Pete Vilmur explores early Star Wars press in three parts: 1974-1975, 1976 and 1977.
Eye Candy: Searching LIFE for Star Wars
A couple months ago, the LIFE photo archive went up in Google, fully searchable. Plenty has been done with them since then, but it didn’t occur to me to look for Star Wars until today. There isn’t a ton there – the bulk of images that come up are from The Phantom Menace premiere – but there are a few things of interest, like Time covers, some vintage toy pics and this shot of Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness and Mark Hamill at a party celebrating the tenth anniversary of A New Hope. You get about the same amount of shots searching for just George Lucas, and even more for Harrison Ford, but clearly Sir Alec wins. (Wait! Was it really a party for ANH? Now I doubt.) But perhaps most amusingly: Jar-Jar and Madeline Albright? Or Peter Cushing in Hamlet?
Off the fannish track, two of the more interesting uses I’ve seen around the web have been Jezebel’s The Way We Were features and Typophile’s book cover meme.
Shock and Awe: The 50 best special effects
Den of Geek’s top fifty movie special effects shots is a hell of a list. It willingly embraces all eras, movies that you might not expect (Hitchcock?!?) and hell, I think I learned a thing or two. (And all the scenes have a video. That’s some serious dedication.) It probably goes without saying that A New Hope and Return of the Jedi get entries.
Plus I’ll take any excuse to lead off with Harryhausen.
They also have a list of the 24 worst special effects of all time, which includes that horrible Special Edition Jabba scene. (Which I still hold is worse than Han shooting first.)
Luke’s lightsaber goes for $240,000 at auction
Someone either made a very good or a very bad investment today… The A New Hope lightsaber in the Profiles in History action sold for $240,000, while Threepio’s helmet went for half that. That’s not quite as much as the last high-priced Star Wars item, but it does beat another (or the same?) ANH saber, which went for $170,000 in 2005. (via)
Luke’s saber, Indy’s fedora up for auction
It’s time for another Profiles in History auction! As always, they have plenty of neat movie props and memorabilia, and while it’s probably beyond most of our budgets, at least we can browse!
The Star Wars items start with Lot #345 and include Luke’s blue lightsaber, a piece of the Death Star, C-3PO’s hands and several Vader Project helmets! There’s plenty of Indiana Jones items as well, including a Temple of Doom fedora.
New Star Wars pics at Heilemann’s
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.
Eye candy: Star Wars storyboards
You may have already seen Michael Heilemann’s collection of original trilogy storyboards, as they’ve been all over the internet by now, but what the hell.
The fandom minute: Falcon dreams, lists, cakes…
- Quite a project: Chris Lee of Tennessee is on an “insane quest” to build a Full-Scale Millennium Falcon.
- Lists: A New Hope is a Geeky Movie That Should’ve Been Terrible; Han’s blaster on 6 Baddest-Ass Sci Fi Sidearms Ever; Han and Chewie, Artoo and Threepio make 30 Burning Sci-Fi Bromances
- Cakes The Millennium Falcon and Death Star, again.
- Sightings: Red and Jonny in Fray’s Geek Issue.
Alien reruns: Gotal and Jawas and Biths, oh my
So if last week StarWars.com was celebrating the Millennium Falcon, this week’s pet topic seems to be aliens: Cantina roll-call (originally published on the site back in 2003,) alien collectibles (Hyperspace,) and an old drunk driving PSA.
Explore the cracktastic early drafts of Star Wars
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.