Friday 6 January 2017

'STAR WARS' AT 40: ESCAPING HIS CHORES!


The introduction to Luke Starkiller (later Luke Skywalker) that we never saw, as the excitable farmboy, distracted from his repair attempts on a vaporator (alongside a soon broken down Treadmill Droid), rushes to his Landspeeder after seeing a ship-to-ship battle taking place far above the heavens.

Filmed out in Tunisia, Script Supervisor Ann Skinner took an intriguing, so far not yet publicly seen, colour Polaroid of Mark Hamill as Luke from this moment- a vertical full-length image showing him wearing the hat and goggles, alongside the wheeled floor version of the Landspeeder, unlike the one seen in the above photo, which was attached to the merry-go-round. In the Polaroid, Hamill has his trusty macrobinoculars in hand. Skinner's continuity notes also list Luke having a small welding torch for the scene, with his long rifle (seen briefly in the Tusken Raider attack) being fixed to the side of the speeder.

With thanks to Ann Skinner and the BFI Special Collection.

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