John Stears: the man who built R2-D2

John Stears with the landspeeder

There are a few Star Wars personnel whose names were mentioned a lot when the film was released, yet who don’t seem to get the attention today. 

One of them is John Stears, the British film industry veteran who was the film’s special production and mechanical effects supervisor. He once described his work on the film as “everything that moves, breaks or falls apart” – including R2-D2, the landspeeder, the garbage masher, and hundreds of other effects. 

The Star Wars Official Poster Monthly #2

The US version of the Star Wars Official Poster Monthly #2

In another look at the Star Wars Official Poster Monthly, I'm going to examine how this 1977 publication lifted the curtain on the film's visual effects – and told us about life on Tatooine.

Why the Rogue One re-shoots? Star Wars always was a war movie.

The X-wings attack, World War II-style, in Star Wars

It has been reported that Disney executives, who ordered re-shoots on the forthcoming Rogue One: a Star Wars Story, didn’t like the rough cut of the film because it "had the feel of a war movie”. 

Episode Nothing looks at how odd that quote is, in view of the fact that war movies are a major influence on the original film.

One of our dragons is missing: How Disney’s missing dinosaur appeared in Star Wars

The skeleton in Star Wars that was re-used
from One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing

In the spring of 1976, my birthday treat was to be taken to the cinema with some friends. The film, like almost all of those I had seen at the cinema up to then, was from Disney. It was called One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. Not only was it the kind of movie that pretty much disappeared after Star Wars, but you can actually see the symbolic death of the Disney family comedy in a memorable moment from Star Wars itself. 

What did Gerry Anderson think of Star Wars? The Thunderbirds creator told Look-In magazine in the 1970s

Gerry Anderson of Thunderbirds fame: What did he think of Star Wars?

Gerry Anderson was a huge figure in millions of childhoods from the 1960s onwards, giving us the television series Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Stingray, Space: 1999 and more. He also, unwittingly, cost Star Wars a fair amount of money. 

But what did he think of the film that threatened to replace his series in kids’ affections? Fortunately, a cutting from the British young people’s magazine Look-In lets us know.

Star Wars: The Deleted Scenes #4: Threepio takes the wheel

Threepio takes the wheel of the landspeeder in
one of Star Wars' deleted scenes

In our continuing look at the deleted scenes of Star Wars, we discover that See Threepio can do something useful other than talk – and we watch George Lucas grapple with the question of which bits of the story to leave out.

The truth about Jabba the Hutt

While re-reading issue 4 of the UK's Star Wars Weekly in preparation for a forthcoming blog post, I came up against a mystery that has bugged me for quite a few years:

How would Jabba the Hutt have looked if he had figured in Star Wars as originally intended?

John Dykstra, ILM and the special effects of Star Wars

The special effects of Star Wars – 
fine just the way they were

On its first release, the thing reviews of Star Wars seemed to dwell on more than anything else was, perhaps inevitably, the special effects.

It's not that films hadn't had great visual effects before. 2001: A Space Odyssey almost certainly contained individual effects shots of higher quality than those of Star Wars. But films had never had so many great effects, flitting by so fast.