Trivia / Starcrash

• Channel Hop: American International Pictures were initially set to release the film, only to bail out once they saw the final cut. Roger Corman's New World Pictures snatched up the film and it's believed that this is what prompted the B-movie king to create his own Star Wars clone with Battle Beyond the Stars.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Star Wars ripoffs were all the rage at the end of the 1970s — this is the best-known European example. However, when director Lugi Cozzi was told to make something like Star Wars, there was one problem: he had never seen the film due to the fact that it had yet to be released in Italy, but in his possession he did have the novelization, making for a rather unusual knock-off.
  • 'Zarth Arn' is also the name of the younger son of the Galactic Emperor in Edmond Hamilton's The Star Kings. This is probably coincidence, though that book did include a star system destroying weapon (implied to be galaxy or universe destroying if handled incorrectly).
  • For what it's worth, director Luigi Cozzi has repeatedly insisted in interviews that the design and script were both developed prior to the release of Star Wars. The two movies are dissimilar enough that it's at least possible it was just a coincidence, but if it is then the similarities are definitely uncanny. Most likely an early draft of the script was penned pre-Star Wars with blatant reference elements like Akton's lightsaber added later on.
  • As for the blatant Jason and the Argonauts homage moments, Cozzi conceived the film as "Sinbad on Mars", a love letter to all things and sci-fi and fantasy, resulting in a homage to one of the most famous giants in all of cinema.
• Vacation, Dear Boy: Christopher Plummer's reason for taking the role was just to visit Rome. Really.
  "Give me Rome any day. I'll do porno in Rome, as long as I can get to Rome. Getting to Rome was the greatest thing that happened in that for me. I think it was only about three days in Rome on that one. It was all shot at once."

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