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Description
George Lucas was the first to admit that Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) had a huge influence on him when he made the original Star Wars (1977). Here I've taken the liberty of illustrating a few of the more obvious examples. Kubrick was the first to give us a space ship that felt both gigantic and majestic at the same time. Lucas used both lighting and camera angle to give us the same effect in the opening scene of his movie, making the star destroyer seem almost endless in scale. The docking scenes in both films are also very similar with only the tone being the key variation: in 2001 the use of Strauss was employed by Kubrick to suggest a kind of 'dance' between the oncoming ship and the space station, while Lucas emphasized the sense of dread as the Millenium Falcon is swallowed up by the well-named Deathstar. 2001 wasn't the first attempt to create a sense of 'faster than light' travel, but it was the first to do so successfully. Lucas again borrowed 2001's psychadelic sensability for the now famous 'jump to hyperspace'.

Description
George Lucas was the first to admit that Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) had a huge influence on him when he made the original Star Wars (1977). Here I've taken the liberty of illustrating a few of the more obvious examples. Kubrick was the first to give us a space ship that felt both gigantic and majestic at the same time. Lucas used both lighting and camera angle to give us the same effect in the opening scene of his movie, making the star destroyer seem almost endless in scale. The docking scenes in both films are also very similar with only the tone being the key variation: in 2001 the use of Strauss was employed by Kubrick to suggest a kind of 'dance' between the oncoming ship and the space station, while Lucas emphasized the sense of dread as the Millenium Falcon is swallowed up by the well-named Deathstar. 2001 wasn't the first attempt to create a sense of 'faster than light' travel, but it was the first to do so successfully. Lucas again borrowed 2001's psychadelic sensability for the now famous 'jump to hyperspace'.