One only has to look at Disney’s The Black Hole (formerly Space Station One) to see that if effects and funny robots were the key, then there would be hundreds of Star Wars. That 1979 film, which also had beautiful matte paintings by Harrison Ellenshaw, is in fact the film Twentieth Century-Fox was afraid they were getting from Lucas: robots with eyes painted on them, cardboard characters, slight themes, and corny special effects. The Black Hole is not that bad a movie—particularly the end montage of hell—but in its attempts to copy Star Wars, right down to the opening shot, Lucas’s uniqueness
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