Club Jade

It’s a sad day in fandom: The man who gave Star Wars its first images passed away yesterday. Originally commissioned by George Lucas to illustrate scenes from the Star Wars script in 1975, Ralph McQuarrie was the first – and certainly the most well-known – concept artist for the saga. On StarWars.com, Lucas said: “When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph’s fabulous illustrations and say, ‘Do it like this.’”

In addition to the original trilogy, McQuarrie also worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award.

McQuarrie was 82. His official site is asking for memorials to be posted to his Facebook page or via email.

Any excuse for a gallery, and this time io9′s is concept art that reimagines the greatest space epics. The Star Wars offerings are the best of the bunch, naturally.

An interview with Ashley Eckstein, and while we’re on the topic of voice actors, James Arnold Taylor in the new Insider or over at Newsarama. Also playing? Seth Green!

io9 provides some bootleg-style pictures of concept art, including the a rehash (prehash?) of the Grievous/Obi-Wan duel above. StarWars.com has better pictures of the least interesting offerings (We’ll get the quality scans eventually,) as well as pics of Cad Bane and the clone troopers.

It might be worth heading out to the comic store Wednesday, as Diamond is shipping Star Wars Adventures: Princess Leia and the Royal Ransom, Legacy #38 and even the latest Star Wars Insider.

Also worth looking for is The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Despite the October release date I spotted a copy or two at a Borders this weekend and I’m nowhere near San Diego.

Star Wars: People seemed really excited about the Battlefront III Sith Obi-Wan concept. I’m underwhelmed. Slightly more interesting is this Vader gas mask, which is the first piece revealed from a new round of The Vader Project.

• Battlestar Galactica: Interviews with the final cylon and Friday night’s decoy/casualty.

• Star Trek: Sci Fi Wire has 15 things you might now know about Khan Noonien Singh.
• Trivia: The day jobs of science fiction writers.
• Lists: The 15 greatest science fiction movies of the 70′s.

The Old Republic site has updated with a number of new screenshots and concept art for the forthcoming MMO.

These green, hill-shaped building plans that io9 discovered are still in the planning stages, but they’re rather reminesant of some of the concept art for Alderaan. Greener, of course, but I don’t think the Alderaani would object.

Michael Heilemann’s collection of Star Wars pictures is, as far as I know, unequaled online – and he just announced that he’s added “a couple of hundred” new images. Go forth and check them out.

(We’ve previously featured his McQuarrie and storyboard collections.)

I really wish StarWars.com would put out a simple, easily browsable selection of photos like this… Of course, that might mean they’d shut Heilemann down. Still, the popularity of these sets – you can’t go anywhere on the internet this month without seeing a link to the storyboard gallery – shows there’s plenty of interest for this sort of thing.

io9 goes inside The Clone Wars DVD so we don’t have to. Also roaming around online is a ‘complete list’ of titles for season 1 of the TV show, at least some of which seem to have originated on the DVD.

Try not to be totally surprised that Star Wars is #2 on Cracked’s list of seven terrible early versions of great movies. After reading the early drafts, some of the prequels less-stellar quirks make a lot more sense.

You can read early drafts of Star Wars for yourself at The Jedi Bendu Script Site, and see the (considerably less painful) Ralph McQuarrie concept art in Michael Heilemann’s Flickr collection.