HAPPY MAY THE FOURTH! (INTERNATIONAL STAR WARS DAY).
Here are a few of our favourite trivia.
R2-D2 stands for Reel 2, Dialogue Track 2. George Lucas saw the abbreviation while he was working on American Graffiti, and he thought it sounded cool.
Palpatine's name is never said in the original trilogy. He's always just referred to as "the Emperor."
He's called Palpatine in supplemental materials, like the novelizations and action figures, but never on screen.
They never say the word ewok in Return of the Jedi.
In the original 'poster a' (pictured on the right) marketing material. Luke is wearing Vader’s boots. Leia is toting Han’s blaster!
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, and 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 35 millimeter (mm) film projector and passing a slightly broken microphone cable by the tubes of an old television set.
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.
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.
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.
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