5 Reasons It's A Miracle That 'Star Wars' Got Made At All

And what reason did anyone have to think that Lucas could make a world-changing fantasy blockbuster? The only thing remotely similar on his resume was 1971's THX 1138, a bleak, weird film that had been dismissed as incomprehensible by the studio and bombed at the box office. So imagine being the studio executives when this bearded guy brings in his 200-page script that's a confusing mishmash of insanity and "borrowed" ideas. Even personal friends of Lucas admitted that they couldn't understand what the script was about.

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And just between you and us, we think there's something seriously wrong with this Annikin kid. Another quote:

Yes, you read that right. He SOCKS PRINCESS LEIA IN THE FUCKING FACE. Now, since you've probably seen movies before, you may have guessed that Leia falls madly in love with young Starkiller. This draft's version of Leia is 14 years old, by the way. Just thought we'd mention that.

Also, we already knew that Lucas likes to make up funny names, but we doubt that's much consolation for the unlucky Sith knight Prince Valorum. And it probably doesn't make the Emperor feel much better, either, seeing as he has to go through his fictional life with the unfortunate name of Cos Dashit. As a side note, we'd like to recommend that if a woman named Beru ever offers to cook for you, say no.

A lot of the characters are there in that first draft, at least by name. Han Solo is a Jedi and, quote, "a huge, green skinned monster with no nose and large gills." Meanwhile, Chewbacca "resembles a huge, grey bushbaby with fierce baboon-like fangs." This thing had the potential to be amazingly bad.

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That's because when Lucas ordered up an army's worth of fancy space soldier duds, the costume department rightfully shit their pants. They simply weren't equipped to crank out something on that scale, so they needed someone who was. And since people who specialize in the large-scale manufacturing of space armor don't exist, they turned to the next best thing: Andrew Ainsworth, a man who made fish ponds and canoes for a living. Ainsworth went straight to work, pretty much making shit up as he went along. Ainsworth vacuum-formed stacks of stormtrooper helmets out of high-density polyethylene plastic, then blasted them with a thick coat of white automotive paint. This would've been a fine solution if it weren't for the fact that absolutely no kind of paint whatsoever will bond to HDPE.

The original stormtrooper helmets were so poorly finished that collectors can spot the original props by matching up their glaring paint flaws with their screen appearances.

Everyone had to make do with what they could find. To create the human figures occupying the miniature of Luke's landspeeder, 98th-level visual effects wizard Lorne Peterson looked for a quick and dirty alternative to sculpting wee versions of Luke and Obi-Wan. He found it in the form of two Steve Austin (OG Six Million Dollar Man, not the Stone Cold one) action figures, which he mildly disguised with tiny Luke and Obi-Wan robes and stuffed into the vehicle. Although it looks downright ludicrous from the front, it totally worked in the film because the prop was shot only from far away or from behind, and for only short amounts of time. Which is a good thing, because miniature Luke isn't wearing any pants.

The ships were born from a process Hollywood model makers call kitbashing, wherein they plunder store-bought model kits (typically tanks and military aircraft) for high-tech-looking plastic bits, which they'd then glue together into even more high-tech-looking plastic bits to make a good-looking model for the film. (This process would oddly come full circle when, years later, the team would buy an officially licensed X-Wing model off the shelf to use in a Return Of The Jedi effects shot.)

Oh, and the iconic Meridian Trench that wraps around the Death Star -- you know, the setting of one of the most thrilling climactic sequences in cinematic history? That's due to a totally accidental flaw in model maker and spaceship designer Colin Cantwell's model. The material Cantwell used to form the Death Star's iconic "that's no moon" shape had a tendency to shrink, which caused the two dome-shaped halves to not quite meet up in the middle, leaving an unsightly gap around its equator.

Rather than, you know, fill it in, he called up Lucas and suggested that he rewrite the final battle scene to include a thrilling sequence in the giant crack in his model which was totally part of the original design and in no way a mistake that he didn't feel like fixing. Cantwell pitched the idea of a "ditch" around the Death Star which the heroic Rebel pilots had to dive and swoop and swish their way through, breathlessly avoiding heavy armaments on their way to the final attack point. Prior to that, the now-famous exhaust port was an obvious but well-guarded hole that the Rebels would swarm around like flies at a picnic table. Lucas agreed that Cantwell's pitch sounded way better (because, Cantwell's motives aside, it was), at which point Cantwell presumably wrote "DONE!" on a sticky note, slapped it on his model, and went out to get hammered.

Meanwhile, everything that could be recycled, was. Rebel troop helmets are the same helmets the Death Star gunners wear, painted white with the face shield removed:

Extraordinarily bored Star Wars fans have even made a sort of Where's Waldo? game out of figuring out how many times the head of unintentionally hilarious robotic bounty hunter IG-88 was reused as a background prop.

Oh, and after spending who knows how much time and money on an elaborate model of the Millennium Falcon ...

... they realized it looked too similar to the Eagle, a ship from the television show Space: 1999:

So the effects crew had to start over from scratch. (The original model got recycled as the briefly seen Tantive IV.)

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Thus, Star Wars was booked into a whopping 39 theaters for its grand opening, in the hopes that it would at least make a little bit of its money back. All but one of those theaters saw this weird little movie break their all-time attendance records. At the end of all that, the crazy bearded guy was right. Within a couple of years, approximately 96 percent of the world's children were dressing up as a Star Wars character for Halloween. The era of the high-concept sci-fi blockbuster was born ... and with it, the era of building films around franchises and merchandising potential.

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Let's look at Darth Vader, for example. The prequels make it clear that the overall saga is supposed to be the story of Darth Vader's corruption and final redemption ... but Lucas didn't even know who Darth Vader was until the second draft of Star Wars II (that is, The Empire Strikes Back). In interviews, Lucas has claimed that he came up with the name "Darth Vader" as a variation of "Dark Father," implying that it was always supposed to be a clue of his relationship with Luke. But in the early drafts, Lucas gave the name "Darth Vader" to a completely normal Imperial general who had nothing to do with Luke.

In all likelihood, Darth Vader's real name was supposed to be ... Darth Vader. That's why in the original Star Wars, Obi-Wan calls him "Darth" instead of "Anakin," the name he would have known him by. In fact, in Lucas' early notes, Vader and Luke's father are supposed to appear together onscreen. Though we're saying all of this to avoid the obvious: If Lucas had planned for Leia to be Luke's sister all along, this probably wouldn't have happened ...

None of this should diminish Star Wars in your mind -- it should do the opposite. All of that chaotic, slapdash bullshit came together to create a cultural phenomenon that will probably inspire generations of children long after we're dead. After the apocalypse, scavengers will dig up our Star Wars merchandise and trade it as currency. With this comes a lesson none of us should forget: The line between madness and genius is very thin indeed.

The material in this article originally appeared in 5 Classic Movies That Seemed Like Terrible Ideas At The Time, 6 Classic Series You Didn't Know Were Made Up On The Fly, 5 Dumb Accidents That Made 'Star Wars' A Classic, and 7 Terrible Early Versions of Great Movies, right here on Cracked!

Some of Lucas' best creations are a lot more adorable and significantly less murdery as plush toys.

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