John Mollo, Oscar-Winning ‘Star Wars’ Costume Designer, Dies at 86
Sad news. His work on SW and Alien made those films much more tangibly real. RIP.
I’ve always wished for an art book of his SW drawings. I still hope that comes to happen one day.
Mojo will not be saved by
the Holy Ghost.
Mojo will not be saved by
the god Plutonium.
In fact,
MOJO WILL NOT BE SAVED!
Is this one of those “Savior, save thyself” situations?
I like the inconsistency. Wish the SW universe would hurry up and get to becoming a multiverse without a single “canon” already.
One without “A New Hope” in the title.
For which Despecialized is fine.
Sounds like a rumor to me. In the ROTJ scripts Leia was always Luke’s sister.
Probably about as much coincidence as Tatooine being in the Arkanis Sector.
Equally random (perhaps) is a passage from Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was a wildly popular book in the 1970s and certainly left its mark on popular culture for decades. I’ve read it a few times through the years and below is a passage that always makes me wonder. It’s a long shot that it was an inspiration, but it was a very well known NYT best seller and widely read. It’s been referenced countless times in films, music, TV, etc
“Jonathan opened his eyes. He stood alone with the Elder on a totally different seashore - trees down to the water’s edge, twin yellow suns turning overhead”.
If there are other science fiction stories or films predating the 70s and referencing twin suns (and there may be several), I’m unaware of them.
Talos IV in the original Star Trek TOS pilot was a binary system. Spock mentions it in dialog at one point.
Good observation though!
Just noticed that Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser novella Rime Isle (in which Fafhrd the barbarian loses his left hand) was first published in 1977.
Interesting…
This reminds me of the post-credits scene in one of the unreleased adaptations of Star Wars 1974.
And sadly, I’m totally serious.
According to the Wookieepedia page, the intended meaning was more like “millenarian”.
The Ewoks funded many experimental films.
Isn’t there an early script where Luke is older than Annikin? I’ll try to find where I saw it.
That would be the first draft. Luke was the Obi-Wan figure with Annikin playing the hot-headed apprentice.
Yeah, in this case the names are misleading, but the character archetypes are similar to the film we know. Though some of Annikin’s brashness later was given to Han Solo instead.
Lucas seems to have used 1974 Annikin as a template for some aspects of Anakin Skywalker: like Luke, he’s a powerful Jedi and a skilled pilot, but he has an impulsiveness and a temper that’s difficult to restrain. And Lucas in 1974 imagined Annikin with dark hair, like Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers, and also Sebastian Shaw.
Of course, there’s also the fact that Ben’s age was said to be at least 70 in the August 1975 third draft.
ToscheStation said:
ATMachine, I think the “stumbling block” for a lot of people on the “secret Skywalker” thing for Vader’s former identity pre-Vader, is the forgone conclusion that Anakin Skywalker was envisioned as an only child back when Star Wars was made, just like he is in the PT.
This is a good suggestion. That’s an assumption on their part, though, and not necessarily warranted. I mean, you’d think Uncle Owen would be reason enough to doubt this received wisdom.
Even in the 1974 rough draft, protagonist Annikin Starkiller (who was a template for Anakin when Lucas made ESB and ROTJ) had a younger brother, and Luke had an older brother of his own in the January '75 second draft. The idea of a Skywaker sibling predates Vader being Anakin by several years.
An anthology film about the Falcon’s previous owners might actually work. Ending with Lando getting it. If the ship is still as old as it used to be.
Cast Christopher Walken, Al Pacino, and Kurt Russell as three of the previous owners, make it a black comedy, and I’m sold.
Ur-Han Solo owned the Falcon before Han Solo?
Seems legit.
Quondam et futurus.
This
is a weapon of terror. It’s made to intimidate the enemy.
This
is a weapon of war. It’s made to kill the enemy.
However, both were originally designed for The Empire Strikes Back.
I was just going to ask: why is Ron Howard tweeting a picture from a video game?
“Almost”?
Exactly. It’s the same mentality that puts the phrase “imaginary story” on the cover of a Silver Age AU comic book with no hint of irony.
Mark’s Down On Your Syntax said:
So Panaka is Typho’s uncle? Well, well, well.
In the normal sense or the cardinal-nephew sense?
It seems like it was a missed opportunity to not have young Anakin be a hot shot Skyhopper pilot in TPM.
If you’re committed to making the Prequels as mediocre as possible, it isn’t.
Speaking of the standalone sequel Episode VII movie, in that storyline the main male protagonist loses a leg in a duel with the Dark Lord at the film’s end. However, he survives and wins with the help of his girlfriend, Kira Starkiller/ Skywalker.
This is alluded to in Marvel’s recent Darth Vader comics, where Vader’s suit is injured in three areas: the eye of his helmet, his left arm, and his left leg.
The broken eyepiece reveals the eye of Anakin Skywalker, but his suit’s left arm being torn off is a reference to Luke losing his left arm at the elbow in early drafts of The Empire Strikes Back. (To make sure we get the reference, Vader retains his glove, but it has a hole on the back, where Luke gets shot in the hand in ROTJ.)
And the left leg being lost entirely, droid limb and all, is a reference to this alternate Episode VII. (The comic has a few other cerebral in-jokes as well, such as a planet Vader visits having a mountain called “Passvaal”, as in “Parsifal”, and shaped like the Mount of Purgatory from the Divine Comedy.)
I mention this here because according to George Lucas, limb injuries are sublimated castration scenes. You’re welcome.
Small note: When George Lucas decided to expand the Sequel Trilogy from one film to three (as mentioned in The Making of ESB), he initially considered having each film use the same cast and script, but different directors.
That way, by experiencing the same story three times in different ways, audiences would see what a director’s sensibility brings to a film: a particular point of view.
Too bad directors don’t direct the film anymore. It’s now a soulless, corporate, machine.
It’s quite remarkable how one of Star Wars’ greatest legacies is the resurrection of the 1930s studio system whose death brought about the New Hollywood in the first place. One more sad indicator of how Lucas became the King Midas of Hollywood: turning ideas to gold at the price of sucking out their life.
True. Though usually it doesn’t extend to enshrining the idea of “you kill Space Hitler, you become Space Hitler” in its official doctrine. That’s just Trek Mirror Universe levels of cartoonishly silly evil.
Well, not really – the January 1975 second draft established the basic plot structure, and the August 1975 third draft set up the character dynamics we know (save for Governor Tarkin, who was added as an additional villain in the fourth draft Jan 1976 script).
But I do think it may have been something Lucas talked about with someone at one point, hence the model being created.
Similar to how Luke told Ralph McQuarrie in April 1975 that he was considering having a female protagonist, and McQuarrie drew concept art accordingly for a month until Lucas changed his mind and started thinking about the third draft.
Lucas was extraordinarily good at throwing out interesting ideas in casual conversation – the Holiday Special premise began as an “alien fairy tale” bookend idea he suggested offhand for the first film, and he also considered a scenario where Luke, Han, and Chewie all get captured on the Death Star and rescued by Ben. However, Lucas’ slow methodical style of writing (and his tendency to preserve language from previous drafts whenever possible) meant these never reached a script page. The Skyhopper idea may have been a similar case.
