Meanwhile producer Gary Kurtz had the headaches of finding a suitable place to film, working out logistics and budgeting. Starting off with simple sketches, Ralph McQuarrie began visualizing the characters, costumes, robots and scenery - finally producing a series of full colour paintings to give an idea of what George Lucas wanted in various scenes. Collin Cantwell, who had worked on "2001 - A Space Odyssey", was brought in to design the spacecraft models. The first step after completing a satisfactory basic script concept was to visualize a whole new world. Finally 20th Century Fox were persuaded to back it, but nobody thought it would be a big success - little did they know. United Artists were the first to be offered the embryo idea, but they turned it down because they couldn't see the potential! Universal were more interested at first, but also gave it the thumbs down. At one point there were four different scripts, each one with a different blend of storyline and characters. He worked on the story virtually full time right up to and even during the actual filming in March 1976. Jules Verne had preceded even this but never made his hero battle space creatures or have adventures on distant planets - the basis for a whole new concept (then) in adventure stories.Īs soon as he finished American Graffiti George started writing Star Wars - that was in January 1973. After a fair bit of digging, he realised that the Flash Gordon concept was probably based on a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame) about "John Carter of Mars." In turn it looks as though Burroughs had been inspired by Edwin Arnold's "Gulliver on Mars" published in 1905. Thwarted by this setback, he started researching the possible sources that inspired Flash Gordon. Originally he wanted to make an up-to-date version of Flash Gordon - but couldn't obtain the copyright to the characters created by Alex Raymond. All those zeros are the result of six years work by writer-director George Lucas, and an end product that makes the TV series Star Trek look as spectacular as Number 96! Īs early as 1971 George Lucas had the idea of filming a space fantasy. Jim Perry looks behind the scenes and inside the robotsīY THE TIME this story is printed STAR WARS will have probably grossed 200,000,000 dollars worldwide. His workshop was next door, but much smaller, we had all the lathes, mills, welding kit and expertise for all the metalwork.ĮLECTRONICS TODAY INTERNATIONAL - DECEMBER 1977 But we made R2-D2, C-3PO, the landspeeder, the X-wings, Y-Wings, Millenium Falcon and of course the lightsabers here in our workshop! Above are Malcolm Page, Geoff Burnstein and Harry Hankin adding the finishing touches to John Stear's working R2 in Norank's workshop. Sometimes when you read the archive books, Elstree is hardly mentioned. Text and image from Norank's webite here.Īlthough our overseas friends sometimes forget, all the best bits of Star Wars were British made. This article focuses on the R/C model, plus other R/C robots in the original movie.įor one of the better R2-D2 sites – see here Visually the main difference is the Kenny Baker model only ever had two legs, and the R/C version had three, although the single forwad leg was retractable. The models operated by Kenny Baker, the other a radio-controlled (R/C) model. Not so well known is that there were two main types of R2-D2's in the original Star Wars space opera.
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