It's one of the biggest ‘what ifs?’ in cinema history. How different would modern Hollywood look had George Lucas succeeded in his mission to nab the film rights to Flash Gordon in the ‘70s?
Of course, what happened next has become the stuff of legend. After his advances were snubbed by producer and Flash rights holder Dino De Laurentiis, Lucas went on to create his own galaxy far, far away – and his take on the 1930s sci-fi serials he'd fallen in love with as a kid subsequently did rather well at the box office.
Star Wars was so successful, in fact, that – in a bizarre role reversal – the new kid on the block was able to influence its spacefaring forebear. So with sci-fi suddenly hot property in cinemas around the world, De Laurentiis decided to cash in on his own little piece of stardust.
Yet despite arriving the same year as The Empire Strikes Back, Flash Gordon was cut from rather different cloth. While Lucas and his hero Luke Skywalker were being drawn towards the emotional complexity of the dark side, this larger-than-life adaptation of Alex Raymond's comic strips featured ornate, brightly coloured sets, a villain who had an actual moustache to twirl, and a clean-cut, all-American hero who never had any doubts whether he was doing the right thing. The film was also kinda funny.
“I don't see the connection between wanting to get the rights to and eventually doing !” director Mike Hodges tells . “ was very entertaining but I found it visually kind of grey. What I loved about and the strip cartoon is it's so was a completely different thing to , the antithesis of it in many ways. So didn't influence me at all and I was quite happy to be moving in a totally different direction. I wouldn't have wanted to have competed with , that's for sure!”
