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Star Wars (1977) - a general Random Thoughts thread — Page 2

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Holy Bantha Poodoo! I never picked up on that before. 😮

Another deliberate creative decision I’m sure…

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Where were you in '77?

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TAN-ti-vee FOUR.

Respect to the the Radio Dramas and Brian Daley.

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J. Yuenger, (music producer, world traveler & White Zombie guitarist) posted his “quarantine movie playlist” on instagram, which includes… Star Wars '77 (despecialized)!
The guy who used to sing in his band (Rob Zombie) has also mentioned Despecilized in interviews. They used some samples of Greedo on a couple songs.
These connections make me happy.

Ray’s Lounge
Biggs in ANH edit idea
ROTJ opening edit idea

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Rob Zombie would be cool as a bounty hunter or something in The Mandalorian.

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SilverWook said:

Holy Bantha Poodoo! I never picked up on that before. 😮

Another deliberate creative decision I’m sure…

What’s extra funny about this is that it was a fix back in 1977. In Making of Star Wars, there’s a shot of Williams at the podium, and an early composite of that same shot from the approach except Yavin has actually been composited in. They obviously removed it for logistical reasons back then.

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I’m just here because I’m driving tonight.

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Excellent find! Although Yavin 4 is still at least still coming out from behind the gas giant in that shot. Nice that somebody back in '77 gave it a little more thought given the breakneck pace of post production.

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Excellent! I had been wondering myself if the absence of Yavin in the original shot was due to that very consideration.

“That Darth Vader, man. Sure does love eating Jedi.”

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I had a weird dream where I was talking to Gary Kurtz. He told me that he’d always wanted George to fix the blue door on the escape pod, but George said “it’s good enough” and decided not to fix it. He said that back in the day George didn’t want to spend the time or money to make things like that as good as they could be, but now that SW is a massive success he’s going back and fixing those things.

“That Darth Vader, man. Sure does love eating Jedi.”

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canofhumdingers said:

What am I missing that everyone thinks Annie Hall is so great? It was just whiny and pedantic and miserable at every turn. I just don’t see the appeal. I’ve never really paid any attention to Woody Allen, but if this is his typical brand of comedy it clearly isn’t for me.

The very appeal of Woody Allen is his self-aware whininess, pedantry and miserablism (“I wouldn’t want to join a club that has someone like me as a member”). It’s okay not to like it - but I personally love it!

It was also innovative like breaking the fourth wall with a Woody talking to camera (see the Marshall McLuhan scene)- and playing with other conventions like split screen scenes. It had a brilliant and iconic part in Annie Hall for Diane Keaton.

Also echoes of Woody’s earlier slapstick stuff (the sneeze scene).

A simple comedy or romantic movie it ain’t!

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Luke would still have gone after Artoo and still get mugged by Tusken raiders though.

Would be cool if Marvel did a Star Wars What If? comic. Yes, I know Dark Horse sort of did it already.

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Continuing a discussion ZkinAndBonez and I were having in another thread: apparently Ralph McQuarrie did some concept art of NSFW Leia outfits for the prison escape in the original Star Wars. See here, here, here, and also here.

In the first image, Leia’s clothing is just a loincloth, and she’s naked from the waist up. The same thing is true in the second image: the loincloth is pencilled in more lightly this time, but Leia is covering her exposed breasts with her right arm. And in the third picture (a detail from the frontispiece in The Making of ESB, though it was actually done for SW 1977), her top has partially slid off during the Imperial torture droid’s interrogation, exposing her left breast.

The fourth image is more debatable, but I think it shows Leia wearing a nipple chain under her tunic, likely inspired by a line Katharine Hepburn has about wanting to wear one in The Lion in Winter.

Contrast this image, where Leia is wearing a much more demure outfit, apparently consisting of a pair of pants and a midriff-baring tank top. So McQuarrie did indeed draw costume concepts in some of these storyboards.

Is there textual support for this sort of nudity in SW? I think so.

The 1974 SW rough draft includes a scene where Annikin Starkiller and Princess Leia are separated when they land on the jungle moon of Yavin. When Annikin catches up to her, Leia is the prisoner of nine “Ureallian trappers”, and is “half-naked” and unconscious. It’s implied they’ve sexually assaulted her.

JW Rinzler apparently thought so, but preferred not to spell it out explicitly: in one blog post on the official SW site he wrote “In the original 1974 rough draft… the “trackers” are nasty aliens who live on an Ewok-free planet known as Yavin. I don’t want to say what havoc they cause, but it isn’t pretty.”

The 1975 third draft similarly has Leia suffer a hands-on interrogation from Vader and two Imperial officers, which may be based on a scene in the THX 1138 novelization where LUH 1417 is assaulted by three guards during her imprisonment. If something similar happened to Leia, it would give Lucas a good reason to tell Ralph McQuarrie to draw her bare-breasted.

“That Darth Vader, man. Sure does love eating Jedi.”

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^ my response from that same thread…^ I highly disagree in all cases . Artists who have studied life drawing typically draw the "nude "figure and build it up from there , adding drapery and then erasing the construction lines… Mcquarrie has studied life drawing . The "nipple chain " you see is a set of lines to establish form and indicate where shadows will fall . What you claim is akin to saying the artist in this example intended these figures to be nude…https://seattleartistleague.com/art-classes/teen-figure-drawing-clothed-afternoon-july-6-10-ages-13-18/

At any rate , Star Wars was never conceived as a film containing nudity . Do you have any articles or behind the scenes interviews to show as proof of what you claim ?..now you cite some examples here, but your conclusions are pure conjecture and not solid proof .

https://screamsinthevoid.deviantart.com/

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screams in the void said:

^ my response from that same thread…^ I highly disagree in all cases . Artists who have studied life drawing typically draw the "nude "figure and build it up from there , adding drapery and then erasing the construction lines… Mcquarrie has studied life drawing . The "nipple chain " you see is a set of lines to establish form and indicate where shadows will fall . What you claim is akin to saying the artist in this example intended these figures to be nude…https://seattleartistleague.com/art-classes/teen-figure-drawing-clothed-afternoon-july-6-10-ages-13-18/

At any rate , Star Wars was never conceived as a film containing nudity . Do you have any articles or behind the scenes interviews to show as proof of what you claim ?..now you cite some examples here, but your conclusions are pure conjecture and not solid proof .

Leaving aside that one sketch that you keep mentioning, the other drawings do appear to show a bare-breasted Leia wearing only a loincloth, or at the very least having enough of a wardrobe malfunction to alarm the MPAA. Or else why is Leia covering her breasts with her arm in the second sketch?

And how do you know that “Star Wars was never conceived as a film containing nudity”?

“That Darth Vader, man. Sure does love eating Jedi.”

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because Lucas conceived the film as a retelling of the serials of his youth and wanted to give kids a modern fairy tale mythology and has been quoted many times as saying so . George Lucas in an interview in the New York Times, published on the 12th of September 1976:

It's for young people. 'Graffiti' was for 16-year-olds; this is for 14-year-olds. Young people don't have a fantasy life anymore, not the way we did. All they've got is Kojak and Dirty Harry. There's all these kids running around wanting to be killer cops.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/film/091276wars.html

and the drawings appear to YOU to show that , again , conjecture on your part and not fact .

See also…In the cover story of the April 1977 issue of American Film, for example, Lucas is quoted as saying: “I decided I wanted to make a children’s movie, to go the Disney route”; because he had realised that “a whole generation was growing up without fairytales” (Zito, 1977: 9, 13).

https://screamsinthevoid.deviantart.com/

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By the time of those George Lucas quotes, he’d already filmed the movie and decided against having any nudity. But the concept art was done at a time when the script was still in flux. Going “the Disney route” wasn’t necessarily a decided thing in 1974-5.

Besides which, costume designer John Mollo wrote in his notes from 1975 that Leia’s outfit was to be “mock-medieval” but also “Tarzan-type” (apparently for the prison escape). Which fits with the loincloth in the McQuarrie sketches.

And as I said above, there was basically a rape scene in the 1974 rough draft with a “half-naked” Leia and the “Urellian trappers”, which was indecent enough that JW Rinzler shied away from describing it on the official SW site.

I really think it’s your own assumption that, since SW is “family-friendly” now, it must have always been that way from the very beginning. The evidence suggests otherwise.

“That Darth Vader, man. Sure does love eating Jedi.”

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ray_afraid said:

How do you pronounce Tantive IV?
I’ve always said “Tant-ev Four” but apparently it’s supposed to be “Tan-tee-vee Four”???

Precisely why I always just say “blockade runner.”

…and I just say “walker” instead of AT-AT.

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ATMachine said:

By the time of those George Lucas quotes, he’d already filmed the movie and decided against having any nudity. But the concept art was done at a time when the script was still in flux. Going “the Disney route” wasn’t necessarily a decided thing in 1974-5.

Besides which, costume designer John Mollo wrote in his notes from 1975 that Leia’s outfit was to be “mock-medieval” but also “Tarzan-type” (apparently for the prison escape). Which fits with the loincloth in the McQuarrie sketches.

And as I said above, there was basically a rape scene in the 1974 rough draft with a “half-naked” Leia and the “Urellian trappers”, which was indecent enough that JW Rinzler shied away from describing it on the official SW site.

I really think it’s your own assumption that, since SW is “family-friendly” now, it must have always been that way from the very beginning. The evidence suggests otherwise.

^can you post a link to that script showing where it explicitly states that she was half naked ,or a rape ?
and I will concede that it was not decided definitefly at the start …https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2001/december-2001/kramer.pdf still do not see a loincloth or nudity in any of those sketches you posted though .

https://screamsinthevoid.deviantart.com/

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Sure:

The trappers speak in a strange language, and although they appear slightly human, they are slimy, deformed, hideous looking creatures. Two of the trappers yell at one another in a friendly argument. One shirtless creature goes into a “crawler,” and the remaining eight laugh hysterically. Starkiller moves further out on the limb to get a better view. A couple of pieces of bark break loose, and float a hundred feet to the ground. The trappers fail to notice. Moments later, the shirtless trapper emerges from the crawler with Princess Leia held unconscious and half naked over his head.

Starkiller’s rage knows no bounds. With a terrifying Jedi war cry, the young captain jumps from the tree, sails over a hundred feet, and with great agility, lands in the middle of the startled trappers. In one continuous rapid motion, he ignites his lazersword and cuts down three of the vile creatures.

– Star Wars 1974 rough draft

Also, John Mollo’s notes show that one concept for Leia’s prison attire in the 1975 third draft was a “smock” of some sort, which was skimpy enough that she would wear some of Han’s clothes after reaching the Falcon.

“That Darth Vader, man. Sure does love eating Jedi.”

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screams in the void said:

still do not see a loincloth or nudity in any of those sketches you posted though .

Yeah I can’t see anything in those either. The first two are just rough sketches with what are practically stick figures, and the other two don’t show any evidence of that.

Army of Darkness: The Medieval Deadit | The Terminator - Color Regrade | The Wrong Trousers - Audio Preservation
SONIC RACES THROUGH THE GREEN FIELDS.
THE SUN RACES THROUGH A BLUE SKY FILLED WITH WHITE CLOUDS.
THE WAYS OF HIS HEART ARE MUCH LIKE THE SUN. SONIC RUNS AND RESTS; THE SUN RISES AND SETS.
DON’T GIVE UP ON THE SUN. DON’T MAKE THE SUN LAUGH AT YOU.

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Lucas’ main inspiration, Flash Gordon had a lot of scantly clad damsels in distress and even Flash himself was bare chested almost as often as Captain Kirk. The 1930’s serials reflected this, (as much as the production code allowed at the time) and the 1980 movie made it more overt, as did the Filmation version. The animated Princess Aura was pretty smoking hot for Saturday morning tv!

I don’t know if Lucas was asking McQuarrie to draw Leia in skimpy outfits, but Carrie is on record that the infamous metal bikini in ROTJ was George’s idea.

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Looks to me like in the second image she’s covering her breasts with her right arm (which is bent at the elbow accordingly) and holding a blaster in her left hand. Though I guess it could also be the top of her dress, with her right arm held behind Luke’s back.

But the first sketch does look like Leia is topless: her skin tone is drawn slightly darker than the loincloth she’s wearing. And in the third image her left breast has popped out of her shirt while she’s being tortured (you can see the line where the fabric has slipped under her bust).

Also: this sort of thing is probably the real reason why Lucas thought Leia wouldn’t wear a bra under that dress.

“That Darth Vader, man. Sure does love eating Jedi.”