If you're looking in the right place, sometimes it's easy to spot an artist's influences. Some of George Lucas's inspirations for Star Wars are well documented, but Squarespace interface director Michael Heilemann is working on the definitive guide. Heilemann has worked to record and discover both the obvious and less clear allusions in Lucas' work, and he's writing a (work-in-progress) ebook on his findings. In addition, he's published a (far from complete) mashup of Star Wars that splices in scenes and music from other films right alongside the sequences that they inspired. The resulting video is longer than the movie itself, but it shows off everything from the title crawl in "Flash Gordon" serials to scenes from The Searchers, Casablanca, and Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. For a couple of key sequences, check the 55 minute and 115 minute marks in the video below.