THE ROOT OF SEVEN

Rebel Moon isn’t the first space opera inspired by The Magnificent Seven

It’s well known that the success of the original Star Wars prompted Hollywood to look to the skies, spawning a glut of space operas of varying quality. In the midst of all the Flash Gordons, Battlestar Galacticas and Black Holes came Battle Beyond The Stars (1980), a movie whose title was apparently the result of looking up “Star” and “Wars” in a thesaurus. Space Fight, anyone?

A Skirmish In The Cosmos?

It’s an interstellar western in which young farmer Shad (played by John-boy Walton himself,

Richard Thomas) recruits a bunch of anti-heroes to protect his world from a megalomaniac warlord. Produced by B-movie maestro

Roger Corman, the film’s budget was significantly lower than many of the other movies slipstreaming in George Lucas’s wake – some of the alien costumes look extremely bargain basement – but this take on that familiar The Seven Samurai/the Magnificent Seven blueprint still punched above its weight. It made respectable money at the box office, and boasted an impressive array of talent on both sides of the camera.

On screen, Man From UNCLE star Robert Vaughn more or less reprised his Magnificent Seven

role as assassin Gelt, while a pre-a-team George Peppard showed up as a very literal space cowboy. Future Aliens star Bill Paxton worked as a carpenter, Jimmy Murakami (who’d go on to work on festive classic The Snowman) called the shots, and The Wrath Of Khan/aliens composer James Horner wrote the score.

Then there’s the matter of some guy called James Cameron, who looked after a lot of the (pretty decent) visual effects. We’ll watch his career with great interest…