Source: Official Site

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….

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