The original pirate ship
Our first blog post discussed how Colin Cantwell met George Lucas in 1974 and became involved in working on a movie known in 1975 as The Star Wars. As that title implies, the film was quite different from the version we all know and love.
Among other intriguing details, the second draft of George Lucas’s script featured: a character named Deak, who would be wounded and carried by Chewbacca at one point; a bearded Han Solo, complete with a cape and a lightsaber; and stormtroopers wielding the Jedi weapon too. (George later decided that only Jedi should use lightsabers.)
Han Solo’s spaceship, known only as “the pirate ship” at that time, was also radically different, with an elongated form that had a bank of engines in the back and a cone-shaped cockpit on the front. That version of the ship appeared in some of the pre-production paintings created by Ralph McQuarrie at the time.
A view of the full pirate ship
The right side of Colin’s model.
Another view of the full pirate ship
The left side of Colin’s model.
All three prints of Colin’s ship shown on this page can be purchased in our shop.
McQuarrie used a model built by Colin as the reference for his paintings, noting in J.W. Rinzler’s Making of Star Wars: “I went by Colin’s place quite a bit, and would take photographs of the models as they produced them from casts. I was putting them in the paintings and some of the paintings I updated as Colin would get further into developing them.”
Colin says his design vision of the pirate ship was to approach it as “sort of like a mechanical lizard. It had a stance of claws or feet, and various body parts and things that popped out of the body and so forth.”
A change of plans
According to Rinzler, the first version of Han Solo’s pirate ship cost around $25,000, a steep amount at the time, but a new TV series, Space:1999, forced a radical change in the design. That show’s main spacecraft, the Eagle lander, bore more than a passing resemblance to the ship Colin had been working on.
Such a coincidence is often called “parallel development” in the entertainment industry, given the fact that creative people working on different projects in the same genre will sometimes come up with similar ideas, but George Lucas decided that a change needed to be made.
“They were all very upset that I changed the design, ‘cause they had just finished building the other pirate starship,” Lucas says in Rinzler’s book. “I thought that the other design was too close to Space:1999 and too conventional looking.”
Designer Joe Johnston led the charge as the ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) team quickly iterated on multiple concepts that evolved into the shape of the Millennium Falcon that fans know and love today. “It probably took less than a week,” Joe says in Rinzler’s book.
The new pirate ship’s cockpit was simply repurposed from Colin’s model. “We didn’t have time to generate a fancy new cockpit for the pirate ship, so we just sawed it off [Colin’s] ship and stuck it on there,” model maker Grant McCune says in Making of Star Wars.
During a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), Colin notes that something else survived the transition too: “The turret survived the re-invention from my original lizard design.”
From pirate ship to Blockade Runner
Colin’s work was not in vain, however, because the rest of his ship was perfect for repurposing as Princess Leia’s Blockade Runner, known as the Tantive IV. Her spacecraft roars into view at the beginning of Star Wars, pursued by Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer. It’s the first spaceship to appear onscreen in the Star Wars series of movies, which is fitting given Colin’s status as the first ship designer working with George Lucas.
As for the Blockade Runner’s now-missing cockpit, McCune says in Rinzler’s book that a quick solution was devised for that too: “George and Joe came up real quick with this hammerhead shark idea. That was simply two cardboard buckets filled with Styrofoam and paper peeled off and dug out and covered with styrene and model parts, just to solve the problem right away.”
* Millennium Falcon image Wikimedia license and Blockade Runner image Wikimedia license
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}