ATMachine

Returning to this thread: in a little-noticed detail, Ralph McQuarrie’s 1975 designs for stormtrooper armor differed from the film version by giving lower-ranking troopers helmets with chrome tops.

This was probably the inspiration for Captain Phasma’s chrome armor in TFA (albeit used to signal higher rank rather than the opposite).

Also! Not a costume per se, but here’s a Ralph McQuarrie design for the Death Star torture robot, along with a probably-unrelated helmet design:

John Doom said:

He did much worse and had even more silly dialogues. In an alternate videogame-like reality :\

Back in the day I was sad that game didn’t come out on PC. I do like that LucasArts had some fun by changing up the ending with a riff on the Jedi Knight dark side ending if you play as Anakin.

Tragedy is watching Hayden Christensen act in the SW prequels. Comedy is reading about Edward II being skewered to death upon a hot poker.
– Kevin Costner

suspiciouscoffee said:

Samuel didn’t even do anything in the movie, so I’d hardly call it good acting. He sat around for a while, he said some silly dialogue, and he fell out of a window.

Oh, come on, the Second Defenestration of Coruscant was great.

Lucas originally had Jabba voiced in English by an ILM editor imitating the lines as read by a non-English-speaking Greek actor. Fortunately, Richard Marquand praised this idea, whereupon GL rejected it immediately.

Now I want Snoke to be recast as Warwick Davis in the sequels.

suspiciouscoffee said:

The Rebellion was just a rebellion, not even remotely affiliated with any government, which was clearly established. In TFA, they mention that there is a relationship between the Republic and the Resistance, but don’t establish what that relationship is.

As far as I can tell, the Republic and the First Order are two separate states which co-exist uneasily in a sort of Galactic Cold War (at least up until General Hux presumably starts a war with a Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack). The Resistance is the Republic’s covert ops arm inside the First Order’s territory. Kind of like the French Maquis during WWII.

SilverWook said:

She does have thrusters on her belly and could be venting all sorts of things we can’t see on her final approach. That looks more like a pressure wave anyway.

using ventral thrusters to reduce speed during landing does have precedent in SW – look at the Raven’s Claw in Jedi Outcast.

Wheels within wheels.

Found on Tumblr:

A nice shot of the medal ceremony from the end of the original 1977 Star Wars… except that in this version, Luke isn’t wearing his yellow jacket when he gets his medal.

We know from other BTS pics that GL and Mark Hamill shot several alternate takes of Luke’s scenes on Tatooine, with Luke wearing his desert poncho… perhaps something similar took place for the ending scene?

“Snoke rises from the mountain of Dune; Leia, a vampire; and her daughter Rey flies to Ireland, bearing my sword. For that is why you have come, is it not, my child?”

I don’t tend to get too fussed about the amount of time that passed between the escape from Hoth and the heroes’ arrivals at Cloud City. After all, if I did that, I’d remember that it should take a few million years for Han and Leia to get to Bespin without a hyperdrive.

TV’s Frink said:

ATMachine said:

On topic: I thought that the main characters in certain scenes of The Force Awakens were not in enough Peril. For instance, where were the sort of scary monsters (dianoga, space slug, etc.) that you see in the OT?

Rathtars.

Ssh! If we can’t see them, they can’t see us.

On topic: I thought that the main characters in certain scenes of The Force Awakens were not in enough Peril. For instance, where were the sort of scary monsters (dianoga, space slug, etc.) that you see in the OT?

And Captain Phasma needed more screentime. Seriously, she was almost as underused as Boba Fett in ROTJ.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

I keep meaning to ask this and keep forgetting–is it just me, or did the effect on C-3PO’s voice sound a little different in TFA than in the OT and PT? like, a little more tinny or something?

It’s because Bill Corbett replaced Trace Beaulieu after the move from Comedy Central to the Sci-Fi Channel.

eiyosus said:

[ATMachine said:]> I second the request for a source on this.

Dang, I can’t believe I out-geeked you guys!

(as the link says, they printed some of his hand-written guidelines in the back of a book and there was mention of midicholorians.)

For all my Google-fu, I’ve been unable to find that particular passage in The Making of SW. Page numbers (or better yet, a direct quote) would be helpful. 😃

My question is: Why are Anakin and Darth Maul fighting at Cloud City?

ZkinandBonez said:

eiyosus said:

ZkinandBonez said:Although it has more of a PT feel to it (e.g. Midichlorians being needed to tap into the Force).

To be fair, midichlorians were something Lucas had in mind back when he wrote Star Wars (according to the guidelines he gave Marvel Comics to follow).

Oh? Where did you read this? I’ve read quite a lot of the Marvel comics and I haven’t come across anything to suggest something similar to Midichlorians.

I second the request for a source on this.

While I personally strongly advise against watching the prequels before the OT, the best advice on how to watch a Star Wars marathon is this:

Watch a Star Wars marathon.

(Also, buy a ticket for TFA. It’s not that expensive.)

Besides the Flash Gordon serials, the original 1930s Flash Gordon comic strips by Alex Raymond are also well worth checking out if you want to look for the origins of Star Wars. There are a couple of different series collecting Raymond’s ten-year (1934-44) run easily available on Amazon. (A welcome improvement from when I started checking them out a few years ago, when they were much harder to come by!)

In literature terms, EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman space-opera series contains a notable forerunner of the Jedi Order in SW, to say nothing of Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserit. Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter series and Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark stories are also good examples of the planetary-romance SF which Lucas also read.

Also, don’t forget the films of Akira Kurosawa. (All of them. Any of them. But especially The Hidden Fortress and the Yojimbo duology.)

Be careful. If you cut off his tail it’ll grow into another lizard.

ZkinandBonez said:

SilverWook said:

George also used Buck Rogers footage in THX 1138, so you might be on to something. 😃

Right, I forgot about that.

I’d be kind if funny if Han was based on a Buck Rogers book considering how in the first draft they meet him in a spaceport called Gordon.

Bear in mind that the “Han Solo” of the 1974 rough draft was really more akin to Chewbacca: a tall, monstrous alien who nonetheless is a faithful friend and ally of the human heroes. Albeit instead of being a tall furry Bigfoot-like creature, alien-Han was a green and scaly swamp monster, in the vein of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The titular country of “The Airlords of Han” was actually Han China – being used in the racist Yellow Peril sense, since the villains in Buck Rogers (both the novellas and the early comics) were the soldiers of a Chinese Empire that had managed to conquer America in a sneak attack.

I don’t deny that this is a possible inspiration for Han Solo’s first name. However, it seems to me more likely that the character of Han Pritcher from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series was more important in this regard.

Pritcher and his partner, Bail Channis (!), are detectives working for the empire of “the Mule,” a dictator who conquered the titular Foundation settlement. Their objective is to find the elusive “Second Foundation,” a group of telepaths seeking to overturn the Mule’s empire and restore the rightful government of the Foundation.

The two operatives eventually succeed in capturing a member of the Second Foundation; unfortunately for the Mule, this doesn’t work out quite as he’d expected.

Also, another inspiration for Han Solo’s name (both first and last) was probably Hansel from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. In this case, the surname “Solo” suggests that, unlike his gingerbread-gorging namesake, Han the space-pirate doesn’t have a sister.

Star Wars
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
Willow
Trinity
Worlds End

(the last two on this list assume that you’ve been invited to GL’s private screening room)

DuracellEnergizer said:

I don’t know how the insipid post-AOTC EU got away with publishing a novel featuring a Jedi with a red
lightsaber. Whatever the answer may be, I just love that this cover exists.

This cover suffers from a disturbing lack of space Nazis.