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.

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?"

"The moon with the Rebel base will be in range in thirty minutes..."

"I got a bad feeling about this..."

"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.

Ralph McQuarrie Millennium Falcon

More work on the Millennium Falcon

Lots of small things falling into place, bringing me closer and closer to completion. Here are some renders of the little stuff I've been adding, and a video walk-through of the whole model.

Re-addressed and textured the boarding ramp so it's more accurate:

Finished off the access pit in the back starboard quarter:

Textured the blast mark on the starboard docking-ring from a movie screencap, rebuilt the forward quarter access pit from a photomatched screencap ("she may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts"), and finally added the junk under the cockpit access tube.

And a new video stitching the exterior and interior models:

Millennium Falcon: what might have been

The original designs of the Millennium Falcon was basically what we now know as the Rebel Blockade Runner, but with the current Falcon's cockpit for a nose. This version was slated to be Han Solo's ship for quite some time. The filming model was fully built, and blueprints exist for full scale shooting sets. But the flying saucer with mandibles we now know and love took its place. Below are some renders of what might have been, if that original version had made it into the final cut of the film.

Farewell to a nice weekend

A Bet Between Stormtroopers

It's an obscure point, but there's been some argument over there years about Lando's rescue of Luke from underneath Cloud City on Bespin. An exterior shot of the Falcon does show Lando coming up from the circular hatch pictured above, but the scale is off. Though the Millennium Falcon is no stranger to mismatched scale (such as the interior not fitting the exterior), so in the end, it's just a bit of movie magic.

Millennium Falcon Engine Deck

The back quarter of the Falcon has more detail than I can shake a stick at. But I'm gonna try to shake that stick anyways. I've been avoiding building the details in the engine for just about 2 years now. But I'm finally, finally putting in some good hours back there.

Also, while you're working on a model like this, it's really easy to lose sense of the scale of things. So I've included a Stormtrooper, just hanging out there gawking at the details. It's amazing to me what he does to put things in perspective.

all the images are cropped to hide the fact that at the moment the rest of the engine deck is bare of details. In the near-ish future, I have to go from blank slate, to something resembling this:

yikes.

worth it though, I hope. 

Millennium Falcon Exterior and Death Star Docking Bay (part 7)

TK-421, Why Aren't You At Your Post!?

Millennium Falcon Exterior and Death Star Docking Bay (part 5)

Added some stormtroopers dowloaded from the sketchup warehouse...