Silent Running
How Douglas Trumbull's 1972 bleeding heart, science fiction classic yielded the humanity of R2-D2 and robots everywhere.
The Mead-llenium Falcon
One of the long-standing unanswered questions on my todo list for Kitbashed is a thorough history of the Millenium Falcon. There are several reasons I haven't written it yet, one of them is my being unable to bridge the disconnect between the various versions of the Falcon, including the 'Mead-llenium' version.
Cantwell's Concept Art
Thanks to an insightful interview with Colin Cantwell by Jason DeBord of the Original Prop Blog, we now not only have some long-wanted insights into Colin Cantwell's role on Star Wars, but to everyone's astonishment, even some never before seen concept art. In fact, not just never before seen, but never before talked about! Cantwell's pieces were auctioned off this weekend in California; hopefully these were documented and will end up in a second edition of The Making of Star Wars some time in the future.
The Score
To this day, the most financially successful film score of all time, and arguably one of the most influential, John Williams' throwback to romantic adventure films of yore became a defining part of Star Wars, as much as if not more than any other part of the phenomenon. It too borrowed from the past.
The Searchers
When it was first released in 1956, John Ford's latest western The Searchers didn't set the world on fire. But it wasn't long before it started its long crawl back into the limelight. And by the late 60s a new generation of film makers, including George Lucas, found renewed inspiration in it.
Kurosawa
With a career stretching almost 60 years, Akira Kurosawa remains one of the most influential directors in the history of the medium. The pinnacle of his popularity however was perfectly timed with a batch of impressionable USC students ready to take on the world, and his impact on George Lucas in particular is the stuff of legends.
Dark Star
In the slipstream of Lucas's student version of THX 1138, John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon managed a similar trick, when they stole their short film from the vaults of USC and padded it out for a feature film release. Though little known as much more than a distant cult classic, Dark Star would become the predecessor to Alien, and fling off visual ideas to both Star Wars as well as Star Trek.
