Part IIa: the Cockpit Sets
The cockpit is one of the more interesting aspects to the Millennium Falcon’s design. Unlike most traditional movie spacecraft up to that point, Joe Johnston’s design for the Falcon is proudly asymmetrical, with a cockpit that’s cantilevered way off to the starboard side, and a sensor dish (or whatever it is) on the port side.
Internally, the cockpit is a narrow cramped tube, filled with intriguing-looking controls and equipment. And definitely one of the most important sets in the Star Wars universe.
The design and the designers
The exterior of the Falcon was designed by Joe Johnston and the team that later became ILM in California, but the interior sets as they appeared in the film were designed and built by a team of British set designers, since the live action was shot at EMI Elstree studios in England. Drawings and paintings by Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie served as starting points.
The earliest known drawing of the Millennium Falcon's cockpit, by Ralph McQuarrie.
Indeed, the basic design of the original ANH cockpit dates back to the earliest conceptual sketches by Ralph McQuarrie in the mid 1970s, when the Falcon was still known as simply “the pirate ship.” It wasn’t supposed to be a standard-issue sci-fi clinical white futuristic tube, lined with glowing screens. Instead, its World War II military influences were clear — George Lucas wanted it to resemble a cluttered and crowded American B-29 bomber cockpit, updated for outer space. (the sketch above refers to a B-52, but that's presumably in error since B-29 bombers had the characteristic round windows whereas B-52s do not)
A more detailed concept drawing by Joe Johnston.
From what I've read, the key person who worked on the hold set was set decorator Roger Christian, the key person who worked on the gunbay was Star Wars art director Norman Reynolds, and the key person who worked on the cockpit was Harry Lange. Though they all chipped in on the various sets as the projects went along.
Lange was an ex-NASA designer who had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he brought his sense of precision and visual logic to the Falcon set as well. His goal with the Millennium Falcon cockpit design wasn't to achieve the kind of scientific rigour demanded by Stanley Kubrick, but Lange nevertheless clearly strove to make the cockpit feel realistic and believable in its own right.
You’ll notice that the square pushbutton motif, in blue and white with pinstripe outlines on a black panel, is essentially a recreation of the panels seen in 2001.
Harry Lange at work on the original Falcon cockpit set. I have a higher-resolution crop of the backwall further down this page.
The full-sized sets.
When it comes to the Millennium Falcon’s interior cockpit set, there were three (or four, from a certain point of view) screen-used versions. Note that these are all movie release dates, not an indication of when the sets were built!
1976-77
Star Wars. Where it all started.
The original cockpit interior set consisted of flat angled panel surfaces lining the tube walls, and a central T-shaped console, decorated with contrasting lines made from narrow pinstriping tape - possibly Letraset's Letraline tape. The panels were covered with rectilinear arrangements of lights, physical rocker and toggle switches, and random bits of found hardware, many scavenged from old aircraft. The lights were mostly backlit translucent acrylic plastic or physical incandescent miniature light bulbs. There is no writing, and there are no symbols.
The cockpit was a separate self-contained set, and built on a simple rostrum stand that allowed it to be shoved and shaken by stagehands, simulating laser impacts or the tender ministrations of a tractor beam. The view below shows one of the stagehands at work, and Alec Guinness seemingly in pain at having to perform such "rubbish" dialogue (as he referred to it in a letter to a friend).
This screencap, from the Making of Star Wars TV documentary, is a particularly valuable shot for the modelmaker, as it reveals the front of the dashboard front console (see section later on). Note also the empty slots for the missing vertical window bar at the top – see later in this article.
1978
This barely counts, but... there was a later throwaway cockpit built by a TV studio for the Star Wars Holiday Special of 1978. Much like the Holiday Special itself, this cockpit (shown below) is totally shitty. It‘s also, as Peter Mayhew’s protruding Wookiee feet demonstrate, undersized.
Ironically this smaller-scale cockpit might actually be closer in size to what the cockpit interior would be scaled to, given the undersized external sets. If that makes sense.
1979-80
The rebuilt and extended Empire Strikes Back set. Reused for Return of the Jedi in 1983.
This set was a complete reconstruction of the ANH cockpit. The first Star Wars wasn't expected to be a hit, so of course the sets weren't properly preserved. The ESB set had to be rebuilt using leftover bits, photo references, enlarged movie frames, blueprints, and the memories of the builders. It's unknown what percentage of the original set was available and used to build the ESB version.
All greebled up... the revised ESB set.
Many of ANH's original set details had been installed on the fly during construction, primarily by Harry Lange and Roger Christian, and so specific components and their locations weren't recorded. There were thus noticeable changes between the ANH and ESB sets. Set depth (see the "sidewalls" section below) was a particular issue.
This photo shows how the sidewalls are made up of two sections. The frontmost panels are narrow and are the extra 18 inch panels added for ESB. The rearmost panels are of the same width as ANH's panels.
2015
The Force Awakens.
Recreating the set posed a problem for the production team behind the new sequels. Blueprints and some photos live in the Lucasfilm archives, but no documentation existed as to what specific greebly was fastened where, let alone where each part came from.
Balancing on the edge of an ejection seat is one of BB-8's multifarious skills. That, and being Photoshopped into pictures.
So a reconstruction was made based on every photo, blueprint, drawing, and screen grab available. The result is a reasonable replica of the ESB set, but with some obviously 3D printed greeblies, and LED lights which have a different colour cast from the original tungsten bulbs. The set is oddly not as dirty and weathered as the originals. This cockpit set was used for The Force Awakens set; reused for the Last Jedi (2017) and the Rise of Skywalker (2019). Probably used for Solo in 2018, though this has been modified slightly to resemble the ANH panel a bit. However, the Solo version includes steering yokes, which weren't added until ESB.
This photo isn't of the screen-used set, but of a replica built for private sale by a company (the now-defunct Propshop) that worked on the TFA set.
As with previous movies, the cockpit set is its own self-contained unit, with a stub corridor leading nowhere. However, rather than just mounting the cockpit on a couple of brackets and having stagehands shake things around, the TFA cockpit could be transferred to a huge hydraulic mechanism that allowed a remote operator to jerk and slam the entire cockpit around violently to dramatic effect.
Daisy Ridley as Rey is seen inside the fast-moving TFA cockpit set, which no doubt assisted with the verisimilitude of the Escape from Jakku scene. The grey and yellow boxes are massive IMAX cameras.
Cockpit backwall
The back of the set is a circular wall bearing a sliding door, a cushioned doorframe, and numerous illuminated control panels.
1976-77
The first iteration of the backwall basically had a lot of lights, switches and buttons, and a permanently open doorway.
This unused promo photo (presumably not chosen because Guinness is looking right into the lens) was from the same photo shoot that produced the picture at the top of the page. This version is quite useful for the modelmaker, because its aspect ratio isn't as wide as widescreen movie film. This means the ceiling and the front edge of the console are both visible in frame.
There isn’t any photographic evidence showing what the lower section of this backwall looked like, though most of the upper section can be seen in screengrabs from the movie. The closest we have to the lower section is in this prototype paper backwall below.
This is what the cockpit design by Harry Lange looked like. Now, there are some small differences between this preliminary design and the final upper cockpit backwall. So it seems likely that the final set's lower backwall wasn't exactly like this. For one thing, this design doesn't make enough space for the narrow edge of the shelf. But this is the only information we have as to how it might have looked!
1979-80
The backwall and sidewalls sprouted a whole ton of miscellaneous new greeblies for ESB, apparently because director Irvin Kershner felt the original set wasn’t busy enough. This is the most familiar version of the cockpit, partly because some memorable scenes took place in it (eg: the asteroid chase), but also because subsequent versions have all followed this design. There is quite a bit of published photographic documentation on this set, except for the front console.
This behind the scenes shot reveals some of the lighting placement for the scene - there's a lamp on the left hand shelf.
2015
This version is a largely faithful copy of the 1980 set. Modified elements include the backwall display.
Door
The cockpit backwall has a narrow coffin-shaped sliding door in the centre. The shape is dictated by the tight clearance at the top and bottom because of the circular cross-section of the cockpit tube and backwall.
The door opening is framed by simulated padded cushions. The inner doorframe has a series of protruding silver cylinders or bolts, but they don’t align with the actual door, so don’t seem to be useful as interlock mechanisms or anything like that.
1976-77
The door is never shown in this film. It’s always open, revealing the corridor behind. It's possible it may never have been built, in fact.
1979-80
The door is shown opening and closing, and is normally closed when the Falcon is in flight. Framing and details of the door surface were therefore constructed for this movie. The door has a recessed panel in the centre containing what appears to be a small group of seven-segment red LEDs, of the kind used to display numerals on a digital clock. The array was set up to flash sequences of lines in patterns and didn’t show any obvious symbols.
2015
The Force Awakens cockpit door was a replica of above.
The corridoR
The cockpit set always has a stub of corridor behind it. This hallway ends just out of view of the camera. For more details, check out the section on corridors on the page on sets.
Sidewalls
The sides of the cockpit were made of flat panels, arching over the seats.
1976-77
The original sidewalls were flat panels with lights, buttons, and switches. A few larger greeblies are evident, but it’s mostly just panel sections marked out with pinstriping tape. The countless switches and buttons were apparently commonly available as surplus in the UK in the 70s, and were fairly large and clunky things. Years later, Harrison Ford recounted that he found the flip switches on the original set particularly frustrating, since they lacked springs to stay in one position and would flop back. One exception are the rocker switches which, if they're like the rocker switches seen on other Star Wars sets and props, were simply blocks of wood.
The 1977 cockpit also has a slightly lower ceiling than later versions of the set. See the section on "lightbars" below for details on why this happened.
This awesome photo shows designer Harry Lange taking a break during the construction of the original Star Wars cockpit. The short sidewalls and the banks of tungsten lamps used to backlight the buttons and controls can easily be seen, as can Roger Christian's metal dice. Interestingly, the central display unit shows that a simulated nav display was actually installed. Also interestingly, the set has glazing in the windows, which was later removed for filming. Also also interesting, the vertical front window bar is present.
1979-80
The biggest cockpit change occurred for Empire, when producer Gary Kurtz instructed the set builders to deepen or lengthen the cockpit set, knowing that multiple intense scenes would be shot on the set with four actors at a time. Accordingly 18 inches (about 45cm) was added to the back of the tube in the form of a new ring of panels. The extra panels were often simple black metal panels with X-shaped braces, but were sometimes more complex and greebly-encrusted than ANH's more austere panels.
These actual blueprints illustrate the point. The upper blueprint is of the ANH cockpit, and was published in a vinyl pouch of original Star Wars blueprints in the 1970s. The lower blueprint is of the ESB cockpit, as published in Star Wars: the Blueprints by J. W. Rinzler.
It’s obvious that the ESB plans are a direct copy of the ANH plans, but the mid section of the cockpit is slightly longer, as I’ve indicated here in red. While the ANH cockpit is 3 feet deep, the ESB cockpit is 4'6" deep, though the blueprint does add “dimensions subject to alteration.” However, the Volvo 343/345 dashboard box on the side of the ESB set is 1 foot 1 inch wide, so it appears that the 18" additional depth measurement is correct.
This breathing room probably helped the actors, who reportedly struggled with the claustrophobic cockpit scenes anyway, but, according to JW Rinzler's Blueprints book, annoyed George Lucas when he heard of the change, since he wanted a crowded cramped cockpit as part of the look of the Falcon.
Two C-shaped metal handgrips were also added to the front of the sidewall. This addition is most easily seen during the asteroid chase, where C-3PO can be seen hanging onto one for dear robotic existence. You can also see the break in the lightbar, showing where the extra 18 inches of panel have been added to the front.
2015
Same depth as ESB. Mostly similar details and greeblies, though since many were reconstructed there are some variations from the 1980 set.
2018
Oddly, images from the "Solo" movie clearly show that the extended cockpit was used in the prequel. Which is a shame, as that means the cockpit starts out deep, then becomes mysteriously shallower for ANH, then goes deeper again. It's one of the few continuity errors not addressed in the film. Of course, it's also got different light arrangements and greeblies than the later sets.
Note how the actors are bathed in blue light from the exterior. This is because the cockpit set wasn't built around bluescreens, as the original sets were. Back then they had to add the scenes outside the window using optical compositing, so the actors had to respond to black blue screens. The Solo cockpit set was built around enormous LED projection screens, upon which actual computer graphics were projected in realtime. That means that the actors could actually see the exterior scenes they're supposed to be playing off. It also means there's no need to composite the effects in later - the stuff is already right there in camera. Also, any colours from outside will end up tinting lighter surfaces inside the set, for extra realism.
Shelf
A narrow shelf at waist height runs around either side of the cockpit. Not much to say about this, other than it had a stepped routed edge. I think it's kind of fascinating that despite the limited budget of the show they went to the trouble of designing the shelf that way, even specifying its routed-out measurements on the original blueprints.
Set lighting
1976-77
The set lighting is notably very old-fashioned in the first Star Wars movie. The director of photography was old-school English cinematographer Gil Taylor, who took the traditional approach of blasting light into every set. The light was very hard – see the photo below, where a huge Mole-Richardson Fresnel lens lamp can be seen. And so everyone is lit in a very unflattering way. The scenes of Leia and Tarkin on the Death Star are other classic examples of this.
The Falcon cockpit was also lit this way, and it really makes no sense at all. Aside from being aesthetically harsh and ugly, it means that the scenes of the crew in deep space has them illuminated by some mysterious bright light source outside the windows.
Filming the original 1977 cockpit. Note the huge lamp, probably a Mole-Richardson Fresnel, left front. The small conical photoflood lamps clamped to the set on the far left side of the frame are used for backlighting different greeblies. Note also that the front window bars are all missing. They were clearly unscrewed and removed for ease of filming.
1979-80
The lighting in ESB is considerably different. Empire's cinematographer Peter Suschitzky adopted a darker, moodier, and subtle style, with much more soft and complex lighting. He usually lit the Falcon interior to give the illusion that everyone was illuminated by the actual lights inside the cockpit, rather than being lit by some random light source outside in the blackness of space. The sophisticated cinematography is a significant reason, I’d argue, that ESB has aged less than ANH.
This approach wasn’t without its risks, however. During filming of one cockpit scene in Empire, Peter Mayhew’s Wookiee costume actually caught fire because of a light mounted on the floor!
Lightbars
The cockpit is ostensibly lit by a set of horizontal lightbars. These were milky white acrylic panels, backlit. They also had fine pinstriping running parallel to the edges.
1976-77
One of the odd points about the original set concerns the noticeably misaligned light bars in the port corner, where the backwall joins the port sidewall. Given that Harry Lange was a skilled and experienced set designer, this seems strange.
It turns out that George Lucas visited the cockpit set when it was nearly done and offered the view that it was too big. He wanted a cramped and crowded cockpit, like a plane from a war movie. His request for a lower ceiling resulted in a hasty rejigging of set parts shortly before filming, in order to make the cockpit smaller in diameter. This is apparently the cause of the alignment problem.
But why is the lightbar misaligned on Han's (port) side, but fine on Chewie's (starboard) side? I've vaguely puzzled over that for some years, but Stinson Lenz has come up with a simple and logical explanation. Basically when the crew revamped the cockpit to make it slightly smaller, they simply "rotated" the sidewalls as a whole unit, intact. They did so in a clockwise fashion if you're looking towards the door of the cockpit, and the rotation point was essentially around the lower bottom edge of the Chewie side of the set.
This explains why the sidewalls are mostly aligned on the Chewie side, since they pivoted at that point. But they were rotated and thus lowered slightly on the other. The manoeuvre also decreased the visible top section of the cockpit backwall, which also explains why the Han-side medium-grey coloured wedge piece has a different profile from the ESB and later cockpits (essentially the rotating sidewalls took a notch out of that panel). It also explains why the angled joins in the sidewalls don't line up with the points at the top of the backwall.
1979-80
This version of the set fixes the alignment issue. All light bars line up, because the sidewalls and ceiling weren't rotated down.
Light was also added - a small light panel is now visible in the rear starboard corner, near the nav display. The shot below shows a roof panel that was removed for the filming so that additional lighting could be added. It also is one of the few clear shots known of the ceiling handles.
2015
As above.
Backwall “nav computer” display
One notable detail of the backwall is the circular screen to the top starboard corner, often referred to in ancillary marketing material as the nav computer display, though it’s never described in any OT script. It was later retconned in "Solo" to be the navigational capabilities of ill-fated rebellious droid L3-37.
1976-77
This screen was simply a round piece of glass or plastic with a simple picture behind it. The display showed a graphic of curved lines and a box in green, red, and white, and never changed. There were small lights around the “screen” grouped in a part circle, and these lights mostly flashed on and off in groups. This design was shown in "Solo" as an Easter egg when Qi'ra installs the display.
1979-80
The ESB display had some simple red LED animations. Interestingly it seems to have some depth from certain angles, suggesting it might have been a small “hall of mirrors.” In other words, the display might have been made from two pieces of half-silvered glass or acrylic sheet, facing inwards and sandwiching a layer of LEDs. This is just conjecture though. There’s a fine circle of red light seen on this screen sometimes, but it doesn’t appear to be made of a bunch of dots like a set of LEDs.
2015
The TFA and TLJ nav display has a bunch of red LEDs showing an animation in a circular sweep. It doesn’t have a hall of mirrors look – it’s just a plain black circle with the red lights. Kind of naff looking, especially since it seems to have used ordinary 5mm LEDs and so the patterns are made up of obvious dots.
Luke gazed around the Falcon cockpit in horror. “What... what have you kids done? In my day, we had real light bulbs, not these phoney red and blue LEDs!”
Openable panels
1976 – 1983
The original movies never show anyone opening anything up in the cockpit.
2015
One of the extra ring panels - a starboard blank panel with the X-shaped bracing - becomes openable in TFA. This is for the moment when Rey manages to miraculously fix a problem with the Falcon by extracting some component or other. The panel recess seems oddly deep given the diameter of the cockpit tube, but presumably the Falcon’s hull is made of some powerfully tough, yet thin, material.
It’s not entirely unreasonable as the black panels with X marks do look like thin cover plates with reinforcing bars, and they do have greeblies which resemble locking pull handles.
Front side panels
1976-77
The first set had fairly basic flat wedge-shaped panels on the sides of the cone at the front. Pinstriping tape, a few small lights.
1979-80
The ESB set had a bunch of new greeblies, including a series of wedge-shaped panels with recessed rectangular holes. These were dashboard panels from a Volvo 343 mounted backwards, and were the same car parts used on the side of the Han Solo carbonite module. Interestingly, there were fewer lights in this area than on the 1977 set. Also, the Volvo panels are basically empty – they didn’t use the cutouts in the frames to house fake instrumentation or anything.
2015
This set replicated the Volvo panels and other greeblies.
The dashboard.
The cockpit has a T-shaped dashboard with a central console running between Han and Chewie, and a front panel. All kinds of controls adorn this thing – mostly switches and pushbuttons.
1977
Loads of buttons, switches, and lights. The top console features a few greeblies, notably the bottom halves of old Vickers Viscount aircraft reading lamps, which look like two small steel colanders. In ANH and ROTJ these both appear to be bolted straight to the console surface. To the right are a set of turned aluminium levers. There are a number of round domed lights with chrome rings.
The central black object is supposed to be a display screen of some sort. It’s an odd design, really, since it’s a very small portrait-orientation display, buried deep inside a black rectangular thing that appears to resemble a stepped lens hood from a very old large-format camera. It contains a static diagram that's visible during the "I'm in it for the money" scene.
1980
A couple of extra levers on a black circular plate were added to Han’s side of the middle console. From certain angles these look like microphones, but they’re not.
The large round dashboard lights (such as the flashing red "losing a deflector shield" light from ANH) were replaced with flat clear acrylic squares, mostly lit with circular areas underneath.
Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) plays it cool in the cockpit, clad in particularly hip fashion. Note how the left-hand colander is atop a frame.
Strangely in ESB and TFA the left-hand colander Vickers lamp is mounted inside a black rectangular frame with rounded corners.
The central dash monitor screen was also shown in operation. At least, it was shown through implication – Han and Leia supposedly examine star charts on it, but only by being bathed in blue light. The display is never actually shown to the audience in any film. The central dash has some extra hand controllers.
2015
The left-hand colander-shaped Vickers lamp reverted to the ESB look, despite the ROTJ look resembling the ANH look. The large dash lights also went back to the round ANH look.
Return of the Jedi (1983) featured two Vickers reading lamp colanders, this time with red lights in them. Both were bolted straight to the dash.
Yokes.
1977
The original set had no steering facilities at all. It’s no yoke! No wheel, no levers, nothing. Just a bunch of switches and buttons. This absence of obvious control mechanisms made the actors look like they were demonstrating a musical electric organ in a 1970s shopping mall. While the mall was on fire.
Yokeless. The vertical window bar and glazing are missing in this shot, indicating that the set has been used for filming.
Harrison Ford has been using this fact as an amusing TV chat show anecdote for years. “...and then I asked George... how do you fly this thing? And he just said, you know - you just... fly it!”
1980
The ESB set added a pair of control yokes (ie: levers but with crossbars, not like car steering wheels) taken from old British Vickers Viscount airplanes – one for Han and one for Chewie. They were mounted upside down, equipped with a couple of red 5mm LEDs on the top of the post, and bring a nice air of steerable authenticity to the ship. Note that the behind the scenes photo below shows the yokes on posts which extend to the floor. This appears to be an in-progress photo, since the final movie yokes are just bolted to the edge of the dash. Perhaps the posts got in the way of the actors, and so were removed. Some model makers have replicated these posts, but that isn't correct to the on-screen appearance.
Incidentally, the view below demonstrates what a crummy design the Falcon cockpit would actually be to fly as a pilot. The side panels are pretty high, and result in terrible viewing angles. On top of the confusing side-slung cockpit position.
2015
The TFA set was a reconstruction of the ESB set, including the yokes.
Rear dash ring.
The tail end of the dashboard unit features a metal ring mounted at the back. But what appears in this ring depends on the movie - and even what scene in the movie!
1977
Modellers making the ANH dashboard have a particular challenging decision to make – the case of the vanishing greebly. There's a metal cylinder that appears as part of the back console in some scenes and photos, and is completely missing in others.
There it is...
There's no story reference made to it in the film – it just seems to be a random continuity error, like the metal dice that briefly appear in one scene. It’s not like it’s a giant ignition key or a Corellian alarm disabler or something. So you just need to decide what moment in time you want to model. The non greebly version has two concentric, but not centre-aligned, rings.
...and there it isn't. Just two metal rings remain on the rear console.
1980
In the ESB set this part is replaced by a black rectangular block, which looks a bit like a videocassette from certain angles. It’s thicker and narrower, though, and has some metallic bits. In the photo below it appears to have some paper wedged around it for mysterious reasons. There's also a blocky rectangular metal greebly added to the very top of the rear console.
Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill were not impressed by Billy Dee Williams' habit of breaking out into the chorus of “There’s Nothin’ Like a Dame” from the musical South Pacific at the drop of a hat.
2015
In the TFA set there’s a new part altogether - a bolted-down glass and metal cylinder, equipped with an unearthly turquoise glow that kind of looks like it’s from another fictitious universe, like some generic prop from a Marvel steampunk movie. There's been some theorizing that this glass canister is supposed to be the “compressor on the ignition line” that Han complains about in the script, though it does seem bizarre that an “ignition line” would run behind the pilot’s seat console...
Some moof-milker...
Blinkies.
The different movies show different blinking patterns of control panel and dashboard lights.
Flashing lights are always a tricky thing to pull off. In real life you don’t see a lot of blinking panels for the simple reason that control panel lights are supposed to indicate some piece of information or other. And flashing lights are typically meant to indicate some sort of warning. It would be a confusing and distracting mess if every light blinked.
But in movies you want some blinking lights since they give a sense of activity and life to the set. And so blinkies have long been a staple of SF movies. These also reflected what actual computers looked like in the 60s - panels with single-purpose lights and not many video monitors.
Really bad movie panels tended to look like Christmas light showrooms - entire banks of colourful lights flashing in large meaningless groups. Or entire sections of lights flashing together, such as the “Mother” computer brain room in the first Alien film (the only unconvincing set in the whole film).
1977
The first movie has the worst blinkers of the lot. They’re too Christmas lighty. For example if there’s a row of little lights, the whole row typically blinks on and off. Which looks pretty unconvincing and fake, since you’d expect individual lights to blink if they're meant to convey anything meaningful. The blink rate also tends to be rapid, which lends to the overall phoniness. The nav computer in the hold has particularly crappy looking lights this way. That said, the panel lights in the first film's cockpit aren't too bright, and so look more realistic in that regard.
1980
The ESB cockpit has more believable blink patterns, since the lights tend to flash individually or in smaller groups, rather than entire rows. There also aren’t as many obvious patterns visible in the brief clips of the cockpit. The scene where Leia sits quietly in the cockpit, wrestling with her feelings inside an alien slug belly, has fairly decent looking blinkies.
The ESB blinkies are mostly red, suggesting many may have been LEDs. Note that blue and white LEDs didn’t exist at the time, and green and amber ones weren’t readily available in high brightness versions. The ESB cockpit is arguably a bit garish in its blinky lighting, though.
2015
The TFA cockpit is supposed to emulate the 1980 set, but mainly relies on LEDs rather than small light bulbs, so has a different feel. Even some of the larger red lights, which were clearly incandescent bulbs in large plastic holders on the ANH set, are replica holders containing 4 LEDs on the TFA set.
LEDs emit more narrow bandwidths of light than bulbs and so look different from incandescent bulbs. As a result this version of the cockpit somehow looks more synthetic than its predecessors, somehow. The blink patterns are supposedly modelled after the ESB ones, but it’s obviously hard to say. They definitely seem closer to the 1980 set than the 77.
The Force is strong with these 5mm red LEDs, which Han Solo won in a bet on the scrap planet Radioshacka.
2017
The Last Jedi shows Luke Skywalker entering the Falcon cockpit, and gazing around with the shock of reminiscence. The scene is notable for Falcon fans, in that the lights are shown powering on in a way quite different from the way they start up in ESB.
When Han is shown entering the ESB cockpit, and thumping the wall to get things working, the lights are shown powering up in two groups – the white lights and the red lights, basically. In TLJ all the lights are shown powering up in very separate groups, indicating they were wired up separately or, more likely, they were dot or group addressable LEDs controlled by CPUs.
Seats.
The seats are a prominent example of the reuse of found items. The pilot and copilot seats, for example, are apparently largely unmodified car seats. Some sources claim they were from a 1970s Porsche, whereas other sources claim they were custom auto seats made by Cobra. The seats are covered with a tan coloured material, perhaps fake leather, and possibly have slightly different front and back upholstering.
It's not clear how the front seats were mounted. They were either on horizontal sliding tracks, or on short pivoting arms, judging by the way the actors move on the seats in ANH. The rear seats were mounted on vertical posts, so they could rotate but not move.
Notice even the front seats had bubblewrap-encased seatbelts! Also, this shot reveals the X-marked panel on the lower section of the backwall.
The two rear seats, with their distinctive high backs and headrests, are altered ejection seats from a British fighter plane (specifically Martin Baker Mk4 seats from an RAF de Havilland Sea Venom), adorned with additional details, such as strips of foam rubber and circular radial-patterned 1970s Tupperware lids.
There don't seem to be massive differences between the various sets in terms of seats. It's hard to tell, though, as the seats are mostly covered by actors or, in the case of the back seats, by the front seats. The TFA seats do seem to be shinier, lighter, and newer looking than the OT seats.
Dice.
1977
A couple of scenes in ANH feature Roger Christian’s chromed metal dice dangling from a string, amongst a collection of poorly-seen ring-like attachments on the ceiling. The dice are most evident in the first view we get of the cockpit, when Chewbacca works his way in, and the cockpit lights are powered off. Christian felt they added a little personality to the set, and were also a homage to one of the cars in Lucas' previous film American Graffiti. The dice were taken away for later scenes, by cinematographer Gil Taylor according to Christian.
1980-1983
No dice.
2015
JJ Abrams apparently went all retro for dice in The Force Awakens, but I can't be bothered to watch the film again to see if they made the final cut.
2017-2018
Dice take on minor plot points in both The Last Jedi and Solo.
Overhead controls.
There appear to be some levers or controls located overhead, on the front edge of the cockpit tube by the upper windows. This is a section of the roof with a quilted black fabric covering. The area isn't really ever shown in great detail in the actual films, however.
Some of the controls in ANH might possibly be circular devices with handles that extend out and pivot on a central axle near the centre of the circle. The family landspeeder in Luke's homestead garage has one of these things on the top, as does the large circular display table at the Rebel base on Yavin IV. Whether that was a repurposed real object greebly, or something manufactured for the film, I don't know. These ANH greeblies definitely weren't used on the ESB set.
1977
These controls are visible, mostly in a sort of silhouette form, during the "that's no moon" sequence. Han is seen reaching up to pull one. Vertical window bar missing.
1980.
This nice behind-the-scenes shot reveals a pair of box housings with the mystery rings. It also shows the backside of the ejection seat chairs (complete with bubble wrap on the seatbelt straps) and the back of some of the sidewall greeblies. Vertical window bar is back.
Windows.
A key design element of the Falcon's cockpit is the window. This was intended to resemble the concentric circle design of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber cockpit.
The full-sized set rarely featured any glazing in the Original Trilogy, as the camera would typically shoot back through the windows, or forward to a bluescreen. Glazing would cause reflections. The space slug window-sucking Mynock scene is of course one exception. The new films often feature clear acrylic panels screwed to the window frames for scenes when the camera is outside.
1977.
A common observation in this film is that the vertical window bar above the circular section of the window is, in fact, missing in all scenes looking forward. It appears that the bar was removed during filming (presumably it was in the way of the camera for certain shots), resulting in a minor continuity error between the model and the interior set. Since the slots where the bar fits are visible from the front, and since the bar is visible in some behind the scenes shots, it seems that this was a simple mistake by the crew that nobody noticed at the time. It wasn't fixed in the Special Edition.
2017.
This TLJ promo shot shows the B-29 inspired round windows of the cockpit very well. It also shows how weirdly clean and tidy the new Falcon looks, despite being chronologically older than the OT ship. The geometry of the window frame looks quite different from the shot above, but that's largely because the newer photo was taken with a wide angle lens.
Dashboard front console.
So, what did the Millennium Falcon's front console look like? This is an arcane mystery that has confounded religious scholars for decades.
One of the most important cockpit interior details of the Falcon, from the point of view of the model maker, is the front panel of the dashboard console. For the simple reason that it's the most visible part of the interior when you peer in through the front window.
But it's also the least important part to the actual filmmakers, since it's an area of the set that's not really shown on screen. Accordingly there's very little visual evidence of what this part of the set looked like.
Now admittedly, having details up there doesn't make a heck of a lot of narrative sense. Why have a load of lights and controls there anyway? You can't use or see them from the pilot's and copilot's seats. All they'd do is create annoying reflections on the windows. (this isn't conjecture - have a look at the photo of Harry Lange inside the glazed cockpit set earlier on in the page!) But we're talking movie logic here. And of course we want our model to look cool, so details it is! Sure beats a blank metal plate up front.
1977
We have a bit of photographic and video evidence of the first film's front console. This mainly consists of three sources - still photos of the set and cast taken for publicity purposes, a behind-the-scenes film clip included in the Making of Star Wars TV documentary, and a poorly exposed making-of photograph. These were taken during the "I thought you said this thing was fast" and "that's no moon" cockpit sequences.
One of the press kit photo outtakes is in the "cockpit backwall" section of this page, and clearly shows the top edge of the front panel. You can see circular blue lights with round metal edging. A black and white photo from the same shoot is in the "rear dash ring" section, and it shows the front dash edge in slightly better focus.
The documentary footage is of relatively poor quality as it was handheld 16mm footage that was converted to NTSC TV, but it shows the entire front panel. There's a shot at the top of this page in the "full sized sets" section, and also the one below.
This making-of photo gives a slightly better look of the front panel with the top square plate removed. Reflection from the key light reveals which areas were flat and which weren't.
Unfortunately this material isn't enough to give us an unequivocal sense of what the front details looked like, especially at the bottom, so there's been a lot of guesswork and conjecture over the years. In particular Joshua Maruska and Stinson Lenz have produced some awesome CGI models of the cockpit interior. These designs have been very popular, even influencing commercial product design and Lucasfilm animation!
Somehow the conjectured rectangle of blue extruded square lights has made it to a TFA-era animated cockpit! This is a particularly strange picture, as the cockpit tube looks self-contained - you should be able to see the bulk of the ship out the port window...
However I'm not convinced that the documentary material corroborates an extruded square blue light design, which is the theorized look reproduced above. They seem like mostly round backlit holes in a nearly-square plate.
This shot is a bit murky, but shows the round lights in the hollow wooden box of the front console. It's another shot where the top plate, which includes blue plastic sheets or gels, has been removed for some reason.
Finally, the lower panel is particularly tricky to interpret. It appears to be extremely shiny in the making-of footage, as if it were a chrome-plated panel with recessed areas for lamps. It’s hard to know what’s a red light and what’s a reflection. Accordingly, one theory that Steve Starkiller has proposed is that this panel may well have been a chromed car part, such as a headlight reflector or dashboard trim.
Here's my grossly simplified model of the dashboard console, with one theory as to how the front panel might have looked.
This model doesn't come close to the highly detailed work of people like Joshua Maruska. I just made as much detail as is printable at 1:72, which is why it's a pretty stripped-down model, and why the pinstripe lines are represented by grooves. It's total guesswork what the greeblies in the "chromed" section looked like.
1980
The design changed completely for ESB. Gone is the square of blue lights and the possibly chromed red light holder. There are photos of the whole thing, but they’re not very sharp and so few details are known.
It seems that the top has a large low black box on the copilot side, divided into quadrants. An inverted white or metallic T shape sits at the bottom of this box. There’s a narrow aluminium box to the pilot’s side, looking like part of a heat sink, from which wires and cables loop down.
Below that are a couple of larger dark boxes, seemingly festooned with greeblies, and possibly sporting a pair of round things that vaguely resemble plumbing fixtures. There is a large pinstriped blank area on the pilot side. There are fewer lights than the ANH design - just a couple of small red lights near the pinstripes.
The bottom section in particular is rather vague. You can’t really see what details existed on the black boxes, and the section directly above with the wires and things is very poorly seen. The upper section is a bit better known, owing to shots of the cockpit taken more from the side, including angles used in the actual film.
1983
Only the top edge is visible in the film, and it's basically the same as the ESB front console. However, red and white circular lights have been installed in the flat black boxes in the upper left. I've never seen any stills of the Falcon from this movie.
2015
The Force Awakens had a reconstructed Falcon cockpit that was largely an attempt to copy the ESB design as much as possible. But I have to say that the TFA front panel frankly doesn't look very good. It's clearly shown in this behind the scenes shot of celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. But unlike the rest of the lovingly recreated set, it just looks kind of incomplete and unfinished, as if the set builders had difficulty finding decent photographic records and ran out of time.
Annie Leibovitz at work, taking the photo that's towards the top of this page. I'm not sure Han Solo would truly have approved of Rey planting her arse right on the dashboard console, though.
The two black-painted plastic boxes at the bottom, and the four honeycomb grid boxes (which are much more widely spaced than those from the ESB set and which resemble these photographic flash grids, look way too clean! They also look plunked down, and don’t look like they should do anything. Star Wars sets contain greeblies that are carefully arranged and equipped with wires and cables and so on, so that they look like they have some practical function or other.
Whether this unfinished look is because the Leibovitz shoot occurred before the set was finally complete, or whether it’s because that’s as far as they got in the reconstruction, basing their work on the same incomplete material available to fans, we don’t know.
One of the prop-making contractors who worked on the movie (the now defunct Propshop) offered this full-sized replica set for sale, which was marketed to corrupt oligarchs by the crassly expensive English department store Harrods. This replica also featured an incomplete front pane, so perhaps the movie one was like that after all.
This TFA-style cockpit replica was available for sale to the stupidly wealthy.
EXTERIOR COCKPITS
There were also cockpits built into the Falcon physical sets.
The half-Falcon sets built for ANH have some cockpit details that can be seen from the outside. It’s hard to make much out, but this set does seem to more or less resemble the interior cockpit set. Interestingly the cockpit lights are on in the Docking Bay 94 scene and off in the Death Star scene – which makes sense, though does mean there‘s a continuity error on Tatooine since the cockpit lights are off again when Chewie is seen entering and getting seated.
The full sized set for ESB also has a rudimentary cockpit with lighting and seats, and Chewbacca can be seen inside it in the Hoth hangar scene. This cockpit is significantly undersized, of course, compared to the sets used to shoot actual cockpit interior sequences.
THE MINIATURE COCKPITS.
The two main shooting miniatures of the Millennium Falcon used in making the Original Trilogy - the original five footer (below) and ESB’s 32 incher - actually had cockpits that didn’t resemble the full sized sets at all. But most model makers generally try to replicate the look of the full sized sets, so I’m not going to cover those miniatures here. I do have a full page of info on the five-foot Falcon's strange cockpit, though.
THE COMMERCIAL MODELS.
Incidentally, hardly any commercial model has a correct cockpit interior that matches the model’s external appearance. So many commercial models seem weirdly obsessed with randomly mixing and matching elements from different movies. Or just inventing new and random cockpit designs.
The Bandai 1:72 “Perfect Grade” model, for example, has a flawlessly reproduced ANH exterior – but an ESB interior. The DeAgostini Falcon has an ESB exterior and mostly ESB cockpit details except for the interior sidewalls, which are ANH. Paragrafix makes a spectacularly detailed etched brass interior for the ESB DeAgostini Falcon, but sadly it replicates the ANH-era short sidewalls.
The Fine Molds/Revell Master Series kits are kind of consistent, in that their cockpit interiors seem partly based on the 32" miniature, not the sets. Though they look a bit odd if you’re used to what the full sized set looked like.
Then there are kits like the MPC Falcon, which had a totally random interior which resembled neither the set nor the shooting miniature and even had a bizarre submarine-like hatch for a door. The steampunk Falcon!
One of the few arguably consistent commercial kits is the Bandai 1:144, which has both a TFA exterior and a TFA interior.
THE NOTES
Part IIb: the Boarding Ramp Sets (the next section)
Copyright notice: This text is freely available to anybody who wants to geek out on their model plastic spaceship. Please link back to it, though.