What is Star Wars, exactly? Obviously, it's a collection of films, books, video games, and underoos. But with the "Skywalker Saga" supposedly ending this year, the future of the franchise is currently one big Aurebesh question mark. So we can't help but wonder: What is it that makes Star Wars tick? What's the common denominator that unites this sprawling mess of stories, characters, and genres? It's not George Lucas; he sold the company in order to buy $4 billion worth of plaid shirts. It's not the music of John Williams; he's quitting Star Wars, presumably to go live in a castle made of royalty checks. So maybe the answer is ... ripping off Japanese cinema?

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It's widely acknowledged that the original Star Wars owes a debt to samurai movies, but the connections run even deeper than you might think. And even now, more than 40 years later, Star Wars stories are still cribbing from classic Japanese films, even in ways you might not anticipate.

When the show was first announced, the cast of The Mandalorian acknowledged that the lead character would be a riff on the ronin from legendary director Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. When it came out, there was an added twist that only counts as a spoiler if you haven't been within 50 feet of an internet-capable device in the past month: Baby Yoda. A transient badass with an infant in tow? Sure seems like an unsubtle shout-out to Lone Wolf And Cub, the classic '70s manga which was turned into a series of movies. Instead of a bounty hunter with an adorable green puppet, Lone Wolf And Cub followed an assassin-for-hire who roamed the countryside with his young son, rather than just dropping him off at whatever the feudal Japanese equivalent of a ball pit is.

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Walt Disney Pictures

Lifting elements from Japanese movies might be as intrinsic to Star Wars as lightsabers and goofy names. Most famously, the first film cribs many elements from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Lucas has admitted that his biggest takeaway was the idea to tell the story through the eyes of the "two lowest characters" -- in his case, two catty robots instead of peasants.

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20th Century Fox

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And The Hidden Fortress seemingly inspired those iconic Star Wars wipes (the transitions, not Lucasfilm-branded cleaning products).

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