Star Wars and toys have gone hand in hand ever since the franchise kicked off four decades ago. But usually, it’s the movies dictating what we see on store shelves — not the other way around. But in one particularly odd case, it ended up being that way for The Last Jedi.
Speaking recently at VFX Festival in London, ILM VFX Supervisor Mike Mullholland told audiences about the process of designing Kylo Ren’s TIE Silencer, which was being modelled by the VFX team for a crucial sequence early on in the film, where young Ben struggles with having to pull the trigger on a missile attack that could kill his mother, Leia Organa, aboard the bridge of the Resistance flagship. A small moment, but an important one in the movie.
Originally, the VFX team created a version of the Silencer that had missile pods on its underside, and work continued as planned… and then Rian Johnson got an early prototype of the Silencer’s toy version sent to him:
Initially, the plan was to have missiles on the underside, and shoot them off, and that was it. But halfway through production Rian got a toy, a prototype toy of the Kylo fighter. And they had the missiles on the side wings! So we went and redesigned a bit of it [in the movie] so that we could open it up and pop them out.
I’ve heard of the toys’ influence in the past, but that was the first time for me.
Oops. So yes, in order to ensure that the toy remained movie accurate – which, next to canonicity, might as well be the most important factor in any piece of Star Wars tech ever created – the team had to go back and alter the ship’s design, so that when the Silencer fired missiles (as it does to blow up the Raddus‘ hangar), they fired from the wings of the ship instead.
Never let it be understated just how important toys are to Star Wars.
Comments
10 responses to “A Toy Design Actually Forced A Change To Star Wars: The Last Jedi”
Wow…
…
…I find this to be horrible.
This just sums up Disney Star Wars..
In his agreements with the studios for Star Wars, George Lucas got the bulk of the merchandising profits. Knowing this, he built the importance of merchandising opportunities into the fabric of Star Wars way before Disney came sniffing around.
Yeah this has been a factor in star wars from the start. Check out Toys That Made Us in Netflix, which goes into detail.
In other words: “This sums up Star Wars.”
Well, at least it gave us The Knights of the Old Republic games.
George Lucas as a creative lead I imagine never compromised for the sake of toys.
If you want an interesting tid-bit, the Jedi Starfighter, from Episode 2, had a function with it’s toy that made the wings open up in I believe two stages, the design of the Starfighter from episode 3 was inspired by this design. The original design was shown to Lucas and he made an amendment with the cockpit which is what the final result was, if you look you’ll notice it’s a stylistic lead-in for the Tie Fighter cockpit, at least in regards to the window.
(after googling trying to source this I can’t find it, but I swear it was in the Blu-Rays so I’ll pull them out later and try to find it.)
https://puu.sh/zrusN/06f6696753.png
https://puu.sh/zrutF/f81c95a274.png
On my list of worst things to happen to Star Wars Rian Johnson sits just below Disney and just above jar Jar Binks.
It’s like a less noticeable version of C3P0’s red arm fiasco!
Bummer the toy company didn’t make a Luke doll that wasn’t a scared old non-jedi pretending to fight Kylo.
Then Rian might have changed that bit too
>Article about missile pods
>Gif doesn’t show missile pods
Wut