--EDIT: Zombie84 pretty much said the exact same thing I said, but much more efficiently. I'll leave my original post here anyway. Just goes to show you can't write a really long response without expecting someone else to beat you to it :-) --

---ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS---

The thing is, "Star Wars" DID start out as a remake of "The Hidden Fortress." So much so that Lucas considered getting the rights to the film in order to avoid a "Fistful of Dollars" scenario (Kurosawa sued Leone for plagiarizing "Yojimbo," which he did). That was '73, '74, something around there.

The reason the final product is so different is that when Lucas' "Apocalypse Now" project fell through, the vast majority of his screenplay/story for "Apocalypse" ended up being the story for "Star Wars." Eventually, "Apocalypse" would end up being completely rewritten and made by Lucas' friend Francis Ford Coppola.

Mix in a few original ideas here and there (to be fair, most of Lucas' "Apocalypse" was fairly original, but in this sense I mean not taken from another work, his own or someone else's), and he ended up with a screenplay very different from "The Hidden Fortress," but with clear echoes of that film.

So "Star Wars" DID start out as a "Hiden Fortress" remake, but in the end we got a film that was vastly different from "Fortress," but clearly inspired by it.

The argument does hold some weight, but not enough for anyone to claim that the final product was a remake of anything.

By the way, if you haven't read "The Secret History of 'Star Wars,'" I highly recommend it. While it's not the most well-written work, it has a wealth of very good, very accurate, highly-researched information in it. Every fan of the OT should read it. Much of the above I learned from the first 100 pages of that book. (I need to go buy it - you can get the first 100 pages online for free, so sadly that's all I've read. I really want to find it and read it in its entirety.)