Chewing Gum Solved A Tricky VFX Problem For Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi
The "Star Wars" films are well known for their impressive special effects, with beautiful matte paintings, a stunning number of miniatures and puppets, and brand-new techniques developed simply for these movies. But sometimes the budget wasn't able to cover yet another painting or miniature, and that meant that the team working on the film had to get really creative when it came to filling out the universe of "Star Wars." In Issue 67 of "Star Wars Insider," concept artist and visual effects artist Kenneth Ralston explained the secrets behind some of the biggest, most intense sequences in "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi," and they were a lot more mundane than you might think!
The making of "Return of the Jedi" was even more stressful and chaotic than the average movie because the film's creatives (including, of course, "Star Wars" creator George Lucas) had to follow up on the success of not only "A New Hope" but also "The Empire Strikes Back," leading to lots of late-night stress, edits, and re-shoots. With the budget and people's sanity stretched thin, Ralston used whatever items he had at his disposal to create special effects, and that included used chewing gum. It sounds kind of gross, but hey, whatever works!
Pickle ships made of bubblegum
The space sequences in the original "Star Wars" trilogy had to be created without much in the way of digital assistance, which meant putting models and paintings on panes of glass in various formations. This helped create depth, but it could also be a lot of work putting it all together, which led to Ralston getting really creative with the Mon Calamari starcruisers in the distance during the Battle of Endor from "Return of the Jedi":
"I would call those oddball thingamajigs the 'pickle ships,' and when you see a bunch of them in the background, for a couple of those shots, I just took wads of gum and stuck them on glass! That cracked me up 'cause it worked; it had the same kind of bulbous quality. I thought, 'This is great — who needs models?' It was funny. The tense thing was George [Lucas] saw most dailies, so if some of those shots came up, I just hoped he wouldn't catch on as to what I was doing — if something slipped by, then it was in the movie."
There was probably a lot on Lucas' mind when he was watching those dailies, so catching the tiny blobs in the background being anything other than tiny blobby ships would be pretty tough. Chewing gum wasn't the only everyday item to end up becoming a "Star Wars" spaceship, either, and some of the other objects are really silly.
Tennis shoes and yogurt containers too!
There are a lot of ships onscreen during the Battle of Endor, and it's really impressive to think about how they were all put together in the real world in order to create those shots. Fans who want a fun little game during the scene can look for the Mon Calimari chewing gum "pickle ships," a ship made of tennis shoes, and even a ship that's part yogurt container!
Ralston pointed out that it would be impossible for anyone to really know what the ships were originally because they were so far in the background and there's so much going on, but it's still kind of fun. Instead of thinking about it too hard and driving himself up a wall creating the massive space sequences, Ralston had fun with it and created spaceships out of basic stuff. Maybe that's a lesson to us all: sometimes it's okay to just wing it!