Check out screen-used costumes from Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, The Mandalorian, and the newest Disney+ live-action Star Wars series.
San Diego Comic-Con is back! Today, fans at the pop-culture convention are among the first in the world to see costumes from Andor, the forthcoming Disney+ series that will tell the backstory of Cassian Andor, whom we first met in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The display inside the Lucasfilm Pavilion also features costumes from The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi and intel on the characters. Get a closer look for yourself below!……
Welcome to a look inside The Holocron. A collection of articles from the archives of starwars.com no longer directly available.(Archived here with Permission utilising The Internet Archive Wayback Machine)
A long time ago, in the Land of the Rising Sun.
In 1991, an up-and-coming stage manager named Scott Faris took a phone call from Kenneth Feld, whose Feld Entertainment ran the so-called Greatest Show on Earth, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The year before, Faris had been instrumental in helping Feld Entertainment open Siegfried & Roy’s magic show in Las Vegas, which cost a record-setting $28 million to produce.
This phone call was not about Siegfried & Roy.
“Hey, this Lucas thing’s happening,” Feld said. “Come up and meet with me.”Faris gave notice at his current theatrical production. A few weeks later, he flew to Oakland, rented a car, and drove to Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael, California. There he toured Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic with Feld and a group of Japanese businessmen. The party ended up in a boardroom with about a dozen members of Lucasfilm, where Feld took charge. After a day of sightseeing, it was time to talk about why they’d all gathered together.
“The show’s got to be an arena show, and the show has to be two acts, and it has to involve the audience,” Faris remembers Feld saying matter-of-factly. No one else in the room spoke.”I thought ‘Okay, what the hell? I’ll pick up the ball,’ ” Faris remembers. “I said, ‘what I think we should do is find a way to tie together all of George’s films.’ ” Pens rustled on notepads. Again, no one spoke.
So Faris kept talking.”I’m going to create an assignment for you Lucas guys and for myself,” he said. And then he laid out the simple instructions that would soon inspire the most bizarre celebration of Lucas’ films this side of the Stars Wars Holiday Special:
“We’re going to watch the Lucas films, all of them, from five different points of view.What is the thematic high point, the special effects high point, musical high point, comedic high point, and [most memorable] action sequence. I’ll fly back to San Rafael in a week and I’ll meet up with you guys.
“Everyone was on board. With that, the meeting was over. They all went out to dinner. And for the next two years, Scott Faris spearheaded what Kenneth Feld casually referred to as the “Lucas thing,” hiring and directing more than 100 cast and crew for an arena production eventually titled George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure.
Japanese TV companies ponied up $25 million dollars to finance the production. Faris dreamed up a script that combined Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Willow, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and American Graffiti.
In April 1993, George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure opened to a crowd of more than 10,000 in the Yokohama Arena in Japan.
The show toured Japan for five months.
And yet, 20 years later, almost no one has heard of, or remembers, the Super Live Adventure. It persists only in the minds of the Japanese children who once saw the show live, and few remnants–newspaper archives, blurry VHS recordings, tacky merchandise–survive to preserve its memory.
How could such an enormous production, based on some of the most popular films ever made, drift into obscurity? It was elaborately produced, even for an arena show, with an elevated stage 60 feet across, a pair of giant screens showing 70mm projections of Lucas’ films, hand-fired lasers, and a full-scale inflatable Millennium Falcon landing on stage for the finale.
In a single night’s entertainment Willow defeated General Kael, Luke vanquished Vader, the rebels destroyed the Death Star, Nazis unleashed the Ark of the Covenant, and Indiana Jones wrestled with a live tiger. This is the story of how it all happened, how it almost didn’t, and why, 20 years on, barely a trace of George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure remains.
From Lucas Film to Lucas Live
Scott Faris worked for Kenneth Feld Productions on Siegfried & Roy from 1989 to 1990. It was far from his first job in the theater business, but it was a career-changing one. And what a show it was–the production included “75 tons of scenery, the most sophisticated and powerful lighting system ever created, and [a] six-story-high computerized dragon, spitting smoke and flames.” Even in a town built on neon and decadence, Siegfried & Roy’s $28 million production burned blindingly bright. In one famous act, Roy rides atop a white tiger which is standing on a disco ball that hangs suspended above the stage.
To ensure the massive production opened on time, Faris took on on more and more responsibilities. “A lot of it fell into my lap and I was kind of the guy that made that show open,” Faris remembers. He started talking to Kenneth Feld, who would come to Vegas once a month to check up on the show. During one of those conversations, Faris asked for advice on producing a show of his own. He wanted to move up the ladder.
“I’ve got a show,” Feld said. “With George Lucas. Are you interested in that?” Faris’ answer? Hell yes. He leapt at the chance. In 1990, however, there was no George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure. Not yet.
There was just the potential for something.“Kenneth was at the peak of his form,” Faris remembers. “He had brought the circus back to life. There was a big article about him in Time. The Lucas people came to him and said the 20th anniversary of Lucasfilm is going to happen in [1991], and we want to do something for George to celebrate it.”Feld proposed an arena show, and he knew how to pay for it. He’d established Japanese connections a few years before with a successful Siegfried & Roy tour in Tokyo, so he arranged for Japanese broadcast companies NTV, YTV, and Nagoya finance the Lucas production. Everything was ready to go.
Then, in August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, instigating the Gulf War. “Everybody stopped investing,” Faris says. “The Japanese economy kind of went crazy and the Japanese were put on the spot and donated to this war effort, the coalition effort. Everything investment-wise froze in Japan so the thing just disappeared.”A year later, out of the blue, Faris got the call from Kenneth Feld. The “Lucas thing” was back on.
As he promised, Faris spent the week after that first Lucasfilm meeting diligently watching the movies and taking notes. But when he returned with ideas for the production, no one else had done anything. “I started going through all my notes and nobody offered up any ideas,” Faris says. “I walked away from the meeting and called Kenneth and said ‘You know what, these guys just want to be contracted as a division of Lucas Entertainment to create the show. I don’t think that’s right. I think we can create it ourselves.
“Inspired by Lucas’ use of the Hero with a Thousand Faces, Faris decided to create a character whose fate would be intertwined with the adventures of each film.Feld said: Great. Go do it. Faris isolated the thematic high points of all of the films and came up with a way to connect them all together. Inspired by Lucas’ use of the Hero with a Thousand Faces, he decided to create a character whose fate would be intertwined with the adventures of each film. When writing Star Wars, Lucas had turned to the narrative structure outlined in Joseph Campbell’s The Magic of Myth, which sees a hero answering the call to adventure, undergoing trials, and eventually succeeding in a quest.Some of Star Wars’ key plot points, like Luke’s initial refusal to leave Tatooine, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s supernatural aid, Luke’s meeting with Princess Leia, and his rescue by Han Solo all closely follow the Hero’s Journey.
Super Live Adventure’s central character ended up being a young Japanese-American actress, who would sit in the audience and “randomly” be plucked from her seat at the start of each show. The girl, named Hiromi, traveled through Lucas’ film worlds with the aid of a magic wand, seeking a hero to fight the powers of evil. In the end, of course, Hiromi discovers that she was the hero all along.After Lucasfilm gave Faris’ proposed story the green light, he brought on writer Roberts Gannaway to turn his stew of Lucas stories into an arena-worthy extravaganza. The script they eventually concocted not only scrambled together Lucas’ films, it blended elements from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies into half-recognizable amalgamations. When the auditorium lights raised at the start of each show in the summer of 1993, an audience of thousands of Lucas diehards were treated to familiar film clips of their favorite silver screen moments. What followed, however, could get a little–well, strange
A Hero’s Journey
A draft of Gannaway’s GLSLA script dated January 26, 1993 begins with an exuberant description of the show’s opening moments. “Abstract SOUND EFFECTS – the SCREECH of an exotic beast, the ROAR of a Tie fighter, etc. – reverberate through the auditorium, heightening anticipation and hinting at the marvelous things to come. Each of the large screens displays the ‘George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure’ logo.”
“A swiftly edited series of Lucasfilm highlights accompanied by a trumpeting medley of the most MEMORABLE THEMES,” the script continues. “It’s a thrilling, breathtaking, even humorous collection of similar moments from the different films, and all the Lucas heroes…”
After the opening film montage–which includes clips of Lucas himself directing and working with scale models, just to make sure the fourth wall is good and broken–an actor playing Willow enters from the back of the auditorium and hands a small bundle to Hiromi, who is sitting in the audience. Faris recalls the show’s opening moments beat-by-beat.”He runs up on stage and he’s confronted by the evil General Kael from the Willow movie,” says Faris. “Willow’s frozen with fear and the general comes up on horseback on this giant black Friesian, beautiful Friesian horse, and he climbs down, takes out his broadsword, and he chops Willow in two. And he ends up with only a cloak. It was a great effect.”
[Kael] gets back on his horse and rides off and Willow’s discovered out in the house, and he grabs the girl and pulls her out and brings her up on stage and she’s got a baby. And that’s the baby that the evil queen in Willow wants. This is the setup of the whole show. He brings her up on stage and suddenly they’re visited by this spirit, this fairy that appeared in Willow, and she speaks to them and says ‘We’re looking for a hero to protect us. There’s a dark force coming. And you’ve been chosen to find that hero. Take this wand’–and magically this wand appears. ‘And use it on your journey. It will help you.’
“Massive set changes, which regularly exchange one set of towering scenery for another, allow Hiromi and her magic wand to travel through Lucas’ films worlds, some emphasizing grand setpiece moments over familiar narratives. A looming castle with a working drawbridge dominates the Willow set. In the world of American Graffiti, dancers dressed in their best 1950s sock hop outfits twirl across the stage as a giant jukebox towers 15 feet above their heads.
When the lights go up on Indiana Jones’ segment, the action moves from a suspension bridge dangling high above the stage, to Hong Kong’s Club Obi-Wan (complete with giant dragon backdrop), to the Ark of the Covenant. Along the way, Indiana Jones’ nemesis Belloq tries to steal Hiromi’s magic wand, Indy battles a tiger, and the famous face-melting finale to Raiders of the Lost Ark gets its due as Belloq opens the Ark.”
After this moment of beauty, the angelic voices melt into a foreboding chorus of INHARMONIOUS MOANS,” reads the script. “Without warning, a sheet of fire and smoke consumes the altar, blotting Belloq from view. We hear his blood-curdling SCREAM and can practically smell the stench of burning flesh. Then a gust of wind sweeps the smoke away, revealing Belloq’s toasted skeleton!”
In each world, Hiromi gets her own heroic moment, building up to the feel-good final reveal that she was the pure-of-heart hero the world needed all along. The script describes these moments with a childlike excitement as if it, too, is surprised by every twist and turn. When Indy is trapped under a statute as the Ark’s temple set falls to pieces, she saves the day. “Without a split-second to lose, Hiromi plucks the wand off the staff, aims, and wishes!” reads the script. “A beam of light bursts from the wand and connects with the statue. The sculpture’s fall is halted…and it wavers in mid-air! It’s as if Hirmoi is holding the statue up with a single beam of light! An awestruck Indy frees his leg and dives to safety.” Hiromi, of course, is blissfully unaware of her heroism, evne when Indy “pops his hat onto Hiromi’s head” and says “I think you’re the hero around here.”
The Star Wars segment is the most elaborate of them all, combining Jabba’s palace, the Mos Eisley Cantina, and a Death Star poised to destroy a Rebel base. Admiral Ackbar delivers a dramatic speech to a crew of Rebel pilots, but not before bowing in typical Japanese fashion. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader battle with lightsabers across the Death Star set, but it is eventually Hiromi who saves the day with Luke’s lightsaber.
Like the Indiana Jones segment, GLSLA’s Star Wars finale combines the Death Star of A New Hope with the climax of Return of the Jedi, blending the threat to the rebel base with the death of the Emperor–this time it’s Vader who gets thrown down an energy shaft–and Jedi’s climactic space battle. But most of the iconic images from the films actually show up on stage, including Jabba and a life-size Millenium Falcon. Super Live Adventure’s script can’t truly convey the scale of the production, or its quirks; the way the Japanese audio and the actors’ exaggerated motions don’t quite line up, lending the show a slight Power Rangers feel. Or the way combining classic film scenes and brand new ones, like Indiana Jones facing off against a sleepy, disinterested tiger, feels a bit like big-budget fan fiction.
As conceptually absurd as the production is, the scale of the sets, stunts, and special effects is even harder to believe. It took a cast and crew of more than 100 to make George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure work, and nearly two years passed between Faris’ initial meeting with Lucasarts and the premiere in Japan.
Before Hiromi could embark on her Hero’s Journey–before she even had a name–Faris spent months finding his crew. Then, together, they spent an entire year figuring out how to bring Lucas’ fantasies, originally built with scale models and post-production special effects, to live audiences.
Inflatables, Laser Beams, Fantastical Things
Super Live Adventure would need a production designer who could build big.
Scott Faris’ first hire, before there was even a script for GLSLA, was production designer Douglas Schmidt. Faris knew about Schmidt due to his work on 1981’s Broadway production of Frankenstein. At the time, the $2 million dollar production had been the most expensive Broadway show of all time, and the play infamously closed after a single performance. Schmidt’s grandiose sets weren’t to blame, and Super Live Adventure would need a production designer who could build big.
“Once Doug was on board, Doug and I went on this research phase,” Faris says. “We just flew around the country seeing concerts. If somebody had indoor pyro, we’d go see if. It somebody was using video in some amazing way, we’d go see it. Whatever tickled our fancy, we’d go see, and we’d see how we could work some variation of that into the show.”
Schmidt, who still works as a theatrical production designer from his studio in San Francisco, remembers getting a call about the show and being on the next plane to Burbank, where Faris kept an office.
“We had nothing–a big pile of Xerox paper to start with,” Schmidt says. “The first thing that I did was arrange a sitdown talk with the folks at Lucas. Mercifully they’re right in the neighborhood. I was able to get access to their archives, which was fabulous. It was like a kid in a candy store. Just to hold those Ralph McQuarrie sketches in your hand, just pull open these drawers and see this whole movie in pictures, painted and imagined, it was truly cool.”
While Schmidt researched Lucas’ films for inspiration, Faris hired more key staff members for the production, including scriptwriter Gannaway, his regular collaborator Jonathan Deans as sound designer, and former My Three Sons actor-turned-musician Don Grady as composer. He hired a Hollywood stunt coordinator to handle stunt rigging and editor Dustin Ebsen to assemble the film clips that would supplement the stage performances. The Super Live Adventure production eventually held auditions in New York and Los Angeles and even Orlando, where stuntmen congregated for gigs at Disney World and Universal Studios.
As the production designer, Douglas Schmidt was responsible for directing the visual look of the entire show. In smaller theatrical productions, the production designer may handle scenery, lighting, and even costumes, directly overseeing nearly every production department. On Super Live Adventure, lighting, lasers, sound, and costumes were such enormous undertakings, they all had their own leads. It still took the entirety of 1992 to put the show together.
“There were all kinds of physical problems to deal with,” says Schmidt. “If you look at those movies, and you look at the research materials, everything’s huge. Couldn’t possibly be bigger. Somehow we had to figure out a way to make all of that user friendly enough that we could get it first to Japan, then tour it, because once we got it to Japan it was going to go to three or four different cities.”
Schmidt had long wanted to try inflatable sculptures as set elements, and Lucas’ grandiose movies offered the perfect opportunity. Some of Super Live’s key set pieces–the Chinese dragon from Temple of Doom’s Club Obi Wan, a gigantic jukebox inspired by American Graffiti, and Jabba from Star Wars, were all inflatables. Each inflatable started as a half-inch scale clay model which was then painted with latex. Once the latex dried, it was carefully cut off the model, flattened out, scanned, and digitally enlarged to the appropriate size. While there’s a telltale bulge to the inflatables up close, from an arena seat, the massive props were impressively enormous and realistic.
Larger Than Life Inflatables, still in business in San Diego, made the blow-up scenery. Both Faris and Schmidt say that they’ve never seen another theatrical production use inflatables on the same scale. A full-scale Millenium Falcon–or rather, the front half of one–dwarfed them all. The balloon wasn’t quite spaceworthy, though it was based on the original schematics used to design the external set that appears in The Empire Strikes Back.
“It was [mounted on] a steel framework and onboard fans kept the thing inflated,” Schmidt says. “These big doors opened up and from way way way upstage the spaceship comes down towards you and is landing, and then a ramp comes down and all the people come out.” (In reality, fog machines and dry ice obscured the ramp lowering from the steel truss, and actors walked out from behind the ramp.) With the inflatables, Schmidt was able to match Lucas’ sense of scale, and between shows the blow-up stage elements could be deflated, packed into boxes, and carted around with ease.
Many of the sets were constructed from more traditional materials, like the bridge that Indiana Jones fought across; stuntmen and acrobats would have to fall from the wood-and-rope bridge, through smoke obscuring the stage, and into trapdoors hidden in the floor. The temple housing the Ark of the Covenant was reproduced in sculpted foam, and its giant statues would crash to the ground as Indy and Hiromi made their escape. Lucasfilm loaned the production a real Tucker automobile from the 1988 film.
Schmidt designed a raised stage a massive 60 feet in diameter, which could accommodate subterranean elements like trap doors, fog machines, and spears that would pop up to get stabby with Indiana Jones. The backstage area, which also had to be raised, was twice the size. Schmidt also designed a grid that hung over the stage, which actors would repel down from 462 lights bathed the set in a rainbow of colors. The stage was constructed by Tait Towers, known for supplying lighting grids, stages and other pieces of equipment for enormous rock concerts. Their recent portfolio includes the London 2012 Olympics Ceremony and Madonna’s MDNA tour.
Costume designer Frank Krenz and Kenneth Feld’s prop shop produced more than 400 costumes for GLSLA, including Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2, the aliens from the Star Wars cantina, and more than a few sets of Stormtrooper armor.
Other companies were brought in to supply the sound system, rock concert-caliber lighting, pyrotechnics, lasers, and wild animals (two tigers, two horses, and four dogs). Don Grady based his score on the original music from Lucas’ films, then flew to London to record it with the Royal Philharmonic, the same orchestra that played for John Williams.
Sound designer Jonathan Deans recalls that all of the sound effects came on hard drives from Skywalker Ranch. The screams of the TIE fighters, laser zaps, and lightsaber clashes were straight from the movies. Due to the storage limitations of the time, nearly every scene in Super Live Adventure had its sound files stored on a separate drive.
“We actually developed equipment for the show,” Deans says. “We created a console that could [control] 15 tracks…The audio was digital on the hard drives, but at the time there were no digital consoles. The console, the LCS console–the next [iteration] of that console became digital and actually was the first digital console to be used in live entertainment. So it was just pre-[digital], by a very short time, that it existed.”
And, of course, there were the lasers, which would likely be replaced by LEDs in a modern production–safer and cheaper, but nowhere near as flashy. For the duel between Luke and Darth Vader, the laser technicians created lightsaber by trapping laser beams within tubes.
“The budget for lasers was outrageous,” Scott Faris says. “We did things that had never been tried or were not even legal, and we found ways to get them approved. Hand-fired lasers had never been used in that way before, but we had to have it for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo shooting it out with the stormtroopers. And our laser guys worked out a system of interlocking safeties so an infrared beam would target on the chest of a stormtrooper and when it got positive feedback it would fire the laser, and when the laser fired a squib charge would go off on the stormtrooper, and he’d fall and die. It looked just like the movies.”
By February 1993, George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure was coming together. Feld found an empty arena in North Carolina where the production could set up and rehearse. And rehearse. And rehearse. “We were [there] for two months,” Schmidt says. “Two months in Charlotte. We got it together. We had a show at the end.”
After two months of rehearsal, it was time to ship cast, crew, costumes, sets, and stage to Japan. As the premiere date of Super Live Adventure drew closer, the Japanese financiers prepared to take advantage of something even more popular in Japan than the Star Wars films–George Lucas himself.
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Big in Japan
A thin, early-40s Lucas with the first hints of gray in his beard was the face of Panasonic.
In 1987, Matsushita Electric–now known as Panasonic–began a Japanese ad campaign called Something New. A thin, early-40s Lucas with the first hints of gray in his beard was the face of the campaign. Commercials and print ads were created in the US at ILM, with props and models from Star Wars making regular appearances. ILM even built a robot mascot named Sparky for Matsushita that was designed by artist Ralph McQuarrie.
The Matsushita campaign swept advertising awards in the late 1980s. By 1993, when Super Live Adventure made its premiere, Lucas was no longer starring in the ads, but the cult of celebrity was already established. His face had been all over Japan for years.
Alongside his role of producer and director for Super Live Adventure, Faris found himself also producing a giant press conference ahead of the premiere.
“They wanted to interview [Lucas] for Japanese TV so they said I should go up and ask George the questions,” Faris says. He met Lucas at Skywalker Ranch briefly during during production in ’92, then flew to Japan to hold the press conference at the Akasaka Prince hotel in Tokyo. Tokyo Disney loaned Faris C-3PO and R2-D2, and they brought in 20 sets of stormtrooper armor and a Darth Vader costume created for Super Live Adventure.
“That all led up to George walking in through a giant laser tunnel,” he says. “It was outrageous. There were like a thousand journalists. Then, after that, the coolest thing ever: They got us lunch and took us to a private room and George and I just shot the shit…I’m telling you it was absolute heaven for me. I was a total Star Wars geek myself, and working in theatre, which had nothing to do with film, but I just loved film. I remember [when Return of the Jedi came out] and there was a big announcement in Variety. I said ‘I’m going to work with George Lucas.’ And 12 years later I met him.”
Months after his huge press conference, Faris returned to Japan ahead of the rest of the production and supervised the the voice cast that dubbed the show into Japanese. All audio in the production, from music to sound effects to dialogue, was pre-recorded. The Japanese actors who originally dubbed Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Lucas’ other films all lent their voices to Super Live Adventure. The American actors had to pantomime the entire show, as all of their practice performances in Charlotte had been in English.
Other than the dubbing, little of the production was catered to the Japanese audience. “[The TV companies] wanted me originally to use a Japanese fight choreographer, and maybe I should’ve,” Faris says. “That would’ve been a good thing, because their swordsmanship was unbelievable. But at the time I was committed to a guy from the theatre who was a broadsword expert…I don’t remember, other than them feeling like they wanted to have a say in it, that there was anything that wasn’t happening.”
On April 27, 1993, George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure debuted in Yokohama.
Doug Schmidt remembers a huge audience at the premiere–and a strange one, to Americans unaccustomed to Japanese etiquette. “The audience response was so muted we thought, ‘Do they hate it?’ We got nothin’. Nothin’ during the show. No applause, no oohs, no ahhs, nothin’. They might as well have been dummies sitting there. Then at the end, they went crazy, they loved it! But nothing during the show, which threw everybody. We didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Lucas, at least to Faris’ recollection, loved the show; he later brought his daughters to see it in Osaka.
Faris remembers sitting in the royal box with his wife and George Lucas, who returned to Japan to watch the premiere. Lucas, at least to Faris’ recollection, loved the show; he later brought his daughters to see it in Osaka.
Through spring and summer, Super Live Adventure toured Japan’s arenas, drawing big crowds at each location. As it toured, Feld flew over American entertainment bigwigs in hopes of setting up a US tour. The production sold mounds of merchandise to help recoup costs.
But by the end of Japan’s summer, the show was finished, packed up, and shipped home for storage. It’s been fading into obscurity ever since, begging a question that’s difficult to answer today: was George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure actually any good?
The Show Goes On, Until It Doesn’t
“We were so proud of it,” Scott Faris says. “It was so much fun. We explored things that hadn’t been done and everybody on the creative team was just into it. They were ready to try anything and make it work.”
During one show–maybe opening night–one of the show’s generators exploded.
Faris and his crew pulled off a technological feat with Super Live Adventure, but that technology suffered its share of technical problems. Faris, Schmidt, and sound designer Jonathan Deans all remember one disaster differently. According to Deans, there were multiple generators in trucks parked outside the arena, which were used to provide extra power necessary for the show. During one show–maybe opening night–one of those generators exploded.
“It actually blew up,” Deans says. “Parts of the generator flew out of the truck and landed on other cars parked in the car park. It was just as Mad Martigan in Willow was about to have his head cut off.”
The generator’s explosion fried every MIDI chip in the sound system, which they used to send commands between audio devices. Deans and his team had to trigger and mix all of the sound effects and music manually. On other nights, the projectors refused to send the proper timing signature to the audio gear, causing sound to regularly cut out as film clips were being played–and to come back on with a deafening explosion.
Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt during the production, though a forum post from a former cast member recalls “numerous cast members rotated out of the show due to injuries, me included.”
The scariest incident–and the funniest in retrospect–came during rehearsal in North Carolina, when one of the tigers escaped from its trainer. Deans remembers the tiger being freaked out by a shiny gold prop for the Indiana Jones segment, attacking it, and running loose. The tiger, he says, was “really fucking pissed.”
The escaped tiger was “really fucking pissed.”
Scott Faris elaborates: “We hear, suddenly, over the [loudspeaker]: ‘Please close the doors. The tiger is loose.’ And you just see people running and slamming doors. I remember one person in the office, this would be in the interior of the arena where all the dressing rooms are…this one office person calling us on the phone saying ‘Um, the tiger just walked by me in the passageway…’ Nobody got eaten, but that was a huge bit of excitement there in the early days.”
Still, neither safety nor reliability were seriously detrimental to the show’s brief run. All productions of that scale are going to have their problems. Ultimately, if George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure had a critical weakness, it was the story.
“Very sweet. Very cheesy. This show would NOT have gone over well in America AT ALL!” writes the same former cast member on a Star Wars fan forum. Schmidt says the story wasn’t a strong point, and that ultimately he didn’t think the show could’ve sustained a permanent stint in Las Vegas. Faris, however, whose position as supervising producer put him closer to Feld, says there was ample interest in bringing the show to the United States.
“People were after us when they heard about the show,” he said. “We were going to set up permanently at Universal Studios in Florida. Vegas wanted us. There was a lot of excitement after the Japanese run. Kenneth wanted to do a tour. But the one mistake we made was we built Doug’s massive deck–the tech department built it out of heavy steel scaffolding that you’d put up around a building to repair it. Very time consuming to set up and very heavy to transport.”
The Super Live Adventure stage simply took too long to assemble and disassemble to support a brisk US touring schedule. Sadly, right around the same time Tait Towers built the stage, they also developed a new rolling stage for rock concerts. Rolling arena stages could be set up in one part of the arena while lighting and sound were hung from the ceiling, then wheeled into place, effectively cutting setup time in half. But too much money had already been sunk into the Super Live Adventure stage. They couldn’t ditch it and build a new one.
Selling the show to US executives was already an uphill battle, since everyone that Feld brought to Japan had to watch the show in Japanese. Talks never panned out. But the show didn’t entirely die away, at first. For a time, people remembered it.
“My next show after that was EFX and it opened the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas,” Faris says. “One of the CEOs of one of the theaters called me and said, ‘I heard about your Lucas show. Can you put it in my theatre?’…I went down and looked and I said, ‘You know what, it’s not high enough. The ceiling’s not high enough. We can’t fit the scenery in.’ You know, the temple for Indiana Jones was like 30 feet high, and our grid was another 10 feet over that.’ ”
After its Japanese run, Super Live Adventure went into storage at a Feld Entertainment warehouse. Doug Schmidt tried to rent certain set pieces from the production multiple times over the years, but could never gain access to them. His contacts at the company demurred; It would’ve been too costly, or time-consuming, to dig pieces out of storage. When he last tried, about a decade ago, the costumes and props and one-of-a-kind inflatables were gone.
They’d been taking up too much space. Feld Entertainment threw everything away.
A Vision of the Future
Twenty years after its one and only summer tour, the last pieces of George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure that remain are souvenirs and memorabilia, the merchandise sold to Japanese audiences during the short tour. And there was a lot of merchandise, ranging from popcorn buckets to mugs, hand towels, lightsabers, keychains, and Darth Vader voice manipulators. Japanese parents were encouraged to buy their children merch; this even gets a minor mention in Gannaway’s script, when the intermission describes the audience doing “the sort of things audiences do during intermissions: bathroom, concessions, souvenirs, etc…”
Much of the art on the George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure’s merchandise looks just a little off. A Yoda doll is just slightly too rotund and ugly. A bag printed with the art from the official poster transforms iconic faces into cartoonish caricatures. A hand towel sporting the logos from each film represented in the show looks like it could’ve been put together with clip art.
Other pieces are genuinely cool, and even a little awe-inspiring, like the poster of George Lucas, staring straight ahead in a pair of aviators, presented in an orange-tinged silhouette. In his San Francisco studio, Doug Schmidt still has the show’s official poster, which combines everything from Willow to Star Wars into one image, mounted above his drafting table. That poster manages to capture the essence of the classic hand-painted posters for Star Wars and Indiana Jones, deftly avoiding the campiness of Super Live’s other memorabilia.
Despite the eclectic variety of merch available at the arena show, there were even more designs for pieces that were never made. Feld Entertainment likely made the right call in abandoning the Darth Vader tissue box, but it may have missed out on a hit with the chibi Chewbacca backpack. Sadly, if the props, inflatables, and other set elements of Super Live Adventure hadn’t been thrown away, they’d be coveted by diehard Star Wars collectors today.
Even video evidence of the show is scarce. Neither Faris or Schmidt know if the production was ever recorded by the Japanese broadcasters or aired on television. Footage shot from the audience exists–you can find it on Youtube–but you’ll be hard pressed to see the details of Schmidt’s sets or Krenz’s costumes.
Were George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure to return today, it may have the legs to tour across the world. While Lucas himself is moving into retirement, Star Wars may be bigger than ever. The series is, at the very least, far bigger than it was in 1993, when Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn novels were breathing new life into a dormant franchise. But could Star Wars ever spawn another weird hodgepodge like Super Live Adventure?
Faris believes so. “I was out in Vegas working on a show last month and looking at all these crazy shows around Vegas…and I thought, man, that Lucas show would’ve worked today,” he says.
“Man, that Lucas show would’ve worked today.”
Jonathan Deans feels the same. “To do that show now would be stunning,” he adds. “All the technology, we could do that easily now, in every aspect. Technology has grown up and we’d be able to do that in our sleep almost. But of course, we’d make it a lot better.”
With the Disney empire now behind Lucasfilm, a new arena show celebrating Lucasfilm’s legacy doesn’t sound so outlandish. After all, Star Wars’ 40th anniversary is coming up in 2017.
And Lucas has always enjoyed a spectacle. As that extravagant Japanese press conference wrapped up in Tokyo before GLSLA’s tour, after Lucas’ lunch with Scott Faris and a day devoted to endless interviews, the creator of Star Wars gave the director of Super Live Adventure one piece of advice.
“He said, ‘Hey, have a great show, and just remember: do what I do,’ ” Faris remembers. “I said ‘Yeah, what’s that?’ And he said, ‘Save the big explosion for the end.”
That’s the problem with treasure hunting — sometimes, you release an ancient evil.Doctor Aphra has secured the legendary Ascendant technology known as the Spark Eternal, but it’s turning out to be more than she bargained for. The relic has taken hold of the trouble-finding archaeologist, and in starwars.com’s first look at Marvel’s Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #22, Aphra is a prisoner in her own mind…
Doctor Aphra #22, written by Alyssa Wong and illustrated by Minkyu Jung and Natacha Bustos, with a cover by W. Scott Forbes, arrives July 27 and is available for pre-order now on ComiXology and at your local comic shop…
The Jedi Master reflects on an old mission and friends from the past.
For Obi-Wan Kenobi, the past is ever present.Marvel’s Star Wars: Obi-Wan miniseries has followed the legendary Jedi Master in his later years, as he chronicles adventures from years gone by in his journals. It’s offered a glimpse into Obi-Wan’s feelings about a life lived to the fullest, one filled with both triumph and tragedy, while flashing back to his little-seen youngling and Padawan years.
In starwars.com’s first look at issue #3, the now-Ben Kenobi reflects on the Clone Wars. He ponders the conflict it created in all Jedi — normally peacekeepers, not generals — and recalls a previously unseen mission…
The prolific writer on some of his biggest moments in the galaxy far, far away and reaching a milestone with Star Wars #25.
Since Marvel returned to publishing Star Wars comics in 2015, few writers have made as great an impact on the galaxy far, far away as Charles Soule. The scribe took his first steps with 2016’s Lando, a five-issue miniseries that garnered significant acclaim. From there, Soule’s Star Wars star continued to rise, as he racked up credits including Poe Dameron, The Rise of Kylo Ren, War of the Bounty Hunters, and more, often with major contributions to lore; when it came time to shape what would become the Star Wars: The High Republic initiative, Soule was one of five writers recruited as an architect of its first stories. Today, Soule is at the helm of Marvel’s flagship Star Wars series, which is celebrating a milestone along with its writer: Star Wars #25, now available, is Soule’s 100thStar Wars comic. And it’s no ordinary issue. The comic includes four short stories that all see Soule return to characters from his prior runs — Obi-Wan and Anakin, Darth Vader and Palpatine, Kylo Ren, and Poe Dameron — while reuniting with the artists from each respective title. To mark the occasion, starwars.com spoke with Soule about hitting the 100-issue mark, why Ben Solo bleeding his kyber crystal was so important, and why two stories from Star Wars #25 will be particularly “resonant.”
starwars.com: To start, I want to say congratulations on the milestone. That’s pretty amazing. What does it mean to you?
Charles Soule: When all of this occurred to me, it was really just late last year, probably. I was just, “I wonder how many of these things I’ve written,” and I just started adding it up because it was something that you do to procrastinate from doing the actual work of writing the issues. I realized how close I was to writing a hundred. Like, I was very, very close. I think, when I ran the numbers, it was like 97 or something like that. And so I was like, “Man, that’s crazy.” And then I did some more procrastination slash research slash analysis, and looked to see what some of the other prominent Star Wars comic book writers had done. And I realized that, at least in the modern canon, no one else had gotten there.
It meant to me that I had kind of definitively done what I always wanted to do in Star Wars, which was to make a mark, contribute in some significant way to this thing that I’d loved since I was really little. And you don’t have to write a hundred comics to do that. You can do that with one story. You can do that by being a fan. You can do that by loving Star Wars, however you want to love it. You don’t have to do this thing. But for me, it just felt like a really solid, real milestone that made me feel really good. I mean, that’s thousands of pages of material, thousands of pages of story that I got to create with some of the best artists in all of comics, and told stories that resonated with the fans, and have really given me the Star Wars career I have today, which is significant and goes beyond comics.
So it felt great, I guess, which is what I could have said very quickly [Laughs.] as opposed to going through that long spiel. Certain things happen in your career that bring things home for you in a way, right? That make it clear to you where you are or what you’ve achieved, or maybe how your work is received, that pull you out of the day to day, constant applied effort of making the stuff. And for me, this really was one of those, realizing that I had done or was about to do 100 of them….
Despite all the technological wonders at the disposal of today’s sound designers, most sound effects begin their life as recordings of organic sources. In order to record sound for special scenes in Episode I, Star Wars veteran Sound Designer Ben Burtt and Recordist Matthew Wood invited a group of “vocal extras” to become an alien community for one night.
Computers and synthesizers are powerful tools, but a finished sound effect is seldom purely artificial: most of the time, a “real” sound is first recorded, then modified using computers and synthesizers. Even the voice of R2-D2, a mechanical droid character, was achieved through the combination of electronic tones and human vocal chords.
For Episode I, Ben Burtt faces new challenges. Particular scenes require particular effects, and his vast sound library is not always enough to answer every need. “In every movie,” says Burtt, “there are always a few scenes or elements that can’t be matched to anything you have in your sound library, because they’re so specific. You have to go out and record entirely new samples.” Some of these specific sequences in Episode I involve environments where many alien creatures will be present together, and a convincing “crowd effect” needed to be created. To that end, Burtt assembled a group of “vocal extras” on January 14th for a special project.
This group of fifty was brought together in the Stag Theater at Skywalker Ranch, where the acoustics are especially suited to this type of “atmosphere” recording. Burtt proceeded to seat his volunteers properly so that there would be no gap in the sound field, and gave them some advice on how to avoid making accidental noises during the recording. “It’s amazing what the microphone can pick up,” says Burtt. “The rustle of a leather jacket, the soft clinging of two rings touching each other, the jingling of earrings – everything.”
Then Burtt started turning the group into an audio sample from planet Tatooine. For each take, Burtt explained the effect he was looking for, how he wanted to achieve it, and gave specific directions. “Imagine you’re in a busy marketplace on a foreign planet, and you hear all sorts of alien creatures around you, discussing among themselves, bartering for an item, or telling jokes…” The performers would improvise an alien language of their own and get going, chatting with their neighbors and exchanging words no one could make sense of. Some individuals particularly educated in Star Wars lore even spoke a few words of actual Huttese, the language used by the crime lord Jabba the Hutt. “Everybody gets to be the sound designer tonight,” says Burtt with a smile. However he adds a warning: “It’s important not to use English at all, or any other real language, because actual words might be recognized. We need something totally alien for the background crowds – the movie doesn’t take place on the planet Earth. Huttese is welcome, of course.”
Gesturing like an orchestra conductor, Burtt directed his choir: more or less volume, a calmer ambiance, an electrified atmosphere, and so on. Using the final sound effect in his head as a guide, Burtt was effectively starting to mold and sculpt the sounds during the recording process itself. Burtt tried several different things, from having just one row of people perform, to sweeping across the group with his hands and making the “aliens” speak up in sequence. “I try to get a variety of audio textures and different depths,” Burtt says. This way, Burtt will be able to combine different samples together and obtain just the right effect for every scene. “We did go out and record a crowd during a football game,” says Burtt. “We collected good recordings, which will be used to create the backdrop to a massive crowd setting. But this procedure only gives you a generic crowd ambiance. For more specific material, you have to use a smaller, directed group, like this.”
The alien assembly went from one take to the other, speaking a thousand tongues and uttering mysterious words. “Picture yourselves with scales on your back or webbed feet…Imagine you’re at a big sporting event and that something awful just happened on the field…Imagine that you’re in your alien home village, and that something unexpected suddenly caused total panic…” Like a painter, Burtt splashed colors here and there, slowly creating the aural portrait of a breathing, living alien community. Building the same effects from scratch with a computer, using, say, one voice multiplied 50 times, would have been much more complicated and time-consuming, and might never have achieved the same convincing, organic effect. Also, the physical presence of the performers produced genuine interaction, which helped to create the illusion of a true group of aliens gathered together.
“At the end of the evening, I had a very good collection of samples,” says Burtt. “Some of that stuff is excellent, with fascinating textures and true alien environments. It will add important coloration to the final mix.” As the imaginary languages faded and the performers reverted to English while leaving their seats, the Stag Theater kept within its padded walls the echoes of an ephemeral alien community that won’t speak again for several months, until Episode I reaches the screens in spring of 1999.
Phase II of Star Wars: The High Republic begins with a relaunch of the titular comic, the Mandalorian searches for sanctuary, and much more!
Before the Starlight Beacon lit the way for the Republic, the moon of Jedha was a beacon of faith and spirituality, home to the Temple of Kyber. As Phase II of Star Wars: The High Republic kicks off this fall, the titular Marvel comic series will step back in time 150 years for a prequel to the events of Phase I.
Reuniting writer Cavan Scott and artist Ario Anindito, issue #1 will introduce Vildar Mac, a Jedi embarking on a journey that will end in terror.Get your first look at the relaunch of Star Wars: The High Republic#1 and other Marvel Star Wars titles coming in October 2022 — including covers and solicits for the flagship Star Wars series, Chapter 4 in the adaptation of The Mandalorian on Disney+, and new installments in Darth Vader and Doctor Aphra.…
The new Star Wars-themed lounge on the Disney Wish is a must-see for fans.
Aboard the Disney Wish there are amazing experiences behind every door, and with a push of a button you can exit the world of cruise life and enter the galaxy far, far away. Star Wars: Hyperspace Lounge is the first Star Wars-themed lounge on the high seas, where guests can enjoy a panoramic view of space as they taste Star Wars cocktails inspired by familiar planets from across the galaxy. Stay on guard — you never know when a TIE fighter attack may take place right before your eyes while you’re sipping your favorite libation.
With a backdrop of spaceports welcoming ships from across the galaxy, bartenders work to create specialty drinks, like a bright red Berken’s Flow reminiscent of Mustafar’s lava, which has a secret reveal when a blacklight is shined on it. The Golden One — a flavorful, fruity cream-topped drink — is sweet and creamy, its color reflecting the moons of Endor.
Some liquid refreshments are presented with panache, like the Freetown Reserve from Tatooine. Guests can watch as a special infusion tower takes center stage, using local Tatooine botanicals plus added smoke. It’s delicately poured into a glass, the smoky show sure to draw awe-filled glances from across the room. Once the smoke has cleared, the reveal is a sparkling blue Hyperspace logo on a custom ice cube…
During her recent appearance on the Adam Carolla Show, Gina Carano talked about the STAR WARS streaming series that was being developed for her, RANGERS OF THE NEW REPUBLIC. We listen to the highlights and analyze.
Spoiler warning: This article contains major spoilers from Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The epic Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi gave Star Wars fans a close-up look at the dark times, when the Empire was at its height. The story took the weary Jedi Master on a perilous adventure across the stars to save a young princess. Along the way Obi-Wan regained his connection to the Force, let go of the weight of the past, and found a new hope for the future of the galaxy.Here are 25 quotes from the series that illustrate his emotional journey. Some of these lines are stunning in their significance. Some will make you smile. And all are pivotal to Obi-Wan’s story.
1. “The Jedi cannot help what they are. Their compassion leaves a trail.” — Grand Inquisitor
A former Jedi himself, the Grand Inquisitor knows firsthand that members of the Order are caring to a fault. If someone needs their help, a Jedi will give it without hesitation — even if it means exposing their existence to those hunting them. (Part I)
2. “I’ve got a tribe to feed.” — Teeka
Trader Teeka is a shrewd entrepreneur, who’s still charming in her (not always honest) deal-making prowess. (Part I)
3. “Like you trained his father?” — Owen Lars
Owen Lars is not one to mince words. He’s not daunted by Jedi or the Force. He wishes simply to have his family left alone. His harsh truth silences the once quippy Jedi Master. (Part I)
4. “There are many ways to lead. You just have to find yours.” — Bail Organa
Bail and Breha Organa are patient parents who encourage little Leia to find her own path. But there are times the headstrong princess takes that guidance a little too literally… (Part I)
5. “I’m not who I used to be.” — Ben Kenobi
Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t just referring to changing his name to Ben. Struggling with remorse over the apparent death of his apprentice and dear friend, Ben is hiding not just from the Empire, but from the Force as well. (Part I)
6. “I’d rather be digested by a jakobeast.” — Leia Organa
Little Leia is aghast at the idea that she should apologize for putting her haughty cousin in his place. It’s an amusing reminder that no matter who she’s facing — a Grand Moff, a Dark Lord of the Sith, or a scruffy-looking nerfherder — Leia Organa will stand her ground. (Part I)
7. “Look, have I made a few bad decisions? Sure. Do I feel bad about it? Sometimes. Do I like credits? Yeah.” — Haja Estree
Haja is only concerned about Haja. Or is he? He may not be a true Jedi, but Haja displays their same kindness in his actions. He might seem like a con man on the surface, but beneath the fake Jedi robe Haja is hiding a heart of gold. (Part II)
8. “He’s alive, Obi-Wan. Anakin Skywalker is alive.” — Reva
The Third Sister strikes at Ben Kenobi with a statement more cutting than any lightsaber swing. The revelation that Anakin didn’t die on Mustafar shakes Ben to his core. (Part II)
9. “Have you ever been afraid of the dark? How does you feel when you turn on the light?” — Ben Kenobi
Ben Kenobi shows a hint of his old life as a teacher when he explains the Force to Princess Leia. Simple and elegant, this description of feeling the Force surround you is comforting — and unforgettable. (Part III)
10. “Quinlan was here?” — Ben Kenobi
Not only is this the first confirmation that fan-favorite character Quinlan Vos survived Order 66, but it’s also the first time in a long time that we hear a hopeful tone in Ben’s voice. The two Jedi never saw eye to eye, but Obi-Wan’s relief is unmistakable. (Part III)
11. “I am what you made me.” — Darth Vader
You can almost hear Obi-Wan Kenobi’s heart breaking as Darth Vader delivers this devastating statement. (Part III)…
Filmmaker and Friend of RFR Kyle Newman’s latest movie “1UP” is a hilarious look at competitive E-Gaming with a great cast. And, of course, with it being a Kyle Newman flick, there are a few fun STAR WARS references and easter eggs. Find out what they are! You can watch “!UP” now on Amazon Prime. Check it out!
The Disney+ series are nominees across five categories.
A legendary bounty hunter reborn as a leader with a heart, and animated tales of the galaxy far, far away through the lens of some of anime’s greatest creators. starwars.com is excited to report that two Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett and Star Wars: Visions, have been honored with nominations in the 74thPrimetime Emmy Awards. You can check out the full list of Star Wars nominations below.
The Book of Boba FettOutstanding Special Visual Effects In A Season Or A Movie
The Book Of Boba Fett • Disney+ • Lucasfilm Ltd.
Richard Bluff, Visual Effects Supervisor
Abbigail Keller, Visual Effects Producer
Paul Kavanagh, Animation Supervisor
Cameron Neilson, Assoc. Visual Effects Supervisor
Scott Fisher, Special Effects Supervisor
John Rosengrant, Legacy Effects Supervisor
Enrico Damm, ILM Visual Effects Supervisor
Robin Hackl, Image Engine Visual Effects Supervisor
Landis Fields, Virtual Production Visualization Supervisor
Outstanding Sound Editing For A Comedy Or Drama Series (One Hour)
The Book Of Boba Fett • “Chapter 6: From The Desert Comes A Stranger” • Disney+ • Lucasfilm Ltd.
Matthew Wood, Co-Supervising Sound Editor
Bonnie Wild, Co-Supervising Sound Editor
David Acord, Sound Editor
Angela Ang, Sound Editor
Ryan Cota, Sound Editor
Benjamin A. Burtt, Sound Editor
David Collins, Sound Editor
Alyssa Nevarez, Sound Editor
Stephanie McNally, Music Editor
Margie O’Malley, Foley Artist
Andrea Gard, Foley Artist
Sean England, Foley Artist…
The Disney+ series are nominees across five categories.
A legendary bounty hunter reborn as a leader with a heart, and animated tales of the galaxy far, far away through the lens of some of anime’s greatest creators. starwars.com is excited to report that two Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett and Star Wars: Visions, have been honored with nominations in the 74thPrimetime Emmy Awards.
You can check out the full list of Star Wars nominations below.
The Book of Boba FettOutstanding Special Visual Effects In A Season Or A Movie
The Book Of Boba Fett • Disney+ • Lucasfilm Ltd.
Richard Bluff, Visual Effects Supervisor
Abbigail Keller, Visual Effects Producer
Paul Kavanagh, Animation Supervisor
Cameron Neilson, Assoc. Visual Effects Supervisor
Scott Fisher, Special Effects Supervisor
John Rosengrant, Legacy Effects Supervisor
Enrico Damm, ILM Visual Effects Supervisor
Robin Hackl, Image Engine Visual Effects Supervisor
Landis Fields, Virtual Production Visualization Supervisor
Outstanding Sound Editing For A Comedy Or Drama Series (One Hour)
The Book Of Boba Fett • “Chapter 6: From The Desert Comes A Stranger” • Disney+ • Lucasfilm Ltd.
Matthew Wood, Co-Supervising Sound Editor
Bonnie Wild, Co-Supervising Sound Editor
David Acord, Sound Editor
Angela Ang, Sound Editor
Ryan Cota, Sound Editor
Benjamin A. Burtt, Sound Editor
David Collins, Sound Editor
Alyssa Nevarez, Sound Editor
Stephanie McNally, Music Editor
Margie O’Malley, Foley Artist
Andrea Gard, Foley Artist
Sean England, Foley Artist
Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes
The Book Of Boba Fett • “Chapter 1: Stranger In A Strange Land” • Disney+ • Lucasfilm Ltd.
Emmy nominations were announced today and Star Wars has one nomination to celebrate. Last year’s animated series of anime shorts Star Wars: Visions scored a nomination for Outstanding Short Form Animation Program. This is an animated anthology of shorts made by Japanese studios that told unconnected stories set outside of Star Wars canon, where creators were given carte blanche to turn their wildest dreams into reality.
Disney had already submitted one of the shorts, “The Village Bride”, for Oscar consideration in the category of Best Animated Short Film, though it ultimately didn’t earn a spot. Another short, “The Duel”, did get a nomination at the Annie Awards, but lost to an episode of Arcane. The series is now being recognized as a whole by the Television Academy, and will go up against Netflix’s Love, Death and Robots, HBO Max’s Robot Chicken, Amazon’s The Boys Presents: Diabolical, and Disney’s When Billie Met Lisa. The 2022 Emmys ceremony will take place on Monday, September 12.
Star Wars: Visions was received rather well by the audience and critics alike, and Lucasfilm was satisfied enough with its numbers to greenlight a second season. This was officially announced at StarWars Celebration in May 2022, where they said that Volume 2 would be released in spring 2023….
Propmaster Brad Elliott shares insights on fabricating Kenobi’s lightsaber and other personal items that link the new series to the prequel trilogy and the film that started it all. Kristin Baver
Through the props and costumes of Star Wars, we find a tangible link to connect with the characters from a galaxy far, far away and the stories they inhabit. Inside the Lucasfilm Archive, take a closer look at these artifacts and the stories behind their design.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is a man who cannot escape his past.In the Obi-Kenobi limited series, now streaming on Disney+, storytellers explore a previously unseen era in the character’s life — nearly 10 years after the fall of the Jedi with Order 66 but still almost a decade from meeting his fate aboard the Death Star. Behind-the-scenes, the production crew took great pains to find the middle ground between these two known story points when creating the props that would help define the titular character at the midpoint between Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: A New Hope.
Among Kenobi’s meager belongings when the series opens on Tatooine, we find familiar macrobinoculars, a holoprojector, and a datapad that look almost exactly like screen-used items from the prequel trilogy. “It made sense that Kenobi would take a few items with him to watch over Luke,” Propmaster Brad Elliott tells starwars.com. That includes his lightsaber and other tools of the Jedi that were glimpsed in those earlier films. “The holoprojector would have been something that he would take with him from his belongings on Coruscant.” In this case, the item allowed Bail Organa to reach his old friend with an urgent request and was later broken in the chaos.
Kenobi’s macrobinoculars, first glimpsed in the trailer for the series, were fabricated from a pair intended to appear in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Their placement among Obi-Wan’s personal effects is itself a deep cut for fans familiar with a deleted scene showing Kenobi using the same item in Episode II. The prop was original destined for use on Geonosis, but an animated version later showed up in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
The datapad was an even more obscure recreation, seen only briefly in Revenge of the Sith in the hands of Anakin Skywalker. “He is holding a datapad and mentions that Obi-Wan was there, as if the datapad was the evidence that his master had been to see Padmé and had left it behind,” Elliott says. Visual guides further cemented the idea that the datapad belonged to Skywalker’s master, but “we were the first to actually put it in his hands,” Elliott notes.
An elegant weapon
Even a Jedi in hiding needs their trusty lightsaber.
Kenobi’s elegant and iconic weapon from a more civilized age proved to be the most difficult challenge for the prop builders on the series, Elliott says. Designers on the original trilogy and the prequels had utilized similar but not identical designs to create Obi-Wan’s hilt, meaning that the prop builders on Kenobi were tasked with merging the two iterations into something new that still felt authentic.
“His lightsaber was the trickiest thing that we had to figure out,” Elliott says. “The Revenge of the Sith saber is smaller, shinier, and differs in many other details from the New Hope saber that Alec Guinness carried.
“Kenobi is coming from the loss of the war, the fall of the Jedi Order, and the loss of his best friend and Padawan,” Elliott adds. “He’s carrying the weight of his past, so his saber is largely from that past.”
While the design aesthetic mainly mirrors the prequel hilt previously carried by series star Ewan McGregor, prop makers specifically upgraded the emitter to more closely match Guinness’s original and aged the once pristine handle to make it feel like an artifact that had spent nearly 10 years buried in the desert….
Continuity’ is the name of the game for Jayne-Ann Tenggren. As Script Supervisor for the main unit of Episode I, she had to make sure everything captured by the camera eye was consistent with the script – and also with what had been shot before. “It’s really a sort of on-set editorial position,” she says, “but it goes beyond that as well.”
Script Supervisors wield their pens with the painstaking accuracy of Nobel scientists. “After a take I would write down the details,” says Tenggren, “What happened, what was good, what wasn’t, the timing of it all. And then I would go to the camera people and get the setup: lens, distance, stock they’re working on, and all of that.”
However, aboard the Episode I project, some unusual waves inevitably come crashing down on the deck. So in addition to keeping closely in touch with the usual departments – wardrobe, make-up, hair, props – in order to make sure every small detail agreed with everything else, Tenggren needed to add a few unusual contacts to her list. Industrial Light & Magic was one of them, for it was vital that continuity be maintained with a wide variety of digital props, creatures, characters and backgrounds. “The first take we did would be a reference take, and so we would have in there somebody, or something, that was representative of the digital character, and the actors would perform, with dialogue and everything. We would then do the next take without the stand-in, making sure that the timing of the two takes was pretty comparable,” explains Tenggren. Keeping everything cross-referenced with ILM was standard procedure for such sensitive shots.
The numerous action scenes involving stunt doubles also required special care. Tenggren worked with Stunt Supervisor Nick Gillard to keep her knowledge of the fight choreography up to date, while relying on her trained eyes to spot any discrepancy in hair placement, costume arrangement, make-up condition and body position, both during filming with the actors themselves and – a more delicate operation – when switching from actors to stunt doubles and vice versa.
A less obvious problem, which nonetheless remains a major issue, is what could be called the ‘motion print’, the unique way in which every person moves. “At one point we were discussing a connective shot where Liam Neeson’s character runs after his opponent, right before they jump to a different level. It simply didn’t work. And it didn’t work because it wasn’t Liam Neeson running. He has a very recognizable run.” So Tenggren made sure those problems were fixed and that continuity was maintained. Every last detail was examined; no exceptions were made for the fast-paced action scenes. “Even in the scenes that move the most, if somebody’s got a piece of hair sticking out, and you lose a member of the audience because they’re looking at the hair and not the performance, then that’s a shame,” Tenggren comments.
Episode I also involved multiple sets, adding to the already high total of variables Tenggren had to deal with. “The thing about multiple sets is that you have to keep tabs on where each set is supposed to be, or what multiple sets are supposed to form just one,” she says. When characters round some corner, during a chase, and end up in another corridor, everything has to make sense, and each set has to connect perfectly with the next one. Fight sequences, in this respect, once again require delicate handling.
However, sometimes the simplest of problems remain the most persistent. “Long hair is always tricky, because of the way it moves around,” says Tenggren. “Liam Neeson’s hair was sometimes forward, sometimes back, and I had to keep track of that. It was a real issue since the scenes weren’t shot in chronological order. I thought that Obi-Wan’s braid was going to be more problematical than it was, though. Obviously, in a fight sequence, the braid is going to be all over the place, and you have no way of controlling that. You have to live with it.”
Everything about Episode I is being entered into a database which will contain all the work done on the three movies of the prequel trilogy, so that anything can easily be cross-referenced; this meant that Tenggren would need to type up her notes sooner or later. “On the set we did discuss the idea of typing directly into the computer, but there are certain limitations to doing that,” she says. “The idea behind the way in which you structure your day, in terms of notetaking, is that during rehearsals you type up the shot description, and so by the time the camera rolls, the only thing you’re doing is really to focus on the action, the continuity, the dialogue. But on this particular film it was different because much of what we did was organic. The camera would roll and it would evolve and be continually evolving. So I’m glad we didn’t opt to do that. It’s just much easier to have a handwritten pad and, you know, jot all over it.”
Even in a situation where technology seems to be leading the way, the solution sometimes comes in the form of non-technological means. History remembers that an evil Empire once found that out on a lush forest moon.
Obi-Wan Kenobi has ended and we now turn our attention to Andor! We give our takes on the latest news about the next live-action Star Wars series which arrives next month, as well as updates on Ahsoka and The Mandalorian. We also react to the trailer of the upcoming Lawrence Kasdan ILM documentary Light & Magic!
The Resistance base is open to all, so please spread the word about our Star Wars podcast and join us! Listen or watch below, and make sure to subscribe free to the show on your preferred platform!…
In the aftermath of the Battle of Endor, a celebration and a funeral have led the twin rebels to consider what’s next. starwars.com Team
The Battle of Endor was a pivotal victory for the Rebel Alliance, and an occasion for joyous celebration for most.
But what happened after the last wokling was tucked into bed at the Ewok village, the music had ceased, and the embers had cooled on Darth Vader’s funeral pyre?
In the first excerpt to be released from Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel, the new novel by Beth Revis arriving this August, Luke and Leia take a moment to survey the damage of the Galactic Civil War and consider the work yet to be done to topple the Empire……
We’re closing in on the debut of Andor and The Bad Batch season 2, while Ahsoka and news around an upcoming Star Wars film gains momentum. With all of that comes an assortment of news and updates you don’t want to miss!
This past week we also had an awesome opportunity to interview Natalie Holt, Obi-Wan Kenobi composer, in an exclusive podcast episode.
Before we head into another week, catch up on all of the reviews, stories, and news from July 4-10!
Taika Waititi has been popular this week. Between the release of his new Marvel film Thor: Love and Thunder and his tongue-in-cheek quotes, like joking about not knowing Natalie Portman was in Star Wars (which many took seriously) or not knowing whether his Star Wars film will be made (likely also a joke), the director has found himself front and center in headlines and across social media. Well now The Hollywood Reporter is saying plans for Waititi’s mystery Star Wars movie is on firmer footing than the filmmaker would have you believe. Check out the story!
During Star Wars Celebration 2022, Lucasfilm confirmed that Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts is working on a new live-action Star Wars series for Disney Plus titled Skeleton Crew. Here’s everything we know so far!
Nielsen’s tracking for Obi-Wan Kenobi indicate that the Star Wars spin-off series earned a fifth place spot in its third week of release, with nearly 700 million minutes of the show being streamed at that frame of time. Read the update!…
Get your first look inside the comic book adaptation of the first Star Wars live-action series on Disney+. starwars.com Team
“I can bring you in warm or I can bring you in cold.”
In starwars.com’s exclusive first look at Marvel’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian #1, the mysterious beskar-clad warrior arrives to claim his bounty on the Mythrol.
Looking to add some Obi-Wan Kenobi-themedflair to your Instagram story? Missed the bus and need an Inquisitor emoji to help express your frustration? Maybe you’d like to take a selfie with Lola? You’re in luck — though in our experience, there’s no such thing.
You can bring the heroes and villains of Obi-Wan Kenobi — all episodes now streaming on Disney+ —to your social channels and beyond with emojis, stickers, and much more. Check out starwars.com’s guide below for various add-ons and surprises that you can use to celebrate the epic limited series.
Stickers
Head to Giphy.com/StarWars for animated stickers and GIFs that you can add to photos and more. Choose from a disapproving Uncle Owen, cheery Leia and Lola, the bearded Jedi Master himself, and others, all illustrated by famed artist Truck Torrence, as well as clips from the show.
The moment we see Inquisitor Reva ignite her red lightsaber and hear its ominous hum, it’s clear anything can and will happen. The Inquisitors provide chills and thrills in the Disney+ limited series Obi-Wan Kenobi (all episodes now streaming), which marks the first time we’ve seen these ruthless Jedi hunters in live-action. Now fans have the chance to relive all the epic Inquisitor battles with the HasLab-exclusive Star Wars: The Black Series Reva Force FX Lightsaber. HasLab is a crowdfunding program by Hasbro Pulse that makes fans’ dream projects a reality, like the Vintage Collection Razor Crest and a four-foot-long version of Jabba’s Sail Barge.
With the Reva Force FX Elite Lightsaber, the HasLab team has poured in all the details and features to make this saber as iconic as the Third Sister herself. This is Hasbro’s biggest and most complex Force FX Elite Lightsaber yet, but with less than a week left in the campaign, the fate of this saber is now in the hands of fans.
When Hasbro’s manager of product design, Chris Reiff, and his team first learned there would be a live-action Inquisitor lightsaber in Obi-Wan Kenobi, they knew they wanted to find a way to make the dream of it available to fans. That includes Reiff himself who, as a lifelong fan, enjoys building replica Star Wars props in his free time. starwars.com spoke with Reiff over Zoom about the design process of the Reva Force FX Elite Lightsaber, the innovative tech behind it, and the joy of sharing new releases with fans.
starwars.com: When did you and your team begin working on the Reva Force FX Elite Lightsaber?
Chris Reiff: Our normal development cycle is 12 to 18 months, depending on how crazy things are. I would say we’ve been working on this for probably eight months to a year.
starwars.com: Wow. So you’re working on the project simultaneously as they are filming the series?
Chris Reiff: Yeah. A lot of times they’ll be developing the props, taking them into the studio, shooting reference photos of them, and sending us the photos the next day. One of the many great aspects of the partnership and trust we have with Lucasfilm is early access to very detailed references. In this case that took the form of a lot of photographs, 3D data, sound files, and conversations about when the saber would appear. We worked with Lucasfilm closely as we developed our own CAD [computer-aided design] from the reference, making sure we really studied every little detail and feature. This includes a lot of little notes and drawings, even a few early models just to make sure the size was right and felt good to wield. For the team to make it look just right, be able to be configured multiple ways like in the show, and fit more than two lightsabers worth of tech into it was a lot of work but we are excited about how cool it is.
starwars.com: How did it feel when you first saw the Third Sister’s lightsaber in action in the show?
Chris Reiff: It was fantastic. We had seen behind-the-scenes stuff of it in people’s hands, but seeing it come to life in the show with full effects and story behind it, it’s a nice, rewarding thing to see because we’ve been spending so much time and got to know it so well, and then it just takes it up another notch to see it in the show coming to life.
starwars.com: Each of the Force FX Elite Lightsabers offers something new, such as Palpatine’s Force lightning effect or Darth Revan’s color-changing blade. What are the innovative features of this Reva lightsaber?
Chris Reiff: Having the fully integrated blade tech is a huge new add. The ability for the saber to know whether it has one OR two blades installed and adjust its effects accordingly was a blast to see come together as the team has been developing it. The Duel Effect and Battle Replay feature we introduced in our latest mainline Force FX Elite Lightsabers are included in this HasLab Black Series Reva Force FX Elite Lightsaber, but the dual-blade configuration allows us to take them up a notch and have effects like Battle Sequence and Blaster Deflect play out across both blades differently than they do with just one blade. In addition to that, it comes with a rechargeable battery, stereo speaker sound, and fans will have the ability to reconfigure the saber from a half-circle hilt to the full circle hilt.
starwars.com: I’m obsessed with the half-circle, full-circle configuration. It’s so impressive, and it’s obviously screen-accurate. Was that an important design element that you said, we have to have?
Chris Reiff: Oh, yeah. We knew from talking to production and our Lucasfilm partners, we knew kind of how much each version of the saber was going to show up in the show. The half-ring or half-circle version that she wears on her belt, we knew was the primary. But it’s such a cool moment when it does go to the full circle and really as part of an Inquisitor lightsaber, it’s such an iconic look to have that full circle. So we wanted to do all that stuff and have fans reconfigure it to whatever they wanted to because a lot of the Inquisitor stuff you see shows up as just a full circle, and that’s it. But with hers being so unique and doing the half-circle, the ability for our fans to reconfigure their own sabers into whichever version they wanted was super important.
starwars.com: Is there a central button on the hilt that activates both sabers?
Chris Reiff: The great thing about this one is that because it is essentially two sabers in one, there are four buttons on this one. So there are two primary buttons and then two secondary buttons. And each of the primary buttons can turn on an individual blade or both blades, depending on whether you press a click, or hold and press, or whether you have both blades installed or just one blade. So because of that, it’s in the design of the saber — there are two buttons on each end of it, and we took advantage of that design and presumably how it was designed to work in the show, and use those same buttons to do similar features on our sabers.
starwars.com: One of the fun aspects about roleplaying with a Force FX Elite Lightsaber is the sound FX. Can you tell us more about the “series-inspired sounds” included in this design?
Chris Reiff: To start, the sounds in this lightsaber are brand new and different from other lightsaber noises we’ve heard before. Some are even unique to the two-bladed configuration of this lightsaber. The production shared the original sound files with us and the two-speaker setup in the HasLab lightsaber lets us really take advantage of all that to deliver audio beyond our regular Force FX Elite Lightsabers, as well.
starwars.com: As the designer, how does it feel when you’ve been working on these projects for so long and finally release them into the world?
Chris Reiff: It’s a moment we all look forward to just because we’re fans too, we’re working on this stuff, we enjoy it. So we get so close to it in developing it that sometimes we forget just how cool what we do is. And then that moment when we do share it with people and the larger fan community in general, that just kind of brings back that energy for us. And it’s an important part of the whole process, just emotionally, for us to see those reactions from people and to interact with fans and talk to people about it. And I think it was one of the beautiful things about being able to get back to Celebration and do those sorts of events again — where we get to celebrate what we do with people and kind of bring that full circle.
We’ve all heard them: urban legends, friend-of-a-friend stories (FOAFs), tales too good to be true. These are stories of dubious origin that get passed around, distorted, and retold so many times that they acquire a certain authenticity. After all, if so many people claim them to be true, they must be, right?
Numerous books and websites chronicle the spread of urban legends. Most of the tales are patently false. Some have a small kernel of truth to them, and a few are actually true.
The popularity of Star Wars has spread to become part of the public consciousness. And when something enters the arena of popular culture and folklore, the urban legends invariably follow.
This series will present some of the most popular Star Wars urban legends that have been floating around for years.
Urban Legend: A “naughty” Star Wars trading card was printed and made it out on the market, the result of a mischievous airbrush artist.
Sometimes, the truth behind a legend is stranger than the fiction. Topps has long produced quality trading cards for the Star Wars movies. Their first series for A New Hope was an extensive showcase on all the photography taken on set. Collectors cherish their original cards from a time when UV-coating and holographic seals were unheard of, and cards came in wax-pack with sticks of gum. One particular card, though, is valued for collectors for its notoriety.
Star Wars card #207, part of the green-bordered series, has gathered a fair amount of attention. To be delicate, this image of C-3PO looks to be sporting a piece of anatomy that has no business being on a PG-rated protocol droid. Theories blossomed about how this giggle-inducing card could have come about. They invariably followed a common urban legend template — a disgruntled artist on the eve of being fired added a personal touch to the artwork.
The true explanation doesn’t make as entertaining a story, but seems to be a bizarre case of coincidence. In combing through the old archives at Topps and Lucasfilm, it appears that the extra appendage is not the work of an artist, but rather a trick of timing and light. The untouched archive photo shows the image just as it appears on the card. The current theory is that at the exact instant the photo was snapped, a piece fell off the Threepio costume, and just happened to line up in such a way as to suggest a bawdy image. The original contact sheets from the photo-shoot attests to this. They are not retouched in any way, yet still contain the same image. Whatever the real explanation is, the ‘mischievous airbrush artist’ scenario simply doesn’t fit.
No matter how innocent the photo, the card did generate attention. Rather than explain the admittedly hard-to-believe story, Topps re-issued the card with an airbrushed correction. The corrected version currently trades at considerably less value than the original–even though there are probably fewer copies of it in print–which only helps to keep the legend alive.
Urban Legend: Footage exists of the Millennium Falcon being destroyed at the end of Return of the Jedi.
One of Return of the Jedi’s most exciting sequences is the Millennium Falcon’s escape from the exploding Death Star, just meters ahead of a burning wall of fire. It’s a very close call for Lando, and for a moment, it seems that Han’s bleak prophecy — that he’ll never see the Falcon again — will come true. But the freighter blasts through the flames triumphantly.
It’s hard to pin down where the rumor of the Falcon’s demise started. Perhaps Harrison Ford’s suggestion to George Lucas that Han Solo die at the end of Jedi fueled it spread.
One definite culprit in this legend’s longevity is a revised plot synopsis treatment entitled “The Revenge and Return of the Jedi”. Dated July 6 1980, (though undoubtedly printed at a later date), this concise retelling of the basic story — with notable changes — is a fake. It describes Luke taking over the Death Star (re-christening it the Life Star), Vader being the “other” Yoda spoke of, and Leia and Han marrying at the film’s end, with Wicket one of the attendants at the wedding. It also contains the following passage:
“Meanwhile, the Death Star ray begins destroying Rebel ships. Lando and the Rebel Forces unsuccessfully attempt to penetrate the force field, and the efforts on Endor have failed. Lando sees many of his comrades dying for the Alliance. He feels that the Alliance might die itself if something is not done soon. Lando makes a final decision to plow the Millennium Falcon through the force field in a self-sacrificing gesture for the Rebel Alliance. Lando and the Falcon explode in a beautiful burst of energy and color.”
The first giveaway that the treatment is bogus is that its 1980 date pre-dates Lucas’ hand-written first draft of Jedi by over six months. Not only that, but this supposedly older treatment more closely matches the finished film than the first draft screenplay, which has such differing elements as two Death Stars, the Imperial capital world, and tribes of “Ewaks.”
Lucas’ very first hand-written draft screenplay of Jedi, dated February 24, 1981, has Lando surviving. “Chewie slaps Lando on the back, almost knocking him over,” Lucas writes of the end celebration. Different versions of this survive to the final screenplay. Lando is alive and well in every version.
An excerpt from the screenplay that has Lando and the Falcon destroyed and Han looking up, quietly voicing his loss, has shown up on the Internet, but it too is a fake. Also untrue are tales that footage of the Falcon made its way into test screenings of Return of the Jedi, but was ultimately left out of the movie because it didn’t score well with the audience.
Given the weight of this evidence, it appears there is no truth behind the rumor that the Falcon and Lando were originally to have perished. It is possible the idea may have been thrown around during undocumented brainstorming sessions, but the legend that it actually was committed to film is false.
Urban Legend: Long before Star Wars made it to the movie screen, the entire story existed as a series of novels entitled “The Journal of the Whills” which told the tales of Episodes I-VI and more.
It would be the ultimate find: the rumored tome which contains the complete Star Wars saga. One rumor pegs it as a series of 12 books. Unfortunately, such books do not exist outside of wishful thinking.
At the bottom of the Prologue to A New Hope’s novelization is the tantalizing attribution: “From the First Saga, The Journal of the Whills.”
This cryptic citation has caused much confusion over the years. The Journal is not a massive tome with a maddeningly low print run that is eluding collectors. Rather, it is a fictitious work from which the Star Wars stories are culled.
The storyline of the entire Star Wars saga has never been printed. It exists in the mind of George Lucas, and in his binders of notes and story treatments. “Originally, I was trying to have the story be told by somebody else; there was somebody watching this whole story and recording it, somebody probably wiser than the mortal players in the actual events,” explains Lucas in Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays. “I eventually dropped this idea, and the concepts behind the Whills turned into the Force. But the Whills became part of this massive amount of notes, quotes, background information that I used for the scripts; the stories were actually taken from the Journal of the Whills.”
That said, though, there was one Star Wars book published before the 1977 release of the film, which may have helped keep this legend alive. The novelization of A New Hope – then called Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, came out a full six months early, in December of 1976. Now a collector’s item, the novel features early Ralph McQuarrie artwork of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, and proudly states on its cover “soon to be a spectacular motion picture!”
So though the novel was written based on the movie screenplay, it did come out first. This was a time when no one knew about Star Wars, and Lucasfilm had to do anything it could to spread the word about its soon-to-be revolutionary movie. Perhaps fans that saw the 1976 first printing dates began to speculate on there being other early books.
Urban Legend: The footage of Luke and Biggs at Anchorhead appeared in a few early screenings of Star Wars, and was shown when the film first aired on TV.
The letters column of the Star Wars Insider magazine revealed just how pervasive this legend is. A few years back, many fans wrote in, adamant that they remembered cut scenes featuring Biggs Darklighter and Luke Skywalker being shown theatrically or on television. To paraphrase Obi-Wan, “your mind can deceive you; don’t trust it.”
Most fans know of the cut Anchorhead scene. Early in A New Hope, as the droids trek across the deserts of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker has a reunion with his old friend Biggs Darklighter. The footage was cut from the final release of the film. It was never released theatrically. Yet there are many fans who seem to remember seeing it.
Where are these false memories coming from? Well, most Star Wars fans have vivid imaginations — after all, Star Wars is an excellent playground for the imagination. A combination of half-remembered images together with an active imagination could have constructed these past memories. Although the Biggs footage was never shown theatrically, it did survive in a number of forms:
The Star Wars novelization has the scene with Luke and Biggs
The very first Star Wars comic book, from Marvel Comics, included the sequence
A very brief excerpt of filming this scene is visible in The Making of Star Wars television special, which aired on September 16, 1977 — this may account for fans remembering it being shown on TV
The original Star Wars Storybook featured the scene complete with photos
The 1981 Star Wars radio drama included an expanded version of this scene
So, the above sources combined with a fertile imagination may have produced memories of this film being shown theatrically and on television.
Urban Legend: A rocket-firing Boba Fett action figure was made and several were shipped to early buyers.
This one’s been the bane of many an action figure collector. When the first Boba Fett action figure was planned in 1978, following that year’s “Star Wars Holiday Special” on television which introduced the bounty hunter in an animated segment and in anticipation of the character’s role in the upcoming film, The Empire Strikes Back, toymaker Kenner Products had plans to incorporate a special rocket-firing backpack.
The Boba Fett figure wasn’t available in stores initially. It was first unveiled as a 1979 mail-in promotion in which collectors could send in cut-out proofs-of-purchase and then receive the rocket-firing figure a while later. While the toy was still in the final stages of planning, however, a similar missile-firing feature in Battlestar Galactica toys from Mattel raised some child safety issues and caused a product recall. Kenner quickly realized it had to modify the coolest and most promoted feature of its new action figure. It experimented with a few variations to see if it could figure out a child-proof “locking” mechanism for the small firing missile, but quickly gave up and retooled the figure. It removed the firing mechanism and permanently glued the missile into the backpack.
Kenner quickly modified all advertising and promotional material so that the offer no longer made mention of the rocket-firing feature. Also, the Fetts that were mailed came with a small note explaining the following:
“Originally, our Star Wars Boba Fett action figure was designed to have a spring-launched rocket. The launcher has been removed from the product for safety reasons. If you are dissatisfied with the product, please return it to us and we will replace it with any Star Wars mini-action figure of your choice.”
While some people “remember” getting a missile-firing Fett in the mail, none of the rocket-firing Boba Fett figures were released. Their memories are playing tricks on them. A small amount of production-test figures, called “first-shots”, were made for Kenner’s inspection, but these were usually rough, unfinished, unpainted action figures, although these and some painted variations have made there way to collectors’ hands.
So, if you hear tales of “a friend of a friend who got a rocket-firing Fett in the mail,” be gentle.
Urban Legend: At the end of A New Hope, an excited Luke Skywalker can be heard to yell “Carrie!” to Princess Leia.
Actors do make mistakes. They are, after all, humans (even the computer-generated ones, at heart). Since so much work has to go into turning an on-set performance into a finished Star Wars movie, mistakes can be caught and fixed by the many people who handle the film after the shooting is done.
Much of the sound heard in Star Wars was created and crafted after the action had been shot. Though on-set microphones captured the live performance as it occurred, many times actors had to come back in to loop dialog. Even dialog that is captured on set is carefully mixed and massaged by sound editors to achieve a certain consistency and interaction with other added sound effects. In the end, so many people scrutinize the audio recording that it seems unlikely that such a gaff could have gotten through.
So, while it indeed sounds like “Carrie!” to many people, in the finished film, that’s not what Mark Hamill says.
What does he say? While putting together the improved soundtrack for the Special Edition Trilogy, sound editor Ben Burtt investigated the matter. All the original tracks, 1/4-inch tapes, and source materials were pulled out from storage, and listened to in a big mix room at Skywalker Sound. “We made loops out of everything Mark said and played them for a panel of listeners,” says Burtt. “We edited the recording and filtered it and did everything we could to clean up the phrase where he yells as he hugs Princess Leia”
The audio investigation included numerous takes of Mark Hamill recording that scene. “The consensus was that he is yelling ‘hey’ or ‘yay,’ rather than ‘Carrie.’ In other takes he specifically yells ‘yay!’ at that point,” explains Burtt. “Like most garbled dialog, if you listen to it over and over with all the other voices in there you can convince yourself that he is saying ‘Carrie’ or any number of things. But we were convinced that he really was just cheering.”
According to Mark Hamill, he excitedly yells “Hey! There she is!” indicating that Luke was scanning the rushing crowd for Leia. In the excitement, Luke doesn’t stop to enunciate each syllable like a certain golden protocol droid would do. “I ended up swallowing the ‘is’ part,” says Hamill. So the end result was garbled to the point that some people believe it sounds an awful lot like “Carrie!” So much so that even those closely involved in the production can hear that if they listen to it enough times.
Now that we’ve said “Hello there” to all six episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the latest live-action Star Wars story now streaming on Disney+, we have an even deeper understanding of the former Jedi master during his years in exile on Tatooine. Sure, he was looking after Luke Skywalker and keeping the son of Skywalker out of trouble. But now we know that he also had to fight off Inquisitors, former pupils, and protect Luke’s twin sister, Leia. Prove your strength in the Force and find out how well you know Ben, er, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
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Synopsis: (22 Years Before Episode IV) Ten years after the events of the Battle of Naboo, not only has the galaxy undergone significant change, but so have Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé Amidala, and Anakin Skywalker as they are thrown together again for the first time since the Trade Federation invasion of Naboo. Anakin has grown into the accomplished Jedi apprentice of Obi-Wan, who himself has transitioned from student to teacher. The two Jedi are assigned to protect Padmé whose life is threatened by a faction of political separatists. As relationships form and powerful forces collide, these heroes face choices that will impact not only their own fates, but the destiny of the Republic.
Opening Crawl:
There is unrest in the Galactic Senate. Several thousand solar systems have declared their intentions to leave the Republic.
This separatist movement, under the leadership of the mysterious Count Dooku, has made it difficult for the limited number of Jedi Knights to maintain peace and order in the galaxy.
Senator Amidala, the former Queen of Naboo, is returning to the Galactic Senate to vote on the critical issue of creating an ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC to assist the overwhelmed Jedi….
Awards: Academy Award Nominee: Best Visual Effects
Saturn Award Winner: Best Costumes, Best Special Effects. Saturn Award Nominee: Best Actress, Best DVD Special Edition Release, Best Director, Best Music, Best Performance by a Young Actor, Best Science Fiction Award.
Cast
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Ewan McGregor
Padmé
Natalie Portman
Anakin Skywalker
Hayden Christensen
Count Dooku
Christopher Lee
Mace Windu
Samuel L. Jackson
Yoda
Frank Oz
Supreme Chancellor Palpatine
Ian McDiarmid
Shmi Skywalker
Pernilla August
Jango Fett
Temuera Morrison
Senator Bail Organa
Jimmy Smits
Cliegg Lars
Jack Thompson
Zam Wesell
Leeanna Walsman
Jar Jar Binks
Ahmed Best
Dormé
Rose Byrne
Sio Bibble
Oliver Ford Davies
Dexter Jettster
Ronald Falk
Captain Typho
Jay Laga’aia
Watto
Andrew Secombe
C-3PO
Anthony Daniels
Ki-Adi-Mundi & Nute Gunray
Silas Carson
Queen Jamillia
Ayesha Dharker
Boba Fett
Daniel Logan
Owen Lars
Joel Edgerton
Beru Whitesun
Bonnie Maree Piesse
Voice Of Lama Su
Anthony Phelan
Voice Of Taun We
Rena Owen
Madame Jocasta Nu
Alethea McGrath
Hermione Bagwa
Susie Porter
Elan Sleazebaggano
Matt Doran
Lott Dod
Alan Ruscoe
Plo Koon
Matt Sloan
Cordé
Veronica Segura
Mas Amedda
David Bowers
Naboo Lieutenant
Steve John Shepherd
Clone Trooper
Bodie ‘Tihoi’ Taylor
Senator Orn Free Taa
Matt Rowan
Senator Ask Aak
Steven Boyle
Kit Fisto
Zachariah Jensen
J.K.Burtola
Alex Knoll
Mari Amithest
Phoebe Yiamkiati
R2-D2
Kenny Baker
Oppo Rancisis
Hassani Shapi
Eeth Koth
Jerome Blake
Adi Gallia
Gin
Saesee Tiin
Khan Bonfils
Even Piell
Michaela Cottrell
Depa Billaba
Dipika O’Neill Joti
Crew
Directed By
George Lucas
Screenplay By
George Lucas
Executive Producer
George Lucas
Director Of Photography
David Tattersall, B.S.C.
Production Designer
Gavin Bocquet
Editor And Sound Designer
Ben Burtt
Costume Designer
Trisha Biggar
Casting By
Robin Gurland
Music By
John Williams
Visual Effects Supervisors
John Knoll
Pablo Helman
Ben Snow
Dennis Muren, A.S.C.
Animation Director
Rob Coleman
Concept Design Supervisors
Doug Chiang
Erik Tiemens
Ryan Church
Production Supervisor
Stephen Jones
First Assistant Director
James McTeigue
Second Assistant Director
Claire Richardson
Second Second Assistant Director
Paul Sullivan
High Definition Supervisor
Fred Meyers
Supervising Art Director
Peter Russell
Art Directors
Jonathan Lee
Ian Gracie
Phil Harvey
Michelle McGahey
Fred Hole
Assistant Art Directors
Jacinta Leong
Clive Memmott
Art Department Coordinator
Colette Birrell
Draftspeople
Andrew Powell
Edward Cotton
Peter Milton
Damien Drew
Junior Draftspeople
Mark Bartholomew
Andrew Chan
Cindi Knapton
Paul Ocolisan
Set Model Makers
Ben Collins
Kerryanne Jensen
Michael Kelm
Conceptual Researcher
David Craig
Graphics/3d Modeller
Pheng Sisopha
Art Department Runners
Roderick England
Chris Penn
Art Department Supervisor
Fay David
Concept Artists
Iain McCaig
Dermot Power
Jay Shuster
Ed Natividad
Marc Gabbana
Kurt Kaufman
Phil Shearer
Ravi Bansal
Storyboard Artists
Mark Sexton
Rodolfo Damaggio
Sculptor
Tony Lees
Concept Sculptors
Robert E. Barnes
Michael Patrick Murnane
Tony McVey
Concept Model Makers
John Goodson
John Duncan
Carol Bauman
R.Paul Topolos
Simon Dunsdon
Brian Pohl
Katie Cole
Stunt Coordinator/Swordmaster
Nick Gillard
Assistant Stunt Coordinator
Richard Boué
Obi-Wan Stunt Double
Nash Edgerton
Jango Stunt Double
Scott Mclean
Dooku Stunt Double
Kyle Rowling
Padmé Stunt Doubles
Gill Stratham
Carly Harrop
Stunt Performers
Daniel Stevens
Avril Wynne
Chris Mitchell
Jon Heaney
Ray Anthony
Dean Gould
Dar Davies
Robert Simper
Joss Gower
Production Manager (Tunisia)
Peter Heslop
Script Supervisor
Jayne-Ann Tenggren
Unit Manager
Tic Carroll
Production Coordinators
Paul Ranford
Isobel Thomas
Anna Hall
Assistant Production Coordinators
Jacqueline King
Polly Leach
Executive Assistants To George Lucas
Jane Bay
Sarita Patel
Assistant To George Lucas
Anne Merrifield
Australian Assistant To Rick McCallum
Jacqui Louez
US Assistants To Rick McCallum
ArdeesRabang Jundis
Alvin Lopez
IT Manager
Paul Matwiy
Network Manager
Peter Hricak
Unit Nurse
Jacquie Robertson
Extras Casting
Maura Fay
Ros Breden
Casting Assistant
Vanessa Sulman
Artists’ Assistants
Jill Goldberg
Leonard Thomas
Chloe Moss
Alice Lanagan
Third Assistant Director
Gordon Westman
Set PA
Sam Smith
Production Assistants
Ali Keshavji
Felicity Gibbins
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Joshua Watkins
Tim Lion
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Sotiri Sotiropoulos
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George Hatsatouris
Gay Cobham
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Margueritte O’Sullivan
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Kathryn Ramos
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Kevin Plummer
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Valerie Williams
Patrick Plummer
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Ayse Selcuk
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Rajeshree Patel
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Wendy Gorman
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Deborah Eastwood
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Robert Threadgold
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Traci Duxbury
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Val Sunderland
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Fred Meyers
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Brad Shield
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Calum McFarlane
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Brett Matthews
Damian Wyvill
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Luke Nixon
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Jason Binnie
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Matt Hunt
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Michael Taylor
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Cameron Morley
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Geoff Brown
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Jason Klaffer
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David Nichols
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Jorge Escanuela
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Mick Vivian
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Ady Rose
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Paul Anderson
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Rod Conder
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Ben Lindell
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Felix Pomeranz
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Peter Walpole
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Bev Dunn
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Dominic Hyman
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Andrew Crichton
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Tony Xeros
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Godric Cole
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Joanne Tastula
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Michael Dayman
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Reuben Hill
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Shane Aumont
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Ian Andrewartha
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Sandra Carrington
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Robert Moxham
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Peter Kodicek
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Graham Beatty
David Felgar
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Ty Teiger
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John-Paul (Lon) Lucini
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Peter Wyborn
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Trevor Smith
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Jim Leng
Adam Grace
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Keith Rae
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Guy Masek
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Cal Foote
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Thomas Van Koeverden
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Trish Foreman
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Sam Ford
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Sophie Buttner
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Michael Mooney
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Nicole Young
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Ivo Coveney
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Jason Gibaud
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Martin Rezard
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Tim Shanahan
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Ann Maskrey
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Rebecca Villiers
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Vanessa Edwards
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Lyn Askew
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Heather Laurie
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Alan Brown
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Shanthi Nadaraja
Thanks To All The Australian Construction Crew
Gaffer
Eddie Knight
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Cheryl Nardi
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Jason Ballantine
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Allison Gibbons
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Jamie Forester
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Michael Blanchard
Special Visual Effects And Animation By
Industrial Light & Magic
A Division Of Lucas Digital Ltd. Marin County, California
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Judith Weaver
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Alex Jaeger
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James Tooley
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Joe Pavlo
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Blake Sweeney
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Trish Krause
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Christopher Minos
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Delio Tramontozzi
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Christina Yim
Virginie Michel D’annoville
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Sxott Bonnenfant
Maria Bowen
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William Clay
Vincent De Quattro
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Andrea Maiolo
Scott May
Steve McGrath
Tareq Mirza
Richard Moore
Giovanni Nakpil
Timothy Naylor
Susan Ross
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Lee Uren
Omz Velasco
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Li-Hsien Wei
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Yusei Uesugi
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Mathieu Raynault
Susumu Yukuhiro
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Kent Matheson
Masahiko Tani
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Wei Zheng
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Jack Mongovan
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Katie Morris
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Jason Snell
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Amy Christensen
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Jeff Light
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Scott Balcerek
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Nic Anastassiou
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Jerome Bakum
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Amy Allen
Dhyana Brummel
Damien Carr
Christine Castellano
Mai Delapa
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Brian Gernand
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Lauren Abrams
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Melanie Walas
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Carl Miller
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Michael Bienstock
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Sprague Anderson
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Gillian Libbert
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Thomas Cloutier
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Michael Olague
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William Barr
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Carl Assmus
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Craig Mohagen
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Charles Ray
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Geoffrey Heron
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Robert Clot
Post Production Sound Services Provided By
Skywalker Sound
A Division Of Lucas Digital Ltd. Marin County, California
Re-Recording Mixers
Gary Rydstrom
Michael Semanick
Rick Kline
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Ben Burtt
Matthew Wood
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Teresa Eckton
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Christopher Scarabosio
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Marilyn McCoppen
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Mary Helen Leasman
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Coya Elliott
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Eleanor Beaton
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Michael Axinn
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David Acord
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Jonathan Greber
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Christopher Barron
Tim Burby
Adr Recorded At
Soundfirm, Sydney & Melbourne
Mandrill Audio, Auckland
4mc, London
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Frank ‘Pepe’ Merel
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Travis Crenshaw
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Dennie Thorpe
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Ronald G. Roumas
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Gary A. Rizzo
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Jurgen Scharpf
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Juan Peralta
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Sean England
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John Torrijos
Ed Dunkley
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Scott Brewer
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Ken Wannberg
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Peter Myles
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Steven R. Galloway
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Abbey Road Studios
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Shawn Murphy
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Andrew Dudman
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Conrad Pope
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Jo Ann Kane Music Service
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Mark Graham
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London Symphony Orchestra
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Gordan Nikolitch
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London Voices
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Terry Edwards
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Randy Kerber
Additional Shooting Crew
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Brian Donovan
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Giles Nuttgens
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David Lee
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Victoria Chambers-Pike
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Leon Apsey
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Richard Bullock
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Mark Scruton
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Dave Smith
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Sonny Burdis
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Pete Myslowski
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Peter Watson
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Alex Boswell
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Paul Nott-Macaire
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Dennis Bovington
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Eddie Sansom
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Pat Hay
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Jo Measure
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Virginia Murray
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Victoria Morgan
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Phil Allchin
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Jeanie Udall
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Richard Hewitt
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Matthew Penry-Davey
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Brian Simmons
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Nick Dudman
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Paul Spateri
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Barrie Gower
Shaune Harrison
Kate Hill
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Chris Barton
Martin Reid
Tamzine Hanks
Tom Blake
Simon Williams
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Andy Lee
Creatures Coordinator
Lyn Nicholson
Special Effects
Any Effects
Special Effects Supervisor
Tom Harris
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Alex Gurucharri
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Barry Woodman
Director Of Publicity
Lynne Hale
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Lisa Shaunessy
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Jo Donaldson
Jenny Craik
Robyn Stanley
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Elizabeth Tulloch
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Lizzie Eves
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Lisa Tomasetti
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Paul Tiller
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Evelyn Rose
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Ianna White
Image Archivist
Tina Mills
Transport Captain
Hans Van Beuge
Unit Drivers
Duan Kereru
Dave Simpkins
Phil McDonell
Ron Wyndham
In the midst of making a movie, when pre-production is in full swing and everything has to take form quickly, there needs to be people to make it happen, to deftly turn clay and other media into “visualization” tools, or mock-ups. On Episode I, one of those key people was Robert Barnes.
“I’m a long-time Star Wars fan,” Barnes says from his office at Skywalker Ranch. “I’ve always been fascinated by the energy and creativity poured into these movies.” Born and raised in California, Barnes studied art and industrial design in college. “Industrial design combines all the artistic techniques I like,” he says, “and it adds the practical angle of product production, because you’re designing devices that are supposed to be used and not just looked at. I really like that.” Barnes added to his skills by also studying sculpture and painting.
After two years of hard work at California State University, Long Beach, Barnes received an assignment to illustrate a short science fiction script. His instructor brought in the Sketch Book of Joe Johnston – one of the original Star Wars designers – and Barnes was hit by a revelation. “I discovered that I was studying in the same program where Joe Johnston, John Dykstra (visual effects pioneer and former ILM wizard), and Steve Gawley (current ILM Model Supervisor) had been,” says Barnes, “working on that assignment, and hearing the stories from my instructor (Rob Westerkamp), who had been a schoolmate of theirs, made a connection between my childhood love for science fiction ‘stuff,’ and real life. I had always remembered seeing the very first “Making of Star Wars“‘ on television as a kid, and for the first time I realized that it was possible to actually make a living out of that.”
But when the time came to make the jump, things weren’t as obvious to Barnes as he might have liked. “My wife had to talk me into applying for an internship at Industrial Light & Magic,” he recalls. “It was a daunting task, but I finally gave in – one day before the deadline! I put my package together overnight, sent it, and waited.” The last-minute gamble paid off: ILM invited him to come aboard. “I was in the ILM Art Department, doing visual research, putting presentations together, building artwork catalogs and doing a bit of basic sculpting. I also got to work on an architectural model when the department moved, and that was a lot of fun,” says Barnes. “This was my first experience in the movie business, and I got to see how things were done on the other side of the screen. I liked what I saw.”
After his internship, Barnes went back to school in order to complete his training and get his design degree. Upon graduation, he promptly got an offer from ILM, which wanted to hire him as a production assistant. Barnes was happy to be reunited with his visual effects buddies. But after only two months, Episode I Design Director Doug Chiang called and offered Barnes a job as production assistant on the new Star Wars film. “I felt a bit bad about leaving ILM so early,” Barnes says, “but this was too good an opportunity, and the people around me understood that. So I packed my things and moved to Skywalker Ranch.”
Barnes quickly became an expert at quick and effective visualization. Whenever a design needed to be mocked-up so that everyone could see what the object or character looked like as a three-dimensional element, Barnes would whip something up and make it happen. “You just have to be quick, and not be afraid to use anything to reach your goal,” he says. “Foam, air ducting, mat board, liquid latex, gauze, anything that will do the trick.” The key: keep it cheap, keep it fast. Barnes first started by helping Production Designer Gavin Bocquet build foamcore models of Otoh Gunga, the underwater city of the Gungans, and went on from there. “At one point I worked on Podracer mock-ups,” Barnes says. “The mock-ups were built in foam at 1:24 scale, and we’d use a lipstick-sized camera to simulate some shots between and around the models. I felt like we were kids playing with toys.” Barnes didn’t dislike the experience, of course. “I also got to sculpt the first representation of the underwater environment the Gungan sub goes through – the series of underwater crevasses and cliff walls,” he says. “The whole conceptual model was sculpted in a big block of foam, and painted in shades of dark blue, to simulate the kind of lighting you would get at such a depth.”
Among Barnes’ many other projects was the construction of the first full-size battle droid. The mechanical wonder was built out of foamcore, and fully articulated. When it came time to visualize some Podracing scenes with the help of videomatics – crude video footage used for reference – Barnes conjured up Anakin’s cockpit, full size. “That was really fun, because I got to work directly with George detailing the cockpit and adding antennas and instruments. And we all couldn’t resist the temptation to climb in and work the controls. We’d all been working on Podrace elements, but this was the first time we could put ourselves into it.” He also crafted a life-size foam Sebulba puppet, and gave the mock-up pilot a mock-up cockpit. He did the same thing for the videomatic used to visualize the ground battle, skillfully giving life to an assemblage of foam pieces that became a very realistic representation of Jar Jar. Barnes’ diversified skills also allowed him to paint most of the creature maquettes based on Terryl Whitlatch’s drawings. Then he moved on to clay sculpture.
Barnes started by modifying already existing sculptures. In the case of the Sando Aqua Monster, for instance, Barnes was asked to re-sculpt the head and change body details to make the whole creature look more massive. “I used texture to convey a sense of size,” he explains. “I would create fine texture to replace large bumps and the like. We also gave the Monster smaller eyes, which is a good indicator of huge scale.” Barnes also sculpted a handful of characters, like an early version of the pot-bellied Watto. “The challenge here is to take a 2D painting or drawing, and give it a 3D form,” says Barnes. “We sometimes have multiple views for the same object, but they’re all in two dimensions. And that process is right up my alley. It’s product design: interpreting 2D drawing in 3D concepts.”
But why painstakingly create such sculptures when these characters will be re-built as computer models anyway? “Despite all the computer power now available, visual effects artists still rely on clay models,” says Barnes. “They are usually scanned into the computer, and serve as the basic structure on which the computer models will be built. They also use the sculptures along the way as reference material. That’s why there is still a whole team of concept sculptors at ILM. They’re real masters – I’ve learned a lot from those guys.”
Back for Episode II, Barnes will have an opportunity to keep learning and to keep perfecting his fascinating art of bringing concepts to life as quick as a wink.
For Industrial Light & Magic, one of the most demanding tasks on Episode I was to seamlessly mesh computer-generated characters, objects and landscapes together with live-action footage. When a CG character interacts with a flesh-and-blood actor, the illusion of actual contact needs to be perfect. And in this respect, proper light sources greatly help “sell” the effect. So the visual effects teams devised clever and inventive tools that would allow them to duplicate, within their computers, the lighting conditions that existed on the set during filming. One of these tools was surprisingly simple, yet more efficient than any high-tech gear could have been. A simple sphere.
“When you’re putting a CG character into a shot and you want it to look like it’s really there,” says Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll, “it’s extremely important to get the lighting right. And the best way to do that is to try to capture what kind of lighting was present on the set at the point where the CG character is supposed to be standing. So we had a sphere. One side of it was gray, and the other side was chrome. And each time the lights and cameras were set up for a new shot, we would film the sphere – first with its gray side facing the camera, and then the chrome side.”
“The gray side of the sphere is the same 17 percent gray as our standard gray card,” continues Knoll. This gray card is used to gauge the overall lighting at a precise point on the set, and is always the same shade of gray for continuity in the comparisons. “With the gray side, you can see what the key light and fill light ratio were, and what color the different lights were,” Knoll continues.
On a set, the “key light” is the principal source of light, while the “fill light” refers to the source that creates the ambiance lighting – the type of even lighting one gets in a room where the sun bounces off the walls and covers pretty much the whole area. For this reason, the fill is usually created with indirect illumination, such as a spotlight reflected on a white piece of cardboard.
“Within a computer,” explains Knoll, “a great way to get the lighting very close to what it was on the set is to put a computer-generated gray sphere next to the one that was shot with the live-action elements. You can then move your CG lights around until you have a pretty good match and the two spheres look the same.” This technique enabled the digital artists to get information on the color and intensity of the light sources. To obtain details as to the exact position of these lights, the crew rotated their shiny Death Star.
“The chrome side was very useful, in that it would act like a curved mirror and let us see all the lights in the room,” says Knoll. “You could look at the sphere and see that the key light was here and that the fill was coming from a four-by-eight piece of foamcore down there.” This allowed the virtual light sources to be positioned with more accuracy within the digital set.
Despite its obvious usefulness, however, the sphere only provided the visual effects teams with approximations of the way light sources played on the different surfaces present on the set. The digital artists still had quite some work ahead of them to get to the final result. The sphere is a short-cut, but not a miracle. “We’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of that trick,” says Knoll. “With the sphere you can be reasonably sure that when you put your CG character in there, your lighting is already pretty close to the real thing. But you’re not done… So you start with the sphere, and begin tweaking from there.”
December 16, 2000 — John Goodson and John Duncan share more in common than a first name. The two of them are concept model makers on Episode II, and are responsible for helping envision the droids, vehicles and starships that will appear on the screen in 2002.
Working from illustrations provided by Episode II Design Director Doug Chiang other concept artists, these model makers construct detailed miniatures of Episode II’s hard-surfaced machinery, allowing effects artists as well as director George Lucas to look at all angles of an imaginary device before it is built full size or rendered digitally.
The process usually begins with several drawings showing the subject from different vantage points. From there, the model makers draw some refined sketches to extrapolate the angles, proportions and shapes. They begin construction of preliminary small models – typically from three to four inches long – to explore the look of the models. Once that look is approved, the larger model work begins, often between 14 and 18 inches in size.
“John Duncan and John Goodson are probably two of the best conceptual modelers I’ve ever worked with,” says Chiang. “They have just an incredible ability to translate two dimensional drawings into a three dimensional objects that are in many ways far superior to the original designs. They always contribute and add something more. It’s a important function, because once we get something approved on paper, we need to visualize it very quickly three dimensionally.”
Recounts Chiang, “Probably the best example of this would be the Naboo starfighter. That design was already very sleek when drawn on paper. But when I handed it over to John Duncan he made it even more elegant and refined. It’s that kind of working relationship where the design slowly starts to evolve until it’s the final product.”
Both Duncan and Goodson modeled many of the vehicles seen in Episode I. “Let’s see, there was the landing ship, the Trade Federation tank, Sith speeder, Republic cruiser, Coruscant taxi, the Gungan submarine,” recounts Goodson.
“I did the original maquette for the Naboo fighter,” recalls Duncan. “I worked on the battle droid, every incarnation of the MTT, the pit droid, a number of shuttlecraft, Valorum’s shuttle, the STAPs… I almost have to sit down with a list of pictures and say, ‘yeah, I worked on that, that and that.'”
The two can trace their passion for model making back to childhood. “When I was about five years old I built my first model kit,” remembers Goodson. “Another kid in the neighborhood took a model and just smashed it to pieces. I was so fascinated with that I went and collected all the little pieces of it and pieced this thing back together again.” Although the end result, an airplane, was made from shattered fragments with a candy bar cardboard sleeve for wings, Goodson remembers it as a masterpiece. A steady diet of Star Trek, Space 1999, and Starlog magazine fostered in Goodson a love for miniature ships.
“Star Trek was one of my first fascinations when I was a kid,” concurs Duncan. “I had a job mowing lawns and I used to go out as soon as I got paid. I’d take my $5 and run down to the local drugstore and buy myself whatever Star Trek model was on the shelf. So I had all those and I put them together and then of course when Star Wars came out, that one really hit home. I was a big C-3PO and R2-D2 fan.”
Aside from his fascination with the droids, Duncan also was a big fan of the darker characters in the series. “I always liked bad guys,” he reveals. “Darth Vader was one of my very favorite characters from the movie, and with other science fictions shows I’ve always leaned towards the bad guys. They’re always more fascinating.”
For Episode II, Duncan got to work on some villainous machinery in the form of new battle droids. “I made the original maquette of the battle droids for Episode I, and I’m working on the new battle droid for Episode II. That’s the one I can’t wait to see on the screen. I just love robots; Lost in Space, Robbie the Robot, Metropolis, all those classics.”
Goodson also has experience in designing mechanical monsters. “The destroyer droid from Episode I was actually a lot of fun,” he recalls. “I worked on two versions of that, one coiled up in a ball and the other version where it’s standing. I also made a really crude kind of paper and plastic model that would kind of unfold, just to work out the mechanics of it all.”
Prior to their work in the Art Department, both Duncan and Goodson were veterans of ILM’s Model Shop. Duncan’s first project at ILM was helping realize the famous Acura commercial wherein a full-sized car appears to zip through a giant Hot Wheels racetrack. Duncan experienced a childhood thrill when he helped construct the Enterprise-E for Star Trek: First Contact.
As a longtime fan of the Star Wars movies, Duncan was taken aback by the possibility of working on Episode I. “It caught me off guard because there were a lot of people who had been here a lot longer than I had. I guess I impressed the right people and lucked into it. I was very excited. Steve Gawley was the one that came and told me,” recounts Duncan. Gawley had been one of Duncan’s heroes, having worked in the model shop on the original Star Wars trilogy. “It was so funny because the first project I ever worked on at ILM, I got to work with Steve Gawley and I remember going home and telling my wife, ‘I get to call him Steve!’ That he’s the one that told me that they were interested in having me up at the Ranch for Episode I is so funny.”
After his stint in Episode I’s Art Department, Duncan took his model making expertise to ILM, where he would help create the actual shooting models based on the designs of the concept models. “What’s different is that in the Art Department, one artist generally works on one model. At the ILM Model Shop, you get 10 people working on one thing. For the Trade Federation battleship for Episode I, I think just about everybody in the Model Shop had some little piece of that somewhere along the way.”
Goodson also worked at ILM, merging his schooling in industrial design with his childhood fascination of building models into a full-time career. “The job was supposed to be ‘come in for a week,’ and that’s going on 13 years now, so I think it’s worked out perfectly. To wind up working on Star Wars, it’s absolutely amazing to me.”
Despite being involved in cutting edge filmmaking, Goodson eschews computers for a more hands-on approach. “The most sophisticated I get is a calculator,” he says. “Five years ago everybody was totally paranoid that computer graphics would wipe us out. But it’s dependent upon the visual effects supervisor as to what they feel is the best approach. Certain effects supervisors, like John Knoll, love to have models. Even if he’s going to do the whole sequence in CG he loves to have models for lighting reference and shadows and all that stuff.”
Goodson believes there will always be a need for physical models in the concept phase. “I think it’s much harder to see things when you design in a computer,” says Goodson. “I call it going from hands-on to hands-tied because you can put a design on a computer, and put it on a turntable, but it is not the same thing as being able to take it out and hold it in your hand and look at it. Models are little version of reality. People are always intrigued with looking at the detail. Pilots that have flown a B17 in World War II have models of B17s. It’s a fascination.”
Of interest to long-time Star Wars fans is the gradual aesthetic shift from the smooth streamlined designs of Episode I to the more plate-and-armored look of the classic trilogy. “You’re definitely starting to see things that are going to integrate these first movies into the original three films,” says Goodson. “There’s definitely that theme that’s starting to come in. There were a few things that looked like traditional Star Wars — the Federation Battleship and the Republic Cruiser in particular had that kind of plated look with little chunks taken out of the edge of the plating and little chips for detail. But we’re now seeing things that are starting to kind of cross that line.”
Designs adapt and improve as the story progressed. A starfighter design originally intended for evil-doers in the film found its way to the good guy’s arsenal, allowing Duncan to craft a model that would have otherwise gone discarded. “They just keep moving things around,” says Duncan. “If it doesn’t work for one use, it may look great for another. I know they did that for a number of the creature designs where they started making something for one thing, and then George suggest that by scaling it down, it could be used for something else.”
“There are these huge walls in Doug’s office, one that’s called Hopefuls that are approved art, and the other one’s has unapproved or preliminary art,” says Goodson. “There’s a lot of fantastic artwork on the unapproved wall. And a lot of times they went back to it. George would remember previous designs or concepts and either use them as-is, or use them as jumping-off points for other ideas. A lot of times they’ll go back and they’ll pull things off that wall and use them.”
Of the approved designs that Goodson worked on, the one he’s most eager to see on the screen is a brand new military transport. “I’m really anxious to see that,” says Goodson. “Part of the reason is because Doug did one really dramatic concept painting with them, and he’s done a variety of sketches where he’s got all these really great shots where you’re behind it looking over the wings, and it’s firing missiles down below. It’s pretty cool.”
Despite the long time between a model’s completion and seeing it realized on the big screen, Duncan’s steady work makes the wait bearable. “You’re working on it the whole way through so you don’t just do your stuff and then have to sit and wait. One of the hardest things on Episode I was that there was a lot of time spent building these maquettes and things without seeing any shots. At ILM, you got used to seeing dailies or at least periodically seeing something, which would inspire you to keep going. On Episode I pre-production, it was a year-and-a-half of concept work before even a frame of film was shot, it kind of detached you a little from the project. This time around, however, I have a better idea of what is going on.”
Like their work on Episode I, Duncan and Goodson expect to move down to ILM and work on the post-production end of model making there. “What I’m kind of looking forward to is that we’re going to be doing more miniature sets on this one,” says Duncan. “They found that that worked out really well on Episode I. Instead of building all these full sets, they just build a floor and one wall and did the rest with a miniature. I’m excited about that because that’s what I do.”
Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of their work is seeing their designs transformed into mass-market models, so that aspiring model makers can now follow in Duncan and Goodson’s footsteps. When Episode I model kits hit the shelves in 1999, Goodson took a close look at some of his handiwork. “You wonder how they’ll translate some of the parts you designed, because there are little personal details. For the MTT, John Duncan put a Honda symbol on the back end of it. The first thing we did when we got the toys was to look for the Honda emblem. But they didn’t replicate that,” smiles Goodson.
