'Legends Of Tomorrow' Producer Explains How That George Lucas Episode Came Together
I haven't been keeping up with The CW's Legends of Tomorrow (there are only so many hours in a day!), but the news that a young George Lucas would be a character in the back half of season 2 is the kind of thing that makes me want to track down and utilize a some extra television time in my life. The episode, titled "Raiders of the Lost Art," aired last night as the second season's winter premiere and executive producer Marc Guggenheim explained how this crazy idea to pass.
Legends of Tomorrow follows a team of B-level DC superheroes (The Atom, White Canary, Firestorm, etc.) who travel throughout time, dealing with "aberrations" that threaten to change history. And one of those aberrations involves George Lucas dropping out of film school and never making Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which apparently has a disastrous effect on a couple of the show's heroes.
Speaking with Comic Book Resources, Guggenheim spoke about incorporating one of the most famous science fiction directors of all time into his science fiction television show:
You know, originally it started out with where were we going to time displace Rip, and that came out of a variety of different things, including knowing that Arthur [Darvill] does a really great American accent, and we originally had the idea that he was a video store clerk back in the 80s and we changed that to the 1960s and one of the writers had the idea that, well, if he's in the 1960s, maybe he's a film student, and another writer had the idea that, well, he could be a film student with George Lucas. Fundamentally, the way we operate on "Legends" is we always love to go to fun time periods and meet people, like we met Albert Einstein earlier. That's always fun, but what really made the episode come together for us was the realization that maybe George had an effect on Nate and Ray. Maybe, by making "Star Wars," that is what inspired Ray to become an engineer, and by making "Raiders of the Lost Ark," that's what inspired Nate to become a historian. Once we hit upon how it affected two of our characters, the character of George Lucas became worthwhile. It wasn't just a gimmick. It wasn't just a little cameo. It became this major plot point of what if George Lucas never made "Star Wars?" What if he never made "Raiders of the Lost Ark?" How would that have changed the lives of Nate and Ray? That, to us, became the core nucleus of the episode and the reason to do the episode.
Last month, Guggenheim joked about how this could be the storyline that gets everyone fired:
We were watching a cut of it, and I said to Greg [Berlanti] that 209 is either going to be the episode where we'll say that the show found a new gear in terms of how zany it can be, or it's the episode that's going to get us all fired. It really is. You're laughing out loud, I think with it, but it's like, 'Are we really doing this?' It's the '70s bar fight on steroids. The whole episode is that level of crazy.
The second half of Legends of Tomorrow season 2 will continue to air over the coming months. If you're a fan, let me know if you're enjoying this storyline (and if it's time for me to dive back into this show).