I usually like McQuarrie’s paintings, but…who are those people supposed to be?
I mean, sure, the slightly Metropolis-female C3PO and arty deco (with a weird growth coming out of his head) are obvious. But is that Obi Wan, Leia and Chewie? Ewan McGregor, Rey, and some Kzinti crossed with a droid? Where is Luke and Han? They look like refugees from Solarbabies.
I visited London in July of 1977 and was surprised to see that Star Wars hadn’t made it there yet, and I saw no signs of its approach. The big fantasy movie showing thus far in the summer was Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Also the Disney film The Rescuers. And the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, if you count that as fantasy.
Apparently, you missed it by five months: it came out in the UK in December of that year.
I met a Scottish girl while taking the train to Heathrow on my last day. (Just my damned luck! 
) We corresponded over the summer, and I ended up asking her to marry me, but she said no (of course 
). I told her all about Star Wars and what a great movie it was, and she couldn’t wait to see it, since her hobby was going to the cinema. Around about August, she said she had seen C-3PO and R2D2 on TV as guest stars in an episode of The Donny and Marie Show (I can only imagine what that was like), which was apparently popular in the UK that year. I sent her a copy of the first movie’s soundtrack (the one with Darth Vader on the box) and included one of the illustrated promotional handbooks that were being sold at the time. She spent hours listening to the music, which I told her was reminiscent of the 1930s’ Flash Gordon serials, and her mother said she was “daft” for not wanting to throw away the package it came in because it was “from The States.”
It’s a piece of concept art by McQuarrie, commissioned to accompany Lucas’s second draft of the script, which he wrote in 1974, into early 1975. Yes, it’s what became Obi-Wan on the left, though in that draft, I don’t think he yet had that name.
At that time, Lucas was considering making the Luke character into a female, but dropped the idea (though it’s reflected in that concept art). So, that character in the art is effectively “Luke as a girl.”
And, yes, it’s what became Chewbacca, though the character design later changed into the furry Wookiee; decades later, the original design was re-purposed for the Zeb character in Star Wars Rebels.
There’s another piece of concept art from that stage, of Artoo and Threepio, where the Metropolis influence on Threepio is even more evident:
I could be wrong, but wasn’t that character’s name Luke Starkiller in that version of the script?
I believe it’s a very early painting Lucas used to explain the look and help “sell” the movie idea to studio execs, rather than concepts for actually production. At the time, the leftmost male character, who bears a striking resemblance to an enhanced- looks George Lucas, was Luke Starkiller. A hybrid of Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan, an experienced but not aged Jedi, on a mission escorting the bob- haired blonde, back when the plot was ripped much more directly from Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress.
It was Starkiller well into production.
$$$
BBC actors could be had for cheap, especially in the 70s. Alec Guinness was just about the only ‘name’ actor and he was paid commensurately.
I always assumed other Wookies came from all walks of life throughout the Galaxy. His language only sounds primitive because we don’t speak it (and presumably can’t speak it because it requires giant vocal chords, given that Han always speaks to Chewie in whatever they call “English” in Star Wars).
What made Chewbacca “cool” was that he was first mate on a space pirate ship and was an absolutely loyal best friend who could tear someone’s arm off for you!
This what annoys me about Star Wars; it effectively killed the genre of good science fiction movies.
It was admittedly a short-lived run. It started in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey which showed audiences that a science fiction movie could be something more than simple stories about people fighting giant special effects. A science fiction movie could be about ideas. They could explore a world that’s different than the world we live in and thereby give us a new perspective on our world.
Then Star Wars was released in 1977 and we went back to simple stories about people fighting special effects.
I’m not saying all of the science fiction movies that were released between 1968 and 1977 were great. But many of them were at least trying to be about something more.
I think that’s something that’s always been true of science fiction, in any medium, at any point in its history. A few gems mixed in with a bunch of high-spectacle candy (including some high-spectacle candy that is itself a gem).
I’m in no way arguing the anteSW movies were not good, because they were, many of them. But they were also sometimes confusing, so very brown, and so damn depressing! They were so…70s!
Soylent Green
Omega Man
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Westworld
The Terminal Man
Logan’s Run
Slaughterhouse Five
THX 1138
Colossus: The Forbin project
Rollerball
Phase IV
Zardoz(!)
Solaris
and of course, the saddest of them all
Silent Running
Star Wars was a welcome relief. It was hopeful. It was joyous. It was wonderful! Soylent Green is not hopeful. Colossus is bleak. Silent Running makes you want to detonate a nuclear device under your feet.
It’s a bit of a reflection of the era. Vietnam and Cold War. Written SF was similar in many respects. Writers write what they know, which wasn’t all that comforting during that period.
Lucas was aiming for the radio serials of his youth, which reflected a different era
Me, I’d call it mindless.
Mindless escapism can be fun but it’s pretty empty as a steady diet.
I’ll also note that Star Wars wasn’t devoid of violence. There were literally entire planets being blown up with billions of people killed. It’s just the violence was portrayed as if it didn’t matter.
True. But I think if you made a list of all of the intelligent science fiction movies made from 1903 to 2026, you’d find at least half of them were made in the ten year period of 1968 to 1977.
I’m not so sure about that. That seems more like a “let me tell you how old I am without telling you how old I am” sort of opinion.
It is true that it set off a new era of summer blockbusters and a bunch of imitators but any unexpectedly successful movie will do that. There were tons of Star Wars imitators and Tarantino imitators and Jurassic Park imitators and Airport imitators.
And it may also be true that SF as a major studio releases did not happen as much but genres falling out of favor also happens. As actual output, there’s a ton of intelligent SF generated through the period, not only as movies but as TV. There’s probably more intelligent SF developed for TV after the turn of the century than before.
None of those Sci-Fi movies could hold a candle to Star Wars as movies no matter how supposedly intelligent they were, that’s not Star Wars fault.
And as Great_Antibob says more intelligent SF content has been made after Star Wars was first screened than before.
What was special about Star Wars was not story or characters, but the world they created. I don’t think anything like it had ever been on screen - not just good special effects, but a universe that felt so lived in. Not bright and shiny and clean, but dingy and dirty and worn and old… but still fresh and original and exciting. That’s what still attracts me to Star Wars - I love the worlds and aliens and endless possibilities of that galaxy.