’s your basic superhero in outer space. “I realised that I could make up a character as easily as Alex Raymond, who took his character from Edgar Rice Burroughs. They didn’t really want to part with the rights - they wanted Fellini to do Flash Gordon. After THX 1138 I wanted to do Flash Gordon and tried to buy the rights to it from King Features, but they wanted a lot of money for it, more than I could afford then. “I loved the Universal serials with Buster Crabbe. “I loved the Flash Gordon comic books,” he told American Film in 1977. When George Lucas made Star Wars, he never tried to hide the influence of Flash Gordon on his film.