10 surprising facts about Star Wars you didn’t know

Although there are now plenty of programs you can use to simulate the Star Wars opening crawl, the crawl for the first film was actually done without the help of any computers at all.

Instead, they placed two-foot wide yellow paper letters over a black background and moved the camera to simulate the crawl. Ultimately, the opening crawl took 3 hours to shoot, but the effect was instantly iconic in a way that has endured for almost 50 years.

Star Wars gave Mark Hamill his career, so the actor doesn’t really have anything to complain about. Even so, it’s remarkable to think that he only made $1,000 a week to star in what would become one of the biggest films of all time.

That was plenty of money to get by in 1977, and Hamill would make $1 million for Empire alone, but that salary speaks to how low-budget the original film was. It may have become a huge hit, but nobody knew it would be one.

It used to be incredibly common for most or even all of the credits for a movie to play at the beginning, but A New Hope was a huge part of the shift toward showing those credits at the end. When Lucas tried to do the same thing for The Empire Strikes Back, several major Hollywood guilds, including the Writer’s Guild, tried to have the movie pulled from theaters.

Guild rules stated that the writer and director’s names had to be at the beginning of the film. Ultimately, Lucas just had to pay a fine, but he was so annoyed by the controversy that he withdrew his membership from all the major Hollywood guilds.

Lucas eventually realized his vision for the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk in Revenge of the Sith, but he initially wanted that planet to be the setting for much of Return of the Jedi. Lucas eventually scrapped the idea because he felt that the Wookiees were too advanced as a society for it to work.

He wanted the Battle of Endor to be thematically about a low-tech, primitive civilization proving that it had what it took to take out the Empire. That’s how we got the Ewoks, which really just look like smaller Wookiees if you squint.

Another change from an early version of the script, R2-D2 was originally supposed to speak English and be kind of a jerk on top of that. Of course, you could argue that R2 remained a jerk into the finished product, just one that was much harder to understand.

At one point in the initial scripts, R2 tells C-3PO: “You’re nothing more than a dim-witted, emotion-brained intellectual. Why you were created is beyond my logic systems.” Probably better to stick with random boops and beeps.

During an initial story meeting for Return of the Jedi, Lucas suggested to Lawrence Kasdan that the movie could have a very dark ending. “Luke takes [Vader’s] mask off. The mask is the very last thing — and then Luke puts it on and says, ‘Now I am Vader.’ Surprise! The ultimate twist. ‘Now I will go and kill the [Rebel] fleet, and I will rule the universe,’” Lucas reportedly said.

Kasdan loved the idea, but Lucas ultimately decided that a more conventionally happy ending was the right way to go.

Justin Timberlake and Lance Bass declined, but the rest of the band actually filmed as Jedi Knights during the movie’s final battle. Were they any good? We may never know, as their scenes were cut out of the movie’s final cut.

The Porgs were created to hide puffins

Puffins don’t exist in Star Wars, though, so the team got creative and created a creature called a Porg that resembles a puffin but could be native to the island where Luke had been hiding out. Porgs became a meme in their own right, and all because of those darn puffins.

By the time The Phantom Menace rolled around, Lucas essentially had a blank check to make whatever he wanted. Even so, there were still some times when the easiest answer was to just use something that already existed instead of building a totally custom prop.

As it turns out, that’s exactly what they did for Qui-Gon’s communicator, which was built using the molds for a woman’s razor.

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