Post by Science Fiction Movie on May 29, 2024 9:58:28 GMT
65 Facts About the Star Wars Universe
In the 45 years since Star Wars first entered the pop culture landscape, there have been a dozen feature films released (with plenty more on the way), plus dozens of television series, novelizations, comic books, trading cards, video games, and theme park attractions—not to mention hundreds of toys and licensed merchandise sold (oh, the merchandise!) and one awesomely terrible holiday special. There have also been millions (if not billions) of words written about the films, from reviews to fan theories and beyond.
In honor of Star Wars Day on May 4, we’d like to add one more story into the mix. Here are some fascinating facts about the Star Wars universe, any one of which makes a perfect response the next time someone says “May the 4th be with you.”
1. The original Star Wars concept was inspired by Joseph Campbell.
Though equally inspired by fairy tales, westerns, and 1930s sci-fi serials, George Lucas based the framework of the story for the original Star Wars (1977) around the theories of Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The book tracked common mythological motifs and argued that myths from around the world that have been passed down through generations—like Beowulf or King Arthur—share a basic structure. According to Campbell, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Lucas simply grafted these ideas onto his story, with Luke as the main hero.
2. Akira Kurosawa was another major influence on Star Wars.
Lucas struggled with just how to tell this massive sci-fi space opera on a personal and relatable scale, and he found the answer in director Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress. Telling the story of a roguish general protecting a beautiful princess from an evil clan behind enemy lines, “the one thing I was really intrigued by was the fact that the story was told from the two lowest characters,” Lucas explained in an interview for The Criterion Collection’s release of the Kurosawa classic. “I decided that would be a nice way to tell the Star Wars story. Take the two lowliest characters, as Kurosawa did, and tell the story from their point of view. Which, in the Star Wars case is the two droids, and that was the strongest influence. The fact that there was a princess trying to get through enemy lines was more of a coincidence than anything else."
Perhaps not coincidentally, the word Jedi is reported derived from the Japanese word Jidaigeki meaning “period dramas,” or the types of films Japanese directors like Kurosawa would typically make (the kind of movies that clearly influenced Lucas).
3. George Lucas’s first draft of A New Hope was more than 200 pages long.
In 1973, Lucas submitted a 13-page treatment of his story, originally titled “The Star Wars,” to Universal Studios and United Artists following the success of his movie American Graffiti (which was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and a Best Director nod for Lucas) the same year. Both studios passed, saying the far-flung sci-fi extravaganza was too confusing.
The treatment was eventually picked up by 20th Century Fox head Alan Ladd Jr., who gave Lucas a preliminary deal in 1974 to eventually make the movie. But the “final” screenplay Lucas turned in was more than 200 pages long (the average length of a screenplay is between 95 and 125 pages), so Lucas excised the final two acts and presented the first act of the screenplay as the finished story. The script was made into Star Wars, and the final two acts of the initial giant screenplay were eventually expanded and fleshed out into what would become The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
4. Obi-Wan Kenobi was originally supposed to survive A New Hope.
In 2016, Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew—who passed away on April 30, 2019—tweeted out some fascinating details about the Star Wars movies, including one shocking change: that in the original shooting script, Obi-Wan Kenobi actually survived his lightsaber battle with Darth Vader.
5. Visual aids helped to sell 20th Century Fox on Star Wars.
To get 20th Century Fox to approve the then-massive budget of almost $10 million (though the final budget eventually came in at around $11 million), Lucas pitched Star Wars with a series of 21 drawings he commissioned from illustrator Ralph McQuarrie. These included scenes of C-3PO and R2-D2 crash-landing on Tatooine, Vader confronting Luke (then with the surname of “Starkiller”) with his lightsaber, the Mos Eisley cantina, The Millennium Falcon in Docking Bay 94, the attack on the Death Star trench, and a view of a floating city that would eventually become Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back.
6. Harrison Ford’s casting as Han Solo was sort of accidental.
Lucas shared the seven-month-long casting sessions for Star Wars with his friend and fellow director Brian De Palma, who was casting for Carrie at the same time. Lucas was looking for unknown faces that he had never worked with before, and initially brought in Harrison Ford—who had appeared as the antagonist street racer Bob Falfa in Lucas’s American Graffiti—to feed lines to the auditioning actors.
Lucas saw dozens of actors—including a young Kurt Russell—for the part of Han, but liked Ford’s delivery while feeding lines to the other actors so much that he caved and cast him in the part.
7. Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt had to get innovative.
Now-legendary sound designer Ben Burtt got his start on Star Wars fresh out of USC film school. He was tasked with coming up with a completely new and organic soundscape for the movie, which was at odds with the trend of creating intentionally electronic and “futuristic” sounds for sci-fi movies at the time.
The first sound effect he created was Chewbacca’s voice, which is a blend of bear, lion, walrus, and badger vocalizations. R2-D2’s “voice” was made using loops on a synthesizer matched with beeps and boops modeled after baby coos performed by Burtt himself. Darth Vader’s infamous breathing was recorded by putting a microphone inside a regulator on a scuba tank. The Tusken Raider yowl is a mixture of mule sounds and people imitating mule sounds. The lightsaber whoosh was made by blending the hum of an idle 35mm film projector and passing a slightly broken microphone cable by the tubes of an old television set.
8. Orson Welles was considered to voice Darth Vader.
George Lucas originally wanted Orson Welles as the voice of Darth Vader, but dropped the idea when he thought Welles’s famous baritone would be too recognizable.
9. The movie’s iconic opening crawl was created with practical effects.
The opening crawl for the original movie (which was cribbed from the Flash Gordon serials that also inspired the film) was done practically, by carefully placing two-foot-wide die cut yellow letters over a six-foot-long black paper background with a camera making a slow pass over them to mimic the crawl. In total, it took three hours to shoot.
10. Robert Englund encouraged Mark Hamill to audition for Star Wars.
According to Robert Englund, he auditioned for the role of Han Solo but was told he was too young for the part (he would have been in his late 20s at the time). Which didn't stop him from suggesting his friend, Mark Hamill, audition for the film. “I said, ‘Hey, Lucas is doing this space movie. Maybe you’re right for it. The lead guy’s like a teenager,” the future Freddy Krueger recalled. “So Mark got on the phone to his agent and I think he went up the next day. He nailed it, and the rest is history.”
11. Hamill was paid $1000 per week to play Luke Skywalker.
Later on, he received a quarter of one percent of the film’s profits, so he didn’t make out too badly. The Empire Strikes Back alone netted him $1 million.
12. The original Millennium Falcon looked completely different.
The original concept model of the Millennium Falcon was long and cylindrical—very unlike the flat design we know now. The model makers complained the design was too similar to the spacecraft from the 1970s British TV series Space: 1999, so Lucas told them to create something completely different that looked like a flying hamburger and sailed like a sunfish.
A variation of the Falcon prototype did, however, end up in the movie. It’s the Rebel Blockade Runner seen fleeing the Imperial Star Destroyer in the opening scene.
13. Lucas used real-life war footage for Star Wars's space battles.
Industrial Light and Magic is now one of the preeminent special effects companies in the world, but back in the late 1970s it was just a group of artists in an empty warehouse in Van Nuys, California. The company, which invented technology like special computer-controlled camera rigs in order to create the special effects for Star Wars, was tasked with completing a year’s worth of work in just six months.
To give them ideas for the type of high-intensity and cutting-edge sequences he wanted, Lucas used old newsreels to cut together footage of World War II dogfights. ILM eventually matched many of the sequences frame by frame—including the space battle in the Millennium Falcon between Han, Luke, and the TIE fighters—directly to the footage Lucas provided.
14. One of Stanley Kubrick's closest collaborators designed Chewbacca's costume.
To create the original costume for Chewbacca, Lucas hired legendary makeup supervisor Stuart Freeborn, who was recruited because of his work on the apes in the “Dawn of Man” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Freeborn had also previously worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove to effectively disguise Peter Sellers in each of his three roles in that film.) Freeborn would go on to supervise the creation of Yoda in The Empire Strike Back and Jabba the Hutt and the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.
Lucas originally wanted Freeborn’s costume for Chewie to be a combination of a monkey, a dog, and a cat. According to Freeborn, the biggest problem during production with the costume was with Mayhew’s eyes. The actor’s body heat in the mask caused his face to detach from the costume's eyes and made them look separate from the mask.
15. Theaters balked at showing Star Wars.
Less than 40 theaters agreed to book showings of Star Wars after its release date was moved up to before Memorial Day (the studio thought it would bomb in a crowded summer movie slate). Around the same time, 20th Century Fox was going to release an eagerly anticipated adaptation of a bestselling book called The Other Side of Midnight, which theaters were eager to show. Fox then stipulated that any theater showing The Other Side of Midnight must also show Star Wars, which inflated the number of screens for the movie.
Needless to say, Star Wars eventually became the highest-grossing movie ever made up to that time, while The Other Side of Midnight didn’t even break the $25 million mark. And as requiring movie theaters to show one movie in exchange for another movie was actually illegal, 20th Century Fox ended up being fined $25,000.
16. Lucas’s idea for The Star Wars Holiday Special was a “Wookiee Rosh Hashanah.”
One of the most infamous entries in Star Wars’ filmography is The Star Wars Holiday Special, a bizarre holiday variety show that aired in 1978. When it came time to brainstorm ideas for the program, co-writer Leonard Ripps told Mental Floss that his co-writer “Pat [Proft] and I spent the entire day with Lucas. He took out a legal pad and asked how many minutes were in a TV special. He wrote down numbers from one to 90. He was very methodical about it. He had at least a dozen stories he had already written, so we were just helping to fill in a world he knew everything about. His idea was basically for a Wookiee Rosh Hashanah. A furry Earth Day.”
17. Lucas claims he was talked into doing the holiday special.
“Fox said, ‘You can promote the film by doing the TV special,’” Lucas explained in an interview with Empire magazine. “So I kind of got talked into doing the special.”
18. Ford was a tough sell on the holiday special.
“Harrison Ford was not happy to be there at all,” camera operator Larry Heider told Mental Floss. “Carrie Fisher, I think part of her deal was she got to sing a song, and that was her draw to it. Because Lucas was involved, and if another movie is coming out in two years, there’s pressure to keep going. So they showed up, on time. Mostly.”
19. Lucas initially funded The Empire Strikes Back himself.
Due to the overwhelming success of Star Wars, and the studio trying to undermine him at nearly every turn, Lucas decided to put up the money to make The Empire Strikes Back out of his own pocket, which was unheard of in blockbuster filmmaking. The unprecedented move would give Lucas complete creative control, while still having a major movie studio distribute the movie for its theatrical release.
This maneuver wasn’t without its drawbacks, however. When the budget for The Empire Strikes Back ballooned to $10 million over their original estimate, the entertainment branch of Bank of America that put up a loan to help Lucas cover the movie’s costs pulled out, despite the fact that this was the (relatively) financially secure sequel to the then-highest-grossing movie ever made. Lucas then had to approach 20th Century Fox to help, which forced him to give up certain rights to the movie. Lucas was so unhappy with Fox’s approach to the new deal that he brought a new project he was working on to rival movie studio Paramount. That new project was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
20. Irvin Kershner didn't want to direct The Empire Strikes Back.
Though Lucas decided to back out of directing The Empire Strikes Back, he remained a very hands-on producer, guiding the movie throughout production. He offered the directing job to one of his old USC professors, Irvin Kershner, even though he had never helmed such a big-budget effort before.
Kershner initially turned down the offer because he thought anything trying to one-up Star Wars would be doomed to fail. Lucas then met with Kershner to explain that The Empire Strikes Back wouldn’t try to surpass the first movie, but would simply build on its mythology. Lucas’s assurance—and the fact that Kershner’s agent reminded him the job would be highly lucrative—convinced the professor to say yes.
21. Lucas wanted Jim Henson as Yoda.
In an interview with Leonard Maltin, Lucas admitted that he wanted Muppets maestro Jim Henson to play the role of Yoda. “I went to Jim [Henson] and said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m busy, I’m doing this, and doing that, I’m making a movie and all that—I really can’t, but ... how about Frank Oz? You know, Frank’s the other half of me.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’d be fantastic.’”
Henson also recommended creature designer Stuart Freeborn, who explained that, “I was the one who kind of put all the elements of Yoda together, and although Jim didn’t make Yoda, George and he had an understanding that they would exchange technology information. George would give to Jim and Jim would give some of his people to George to help. Wendy Froud helped out a little bit with the character and two other people from Jim’s company worked the cables for me.”
22. Frank Oz recalls the Yoda story differently.
In a 2014 interview, Oz, the normally reclusive puppeteer and director, said that, “George didn't want my voice in the beginning. I gave him a tape. He said, 'No thank you.' And in post-production for about a year I heard that he was auditioning voices for Yoda. He had no intention of using me for the voice. Then I was on my honeymoon with my first wife about 25 years ago or 30 years ago, and he [called and] said, ‘Frank can you come out … I think we'd like to try your voice.’ So I flew back and recorded Yoda.”
After the release of The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas lobbied for Oz to get an Oscar nomination for his performance, but he was ultimately disqualified for consideration when it was ruled that puppeteers aren’t actors.
23. Yoda's first name was Buffy.
In early drafts of the screenplay Yoda was actually named “Buffy,” which was completely changed in subsequent drafts to the full name “Minch Yoda,” and then shortened to just Yoda.
24. The Emperor used to be a chimp.
In the original version of the film, the scene in which Darth Vader converses with the Emperor used to look a lot different. Though many viewers automatically associate the character with actor Ian McDiarmid, the original Emperor was an old woman with chimpanzee eyes and the voice of Clive Revill. (You can see both versions side-by-side here.)
25. In real life, Darth Vader’s suit would set him back about $18.3 million.
In 2016, English sunglass retailer Shade Station broke down the numbers on what it might cost to build Darth Vader’s suit in real life. Their final tally? $18.3 million. We’re not actually sure how much Sith Lords get paid, but it sounds like a lucrative profession.
26. Some of the asteroids you see are spray-painted potatoes.
Many of the shots of the Imperial AT-ATs on Hoth (which were inspired by the alien Tripods in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds) were all done in-camera without bluescreen composites. Highly detailed snowy landscapes were drawn for the backgrounds, while stop-motion animation was used for the walkers in the foreground. The snow in these shots is a mixture of flour and micro-balloon epoxy filler.
When they needed asteroids in the background during the Millennium Falcon’s escape through an asteroid belt, they simply spray-painted potatoes and filmed them in front of a bluescreen to composite later. And that space worm that nearly eats the Falcon? It was just a hand puppet shot at high speeds to give it scale.
27. R2-D2 builder Tony Dyson’s first meeting with Lucas was about hamburgers and airplanes.
When asked to recount his first meeting with George Lucas, R2-D2 builder Tony Dyson (who passed away in March 2016) said that what they talked about wasn’t R2-D2, but hamburgers and flying. Specifically, “The fact that it's difficult to find a good U.S.-style burger in the UK and how much George dislikes flying. The next meeting we discussed R2-D2 and his fabrication.”
28. Alec Guinness didn’t want to be in Star Wars.
Sir Alec had a testy history with his legacy when it came to Star Wars. He described the first film as “fairy-tale rubbish,” and wanted nothing to do with The Empire Strikes Back.
Lucas and the filmmakers eventually persuaded the actor to appear as the ghostly version of Obi-Wan with Yoda on Dagobah, but Guinness would only do it under very strict conditions: He would work only one day but would start at 8:30 a.m. and be done by 1 p.m., and would have to be paid one-fourth of a percent of the movie’s total gross. That 4.5 hours worth of work netted Guinness millions of dollars.
29. Han Solo’s most memorable line was ad-libbed.
In the fateful exchange between Princess Leia and Han Solo before he’s frozen in carbonite, Leia says, “I love you,” and Solo quips, “I know.” But the exchange wasn’t written that way. The script had Solo just responding, “I love you, too,” before potentially never seeing his true love again. But both Kershner and Ford agreed the line was all wrong for a charming rogue like Han Solo.
In a few final takes before breaking for lunch, Kershner switched things up, forcing Ford to think on his feet by spontaneously calling “action.” Carrie Fisher delivered her “I love you” line, while Ford naturally responded, “I know,” improvising what is one of his character’s most iconic moments.
Another notable feat for Han is that, not counting the prequels, he is the only non-Force-user to wield a lightsaber when he uses Luke’s sword to open up the dead Tauntaun for warmth while the pair is stranded on Hoth.
30. Monty Python and The Rolling Stones made Han and Leia smile.
In 1999, Carrie Fisher penned an essay for Newsweek on her Star Wars experience and recounted the time she and Ford pulled an all-nighter at a party with Eric Idle and the Rolling Stones. “Eric had just come home from filming Life of Brian in Tunisia,” Fisher wrote. “He brought this drink that he said they gave the extras so they'd work longer. I called it Tunisian Table Cleaner. As a rule I'm allergic to alcohol, and Harrison doesn't really drink either. But that night, there was a makeshift party. The Rolling Stones were there ... We stayed up all night and drank the table cleaner and never went to sleep. When we arrived at the set the next morning, we weren't hungover—we were, like the extras in Tunisia, more than willing to work. That morning we shot our arrival at Cloud City, where we meet Billy Dee Williams. And it’s one of the very few times in the series both Harrison and I smile. To this day, Eric is proud as a papa of his impact on the trilogy.”
31. Darth Vader’s big reveal was kept under wraps from nearly everyone.
In early drafts of the screenplay, writer Leigh Brackett actually had Luke’s father appear to him as a ghost as a separate character from Vader, which was scrapped in subsequent drafts written by Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan.
The only people who knew that Darth Vader was Luke’s father before the scene was actually shot were Lucas, Kershner, and producer Gary Kurtz. Mark Hamill was told only moments before the first take. To keep the moment a secret for as long as possible, a false page was inserted into all scripts with Vader’s dialogue stating that Obi-Wan killed Luke’s father. David Prowse, the actor in the Vader costume, even delivered the “Obi-Wan killed your father” dialogue during takes while Hamill played the scene with full knowledge of the true lines. The lines were then added later when actor James Earl Jones recorded his dialogue for Vader.
32. Darth Vader could have been Chewbacca.
David Prowse, who ended up portraying the in-costume version of Darth Vader, originally turned down the role of Chewbacca. When given the choice between portraying the two characters, Prowse said, “I turned down the role of Chewbacca at once. I know that people remember villains longer than heroes. At the time I didn’t know I’d be wearing a mask, and throughout production I thought Vader’s voice would be mine.”
33. Dutch and German speakers may have had a clue about Luke's parentage.
Dutch and German speakers should have known Darth Vader was Luke’s father from the get-go, as the Dutch and German words for father are vader and Vater, respectively. (Though it's likely Lucas was thinking of a variation on invader when coming up with Vader's name.)
34. Empire Strikes Back's “big reveal” may not have been such a secret after all.
Much has been made of the lengths to which Lucas and his fellow filmmakers went to keep the revelation that (spoiler alert?) Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father under wraps. In a 2004 interview with Sound & Vision, Hamill shared that “it was a wonderfully hard secret to keep because [Irvin] Kershner, the director, brought me aside and said ‘Now I know this, and George knows this, and now you're going to know this, but if you tell anybody, and that means Carrie or Harrison, or anybody, we're going to know who it is because we know who knows.’” But the truth is that anyone who picked up the novelization of the movie, which was released a month earlier than the film, would have known the plot twist already. (Good thing Twitter didn’t exist.)
35. David Prowse inadvertently spilled the beans on Luke’s connection to Vader in 1978.
Two years before the Empire novelization hit bookstore shelves, a crowd of approximately 1000 Star Wars fans gathered in Berkeley, California, to shake hands with David Prowse, the man in Darth Vader’s suit. Believe it or not, Prowse shared that critical plot point with the crowd. A newspaper clipping from 1978 teased the genetic connection, even quoting Prowse as saying, “Father can’t kill son, son can’t kill father.”
Keep in mind, though, that Empire was still being written in 1978, so Prowse likely didn't have any inside details on the story. He'd later call this spoiler faux pas nothing more than a "lucky guess," according to /Film.
36. Empire's most memorable line is also its most misquoted.
When Darth Vader drops the paternal bomb on Luke, he does so by stating, “No, I am your father.” The line is one of the most often misquoted in cinema history, and usually repeated as “Luke, I am your father.” (Yes, even Chris Farley got it wrong in Tommy Boy.)
37. Cliff Clavin is in The Empire Strikes Back.
Two years before he began his decade-plus run as Boston mailman/trivia expert Cliff Clavin on Cheers, and a full 15 years before he began voicing Hamm in the Toy Story series, John Ratzenberger made an early-career appearance as Major Bren Derlin, part of the Rebel Force in The Empire Strikes Back. While he loved being part of such a major film franchise, what he remembers most is how “I somehow got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog. It was Jim Henson’s space, with this Kermit the Frog sign. So I took a photo of it and sent it to my mom with a caption that read, ‘Look, Mom. I made it. I got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog.’”
38. There was an opening credits controversy regarding The Empire Strikes Back.
To keep the iconic Star Wars logo with the opening crawl, Lucas and the filmmakers wanted to once again put the full credits at the end of the movie for Empire. This caused the Writers and Directors Guilds to try to pull the movie from theaters because of credit rules.
On Star Wars, writer-director Lucas’s name was at least at the start of the film due to the Lucasfilm Ltd. title card, but on Empire, the new director and writers were relegated to the end credits. Per guild rules, they had to be at the beginning, resulting in both Lucas and Kershner being fined over the issue (Lucas paid them in full). The attempt to sabotage the movie by pulling it from theaters on a technicality caused Lucas to withdraw his membership from the DGA, WGA, and the Motion Picture Association (he has yet to return).
39. Empire marked the end of Lucas and Gary Kurtz’s partnership.
Though it’s George Lucas’ name that’s most synonymous with the Star Wars universe, producer Gary Kurtz—who came up with the title for The Empire Strikes Back and also served as an uncredited assistant director—was an essential contributor to the first two films. Yet the pair ended their partnership following The Empire Strikes Back. “I could see where things were headed,” Kurtz told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 of his reasons for stepping far, far away from Lucas’ film galaxy. “The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It's a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It's natural to make decisions that protect the toy business but that's not the best thing for making quality films.”
40. Hamill wasn’t a fan of some of Lucas’s post-release tinkering.
While fans have long lamented the many changes Lucas has made to the original trilogy over the years, even Luke Skywalker himself wasn’t crazy about some of them. “I can't say I cared for that scream they added to the Special Edition (now gone), when Luke sacrifices himself [in The Empire Strikes Back],” Mark Hamill told Sound & Vision. “Kersh and I talked about the fact that when he actually reaches the point whether he has to join them or not, he lets go. It's like he's committing suicide rather than going to the Dark Side. So it is a calm thing. Look, it’s [George's] to tinker with as he sees fit. I always say it's his train set, if he wants to put up new billboards and new landscaping … Remember the old, ‘It's good to be the king?’ I guess George is ‘It's good to be The Emperor!’ If he wants to make them into musical comedies, that's his choice.”
41. Contrary to legend, Return of the Jedi was the movie’s original title.
Lucas and co-screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan originally titled their movie Return of the Jedi, but Fox executives thought the title was too bland, and convinced the pair to change it to Revenge of the Jedi.
The alternate title lasted so far into production that official trailers and posters for the movie featured the “Revenge” title until Lucas realized that within the mythology he created Jedis do not seek revenge. So the title was changed back to Return of the Jedi just weeks before the movie opened on May 25, 1983. The “Revenge” theme would pop up again—in the third prequel, Revenge of the Sith.
42. Return Of The Jedi was called something else during filming on purpose.
By 1983, the fervor surrounding new Star Wars movie had reached an all-time high, with cast, crewmembers, and the public willing to leak any new information about the storyline they could. To combat this, the new movie was shot under the production title Blue Harvest to throw people off.
The thought was that if production notices proclaimed the new Star Wars movie was shooting nearby, there would be unwanted attention. But if a nondescript movie called Blue Harvest was shooting nearby, nobody would likely care. The fake title also helped the production team secure shooting locations without being price-gouged simply because it was a Star Wars movie. The filmmakers even came up with a fake tagline for their fake movie: “Horror Beyond Imagination."
43. Some big names were on the shortlist to direct Return Of The Jedi.
Steven Spielberg was Lucas’s first choice to direct the third installment of the series, but Spielberg was forced to bow out due to Lucas’s unceremonious exit from the Directors Guild, of which Spielberg was a prominent member.
Then-relative newcomers David Lynch and David Cronenberg were also tapped to potentially direct. Lynch was coming off the commercial success of his movie The Elephant Man, but turned Lucas down to direct the big-screen adaptation of Dune instead. Cronenberg was also coming off of a hit—the horror classic Scanners—but he turned Lucas down to write and direct Videodrome.
Lucas eventually settled on Welsh director Richard Marquand because he liked his previous movie, the 1981 WWII spy thriller Eye of the Needle.
44. It took up to seven different puppeteers to be Jabba The Hutt.
The Jabba puppet was partly inspired by stout British actor Sydney Greenstreet, who had appeared in such movies as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. The massive puppet, created by Yoda designer Stuart Freeborn, was controlled by a handful of puppeteers. Three puppeteers were inside: one controlled the right arm and jaw; another handled the left hand and jaw, tongue, and head movements (both of them moved the body); and a third person was in the tail. Outside, there were one or two people on radio controllers for the eyes, someone under the stage to blow cigar smoke up a tube, and another working bellows for the lungs.
45. Han Solo was supposed to die in Return of the Jedi.
Solo’s fate after being frozen in carbonite was intentionally left up in the air at the end of The Empire Strikes Back because Ford’s contract was only for two movies. Ford eventually returned for the third, but urged screenwriters Lucas and Kasdan to kill off Han Solo because there was nothing constructive to do with his character.
Kasdan agreed, and didn’t want Solo to survive the carbonite freeze in order to signal to the audience that anyone else in the movie could be next. Lucas ultimately vetoed the idea because he wanted an uplifting ending for the trilogy with all the main characters making it out alive.
46. The Battle of Endor was originally supposed to take place on the Wookiees' home planet of Kashyyvk.
Early drafts of the screenplay had the final battle between the Rebellion and the Empire take place around the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk, with Chewie and his fellow walking carpets battling the Empire forces on the ground. The idea was eventually scrapped because Lucas wanted the thematic thrust of the scene—that a primitive society would rise up to help defeat a technologically advanced one—to ring true. Within the Star Wars universe, Wookiees are a technologically advanced species that can co-pilot ships like the Millennium Falcon after all, so the lesser-evolved similar species of Ewoks were created and the final battle was switched to Endor.
47. The speeder bike chase was filmed very, very, very slowly.
The mile-a-minute speeder bike chase on Endor between Luke, Leia, and a group of Scout Troopers was filmed in the Redwood State Park near Eureka, California that was about to be cut down for logging, giving the production near-free rein.
To make it seem like the bikes were racing at breakneck speeds, Steadicam operators walked a slow, step-by-step path through the forest and shot at three-fourths frame per second for hours. When sped up on film to the standard 24-frames-per-second, it made it seem as if the P.O.V. shots were going 120 miles per hour.
48. An Ewok got his big break because of food poisoning.
Then-11-year-old Warwick Davis was initially cast as an Ewok extra after his grandmother heard about an open casting call on the radio in England for little people to appear in Return of the Jedi. When Kenny Baker, who played R2-D2 and was also originally cast as the main Ewok named Wicket, fell ill with food poisoning on the day he was supposed to begin shooting his Ewok scenes, the filmmakers had Davis play Wicket instead. Davis allegedly based his performance of the inquisitive little critter on his dog. (Baker assumed the smaller Ewok role of Paploo.)
49. The filmmakers wanted a movie star to be the unmasked Vader.
The one moment at the end of Return of the Jedi that fans had been waiting years for was seeing Darth Vader’s actual face. When the time came, audiences finally got that moment, and the face they saw was… Sebastian Shaw’s.
Shaw, who was primarily known as a British stage actor before making his Jedi cameo, wasn’t the first person the filmmakers had in mind. They initially wanted to make it a momentous occasion by casting a well-known movie star like Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud to be behind the mask, but later changed their minds. Instead of a recognizable star they thought it’d be better if Vader turned out to be a nondescript person, and eventually Shaw fit the role.
50. The original Star Wars trilogy could have ended very differently.
During an early story meeting, Lucas pitched an idea for the end of Return of the Jedi that would have irrevocably changed the entire Star Wars saga as we know it.
His idea started out very much like the end of Jedi now: Luke and Vader engage in a lightsaber battle with Vader ultimately sacrificing himself to save Luke by killing the Emperor, then Luke watches his father die after taking his mask off. But then, in the proposed ending, Lucas suggested that, "Luke takes his mask off. The mask is the very last thing—and then Luke puts it on and says, 'Now I am Vader.'"
The idea was scrapped because Lucas didn’t want the story to go that dark, and wanted a happy ending after all.
51. In 1983, a copy of Return Of The Jedi was stolen from a projectionist at gunpoint.
Hoping to sell a print of Return of the Jedi on the black market, a teenager stole a copy of the film from a projectionist in the parking lot of the Glenwood Theaters in Overland Park, Kansas in 1983. (He wasn’t the only one to have that idea; it became somewhat of an epidemic.) A sting operation was set up and he was eventually arrested; in December of 1983 he was given five years of probation and was ordered to perform 120 hours of community service.
52. The title of Episode I was kept top secret.
Lucas began writing the first prequel for a new Star Wars trilogy in November 1994, which was titled “The Beginning” all the way through production until Lucas revealed the new title as The Phantom Menace. To ensure the movie wasn’t pirated, the film was shipped to theaters under the title The Doll House.
53. Audiences got their first glimpse of The Phantom Menace by seeing Meet Joe Black.
Back in 1998, before every new trailer was just uploaded to YouTube, the first teaser for The Phantom Menace was attached to the movie Meet Joe Black, causing attendance for the Brad Pitt romance to spike. Audiences allegedly went to see the trailer and walked out before the feature even started.
54. Qui-Gon Jinn's communicator is actually a women's razor.
Talk about low-tech! The communicator that Liam Neeson’s character uses in The Phantom Menace is actually a razor. A Gillette Ladies Sensor Excel Razor, to be precise.
55. You won’t find any official clone trooper costumes out there.
Lucas leaned on CGI pretty heavily in the prequels, and it shows. There were no physical Clone Trooper costumes made for Attack of the Clones or the rest of the prequels because every single one is a digitally-rendered CGI creation.
56. Ewan McGregor has some strong opinions on the Star Wars experience.
When asked about playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ewan McGregor was pretty outspoken: "The people I meet are the f*ckers who want me to sign Star Wars photos so they can sell them on the Internet or the people at premieres who are crushing children against barriers to get me to sign their f*cking picture of Obi-Wan Kenobi. They're not fans—they're parasitical lowlifes and f*cking wankers."
McGregor, however, seems to have had a change of heart over the years. As he'll be reprising his role in Disney+'s new Obi-Wan standalone series.
57. Benicio Del Toro was supposed to play Darth Maul.
The Oscar-winning actor dropped out after most of Darth Maul’s lines were cut. He did, however, appear in The Last Jedi.
58. A young Han Solo was supposed to show up in Revenge Of The Sith.
Though 2018's Solo: A Star Wars Story treated us to the adventures of young Han Solo, a pint-sized Solo could have showed up much earlier—in Revenge of the Sith.
Character designs of a 10-year-old Solo were made for a scene that was eventually cut from the third prequel involving the boy being raised by Chewbacca on Kashyyyk, and helping Yoda find the location of the evil General Grievous.
59. Revenge Of The Sith was the first non-PG-rated Star Wars movie.
The third prequel was rated PG-13 by the MPAA for “sci-fi violence and some intense images,” something Lucas attributes to the fiery finale when Anakin Skywalker finally transforms into Darth Vader.
“I would take a 9- or a 10-year-old to it—or an 11-[year-old],” Lucas told 60 Minutes, “but I don't think I would take a 5- or 6-year-old to this. It's way too strong. I could pull it back a little bit, but I don't really want to."
In 2015, The Force Awakens was also labeled PG-13—as have all of the films since then (including the standalone films, Rogue One and Solo).
60. Natalie Portman claimed that Star Wars nearly ruined her career.
In an interview with New York Magazine about late director Mike Nichols, Natalie Portman stated that, “Star Wars had come out around the time of Seagull, and everyone thought I was a horrible actress. I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade, and no director wanted to work with me. Mike wrote a letter to Anthony Minghella and said, ‘Put her in Cold Mountain, I vouch for her.’ And then Anthony passed me on to Tom Tykwer, who passed me on to the Wachowskis. I worked with Milos Forman a few years later. He said, ‘Mike saved me. He wrote a letter so that I could get asylum in the U.S.’ He did that for 50 people, and it doesn’t make any one of us feel less special.”
61. Peter Mayhew's height helped him land the role of Chewbacca.
Peter Mayhew, who passed away in 2019, was chosen to play everyone’s favorite Wookiee primarily because of his tremendous height: He was 7 feet 3 inches tall.
62. Han Solo’s death in The Force Awakens was a long time coming for Harrison Ford.
Though Han Solo’s death at the hands of his son was one of the saddest moments for fans in The Force Awakens, it was a long time coming for Ford. “I’ve been arguing for Han Solo to die for about 30 years, not because I was tired of him or because he’s boring, but his sacrifice for the other characters would lend gravitas and emotional weight,” Ford told Entertainment Weekly. But Lucas, reportedly, "didn't think there was any future in dead Han toys."
63. Oscar Isaac wasn’t initially sold on the role of Poe Cameron.
“J.J. Abrams basically told me it was an intense, heroic, dramatic character and he hadn't seen me do that,” Oscar Isaac told GQ. “I didn't know if I could make it interesting. I didn't know why me and not anybody else.” He spent a few days mulling it over before signing on.
64. The Force Awakens is loaded with celebrity cameos you probably didn’t notice.
Bill Hader, Simon Pegg, and Daniel Craig are among the many stars you probably didn’t notice the first time around. Watch it again and try to spot them. Come on, it's Star Wars Day!
65. The next Star Wars movie won't be out for a while.
Though Star Wars is flourishing on Disney+ with streaming shows like The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, and The Book of Boba Fett, the franchise's big-screen future isn't as set in stone. The last Star Wars movie to hit theaters was 2019's Rise of Skywalker, and while there are projects from director Taika Waititi and Marvel producer Kevin Feige in development, we just don't know when they'll be out. In the meantime, you can watch the latest adventure from a galaxy far, far away right on your couch when the next streaming series, Obi-Wan Kenobi, debuts on May 27.
In the 45 years since Star Wars first entered the pop culture landscape, there have been a dozen feature films released (with plenty more on the way), plus dozens of television series, novelizations, comic books, trading cards, video games, and theme park attractions—not to mention hundreds of toys and licensed merchandise sold (oh, the merchandise!) and one awesomely terrible holiday special. There have also been millions (if not billions) of words written about the films, from reviews to fan theories and beyond.
In honor of Star Wars Day on May 4, we’d like to add one more story into the mix. Here are some fascinating facts about the Star Wars universe, any one of which makes a perfect response the next time someone says “May the 4th be with you.”
1. The original Star Wars concept was inspired by Joseph Campbell.
Though equally inspired by fairy tales, westerns, and 1930s sci-fi serials, George Lucas based the framework of the story for the original Star Wars (1977) around the theories of Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The book tracked common mythological motifs and argued that myths from around the world that have been passed down through generations—like Beowulf or King Arthur—share a basic structure. According to Campbell, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Lucas simply grafted these ideas onto his story, with Luke as the main hero.
2. Akira Kurosawa was another major influence on Star Wars.
Lucas struggled with just how to tell this massive sci-fi space opera on a personal and relatable scale, and he found the answer in director Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress. Telling the story of a roguish general protecting a beautiful princess from an evil clan behind enemy lines, “the one thing I was really intrigued by was the fact that the story was told from the two lowest characters,” Lucas explained in an interview for The Criterion Collection’s release of the Kurosawa classic. “I decided that would be a nice way to tell the Star Wars story. Take the two lowliest characters, as Kurosawa did, and tell the story from their point of view. Which, in the Star Wars case is the two droids, and that was the strongest influence. The fact that there was a princess trying to get through enemy lines was more of a coincidence than anything else."
Perhaps not coincidentally, the word Jedi is reported derived from the Japanese word Jidaigeki meaning “period dramas,” or the types of films Japanese directors like Kurosawa would typically make (the kind of movies that clearly influenced Lucas).
3. George Lucas’s first draft of A New Hope was more than 200 pages long.
In 1973, Lucas submitted a 13-page treatment of his story, originally titled “The Star Wars,” to Universal Studios and United Artists following the success of his movie American Graffiti (which was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and a Best Director nod for Lucas) the same year. Both studios passed, saying the far-flung sci-fi extravaganza was too confusing.
The treatment was eventually picked up by 20th Century Fox head Alan Ladd Jr., who gave Lucas a preliminary deal in 1974 to eventually make the movie. But the “final” screenplay Lucas turned in was more than 200 pages long (the average length of a screenplay is between 95 and 125 pages), so Lucas excised the final two acts and presented the first act of the screenplay as the finished story. The script was made into Star Wars, and the final two acts of the initial giant screenplay were eventually expanded and fleshed out into what would become The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
4. Obi-Wan Kenobi was originally supposed to survive A New Hope.
In 2016, Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew—who passed away on April 30, 2019—tweeted out some fascinating details about the Star Wars movies, including one shocking change: that in the original shooting script, Obi-Wan Kenobi actually survived his lightsaber battle with Darth Vader.
5. Visual aids helped to sell 20th Century Fox on Star Wars.
To get 20th Century Fox to approve the then-massive budget of almost $10 million (though the final budget eventually came in at around $11 million), Lucas pitched Star Wars with a series of 21 drawings he commissioned from illustrator Ralph McQuarrie. These included scenes of C-3PO and R2-D2 crash-landing on Tatooine, Vader confronting Luke (then with the surname of “Starkiller”) with his lightsaber, the Mos Eisley cantina, The Millennium Falcon in Docking Bay 94, the attack on the Death Star trench, and a view of a floating city that would eventually become Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back.
6. Harrison Ford’s casting as Han Solo was sort of accidental.
Lucas shared the seven-month-long casting sessions for Star Wars with his friend and fellow director Brian De Palma, who was casting for Carrie at the same time. Lucas was looking for unknown faces that he had never worked with before, and initially brought in Harrison Ford—who had appeared as the antagonist street racer Bob Falfa in Lucas’s American Graffiti—to feed lines to the auditioning actors.
Lucas saw dozens of actors—including a young Kurt Russell—for the part of Han, but liked Ford’s delivery while feeding lines to the other actors so much that he caved and cast him in the part.
7. Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt had to get innovative.
Now-legendary sound designer Ben Burtt got his start on Star Wars fresh out of USC film school. He was tasked with coming up with a completely new and organic soundscape for the movie, which was at odds with the trend of creating intentionally electronic and “futuristic” sounds for sci-fi movies at the time.
The first sound effect he created was Chewbacca’s voice, which is a blend of bear, lion, walrus, and badger vocalizations. R2-D2’s “voice” was made using loops on a synthesizer matched with beeps and boops modeled after baby coos performed by Burtt himself. Darth Vader’s infamous breathing was recorded by putting a microphone inside a regulator on a scuba tank. The Tusken Raider yowl is a mixture of mule sounds and people imitating mule sounds. The lightsaber whoosh was made by blending the hum of an idle 35mm film projector and passing a slightly broken microphone cable by the tubes of an old television set.
8. Orson Welles was considered to voice Darth Vader.
George Lucas originally wanted Orson Welles as the voice of Darth Vader, but dropped the idea when he thought Welles’s famous baritone would be too recognizable.
9. The movie’s iconic opening crawl was created with practical effects.
The opening crawl for the original movie (which was cribbed from the Flash Gordon serials that also inspired the film) was done practically, by carefully placing two-foot-wide die cut yellow letters over a six-foot-long black paper background with a camera making a slow pass over them to mimic the crawl. In total, it took three hours to shoot.
10. Robert Englund encouraged Mark Hamill to audition for Star Wars.
According to Robert Englund, he auditioned for the role of Han Solo but was told he was too young for the part (he would have been in his late 20s at the time). Which didn't stop him from suggesting his friend, Mark Hamill, audition for the film. “I said, ‘Hey, Lucas is doing this space movie. Maybe you’re right for it. The lead guy’s like a teenager,” the future Freddy Krueger recalled. “So Mark got on the phone to his agent and I think he went up the next day. He nailed it, and the rest is history.”
11. Hamill was paid $1000 per week to play Luke Skywalker.
Later on, he received a quarter of one percent of the film’s profits, so he didn’t make out too badly. The Empire Strikes Back alone netted him $1 million.
12. The original Millennium Falcon looked completely different.
The original concept model of the Millennium Falcon was long and cylindrical—very unlike the flat design we know now. The model makers complained the design was too similar to the spacecraft from the 1970s British TV series Space: 1999, so Lucas told them to create something completely different that looked like a flying hamburger and sailed like a sunfish.
A variation of the Falcon prototype did, however, end up in the movie. It’s the Rebel Blockade Runner seen fleeing the Imperial Star Destroyer in the opening scene.
13. Lucas used real-life war footage for Star Wars's space battles.
Industrial Light and Magic is now one of the preeminent special effects companies in the world, but back in the late 1970s it was just a group of artists in an empty warehouse in Van Nuys, California. The company, which invented technology like special computer-controlled camera rigs in order to create the special effects for Star Wars, was tasked with completing a year’s worth of work in just six months.
To give them ideas for the type of high-intensity and cutting-edge sequences he wanted, Lucas used old newsreels to cut together footage of World War II dogfights. ILM eventually matched many of the sequences frame by frame—including the space battle in the Millennium Falcon between Han, Luke, and the TIE fighters—directly to the footage Lucas provided.
14. One of Stanley Kubrick's closest collaborators designed Chewbacca's costume.
To create the original costume for Chewbacca, Lucas hired legendary makeup supervisor Stuart Freeborn, who was recruited because of his work on the apes in the “Dawn of Man” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Freeborn had also previously worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove to effectively disguise Peter Sellers in each of his three roles in that film.) Freeborn would go on to supervise the creation of Yoda in The Empire Strike Back and Jabba the Hutt and the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.
Lucas originally wanted Freeborn’s costume for Chewie to be a combination of a monkey, a dog, and a cat. According to Freeborn, the biggest problem during production with the costume was with Mayhew’s eyes. The actor’s body heat in the mask caused his face to detach from the costume's eyes and made them look separate from the mask.
15. Theaters balked at showing Star Wars.
Less than 40 theaters agreed to book showings of Star Wars after its release date was moved up to before Memorial Day (the studio thought it would bomb in a crowded summer movie slate). Around the same time, 20th Century Fox was going to release an eagerly anticipated adaptation of a bestselling book called The Other Side of Midnight, which theaters were eager to show. Fox then stipulated that any theater showing The Other Side of Midnight must also show Star Wars, which inflated the number of screens for the movie.
Needless to say, Star Wars eventually became the highest-grossing movie ever made up to that time, while The Other Side of Midnight didn’t even break the $25 million mark. And as requiring movie theaters to show one movie in exchange for another movie was actually illegal, 20th Century Fox ended up being fined $25,000.
16. Lucas’s idea for The Star Wars Holiday Special was a “Wookiee Rosh Hashanah.”
One of the most infamous entries in Star Wars’ filmography is The Star Wars Holiday Special, a bizarre holiday variety show that aired in 1978. When it came time to brainstorm ideas for the program, co-writer Leonard Ripps told Mental Floss that his co-writer “Pat [Proft] and I spent the entire day with Lucas. He took out a legal pad and asked how many minutes were in a TV special. He wrote down numbers from one to 90. He was very methodical about it. He had at least a dozen stories he had already written, so we were just helping to fill in a world he knew everything about. His idea was basically for a Wookiee Rosh Hashanah. A furry Earth Day.”
17. Lucas claims he was talked into doing the holiday special.
“Fox said, ‘You can promote the film by doing the TV special,’” Lucas explained in an interview with Empire magazine. “So I kind of got talked into doing the special.”
18. Ford was a tough sell on the holiday special.
“Harrison Ford was not happy to be there at all,” camera operator Larry Heider told Mental Floss. “Carrie Fisher, I think part of her deal was she got to sing a song, and that was her draw to it. Because Lucas was involved, and if another movie is coming out in two years, there’s pressure to keep going. So they showed up, on time. Mostly.”
19. Lucas initially funded The Empire Strikes Back himself.
Due to the overwhelming success of Star Wars, and the studio trying to undermine him at nearly every turn, Lucas decided to put up the money to make The Empire Strikes Back out of his own pocket, which was unheard of in blockbuster filmmaking. The unprecedented move would give Lucas complete creative control, while still having a major movie studio distribute the movie for its theatrical release.
This maneuver wasn’t without its drawbacks, however. When the budget for The Empire Strikes Back ballooned to $10 million over their original estimate, the entertainment branch of Bank of America that put up a loan to help Lucas cover the movie’s costs pulled out, despite the fact that this was the (relatively) financially secure sequel to the then-highest-grossing movie ever made. Lucas then had to approach 20th Century Fox to help, which forced him to give up certain rights to the movie. Lucas was so unhappy with Fox’s approach to the new deal that he brought a new project he was working on to rival movie studio Paramount. That new project was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
20. Irvin Kershner didn't want to direct The Empire Strikes Back.
Though Lucas decided to back out of directing The Empire Strikes Back, he remained a very hands-on producer, guiding the movie throughout production. He offered the directing job to one of his old USC professors, Irvin Kershner, even though he had never helmed such a big-budget effort before.
Kershner initially turned down the offer because he thought anything trying to one-up Star Wars would be doomed to fail. Lucas then met with Kershner to explain that The Empire Strikes Back wouldn’t try to surpass the first movie, but would simply build on its mythology. Lucas’s assurance—and the fact that Kershner’s agent reminded him the job would be highly lucrative—convinced the professor to say yes.
21. Lucas wanted Jim Henson as Yoda.
In an interview with Leonard Maltin, Lucas admitted that he wanted Muppets maestro Jim Henson to play the role of Yoda. “I went to Jim [Henson] and said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m busy, I’m doing this, and doing that, I’m making a movie and all that—I really can’t, but ... how about Frank Oz? You know, Frank’s the other half of me.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’d be fantastic.’”
Henson also recommended creature designer Stuart Freeborn, who explained that, “I was the one who kind of put all the elements of Yoda together, and although Jim didn’t make Yoda, George and he had an understanding that they would exchange technology information. George would give to Jim and Jim would give some of his people to George to help. Wendy Froud helped out a little bit with the character and two other people from Jim’s company worked the cables for me.”
22. Frank Oz recalls the Yoda story differently.
In a 2014 interview, Oz, the normally reclusive puppeteer and director, said that, “George didn't want my voice in the beginning. I gave him a tape. He said, 'No thank you.' And in post-production for about a year I heard that he was auditioning voices for Yoda. He had no intention of using me for the voice. Then I was on my honeymoon with my first wife about 25 years ago or 30 years ago, and he [called and] said, ‘Frank can you come out … I think we'd like to try your voice.’ So I flew back and recorded Yoda.”
After the release of The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas lobbied for Oz to get an Oscar nomination for his performance, but he was ultimately disqualified for consideration when it was ruled that puppeteers aren’t actors.
23. Yoda's first name was Buffy.
In early drafts of the screenplay Yoda was actually named “Buffy,” which was completely changed in subsequent drafts to the full name “Minch Yoda,” and then shortened to just Yoda.
24. The Emperor used to be a chimp.
In the original version of the film, the scene in which Darth Vader converses with the Emperor used to look a lot different. Though many viewers automatically associate the character with actor Ian McDiarmid, the original Emperor was an old woman with chimpanzee eyes and the voice of Clive Revill. (You can see both versions side-by-side here.)
25. In real life, Darth Vader’s suit would set him back about $18.3 million.
In 2016, English sunglass retailer Shade Station broke down the numbers on what it might cost to build Darth Vader’s suit in real life. Their final tally? $18.3 million. We’re not actually sure how much Sith Lords get paid, but it sounds like a lucrative profession.
26. Some of the asteroids you see are spray-painted potatoes.
Many of the shots of the Imperial AT-ATs on Hoth (which were inspired by the alien Tripods in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds) were all done in-camera without bluescreen composites. Highly detailed snowy landscapes were drawn for the backgrounds, while stop-motion animation was used for the walkers in the foreground. The snow in these shots is a mixture of flour and micro-balloon epoxy filler.
When they needed asteroids in the background during the Millennium Falcon’s escape through an asteroid belt, they simply spray-painted potatoes and filmed them in front of a bluescreen to composite later. And that space worm that nearly eats the Falcon? It was just a hand puppet shot at high speeds to give it scale.
27. R2-D2 builder Tony Dyson’s first meeting with Lucas was about hamburgers and airplanes.
When asked to recount his first meeting with George Lucas, R2-D2 builder Tony Dyson (who passed away in March 2016) said that what they talked about wasn’t R2-D2, but hamburgers and flying. Specifically, “The fact that it's difficult to find a good U.S.-style burger in the UK and how much George dislikes flying. The next meeting we discussed R2-D2 and his fabrication.”
28. Alec Guinness didn’t want to be in Star Wars.
Sir Alec had a testy history with his legacy when it came to Star Wars. He described the first film as “fairy-tale rubbish,” and wanted nothing to do with The Empire Strikes Back.
Lucas and the filmmakers eventually persuaded the actor to appear as the ghostly version of Obi-Wan with Yoda on Dagobah, but Guinness would only do it under very strict conditions: He would work only one day but would start at 8:30 a.m. and be done by 1 p.m., and would have to be paid one-fourth of a percent of the movie’s total gross. That 4.5 hours worth of work netted Guinness millions of dollars.
29. Han Solo’s most memorable line was ad-libbed.
In the fateful exchange between Princess Leia and Han Solo before he’s frozen in carbonite, Leia says, “I love you,” and Solo quips, “I know.” But the exchange wasn’t written that way. The script had Solo just responding, “I love you, too,” before potentially never seeing his true love again. But both Kershner and Ford agreed the line was all wrong for a charming rogue like Han Solo.
In a few final takes before breaking for lunch, Kershner switched things up, forcing Ford to think on his feet by spontaneously calling “action.” Carrie Fisher delivered her “I love you” line, while Ford naturally responded, “I know,” improvising what is one of his character’s most iconic moments.
Another notable feat for Han is that, not counting the prequels, he is the only non-Force-user to wield a lightsaber when he uses Luke’s sword to open up the dead Tauntaun for warmth while the pair is stranded on Hoth.
30. Monty Python and The Rolling Stones made Han and Leia smile.
In 1999, Carrie Fisher penned an essay for Newsweek on her Star Wars experience and recounted the time she and Ford pulled an all-nighter at a party with Eric Idle and the Rolling Stones. “Eric had just come home from filming Life of Brian in Tunisia,” Fisher wrote. “He brought this drink that he said they gave the extras so they'd work longer. I called it Tunisian Table Cleaner. As a rule I'm allergic to alcohol, and Harrison doesn't really drink either. But that night, there was a makeshift party. The Rolling Stones were there ... We stayed up all night and drank the table cleaner and never went to sleep. When we arrived at the set the next morning, we weren't hungover—we were, like the extras in Tunisia, more than willing to work. That morning we shot our arrival at Cloud City, where we meet Billy Dee Williams. And it’s one of the very few times in the series both Harrison and I smile. To this day, Eric is proud as a papa of his impact on the trilogy.”
31. Darth Vader’s big reveal was kept under wraps from nearly everyone.
In early drafts of the screenplay, writer Leigh Brackett actually had Luke’s father appear to him as a ghost as a separate character from Vader, which was scrapped in subsequent drafts written by Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan.
The only people who knew that Darth Vader was Luke’s father before the scene was actually shot were Lucas, Kershner, and producer Gary Kurtz. Mark Hamill was told only moments before the first take. To keep the moment a secret for as long as possible, a false page was inserted into all scripts with Vader’s dialogue stating that Obi-Wan killed Luke’s father. David Prowse, the actor in the Vader costume, even delivered the “Obi-Wan killed your father” dialogue during takes while Hamill played the scene with full knowledge of the true lines. The lines were then added later when actor James Earl Jones recorded his dialogue for Vader.
32. Darth Vader could have been Chewbacca.
David Prowse, who ended up portraying the in-costume version of Darth Vader, originally turned down the role of Chewbacca. When given the choice between portraying the two characters, Prowse said, “I turned down the role of Chewbacca at once. I know that people remember villains longer than heroes. At the time I didn’t know I’d be wearing a mask, and throughout production I thought Vader’s voice would be mine.”
33. Dutch and German speakers may have had a clue about Luke's parentage.
Dutch and German speakers should have known Darth Vader was Luke’s father from the get-go, as the Dutch and German words for father are vader and Vater, respectively. (Though it's likely Lucas was thinking of a variation on invader when coming up with Vader's name.)
34. Empire Strikes Back's “big reveal” may not have been such a secret after all.
Much has been made of the lengths to which Lucas and his fellow filmmakers went to keep the revelation that (spoiler alert?) Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father under wraps. In a 2004 interview with Sound & Vision, Hamill shared that “it was a wonderfully hard secret to keep because [Irvin] Kershner, the director, brought me aside and said ‘Now I know this, and George knows this, and now you're going to know this, but if you tell anybody, and that means Carrie or Harrison, or anybody, we're going to know who it is because we know who knows.’” But the truth is that anyone who picked up the novelization of the movie, which was released a month earlier than the film, would have known the plot twist already. (Good thing Twitter didn’t exist.)
35. David Prowse inadvertently spilled the beans on Luke’s connection to Vader in 1978.
Two years before the Empire novelization hit bookstore shelves, a crowd of approximately 1000 Star Wars fans gathered in Berkeley, California, to shake hands with David Prowse, the man in Darth Vader’s suit. Believe it or not, Prowse shared that critical plot point with the crowd. A newspaper clipping from 1978 teased the genetic connection, even quoting Prowse as saying, “Father can’t kill son, son can’t kill father.”
Keep in mind, though, that Empire was still being written in 1978, so Prowse likely didn't have any inside details on the story. He'd later call this spoiler faux pas nothing more than a "lucky guess," according to /Film.
36. Empire's most memorable line is also its most misquoted.
When Darth Vader drops the paternal bomb on Luke, he does so by stating, “No, I am your father.” The line is one of the most often misquoted in cinema history, and usually repeated as “Luke, I am your father.” (Yes, even Chris Farley got it wrong in Tommy Boy.)
37. Cliff Clavin is in The Empire Strikes Back.
Two years before he began his decade-plus run as Boston mailman/trivia expert Cliff Clavin on Cheers, and a full 15 years before he began voicing Hamm in the Toy Story series, John Ratzenberger made an early-career appearance as Major Bren Derlin, part of the Rebel Force in The Empire Strikes Back. While he loved being part of such a major film franchise, what he remembers most is how “I somehow got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog. It was Jim Henson’s space, with this Kermit the Frog sign. So I took a photo of it and sent it to my mom with a caption that read, ‘Look, Mom. I made it. I got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog.’”
38. There was an opening credits controversy regarding The Empire Strikes Back.
To keep the iconic Star Wars logo with the opening crawl, Lucas and the filmmakers wanted to once again put the full credits at the end of the movie for Empire. This caused the Writers and Directors Guilds to try to pull the movie from theaters because of credit rules.
On Star Wars, writer-director Lucas’s name was at least at the start of the film due to the Lucasfilm Ltd. title card, but on Empire, the new director and writers were relegated to the end credits. Per guild rules, they had to be at the beginning, resulting in both Lucas and Kershner being fined over the issue (Lucas paid them in full). The attempt to sabotage the movie by pulling it from theaters on a technicality caused Lucas to withdraw his membership from the DGA, WGA, and the Motion Picture Association (he has yet to return).
39. Empire marked the end of Lucas and Gary Kurtz’s partnership.
Though it’s George Lucas’ name that’s most synonymous with the Star Wars universe, producer Gary Kurtz—who came up with the title for The Empire Strikes Back and also served as an uncredited assistant director—was an essential contributor to the first two films. Yet the pair ended their partnership following The Empire Strikes Back. “I could see where things were headed,” Kurtz told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 of his reasons for stepping far, far away from Lucas’ film galaxy. “The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It's a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It's natural to make decisions that protect the toy business but that's not the best thing for making quality films.”
40. Hamill wasn’t a fan of some of Lucas’s post-release tinkering.
While fans have long lamented the many changes Lucas has made to the original trilogy over the years, even Luke Skywalker himself wasn’t crazy about some of them. “I can't say I cared for that scream they added to the Special Edition (now gone), when Luke sacrifices himself [in The Empire Strikes Back],” Mark Hamill told Sound & Vision. “Kersh and I talked about the fact that when he actually reaches the point whether he has to join them or not, he lets go. It's like he's committing suicide rather than going to the Dark Side. So it is a calm thing. Look, it’s [George's] to tinker with as he sees fit. I always say it's his train set, if he wants to put up new billboards and new landscaping … Remember the old, ‘It's good to be the king?’ I guess George is ‘It's good to be The Emperor!’ If he wants to make them into musical comedies, that's his choice.”
41. Contrary to legend, Return of the Jedi was the movie’s original title.
Lucas and co-screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan originally titled their movie Return of the Jedi, but Fox executives thought the title was too bland, and convinced the pair to change it to Revenge of the Jedi.
The alternate title lasted so far into production that official trailers and posters for the movie featured the “Revenge” title until Lucas realized that within the mythology he created Jedis do not seek revenge. So the title was changed back to Return of the Jedi just weeks before the movie opened on May 25, 1983. The “Revenge” theme would pop up again—in the third prequel, Revenge of the Sith.
42. Return Of The Jedi was called something else during filming on purpose.
By 1983, the fervor surrounding new Star Wars movie had reached an all-time high, with cast, crewmembers, and the public willing to leak any new information about the storyline they could. To combat this, the new movie was shot under the production title Blue Harvest to throw people off.
The thought was that if production notices proclaimed the new Star Wars movie was shooting nearby, there would be unwanted attention. But if a nondescript movie called Blue Harvest was shooting nearby, nobody would likely care. The fake title also helped the production team secure shooting locations without being price-gouged simply because it was a Star Wars movie. The filmmakers even came up with a fake tagline for their fake movie: “Horror Beyond Imagination."
43. Some big names were on the shortlist to direct Return Of The Jedi.
Steven Spielberg was Lucas’s first choice to direct the third installment of the series, but Spielberg was forced to bow out due to Lucas’s unceremonious exit from the Directors Guild, of which Spielberg was a prominent member.
Then-relative newcomers David Lynch and David Cronenberg were also tapped to potentially direct. Lynch was coming off the commercial success of his movie The Elephant Man, but turned Lucas down to direct the big-screen adaptation of Dune instead. Cronenberg was also coming off of a hit—the horror classic Scanners—but he turned Lucas down to write and direct Videodrome.
Lucas eventually settled on Welsh director Richard Marquand because he liked his previous movie, the 1981 WWII spy thriller Eye of the Needle.
44. It took up to seven different puppeteers to be Jabba The Hutt.
The Jabba puppet was partly inspired by stout British actor Sydney Greenstreet, who had appeared in such movies as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. The massive puppet, created by Yoda designer Stuart Freeborn, was controlled by a handful of puppeteers. Three puppeteers were inside: one controlled the right arm and jaw; another handled the left hand and jaw, tongue, and head movements (both of them moved the body); and a third person was in the tail. Outside, there were one or two people on radio controllers for the eyes, someone under the stage to blow cigar smoke up a tube, and another working bellows for the lungs.
45. Han Solo was supposed to die in Return of the Jedi.
Solo’s fate after being frozen in carbonite was intentionally left up in the air at the end of The Empire Strikes Back because Ford’s contract was only for two movies. Ford eventually returned for the third, but urged screenwriters Lucas and Kasdan to kill off Han Solo because there was nothing constructive to do with his character.
Kasdan agreed, and didn’t want Solo to survive the carbonite freeze in order to signal to the audience that anyone else in the movie could be next. Lucas ultimately vetoed the idea because he wanted an uplifting ending for the trilogy with all the main characters making it out alive.
46. The Battle of Endor was originally supposed to take place on the Wookiees' home planet of Kashyyvk.
Early drafts of the screenplay had the final battle between the Rebellion and the Empire take place around the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk, with Chewie and his fellow walking carpets battling the Empire forces on the ground. The idea was eventually scrapped because Lucas wanted the thematic thrust of the scene—that a primitive society would rise up to help defeat a technologically advanced one—to ring true. Within the Star Wars universe, Wookiees are a technologically advanced species that can co-pilot ships like the Millennium Falcon after all, so the lesser-evolved similar species of Ewoks were created and the final battle was switched to Endor.
47. The speeder bike chase was filmed very, very, very slowly.
The mile-a-minute speeder bike chase on Endor between Luke, Leia, and a group of Scout Troopers was filmed in the Redwood State Park near Eureka, California that was about to be cut down for logging, giving the production near-free rein.
To make it seem like the bikes were racing at breakneck speeds, Steadicam operators walked a slow, step-by-step path through the forest and shot at three-fourths frame per second for hours. When sped up on film to the standard 24-frames-per-second, it made it seem as if the P.O.V. shots were going 120 miles per hour.
48. An Ewok got his big break because of food poisoning.
Then-11-year-old Warwick Davis was initially cast as an Ewok extra after his grandmother heard about an open casting call on the radio in England for little people to appear in Return of the Jedi. When Kenny Baker, who played R2-D2 and was also originally cast as the main Ewok named Wicket, fell ill with food poisoning on the day he was supposed to begin shooting his Ewok scenes, the filmmakers had Davis play Wicket instead. Davis allegedly based his performance of the inquisitive little critter on his dog. (Baker assumed the smaller Ewok role of Paploo.)
49. The filmmakers wanted a movie star to be the unmasked Vader.
The one moment at the end of Return of the Jedi that fans had been waiting years for was seeing Darth Vader’s actual face. When the time came, audiences finally got that moment, and the face they saw was… Sebastian Shaw’s.
Shaw, who was primarily known as a British stage actor before making his Jedi cameo, wasn’t the first person the filmmakers had in mind. They initially wanted to make it a momentous occasion by casting a well-known movie star like Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud to be behind the mask, but later changed their minds. Instead of a recognizable star they thought it’d be better if Vader turned out to be a nondescript person, and eventually Shaw fit the role.
50. The original Star Wars trilogy could have ended very differently.
During an early story meeting, Lucas pitched an idea for the end of Return of the Jedi that would have irrevocably changed the entire Star Wars saga as we know it.
His idea started out very much like the end of Jedi now: Luke and Vader engage in a lightsaber battle with Vader ultimately sacrificing himself to save Luke by killing the Emperor, then Luke watches his father die after taking his mask off. But then, in the proposed ending, Lucas suggested that, "Luke takes his mask off. The mask is the very last thing—and then Luke puts it on and says, 'Now I am Vader.'"
The idea was scrapped because Lucas didn’t want the story to go that dark, and wanted a happy ending after all.
51. In 1983, a copy of Return Of The Jedi was stolen from a projectionist at gunpoint.
Hoping to sell a print of Return of the Jedi on the black market, a teenager stole a copy of the film from a projectionist in the parking lot of the Glenwood Theaters in Overland Park, Kansas in 1983. (He wasn’t the only one to have that idea; it became somewhat of an epidemic.) A sting operation was set up and he was eventually arrested; in December of 1983 he was given five years of probation and was ordered to perform 120 hours of community service.
52. The title of Episode I was kept top secret.
Lucas began writing the first prequel for a new Star Wars trilogy in November 1994, which was titled “The Beginning” all the way through production until Lucas revealed the new title as The Phantom Menace. To ensure the movie wasn’t pirated, the film was shipped to theaters under the title The Doll House.
53. Audiences got their first glimpse of The Phantom Menace by seeing Meet Joe Black.
Back in 1998, before every new trailer was just uploaded to YouTube, the first teaser for The Phantom Menace was attached to the movie Meet Joe Black, causing attendance for the Brad Pitt romance to spike. Audiences allegedly went to see the trailer and walked out before the feature even started.
54. Qui-Gon Jinn's communicator is actually a women's razor.
Talk about low-tech! The communicator that Liam Neeson’s character uses in The Phantom Menace is actually a razor. A Gillette Ladies Sensor Excel Razor, to be precise.
55. You won’t find any official clone trooper costumes out there.
Lucas leaned on CGI pretty heavily in the prequels, and it shows. There were no physical Clone Trooper costumes made for Attack of the Clones or the rest of the prequels because every single one is a digitally-rendered CGI creation.
56. Ewan McGregor has some strong opinions on the Star Wars experience.
When asked about playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ewan McGregor was pretty outspoken: "The people I meet are the f*ckers who want me to sign Star Wars photos so they can sell them on the Internet or the people at premieres who are crushing children against barriers to get me to sign their f*cking picture of Obi-Wan Kenobi. They're not fans—they're parasitical lowlifes and f*cking wankers."
McGregor, however, seems to have had a change of heart over the years. As he'll be reprising his role in Disney+'s new Obi-Wan standalone series.
57. Benicio Del Toro was supposed to play Darth Maul.
The Oscar-winning actor dropped out after most of Darth Maul’s lines were cut. He did, however, appear in The Last Jedi.
58. A young Han Solo was supposed to show up in Revenge Of The Sith.
Though 2018's Solo: A Star Wars Story treated us to the adventures of young Han Solo, a pint-sized Solo could have showed up much earlier—in Revenge of the Sith.
Character designs of a 10-year-old Solo were made for a scene that was eventually cut from the third prequel involving the boy being raised by Chewbacca on Kashyyyk, and helping Yoda find the location of the evil General Grievous.
59. Revenge Of The Sith was the first non-PG-rated Star Wars movie.
The third prequel was rated PG-13 by the MPAA for “sci-fi violence and some intense images,” something Lucas attributes to the fiery finale when Anakin Skywalker finally transforms into Darth Vader.
“I would take a 9- or a 10-year-old to it—or an 11-[year-old],” Lucas told 60 Minutes, “but I don't think I would take a 5- or 6-year-old to this. It's way too strong. I could pull it back a little bit, but I don't really want to."
In 2015, The Force Awakens was also labeled PG-13—as have all of the films since then (including the standalone films, Rogue One and Solo).
60. Natalie Portman claimed that Star Wars nearly ruined her career.
In an interview with New York Magazine about late director Mike Nichols, Natalie Portman stated that, “Star Wars had come out around the time of Seagull, and everyone thought I was a horrible actress. I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade, and no director wanted to work with me. Mike wrote a letter to Anthony Minghella and said, ‘Put her in Cold Mountain, I vouch for her.’ And then Anthony passed me on to Tom Tykwer, who passed me on to the Wachowskis. I worked with Milos Forman a few years later. He said, ‘Mike saved me. He wrote a letter so that I could get asylum in the U.S.’ He did that for 50 people, and it doesn’t make any one of us feel less special.”
61. Peter Mayhew's height helped him land the role of Chewbacca.
Peter Mayhew, who passed away in 2019, was chosen to play everyone’s favorite Wookiee primarily because of his tremendous height: He was 7 feet 3 inches tall.
62. Han Solo’s death in The Force Awakens was a long time coming for Harrison Ford.
Though Han Solo’s death at the hands of his son was one of the saddest moments for fans in The Force Awakens, it was a long time coming for Ford. “I’ve been arguing for Han Solo to die for about 30 years, not because I was tired of him or because he’s boring, but his sacrifice for the other characters would lend gravitas and emotional weight,” Ford told Entertainment Weekly. But Lucas, reportedly, "didn't think there was any future in dead Han toys."
63. Oscar Isaac wasn’t initially sold on the role of Poe Cameron.
“J.J. Abrams basically told me it was an intense, heroic, dramatic character and he hadn't seen me do that,” Oscar Isaac told GQ. “I didn't know if I could make it interesting. I didn't know why me and not anybody else.” He spent a few days mulling it over before signing on.
64. The Force Awakens is loaded with celebrity cameos you probably didn’t notice.
Bill Hader, Simon Pegg, and Daniel Craig are among the many stars you probably didn’t notice the first time around. Watch it again and try to spot them. Come on, it's Star Wars Day!
65. The next Star Wars movie won't be out for a while.
Though Star Wars is flourishing on Disney+ with streaming shows like The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, and The Book of Boba Fett, the franchise's big-screen future isn't as set in stone. The last Star Wars movie to hit theaters was 2019's Rise of Skywalker, and while there are projects from director Taika Waititi and Marvel producer Kevin Feige in development, we just don't know when they'll be out. In the meantime, you can watch the latest adventure from a galaxy far, far away right on your couch when the next streaming series, Obi-Wan Kenobi, debuts on May 27.