Welcome to the Classic Moments Archives. A feature of Star Wars. Com, no longer active. This is not a complete archive but have salvaged what I can. Please note: Not in order of publication.
Zit-umm-woop-new
“The mosquito-faced alien who tracked Luke and Ben Kenobi through Mos Eisley used the voice of a well-known western actor. I took an old loop line where the actor says something like, ‘All right, fertilize the water,’ and ran it through the synthesizer until it came out, ‘zit-umm-woop-new.'” – Ben Burtt
Special Dialogue and Sound Effects
Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
You want to see an Oasis?
“One day, I was walking along the street, there was no pavement, it was all dirt, and Alec Guinness came along in a Mercedes and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘You want to see an Oasis?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ so I jumped in the car and I went with he and his wife to see an oasis. That was a nice trip.” – Kenny Baker, on filming Star Wars in Tunisia
Star Wars Insider #23
Yin and Yang
“Just like I had Vader to contrast with Ben, I created Solo as a cynical world-weary pessimist to play opposite Luke. I tried to establish this kind of contrast with all the characters, even with the robots.” – George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Wookiee Mix
” Chewbacca’s voice is predominantly one bear in combination with a few other sounds, which helps to keep his voice consistent from one reel to the next.” – Ben Burtt
Special Dialogue and Sound Effects
Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Wipe Out
“Wipes were used in the early days of film, in things like the old Republic serials, but used less and less in the post-World War Two era. I remember when I first saw Star Wars I was shocked to see that instead of dissolves it used wipes, which hadn’t been used in a long time.” – Tom Christopher
Film Editor, Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition
The Art of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
What to do with Kenobi?
“As I was writing the third draft of Star Wars, I realized that after they escape from the Death Star, there isn’t anything for Ben to do, and I struggled with finding things for him to do and finally gave up. I figured I’d just write that part later on. When I came to the next draft, it became obvious that he was just standing around, and that was not good, especially for a character of his importance. So it was really in the last draft, the one I wrote before I shot the movie, that I finally came to the decision that I had to do what I had to do.” – George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Walking the Talk
“I met George while he was finishing THX 1138, and he talked about this Star Wars idea at the time. He just said it was going to be a vast galactic battle between factions of interplanetary war, and I said that sounded interesting, but I didn’t expect to ever hear from him again.”- Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Veer Off
“In Star Wars you got the sense that if you veered off the main storyline, there were more worlds and cultures and stories. Introducing a young Jabba, who has a gang that includes Boba Fett, was a real chance to explore this world. Actually, I remember thinking at the time that the Special Edition work was the ultimate interactive storyline for us.”
– Joe Letteri, ILM
Star Wars: Boba Fett magazine
Trouble With Artoo
“When someone asks me to describe Threepio and Artoo, I say they’re the original odd couple out of Detroit. They really are an archetypal duo: the tall one who is rather elegant and thinks he knows everything and the short, fat, stubby one who gets into trouble.” – Anthony Daniels (C-3PO)
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #1
Trench Jargon
“Probably the hardest thing I had to do in either film was that last battle scene in the trench in Star Wars. We did it in one continuous take and I had to memorize all those technical words and lines — like you’d memorize the Lord’s Prayer in Russian.” – Mark Hamill
November, 1980
This is Some Rescue
“She is a leader, and even though she gets captured, the guys are the ones who are fumbling around and being in trouble… I mean, they can’t even rescue her!” George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Thinking Ahead
“One of the sequels we are thinking of is the young days of Ben Kenobi. It would probably be all different actors.” – George Lucas, August 25, 1977
Star Wars: A New Hope: The Illustrated Screenplay
The Starkiller
“The original name for George Lucas’ epic space fantasy had that extra article, ‘the,’ at the beginning. Concept artist Ralph McQuarrie came up with the design — a character that, at the same time, merged some of the best of Han Solo and Luke Starkiller, soon to be renamed Skywalker.” – Stephen J. Sansweet
Star Wars Scrapbook: The Essential Collection
The Son of the Sun
The second and third draft of the script for Star Wars began with the following quote: “And in time of greatest despair there shall come a savior and he shall be known as: THE SON OF THE SUN” (“Journal of the Whills,” 3:12) – Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
‘The Girl’
“Originally, I was known as ‘the girl’. During my first day on the set, someone described the next scene I was in as, ‘The girl crossed the room and exits stage left. The camera operator will have to pan to keep her in frame.’ I asked whether I was to be ‘the girl’ or ‘the camera operator’. They got the idea. I’m now an honorary camera operator.”- Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia)
Bantha Tracks #16, May 1982
The Curtain Rises
“At the beginning of Star Wars you read the scrollup. That’s planned to make you feel like you missed some early chapters. You don’t need that data to enjoy the picture, as little kids know, it just makes you feel like you are coming in on the second act.” – Mark Hamill
Bantha Tracks #18
November, 1982
Tarkin in Slippers
“I said to George [Lucas]: ‘I don’t want you to think I’m asking for more close-ups. But whenever possible, could you please shoot me from the waist up? These boots are killing me.’ He very kindly agreed. So, there I was, stomping around, shouting orders to cut people’s heads off right and left, and I was really wearing carpet slippers.”- Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin)
The Best of Star Wars
Swinging Scared
“When we did the swing across, it would’ve been fun if we’d been allowed to do it a second time. But it was like doing the upside-down roller coaster — We did it one time, and it was scary, and then if we had gotten to do it again it would have been fun. But they didn’t let us do it again.”
– Carrie Fisher
The Making of Star Wars
1977
Sublight Motel
“I went to the White Sands missile testing range once in search of good missile sounds. I got a lot of different missile sounds, but they weren’t nearly as interesting as the air conditioner in the motel where I was staying. It was malfunctioning in my room and produced a very good throb. You might find it hard to believe, but that throb has been useful in constructing many of the large ship noises in all the Star Wars movies.”– Ben Burtt
Return of the Jedi Official Collectors Edition, 1983
Strange Things
“I’d never even heard of George Lucas back in about 1976 when he suddenly appeared in my lab. He vaguely introduced himself. He was very quiet. I really didn’t take much notice because a lot of people were always just wandering in. He said, ‘I’ve heard of what you do and I’d like to see some of the creatures you’ve made.’ I usually keep something of everything I’ve done. He was proposing to make a film that would need a lot of strange things, and he made me interested enough to think that this was really something.” – Stuart Freeborn
Creature Designer
The Making of Return of the Jedi
Story and Spectacle
“People still wonder why Star Wars was so successful. More than anything else, it was because it was about character and story — more than just a visual effects spectacle. For me, the essential moment in the film is the scene before Luke begins his journey. He’s anxious and restless, and he goes out to the crater and gazes up at the two suns above Tatooine. We see so clearly every young man’s yearnings: all of us at some point have experienced that moment. It’s the dream of wanting the journey so much. It’s not so much about finding the treasure. It’s more about the search for it.” – Rick McCallum
Producer, Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition
The Art of Star Wars: A New Hope
Starring Robots
“I love machines. I love gadgets. I think part of it was with Star Wars was that the robots had always been bad and I decided to make them good and make them the main characters of the film. When I started it was an outrageous idea. Everybody thought that I was crazy because in the beginning, the robots were really much more central characters than they are now.”– George Lucas
The Empire Strikes Back Official Collectors Edition, 1980.
Staggering Beauty
“The last line in the script was that the Princess is way down the hall and she is staggeringly beautiful. I crossed off the ‘ly’ and ‘beautiful’ and felt this new wording more approached what I would bring to the character.” – Carrie Fisher
Star Wars Insider #24
Space-y
“It’s kind of a space-y film. Would you like to do the music?” – George Lucas to Composer John Williams
George Lucas: The Creative Impulse
Spacewatch
“George can do anything he wants now. The first one was so successful that he could set the next one in Redondo Beach.”- Mark Hamill
The Making of Star Wars
1977
Solo the Monster
Han Solo appeared originally in the earliest drafts of the Star Wars script as a “huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills.” In the early version of the story Solo is a Jedi warrior and an old friend of General Skywalker. –Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Slicing Through the Ether
“Sound can be designed in different ways. In the Star Wars Saga you want to hear a space ship really slicing through the ether. To design that sound I inspect what the ship looks like, how fast it moves, and what it does, and develop my own concept of how it should sound, then combine subtle little bits that sound almost like a racecar or almost like a jet plane — not close enough to identify consciously, but if the sound effect is designed correctly then the emotional association will be there. You will hear a fast-moving, frightening object. The film will seem far more real because of the indirect use of elements borrowed from the real world.”
– Ben Burtt
Sound Designer
Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Six Ping-Pong Tables and a Jeep
“They had the equivalent of, say, six Ping-Pong tables in the parking lot somewhere in the Valley, with all the ‘tchotchkes’ glued to the surface–I mean, they cannibalized thousands of battleship kits, and just glued ’em all on, and they were making passes on it with somebody just driving a Jeep… And, of course that’s the footage of the TIE fighters flying past the surface.” – Mark Hamill
A New Hope Special Edition, 1997 VHS release
Sinister Appearances
When 20th Century-Fox studio executives asked George Lucas to provide concrete examples of his vision for Star Wars, the filmmaker enlisted the help of Ralph McQuarrie, a commercial illustrator. Lucas gave the artist a script, and McQuarrie prepared sketches for the characters R2-D2 and Darth Vader. In a sketch for Vader, McQuarrie had given the character a mask, because he felt the evil villain “would need something with which to breathe when moving between spaceships.” Lucas didn’t care about this so much; he just liked the mask’s sinister appearance!- ILM: The Art of Special Effects
Sheer Audacity
“My favorite spacecraft from the Star Wars trilogy comes from my very first and still-vibrant memory of A New Hope. Speaking as a spacecraft designer, what space-faring vehicle could be more impressive than the Imperial-class Star Destroyer? What size, what power, what it must have cost to build. One can only marvel at the sheer audacity of its designers and the resources of the civilization that could afford her. Oh well, back to the real world of -million space vehicles (how many credits would that be?).”- Brian Muirhead, Project Manager for the Mars Pathfinder
The Best of Star Wars
Sequels
“We’ve had a lot of speculation about sequels. We are working on story material that will develop into potentially one or more motion pictures that will use the same characters, and I’d like to consider them different adventures rather than direct sequels.”- Gary Kurtz
Producer
The Making of Star Wars
1977
Seizing the Day
“We (Threepio and Artoo) were scripted to march up the aisle with the rest… On a good day I could do steps — at great personal risk. Like my cleaning lady, Artoo doesn’t do steps — even on a good day. So a decision had to be made. My companion and I would not make the trip at all. Instead we would lurk on the platform awaiting the arrival of the superheroes who could go the distance without seizing up.” – Anthony Daniels
Star Wars Insider #42
Samurai
“George described Darth Vader to me as this tall, dark being who sort of fluttered in on the wind, with these black robes, wearing a helmet that looked like one of those flaring Japanese samurai helmets” – Ralph McQuarrie
Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #2
Rubber and Wrinkles
“Playing the role of Princess Leia was fun a lot of times — well, it wasn’t fun all the time. After about two hours in the garbage room, the fun started to wear off, and your skin started to wrinkle, and your rubber suit didn’t fit right anymore.” – Carrie Fisher
The Making of Star Wars
1977
Royal Attitude
“I came to Star Wars straight from an English drama school — quite a jump. I played Leia Organa, who is royal. That was a part I had never played and a type of acting I wasn’t used to. Leia is angry, which is part of her strength, but not all of it. She was very clear about her responsibilities toward her cause, the Rebellion, and that was it for her. That commitment didn’t leave her any time for relationships. While it was okay for ‘the boys’ to be strong, that same strength made Leia seem, somehow, almost mean or sarcastic with her ‘my way or no way’ attitude.” – Carrie Fisher
Bantha Tracks #16
May, 1982
Royal Accuracy
“The ‘helpless’ female who needed rescuing was the best shot of the bunch. Check it out — Princess Leia never misses.” – Andy Mangels
Author
Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Characters
Robot Wars
“In the scene where the Jawas are trying to sell R2-D2 to Luke and his Uncle, I was inside the robot and (my partner, Jack Purvis) was playing the head Jawa. There were all kinds of robots careening all over the desertOne robot crashed into me. Jack was yelling to me, ‘Lookout! There’s a robot coming!’ There was nothing I could do about it, it just crashed into me. It tipped me over.” – Kenny Baker
Star Wars Insider #23
Reel 2-Dialogue 2
“R2-D2 cropped up when we were dubbing American Graffiti. We were working late one night and looking for Reel 2, Dialogue 2, and somebody yelled out ‘R2-D2.’ Both Walter Murch, who was mixing the film, and I loved that name so much we decided to keep it.” – George Lucas
The Making of Return of the Jedi
Rebel Dental Plan
“It was rather strange! As you know, we shot against a blue screen. There were probably 20 different Rebel pilots sitting around on a soundstage and there was a cockpit of an X-wing set up high on what I would describe as a raft on stilts. It was almost like waiting to go to the dentist!” – Denis Lawson (Wedge Antilles)
Star Wars Insider #23
Quick Draw
The Western’s gunfighter persona became, in Star Wars, the rough-riding, quick-on-the-draw Han Solo. Mos Eisley’s cantina is the frontier-town saloon, and Greedo is indeed the bounty hunter. Han’s quick dispatch of his adversary proves that Luke and Ben have hired themselves a proficient gunslinger. – Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Prequel Prediction
“The man Leia called Father was obviously not her father. He is part of the group that ends up having to fight Darth Vader in the film that will be out in 2003 [laughs].” – George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, 1997
Predators
For his Star Wars fantasy, Lucas used a mix of themes from the Westerns of his youth. The first major Western motif we recognize is life on the frontier. Luke, Uncle Owen, and Aunt Beru are “farmers” living at the edge of civilization on the brink of wilderness; the Sand People take the place of the uncivilized “other,” the Western’s predators. – Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Pole Position
“Whenever I used to watch the garbage-masher scene from A New Hope, I’d always picture some stormtrooper standing around on the Death Star with his stormtrooper roommates. ‘Hey, does anybody want this big giant pole? You sure? I’m just going to throw it away…'” – Dan Wallace
Star Wars author
Performance Mix
“There were three different domestic mixes of Star Wars that went out originally, each done at a different time. The stereo version was followed later by the mono mix. Today, each mix is computerized and the settings are saved digitally, but in those days, each mix was a separate performance, so each would come out differently.”- Ben Burtt
Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #10
Pecking Order
“You focus on the human story first, and then you begin to create this world that everybody inhabits, and playing with the lowest person in this hierarchy, I created droids. And that is really how they came about. I was looking for the lowest person on the pecking order, basically like the farmers in Hidden Fortress were.” – George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Over my Head
“When George first took me around Industrial Light and Magic, showed me the model room, the computerized camera for shooting the miniatures and glass paintings, my head started to spin. I said, ‘Look George, I don’t want you to get this wrong, but I’ve never worked on anything this complicated before.’ His reply was, ‘That’s all right. Nobody has.’ I felt much better.”- Paul Hirsch
Editor
Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
One Website
“We’re starting out modestly, just as George Lucas did 20 years ago with a relatively low-budget space fantasy called Star Wars: A New Hope. Just as Star Wars grew, or rather exploded, in the public consciousness, this website will continue to grow and change. And like the films, our aim is to inform, entertain, surprise and amuse you. We’ll all have some fun, and we promise to provide the most up-to-date information (and shoot down rumors) on the Star Wars Universe.” – starwars.com
November, 1996
On the Catwalk
“We tried to find items that were in stock which approximated to the [Ralph McQuarrie] drawings. It was sort of a short cut way of doing it; we dressed the model up in whatever we could find. For instance, Darth Vader had this sort of black motorcycle suit on and a Nazi helmet, and a gas mask, and a monk’s cloak we found in the Middle Ages Department. Once all the costumes were assembled, the artists put on a live fashion show for George Lucas’ approval.” – John Mollo, Costume Designer
Bantha Tracks #10
November, 1980
Nothing Special
“Star Wars was just another film, as far as we were concerned at the time. It was nothing special. Nobody expected it to be something terrific. I thought if Alec Guinness was in it, it must have some credibility. He must know more than I do”- Kenny Baker (Artoo-Detoo)
Star Wars Insider #39
Necessary
“It was the first time a character I had played was so important to the film. It was necessary that this character worked, as necessary for them as it was for me.”- Harrison Ford (Han Solo)
Bantha Tracks #6, Autumn 1979
Monstrous Proportions
“The studio sculptors and designers had thought and created for weeks. On the way from my dressing room I had frequently walked past a giant, steel armed, mucus-green tentacle, a football field long… And what did we get? A fearsome and utterly terrifying…mini periscope and a yard of plastic squid.” – Anthony Daniels
Star Wars Insider #28
Modesty
“I definitely did the movie on the seat of my pants. I didn’t really know what I was doing, I mean, I had some experience in animation, I knew how to make movies, and, you know, I knew I was going to attempt to do something that had never been done before.” – George Lucas
Interview with Leonard Maltin
A New Hope, 1995 VHS release
Modest Threads
“I didn’t want something very flashy in design; I wanted something very amorphous and vague on the costumes. We tried to keep away from anything that brought attention to itself.” -George Lucas
Bantha Tracks #10
November, 1980″
I got the impression that George wanted all the costumes to be a lot more simple. He didn’t want the costumes to be the center of attention.”- Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist
Star Wars:The Annotated Screenplays
Missing Medal
“I say, yeah fine, but I got the last line in the movie because as the camera pulls back you can hear Chewie roaring, so I always think, I was lucky I got the last say.” – Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), on not receiving a medal at the end of A New Hope
Star Wars Insider #35
Milking It
“George staged the stormtroopers breaking through the door only twice; that’s all he had time to do, but he shot with six different cameras. The scene was very short, but because the angles were so drastically different, we were able to overlap some of the action and extend the length of the scene. Basically, the audience didn’t realize that we covered some of the action twice because we managed to go from tight angles to very wide angles.”- Richard Chew
Co-Editor
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Matchbook Memories
“(Anthony Daniels) did the role so well that the crew making the film often forgot that there was a man inside the suit and behind the mask. So Tony printed up a reminder on matchbook covers that he placed on cast and crew buffet tables. ‘They thanked me for the matches, but most of them didn’t get my point,’ he says.” – Steven J. Sansweet
Star Wars Scrapbook: The Essential Collection
Making ‘Splosions
“We started off testing acetylene gas and plastic models of Boeing 747s just to see if that would work. We finally ended up using the standard squib, a mixture of gasoline and mothballs and vermiculite. It gives a pretty good scale explosion.”– Joe Johnston, Effects Illustration and DesignThe World of Star Wars: A Compendium of Fact and Fantasy, 1981
Locomotion Pictures
“Ever since I was in film school in the ’60s, I’ve been on a train. Back then I was pushing a 147-car train up a very steep slope — push, push, push. I pushed it all the way up, and when Star Wars came along in 1977, I reached the top. I jumped on board, and then it started going down the other side of the hill. I’ve had the brakes on ever since.” – George Lucas
Lifelong Friends
“The idea was that Han Solo was an orphan. He was raised by Wookiees, befriended Chewbacca, and they went off.”- George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Life on Tatooine
“George described the Tusken Raiders to me as nomads in the desert, Bedouin type of people. I could have created some alien-type creatures, but I simply decided to give them this mask instead. I knew they were going to have to live in dust storms, and I decided that they were aliens that required an adaptive sort of breathing device to make their life on Tatooine possible.” – Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Laser-Brain
“George said it was a lasersword, and I know that when you project a laser beam, it doesn’t just end after three feet, it continues to project out. But because it had to be used in fights, I gave it about the length of a medieval broadsword.”- Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Jabba the Hutt, Cut
“Even when I first shot the scene with an actor, I had planned to replace him later with some kind of stop motion animated character. I imagined Jabba would be furry, but we just never had the time or money to do that shot, and I had to eliminate the scene. But I always wanted it in there.” – George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Indiana
“My dog Indiana used to ride on the front seat of my car. He was a big dog, and when he sat there, he was bigger than a person, so I had this image in my mind of this huge furry animal riding with me. That’s where the inspiration for Chewbacca came from.”- George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
In Your Face
“While Jabba is physically imposing in Jedi, he’s not menacing, but by putting him on the ground, he could be a really dangerous creature to have in your face.”- Joe Latteri, ILM, A New Hope — Special Edition
Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #11
Imperial Machine
“Vader himself is made up partly of prosthetics, a symbol of how his spirit has been consumed by the Imperial machine. Yet Vader knows that machines aren’t everything; early on he reminds the Imperial officers, ‘Don’t be too proud of this technological terror.'” – Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
I Have a Bad Feeling About This
“I used the line ‘I have a bad feeling about this’ in all three films. It was just a funny understatement, and I liked using it whenever something really bad was going to happen, something outrageously bad. At the same time I was doing Star Wars, I was working on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it was a line that I was really going to use in Raiders, but I realized that Indiana Jones, most of the time, is by himself when he is in those desperate situations. But I had so many characters in Star Wars that no matter what, I figured that there would always be someone there to say the line and someone else to hear it. So the line became a joke that floated not only in Star Wars but in all my movies.” – George Lucas
Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Hi, I’m Mark Hamill
“I went in on one interview, didn’t see a script, didn’t do anything. I just talked about myself. ‘Hi, I’m Mark Hamill. I have four sisters and two brothers. I grew up in Virginia and New York and Japan.’ They said, ‘Thank you,’ and I went away.”- Mark Hamill, on interviewing for Star Wars
Official Star Wars Fan Club Newsletter, 1978
Hero’s Journey
“The hero’s journey actually begins with the call to adventure, the first occurrence of a chain of events that will separate the hero from home and family. Sometimes that call comes from the hero’s own nature, and the hero will set out of his or her own accord, but usually fate brings the call, often sending a herald — a person or animal who literally carries a message that causes the journey to begin.”- Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Head Jawa Jack
“I actually came to the interview with my (cabaret show) partner, Jack Purvis. I got the job right away because they wanted someone small to get into the robot… I said, ‘I can’t just walk into a movie and leave my partner stranded.’ They said, ‘ ‘Well, we have plenty of work for Jack.’ And they made him the head Jawa.” – Kenny Baker (R2-D2)
Star Wars Insider #23
Harrowing Hairdo
“I hear the (Special Edition) is fabulous. I understand that the special effects have withstood the test of time very well, and they’ve actually redigitized my hairdo because that was the only thing that really dated the film.” – Mark Hamill
The Official Star Wars 20th Anniversary Commemorative Magazine
Han and Bob
“A lot of the elements of Han Solo are a lot like Bob Falfa in American Graffiti. But I don’t — I hope — they’re not the same person. I never intended them to be. The jump to hyperspace is like the drag racing in American Graffiti“- Harrison Ford, comparing his two famous roles.
The Making of Star Wars
1977
Hairy Script
“They started trying on all those awful hairstyles, and I was so scared that they’d made a mistake, because the script described how pretty the princess was.” – Carrie Fisher
Star Wars Insider #24
Funny Sound Guru
“I’d call somebody and say, ‘I hear you have a trained bear that makes a funny sound…'” – Ben Burtt
George Lucas: The Creative Impulse
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