I just ran across an offhand comment somewhere that slammed into me with a bit of perspective, a simple one with a lot of baggage: Next year will be the 50th anniversary of Star Wars.
Fifty years ago. Half a fucking century. Why did that little datum suddenly register so specifically? I mean, it’s always been there, waiting to be found, and I’ve been hearing things about our country’s semiquincentennial (or bisesquicentennial) off and on for months. I’ve been seeing the original actors age and, in too many cases, pass away. So what is it about this?
I’ve written before that Star Wars was a turning point in my youth, and it’s hard to describe exactly how, but until that time, the future presented by the science fiction that I’d been exposed to (primarily Star Trek) was a bit too sterile and lackluster, not really holding my interest. Star Wars was gritty, active, little talky-talky and more zoomy-blasty, just right for my age at the time (which I’m not actually revealing, so go squat.) Not to mention that the video and audio effects were outstanding, and set a new precedent for movies that followed.
Now, a small sideline. 2001: A Space Odyssey had been released eight years earlier and had simply the best special effects done until that time, and for years afterward. It still holds up amazingly well in that department, and does indeed beat Star Wars because it has seamless realism for what to expect from space travel – you could easily believe that much of 2001 was actually filmed in space. I had not seen it at the time, and would not have liked it if I had, since it also remains incredibly poorly-paced and sadly lacking in both a captivating storyline and any characters to identify with. But Star Wars had what we wanted to see in space. Or at least, what [blank]-year-old me wanted to see in space…
I’ve mentioned before that I used to be heavily into building plastic model kits, and still tackle it from time to time – not anywhere near as much as I did, but then again, I’m now more into intricate and accurate detailing than I had been. What this means is, I have a stack of kits awaiting my attention, and among those is a Millennium Falcon, which I’ve now decided I will get done within the next year to observe this horrendous anniversary.
[Do NOT make me explain what a Millennium Falcon is. Don’t even contemplate it.]
Notably, this will be my third such kit. George Lucas was smart enough to not only secure the merchandising rights from the studio, he exercised them aggressively, so as soon as the film grew in popularity, figures and model kits were appearing on the shelves. I don’t think the Falcon showed up until the second movie was on the horizon, not sure, but I did receive it as an xmas gift then, and really didn’t do a bad job of it even for my age at the time, adding further lights with fiber-optics (it came with a couple of lights for the engines and cockpit, something unheard of at the time, and I piped more through the body for running lights,) as well as blaster damage and weathering. The exact fate of that kit is unknown, but some number of years later, I got it again and constructed it with my expanded skills, eventually giving this away to a friend when I moved to North Carolina. Yet I still have a picture of it. Kinda.
This was sitting in the background of a self-portrait done back in the late 1980s, among many model kits on display. It was on negative film that aged poorly, shot with my trusty (no) Wittnauer Challenger rangefinder with the 50mm lens, from halfway across the room and thus taking up only a small portion of the frame. So hush – at least you’re not seeing me in the pic. But even here, you can see that I was enthusiastically into the detailing.
The kit that remains waiting in the box right now was purchased some years ago, and I’d decided I’d do it pretty elaborately, so only a short time later I obtained a couple of strips of LEDs to do the lighting much better than the first time – maybe not as elaborately as this, but some of those at least.
[A note on the drastic changes that have occurred over the years. Back in the late 1970s when the first kit was produced, and through into the early 2000s I believe, the only options for model lighting were tiny little incandescent ‘grain of wheat’ bulbs, typically 3 volts and anemic as hell – they looked like shit for the engine lighting, to say the least. LEDs certainly existed, but only in deep red, yellow, or green. They also, being diodes, couldn’t just be wired in straight to a battery, but needed additional circuitry. Now, of course, we have multicolored LED strips readily available that only need to be connected to a power source, as well as a huge range of rechargeable batteries to choose from, so my 2027 kit will not only have the blue-ish engine lights more evenly glowing from the rear, but will be rechargeable through a hidden USB power port.]
So I have my goal, and a decent workspace to do it within, which wasn’t always available before, and now it only remains to see how long it’s going to take me to get started, as well as follow through. But at least this post is here to embarrass me…
And. it’s just, “Star Wars.” That “Episode IV: A New Hope” bullshit was retconned in by Lucas later on, and using it just pegs you as a nerf-herder…
And now, another little bit of trivia from that same cruddy negative. One of the other model kits visible in that image was this one, though the dark background did a lot to obscure some details:
Helicopter kits in the scales that I preferred (in this case 1/24) barely existed, and so I scratch-built this one, my own design – there was no helicopter resembling this in existence. The rotor head, turbine, tailboom, and skids were all cribbed from a ‘Special’ helicopter model from the film Blue Thunder, the interior from a Renault 5 Turbo I believe, and the rest of the body and glass and what-have-you was designed and built entirely by me; the curving glass was carefully cut from a specifically curved portion of a 2-liter soda bottle, and the doors both opened and removed. This was built in the late ’80s. Funny thing is, the Eurocopter EC-120 Colibri wasn’t introduced until 1997, and it looked like this:
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Surprisingly close, isn’t it? Not too surprising in a way, because that distinctive ‘Fenestron’ tail rotor first appeared on the Sud-Aérospatiale 341 Gazelle, upon which the Blue Thunder ‘Special’ was built. Aérospatiale later merged into Eurocopter, and their four-seat single turbine AS-350 Écureuil was updated into the EC-120 Colibri using that same tail-rotor design. But the similarity in body and cockpit shape makes me a little stupidly proud at least – mine is admittedly sleeker.