Star Wars Geek Bliss

I went to the Museum of Science in Boston today for a Star Wars exhibit.  I instantly regressed to age 10 again and just walked around looking at all of the actual costumes and props from all six of the films and just felt completely giddy.  I went with my sister Lisa, her boyfriend Ken, and his friend Chris.

We all had a complete blast taking dorkedness to new heights.  Here are some of the things we learned today:

• The Land-Speeder from the original movie was a frame built over the guts of a three wheeled English car called a Bond Bug.  That explains why the steering wheel was on the right.  They used mirrors to block out the wheels when they shot the car in motion.
• The real reason Darth Vader wore a helmet was because an early draft of the original film’s script had Vader board Lea’s ship in the beginning by crossing empty space between his ship and hers.  They drew up storyboards with Vader wearing a space suit.  They liked the way the helmet looked so they made it permanent.
• Speaking of Lea’s ship, the model they used was originally intended to be the Millennium Falcon, but George Lucas thought it looked too much like the ships from the TV show Space 1999.
• Chewbacca is short for a Wookie.
• The Destroyer droids from the prequels don’t really fold into balls that can roll around.  When they folded up the models they didn’t form full circles, so they rolled similar to a flat tire.  Every time they reached the flat portion of the circumference it would make a “thump.”  They fixed it by adding an extra piece onto the models when they were rolled up, and taking it off when they unfolded… the cheaters!
• TIE fighters were originally going to be blue, but they disappeared from the shots when they tried to put them in front of a blue screen (duh).  As the blue screen technology improved they added more and more blue into the color of the models.

My space’s blog editor is pissing me off to no end right now.  I keep trying to insert images.  The images appear correctly in the editor window, then I preview the post and they are gone.  I go back into edit and they are gone there too.

So I made up a quickie geocities page with some of my better pictures from the exhibit and of course as I’m posting this the page is over it’s miniscule transfer limit.

Here’s the address, on the off chance that something I do actually works tonight.  http://www.geocities.com/roberts_pictures