I just rented “Revenge of the Sith” last weekend and noticed that Kenny Baker still gets credited for playing R2-D2. Why? Haven’t robotics and/or CGI advanced to the point that they shouldn’t need to stick a guy in a can on wheels and have him drive it around from the inside? Plus, according to his website, he’s over 70 now (born in '34) so that’s got to be a little strenuous on him. I’m sure he enjoys the paycheck, but it just seems unnecessary.
You could almost say the same for Anthony Daniels except you’d still need him for the voice.
There are very few shots of the Kenny Baker R2 in the last two films – but it is tradition.
Partly Lucas’ own self-indulgence: The droids were absolutely central to the original Star Wars – they played the role that the peasants did in The Hidden Fortress, providing a light POV of simple and humble folks caught up in a huge conflict and they’re the one constant throughout the entire series.
It probably wouldn’t look any different if R2 was totally animatronic and CGI, although Lucas said Kenny was in there because he gave R2 “humanity.” I think if that was the case, Wicket Warrick could have filled the role just as well, without being such a health insurance liability.
For the last two movies, they went to England specifically to shoot a few shots with Kenny. Most of the shots of Artoo are either CGI or motorized units. Lucas says that it was always his intention to do so, but cynical people may find it significant that the announcement that Kenny would always be part of Star Wars came after a lot of fan grumbling about how horrible a CGI Artoo would be.
Myself, I doubt that Lucas would send an entire second unit to England in order to capitulate to fans. He seems like more of an “Up yours, if I want an all CGI Artoo that’s what you get – and you’ll fricking like it!” kind of guy, to me.
In the first Star Wars movie (Chapter IV), weren’t the only Kenny Baker scenes when R2-D2 was waddling across the Tatooine desert? The wheels of the remote controlled R2-D2 wouldn’t work in sand.
Nah, in the first movie, Artoo was mostly the Kenny Baker version.
And they got around the sand problem by laying plywood down a choosing angles carefully – it’s hard to waddle in sand, too. Most of the time you see him moving, like the Jawa ambush and the trek from the escape pod, it’s the mechanized (three-legged) R2.
Scenes like Artoo doing his “Pick me! Pick me!” dance after the red R2’s motivator blew, showing Leia’s message, or engaging in dialogue – that’s Kenny. Turning the head, operating the “emotion indicator” colour wheel, and flipping the levers for R2’s accessories required a human operator – a mechanized Artoo was hard to sell as a character. Imagine if the award ceremony at the end of Star Wars featured the three-legged Artoo. The surface he was on was perfectly flat, so it would have worked fine – but it would have been impossible to convey that Artoo was happy to be up there, without a little man making him dance like a three-year-old at a birthday party.
I’d think that since there were already going to be CGI Artoo scenes, most that money was going to be spent anyway. They still had to have the hardware, model him, write/purchase the software. etc.
My WAG is that CGI scenes + some Kenny Baker scenes wouldn’t be much less than just all CGI scenes. Heck, maybe it cost more.
Anybody in the trade here that can confirm/deny this speculation?
I’m not in the trade, but I thought a major cost of CGI was still the salary of the people who have the training and talent to work with the software.
For their time, yes, there’d be some overhead at the beginning for ‘modelling’, but you’re also racking up expense for every shot, everything you need a CGI character to do.
