The Star Wars (1955)

Recently I've been poking at a fun mash-up side project.

So it's well documented that George Lucas had originally wanted to recreate Flash Gordon, but couldn't obtain the rights and so he made Star Wars instead. My project imagines a 1950s show called The Star Wars, which would have aired alongside Flash Gordon, and that it's this show that Lucas idolized. In this version he successfully obtained the rights to it and rebooted it to great success in 1977.

Here are some of the props I've designed so far...

The Falcon

Star Destroyer

A Stormtrooper Bucket

and finally, R2-D2

Updated 2026

When I posted this in 2017, I had these crappy screengrabs from sketchup because I really liked the ideas but didn't want to spend any more time on it. Got myself sidetracked this morning updating the renders. Really happy with the results keeping my original clunky details but realizing them fully without taking months off my life for an admittedly very silly little project.

Force Awakens Star Destroyer

Built in Sketchup using photogrammetry.

Imperial Star Destroyer (WIP)

Detained on a Star Destroyer

Doing some spring cleaning, and I came across these renders of a scene a did a while back. The scene I imagine for Han's line: "Even I get boarded sometimes, do you think I had a choice?"

There will be no one to stop us this time.

my god... what kind of can of worms have I opened this time?

"Even I get boarded some times, did you think I had a choice?"

Blockade Runner Captured

Here I've ignored the funny pitch and yaw angles I mentioned in an earlier post, and just put the Blockade Runner in a reasonable attitude in the Star Destroyer's docking bay. Seen here, the Blockade Runner is scaled to 150m long, which makes the rest of the Star Destroyer seem overly large (though still shorted than a mile). The bay I've dreamed up here, which is shown with closed blast-doors on the studio scale model used in filming, would be more than 3 times the size of Docking Bay 327 seen on the Death Star.

No Hope for the Princess This Time

Well, after all that hoopla getting the Tantive model built just so I could do the photomatch of the tractorbeam scene, I got some funny results.

The impression that you get when you watch the film is that the Tantive is drawn into the Star Destroyer Bay with everything at right angles...

well, it turns out the whole thing was kind of catty-wompus...

 fig. 1 photomatch results

The green lines are the geometry of my models, overlaid on a still from the movie, and with the perspective of the still matched in-program.

looks fairly straight forward, right?

nope.

the Tantive is pitched down 12 degrees from horizontal, and yawed to port about 14.

  fig. 2 elevation view of photomatch results

  fig. 3 plan view of photomatch results

Ultimately I don't think this was supposed to be the case, but is an unintended artifact of the effects composite. The production department didn't perfectly match the appropriate angles when the photographed the ships separately, and instead made it look passable. Still, it's kind of interesting... if you're deeply obsessed that is.