Jimmy T. Murakami’s sci-fi retake on The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven was produced by Roger Corman and Aliens‘ Gale Ann Hurd, amongst others, and featured emerging 80s sex symbol Sybil Danning as the improbably named ‘St. Exmin’, a roving warrior prone to thrills, suicidal missions and dares. St. Exmin is featured in two costumes in BBtS; the strip-ribbed second outfit caused the actress some difficulty in taking a rest break, as she had to be sewn into it at the start of shooting, but it’s the Nordic fantasy (pictured above) we first see St. Exmin wearing that is perhaps the more memorable of the two. “I had to be very careful with it,” Danning told a magazine in the 1980s. “The Valkyrie outfit had breast-plates which were supposed to look like metal fingers holding the breasts.” These supporting structures were actually made of Styrofoam, and threatened to raise the PG rating of the film several times. “What was happening,” Danning recalled. “was that my nipples were coming through the breast piece! [the cinematographer] had the wardrobe girl take me out and she asked if we could do a glue job there because that was the only way to cover the nipples while I was moving. Once I was glued in, it was no problem. NBC ran it on TV and they rotoscoped another outfit I wore into battle. It was called ‘The Dart’ because it had little oval darts cut out of the spandex all over it…it was apparently too revealing of my breasts for TV, so they rotoscoped it out.”.

47: Femi Taylor – Return Of The Jedi (1983)Costume designers: Aggie Guerard Rodgers / Nilo Rodis-Jamero.

After Carrie Fisher’s ‘Slave Leia’ costume (see part 2), slave dancer Oola’s get-up in Richard Marquand’s Star Wars entry is arguably the most iconic and copied, and certainly the sexiest. Oola is of the Twi’lek race, schooled in dance on the planet Ryloth, and the popular and distinctive anatomy design on the head (the appendages are called ‘ Lekku’) returned again for the all-too-brief appearances of Amy Allen as Aayla Secura, one of the betrayed Jedi in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). When Femi Taylor was asked to shoot additional scenes for the dance in Jabba’s palace for the special edition of Jedi 14 years later, she was so remarkably unchanged as to be able to not only extend the dance sequence but do some close-up inserts for the sequence where she is confronted with the Rancor. The wide-holed net costume is barely held together by narrow leather strips, and several ‘slips’ occur in Jedi. Is it a coincidence that the sexiest ever episode of the Star Wars saga coincides with the year George Lucas divorced his first wife? He certainly does seem to be under no kind of domestic constriction in this film…