III:  After Elstree: Pickups and Empire, 1977-1980

Pickups and the public

The original ANH droids lived on, even after principal photography officially wrapped up in England on 16 July 1976. Although the bulk of Star Wars' live action filming (Tunisia, Elstree Studios, and Shepperton) was complete at this point, a number of sections of the movie required additional or replacement footage. These were “pickup” shots, to use industry jargon. These were scenes that either couldn't be filmed successfully on location, or else were afterthoughts — cases where George Lucas realized that a scene was missing something and needed additional material to complete.

In particular, the original plan was to film most of the Tatooine sequences in Tunisia. However, problems during the complex and difficult shoot meant that it wasn't possible to get all the required footage in the can. In fact several scenes filmed there had technical issues rendering them unusable. Not only were there difficulties with the robots, but bad weather damaged the sets. And the remote location meant that it wasn't possible to view rushes/dailies to check for any problems - they couldn't just send a motorbike courier over to the film processing lab in London's Soho! In those pre-digital days you just had to shoot film and hope it turned out okay.

So Star Wars required considerable numbers of pickups.

Since robot footage was a problem, a pair of droids was shipped to California when filming ended. The hybrid aluminium/fibreglass “R5”-type body and an R2 dome were used for a number of brief studio shots, and the radio-controlled R2 was used for lengthier sequences that were filmed in California's Death Valley, on the northern edges of the Mojave Desert. ILM's Bill Shourt performed extensive repairs and upgrades on the RC R2 once it arrived in the New World, to improve its reliability for these scenes.

ILM's change of course continued as Bob (sic: his name is Bill/William) Shourt managed to remedy R2-D2's mechanical problems in two weeks, much to Lucas's relief - something John Stears's special effects department hadn't been able to accomplish in six months.

– J.W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars

Beyond pickups there was also, once the film came out, massive public demand for the droids – promotional appearances and other projects.

Studio pickups

The scene in which a Jawa attaches a restraining bolt to R2-D2, beneath the mighty sandcrawler, contained a very brief in-studio pickup. While most of the footage was filmed in Tunisia, the actual moment of enslavement is accompanied by a big shower of sparks and was filmed in California.

I don't know why this pickup was filmed. Perhaps there were problems with the original pyro effects shot in Tunisia, but there is a still image of the unused footage in the Star Wars Chronicles book published in Japan in 2016 and it looks okay to me (see below). There must have been some technical reason why the Tunisian footage for this moment was discarded. Perhaps Lucas felt the sparks weren't dramatic enough originally, or perhaps there were focus or exposure problems with the closeup.

Beneath the sandcrawler

Let's start with the medium shot from the movie, filmed on location in Tunisia. This was most likely taken using a stunt shell R2. It's a bit hard to tell from this murky frame, but the undershoulder details (leg stabilizers, whatever) are both present. And the horizontal door above the coin slots is flat, with no recess.

But then the scene cuts to a studio closeup of the sparking explosion. The pyro was designed by Joe Viskocil, a pyrotechnician who worked on the spacecraft and Death Star explosions at ILM. This was his sole live-action (non bluescreen) pyro effect in the film, since he didn't work on the English film sets – John Stears was responsible for those.

There are several clues that this is a different R2 prop from the Tunisia scene. The undershoulder greebly on the left side of the shot is missing, the weathering and dirt patterns are different, and the horizontal door immediately above the coin slots has a recess to it. This last indicates that the body was the hybrid alu/fibre R5 barrel, known today as the "Identities" droid.

By comparison, here is the original and unused shot being filmed in Tunisia. Note how the charge bay door is unframed.

Now let's go back to the pickup being set up in California. Notice the wooden panels spattered with mud to the right of the frame – these are stand-ins for the sandcrawler's treads, though they're barely visible in the actual shot. The red cylindrical object is a Mole-Richardson 200 watt Fresnel lens Midget lamp for lighting the scene.

There's also the Jawa tool on the floor. This is of course a Microflame miniature welding torch; almost identical to the ones commonly sold at Radio Shack stores in the 1970s under the “Archer” brand name. It's interesting that this American product was used, because a Microflame can be clearly seen in the Tunisian-shot footage. I don't know how common the torch was in the UK, which supplied the props and costumes for most of the live action.

And here is the insert shot being filmed. Note how the robot's feet look a bit taller than they should - R2 seems to have platform shoes! Remember that detail, which will be discussed further in the "dunes" section. Note also that there's a noticeable diagonal dent just above the rear logic light assembly. The droid touring with the Star Wars Identities exhibition also has this dent, suggesting that the dome is one and the same.

I've heard that the person in the Jawa robes wasn't a small person at all, but production assistant Penny McCarthy, who must have been on her knees for the shot. McCarthy is said to have participated in two other pickup shoots as well - the cantina pickups in LA, and the "stolen plans" shot shown in the section on the "Identities" droid.

Droid data download

Here's another pickup being prepared. This is for the moment when R2 is plugged into the Rebel's computer on Yavin IV, allowing the Death Star plans to be downloaded. The same R2 unit used in the previous pickup is being used. Notice how its third leg is partially extended, even though the scene was filmed with R2 in two-leg mode. The guy with the cap and the data interface cable is the late Grant McCune.

And here's how the scene looked in the final film. The fact that the shot was quickly assembled at ILM, incidentally, is why the Rebel computer set looks somewhat simplified compared to the highly detailed John Barry/Harry Lange designed sets used in the UK for principal photography. I've heard that the rebel technician was pyrotechnician Joe Viskocil.

I have no idea what the enormous data plug was supposed to hang onto there. The upper narrow compartment? That's where the arm hinges out from! It's also weird since the large black plug has two protruding cylindrical metal connectors or something. These look like XLR microphone plugs, but the thing isn't plugged in by the rebel technician – he sort of hooks or rests it in place against some unseen bracket.

X-wing copilot

The shots of R2 conducting repairs on Luke's X-wing fighter during the trench attack may also have been filmed using this droid, though it seems the footage was likely taken back in Elstree. Note how the legs are button back.

The “Identities” exhibition droid

Incidentally, the heavily beaten-up prop used for many of the California pickups is currently on tour worldwide as part of the Star Wars: Identities exhibition. Take a look at this photograph below. Notice how there's a rough rectangular notch in the lower edge of the skirt, just right of centre? Note also the R5-style door above the coin slots? Of course, we don't know if it's the same dome, but the body is clearly the same as used in the ILM pickups in the photos above.

In fact, the dome is the one seen in the Princess Leia data upload scene early in the film - the giveaway is the wonky angle of the tall blue panel next to the holoprojector. Indeed, this brief cutaway shot was another pickup filmed in California, apparently with Penny McCarthy hand-doubling for Carrie Fisher.

Here's a closeup of R2's eye from the 4K scan, and you can see two reflections here. On the right is a woman wearing a white dress - though not with a veil up, which is how Fisher was in that scene. And on the left it looks like there's someone on a short stepladder, holding the red light that was used to give the red highlight on the top of the dome. If that was indeed McCarthy, then technically she was the first person to appear on-screen as Princess Leia!

So for your next trivia quiz you could ask “who is the first woman to appear on-screen in Star Wars?” and the answer would not be Carrie Fisher, since this hand cutaway shot appears as a brief tease before we see the character of Leia for the first time.

Though I suppose you could make the case that the first woman in the entire film was the person who played the pale gold droid seen briefly walking behind C-3PO in the opening hallway scene...

However, some bits have fallen off the Identities droid along the way. The silver metal ring between the body and the bottom of the dome is actually missing! Who knows where that went - possibly it's the ring that was sold at a private auction in 2018. The under-shoulder details are gone, though one was gone during the pickups. And the holoprojector nozzles today are crudely patched up with tape or something similar.

It's also weird seeing this one in person, as the thickly-applied and now-yellowing paint looks just terrible! Careful examination of the chipped areas reveal that the droid body and legs were painted a sort of dentist's office sickly green at one point; possibly for the pale green droid that appears on a Mos Eisley street during one of the deleted scenes.

Intriguingly, there's also circumstantial evidence that this droid might have been the first one constructed, since it has some very unusual features. It has the framed R5-style charging bay door, whereas the subsequent droids have the flat door (except for the fibreglass body which may have been cast from this one). Despite having a metal body it has a fibreglass skirt, as evidenced by the chip in the edge. The shoulder buttons are made from Michell record player components, but are four-hole buttons that differ from all other droids. It also has a manually extendable third leg (see the data download photo above), the only ANH droid other than the RC droid to have a third leg. And it has some detail greeblies on the underside of its skirt; parts probably added at ILM, not EMI.

So. Was it a prototype droid? Or one assembled from leftover parts towards the rushed end of the build? I don't know if we'll ever know.

Death Valley Pickups

California's Death Valley National Park was the ideal location for a substitute Tatooine. It's only four hours north of Los Angeles, has rocky canyons broadly similar to the treeless gorges of Tunisia, and even has a field of sand dunes. The main Death Valley pickups (Jawas, R2, and the Banthas) were filmed by Carroll Ballard as cameraman/director of photography. He also operated the camera for the cantina pickups in Los Angeles, though he's best known today for directing The Black Stallion (1979) and Fly Away Home (1996).

So here's a list of key filming situations. If you want to see a shot by shot breakdown, I have that on a separate page.

Artoo on the Dunes

Most of the droids' arrival on Tatooine was filmed on a field of dunes near Nefta, Tunisia. This included the exterior of the escape pod, the droids arguing on a ridge, and C-3PO stumbling past an enormous lizard skeleton (which was actually a pile of fibreglass bones - the spine and skull, but none of the ribs - left over from the clumsy and blandly racist 1975 film, One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing). However, the crew simply weren't able to get any footage of R2 moving any great distance across the Tunisian sands.

The second unit came back here to ILM and rebuilt the robot, and we took him out to Death Valley and actually got some shots of him going more than three feet. So in the beginning there are actually a few shots of him going somewhere.

– George Lucas

The first time we see Death Valley footage in the film is actually the second R2 reaction shot in the droid bickering scene. The first reaction (a closeup on R2's head) was filmed in Tunisia, and the droid dome is physically in pretty good shape. This was a Kenny R2, with Baker inside and the droid tilted back to make it look like it was in 3-leg mode. The image quality is also fairly crisp and sharp. However the second and third reaction shots in the sequence are different - the dome is quite beat up, the image is a bit soft and out of focus, and the sun is coming from a different angle. What's going on here?

The editors working on the film were impressed when they heard Ben Burtt's R2-D2 voice for the first time, since it was surprisingly expressive. So they started putting more reaction shots from R2 into scenes, helping transform the metal can in the corner into a full-on character.

The editors ... began to depend more on the fact that Artoo could talk and they would cut to him much more often – because they knew he could talk. They would say, “Why don't we bounce to Artoo and get a reaction?”

– Ben Burtt, in J. W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars

The “droids bickering on the dunes” scene had limited footage to work with, owing to the problems filming the robots in Tunisia. So the additional R2 pickup footage was designed to help build R2's personality, and make the conversation feel like less of a monologue.

Here's the dune pickup, most likely filmed at the Mesquite Flat sand dunes in Death Valley. It is the RC R2 dome, not a Kenny one, and it's in its post-Elstree condition. It has the continuity error extra silver panel on the back of the dome (a panel that's blue elsewhere in the film), and it's quite dented and banged up. The large rectangular panel to the left of the shot is almost falling off, matching the state of the pickup filmed later in Death Valley's Golden Canyon. The sun is also coming from the left, leaving the eye in shadow. I don't know why the image quality is noticeably worse than the Tunisia footage. Perhaps they didn't use a great lens, or perhaps the film stock they used wasn't all that good. This is the shot mentioned in the previous chapter where the fingers used to turn the dome are visible!

The other pickup in this sequence was also filmed at Mesquite Flat. It's the shot of R2 gliding determinedly off, humming a defiant little tune. The distant mountains, which fit perfectly with the script's reference to “rocky” terrain, are part of the Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range of eastern California. It’s easy to match the range to digital maps - you can tell that the camera is looking northeast at this point, and that R2 is heading towards Nevada.

A couple of things of note about this long shot. First, R2 obviously wasn't capable of driving across soft sinking sand. Examination of the 4K version of the film reveals how this scene was done. Like the escape pod landing scene, R2 was equipped with sled-like glides on his feet, and was simply hauled across the ground. You can make out these extra blocks under the feet.

These blocks, with their curved leading edges, are also visible in the "beneath the sandcrawler" photo above. These blocks, the lack of battery box bars, and presence of a dent to the back of the dome, suggest it wasn't the RC R2 used for this shot, but the empty shell or "Identities" droid. As can be seen in the Yavin data download scene, this empty shell droid had an unpowered third leg.

And second, the sky is clear, and completely different from the cloudy shots taken in Tunisia.

Artoo’s Arroyo

More pickups were filmed further south in Death Valley. These were for the scene at dusk when R2 is waylaid by the Jawas: shots interwoven with footage taken in the Sidi Bouhlel ravine, near Tozeur, Tunisia.

The sequence begins with R2 trundling nervously down a sunset canyon, beeping softly to reassure himself. This Death Valley ravine, dubbed Artoo's Arroyo by fans, is right next to the Artist's Palette visitor parking lot. The dry streambed provided a smooth surface for the RC droid to roll along. It's a terrific establishing shot, making our plucky robot look tiny and lost in the vast desert landscape.

The shot below was also shot near Artist's Palette. And it probably wasn't the first take - the ground has some scratches and marks already. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is one of the scenes where a person, quite possibly a child who played a Jawa, hid behind R2 and turned his head by hand.

A host of Jawas

Two main Jawa scenes were shot in Tunisia: the homestead "droid auction" scene, and the scene in which the Jawas zap R2. The homestead set was on the Chott el Djerid salt flat, and the robot abduction scene was filmed in the Sidi Bouhlel ravine. The latter was used later as a location in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the English Patient (1996).

Notably, the area also appeared in The Little Prince, a hallucinogenic 1974 film adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's beloved children's book. This film had production design by John Barry, and according to Norman Reynolds it was his familiarity with Tunisia that governed his recommendation to film Star Wars there. In fact, one site considered for Star Wars was the fascinating Berber granary architecture found in the town of Tataouine. This was ultimately rejected on cost grounds, though it was used some 20 years later as a location for the Phantom Menace. But more importantly the town's name was borrowed by Lucas as the name of his desert planet.

The scruffy Jawas were played both by adults of short stature, and by children. Kenny Baker's music hall partner Jack Purvis was the chief Jawa, and a local Tunisian little person was also cast. The latter was described in production minutes simply as "the midget (sic) from Medenine", though according to Anthony Daniels' biography he was a teenaged small person named Mustapha. Kids inside the brown robes included producer Gary Kurtz's daughters and, according to J. W. Rinzler's making-of book, 12 local Tunisian children at the Chott el Djerid homestead site.

As for the Sandcrawler sequence filmed at Sidi Bouhlel, the magazine Bantha Tracks, produced by Lucasfilm fan relations, commented:

The Jawas seen getting into the Sandcrawler included an English midget, a French-Tunisian midget, five Tunisian children, the son of one of the production company’s English truck drivers; and producer Gary Kurtz’s two daughters, Melissa and Tiffany.

– Bantha Tracks, July 1978

Stunt coordinator Peter Diamond's two sons also played Jawas, though they were solely in the the sandcrawler interior, filmed in England (ie: they weren't in Tunisia, where their Dad played both a marauding Tusken Raider and an Imperial informant). They performed in the scene where the Jawas walk into the hold and order the robots out for the auction. Frazer Diamond has said in an interview that he played the Jawa who points the droid caller (it isn't meant to be a gun, despite the humorous reaction it elicits) at Threepio, little person Rusty Goffe played the Chief Jawa, his older brother plays another Jawa, and Jack Purvis plays the Gonk droid who runs away in panic as the scene opens.

Jawas in America

The Jawa pickups filmed in Death Valley employed local Californian children. Seven kids from Death Valley Elementary School, in Cow Creek California, were paid a princely $25 each for their moment in movie history.

Almost all the shots of Jawas peering furtively from behind rocks were filmed at Golden Canyon, off the Badwater road. These takes were interleaved with footage of the RC R2 rolling along in Artist's Palette. The sequence then cuts back to Tunisia, where the Chief Jawa is seen zapping R2 in Sidi Bouhlel. The Jawa is credited as Jack Purvis, though bizarrely there's an average-height American man who fraudulently turns up to fan conventions and signs souvenirs, claiming to be the person who played the Jawa in that shot! The little scrap merchants then carry the stunned droid past the famous rock where they hid – a popular Tunisian tourist attraction for obsessed Star Wars fans today.

The long shot of the Jawas carrying their victim towards the massive sandcrawler was another Death Valley pickup, combined optically with a matte painting. This scene was also apparently filmed in Artist's Palette. The now-adult kids who played the Jawas have related how heavy the two-legged droid was, and how its head fell off at one point during the shoot. You can definitely see the children struggling in their heavy robes as they go up the hill. Note that the droid has odd and featureless soles on its feet – this is because it's the droid with the flat skids used for the dune scene discussed earlier. The scene then returns to Tunisia, where the Jawas bring R2 in front of the full-sized sandcrawler set.

If you're interested in seeing the opening desert sequences shot by shot, I have them all on the next page of this site.

Two Banthas down there

Finally, and at the risk of going a bit off piste since no R2s were involved, other Death Valley pickup shots included the scenes with the Bantha and the sandpeople. These were apparently shot in Desolation Canyon, and starred an Asian elephant named Mardji, from a safari park then named Marine World/Africa USA. She wore a special costume with lightweight horns. Her trainers wore the Sandpeople costume for the iconic moment where the Bantha shuffles off with its outrageous mahouts.

The costume had a cleverly designed hairy beard to conceal the elephant's trunk, though she was also trained to hold her trunk up. Only one elephant was employed – the brief shot where Luke spies two beasts through his electrobinoculars used optical compositing to double the Banthas.

Between ANH and ESB: the world wants more

The months following the release of Star Wars, and its massive impact on the filmgoing public, were a whirlwind of events from media outlets and companies keen on benefiting from the film’s unprecedented commercial success. Numerous ancillary projects were launched, from public appearances to participation on variety shows.

Some of these appearances on mainstream TV may seem rather surprising, from the perspective of 2020. But I think it's important to remember what a seismic impact Star Wars had on popular culture, and how much interest and recognition it held. It was also important from an economic perspective to keep Star Wars in the popular eye while its sequel was being financed and created!

Mark Hamill made a publicity appearance on the then hugely popular BBC children's TV show Blue Peter on 15 December 1977. With him are presenters Lesley Judd and the much-loved John Noakes, the latter wearing an Imperial fighter helmet. Hamill spends a lot of time explaining what Star Wars is all about, since the film didn't première in the UK until 4 days later. R2 didn't appear on this show until December 1980.

The reworked, yet heavily riveted, three-legged ANH R2 was ideal for such gigs, since it could be controlled remotely and did not require the fees asked by an actor. Costumed characters with masks, such as Darth Vader and Chewbacca, were similarly useful. I don’t have a list of all the various media appearances that took place, nor do I intend to try to research them all, but some are widely available as video clips. Future TV and film director Mick Garris was the main R2 operator for many of these events.

The Chinese Theatre

A particularly notable appearance was the famous footprint ceremony in front of Mann's Chinese Theatre (as it was known in the 1970s; it was originally Grauman's Chinese Theatre and is now the TCL Chinese Theatre, ironically since TCL is a Chinese company) in Hollywood, August 1977.

Star Wars had premièred in the Chinese Theatre through sheer luck. A long-forgotten film named Sorcerer was supposed to open that week, but had been delayed. So Star Wars unexpectedly got a month-long run. When that was complete, Sorcerer duly got its première. However, it failed utterly to do boffo at the box, and so a month later Star Wars was invited back.

The studio and the Star Wars corporation decided this second run would be the perfect opportunity to hold a glitzy marketing event. 5000 spectators showed up to see Darth Vader, C-3PO, and R2-D2 have their footprints and wheels immortalized in concrete.

Kenny Baker is often cited as appearing, though it's obvious from photos and film footage that the three-leg RC robot was used. It was operated by Mick Garris, long before his career as writer and director of horror films. Anthony Daniels' name is written above C-3PO, as it was him in the golden costume. However, Darth Vader is identified as "Darth Vader" with swooping uppercase letters. It wasn't David Prowse, but Kermit Eller in the black costume. Eller, now known as Bryce Eller, was an American who played Vader in countless promotional appearances in the 1970s.

Making-of

The three-legger was also used in The Making of Star Wars, a TV documentary broadcast on ABC in the US, on 16 September 1977. This show featured clips from the finished film, and quite a bit of behind the scenes footage - both the 16mm material shot in Tunisia and England by Peter Shillingford and Mike Shackleton, and additional footage filmed at ILM during the making of the effects sequences. It also featured R2 and 3PO on a not very Star Warsy looking set, talking about the movie as if they were real droids and the film were fiction.

The RC R2 spins around and rolls far more fluidly in the newly shot footage than he ever did in the movie, reflecting the mechanical improvements made in California earlier that year. The three-legger's ILM upgrades also meant it could rotate its head by this point.

Oddly, a narrow wire of some sort is visible joining the two outer feet, right by the floor. It's far too thin and uneven to be structural. My only guess is perhaps it was an antenna wire for the radio, though it seems odd that it's so visible and so low to the ground.

TV variety

Several surprising droidy appearances came later. The inexplicably popular American variety show Donny and Marie (broadcast in Britain as The Osmonds) also in September ’77, included the upgraded ANH three-legged R2 along with song and dance performances. Around the same time R2-D2 appeared on singer Dinah Shore's talk show Dinah! There was a 1978 energy-saving public service announcement which shows the post-ILM RC R2 moving and rotating his head. I'm sure countless other publicity appearances occurred around that time, leading up to the 1978 Academy Awards ceremony in April.

The Oscars

Star Wars was nominated for ten regular Oscars and won six in 1978.

• • John Williams: Best Original Score.

  • John Mollo: Best Costume Design.

  • Marcia Lucas, Paul Hirsch, and Richard Chew: Best Film Editing.

  • Don MacDougall, Ray West, Bob Minkler, and Derek Ball: Best Sound.

  • John Stears, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Grant McCune, and Robbie Blalack: Best Visual Effects.

  • John Barry, Norman Reynolds, Les Dilley, and Roger Christian: Best Production Design.

Additionally Ben Burtt won a special achievement Academy Award for his sound design, bringing Star Wars' trophy haul to seven.

The Holiday Special

An infamous highlight of late 1978 was the Star Wars Holiday Special, broadcast on the CBS television network in the US. This was a particularly strange artefact of late 70s popular American culture. In those days it was common for the major TV networks to feature campy variety specials, featuring musical numbers and stars of the day. They were basically disposable commercial productions, designed as one-off events to sell advertising and keep various celebrities in the public eye. The idea of doing a Star Wars themed one seemed a perfect way to help the burgeoning franchise along while the sequel was being produced.

Unfortunately, the Special was an awkward melding of two fundamentally incompatible genres of entertainment, and suffered from a lot of production drama. It was universally derided as a colossal embarrassment (A Wookiee religious holiday? Long stretches of Chewie's wife and son grunting and groaning in Wookiee-speke at home, without anyone to translate? Chewbacca's Dad having erotic virtual reality fantasies over singer Diahann Carroll? Comedian Harvey Korman in drag as a four-armed alien chef? Bea Arthur as a cantina owner in a Star Wars/1920s Berlin under the Nazis crossover?), and George Lucas is widely quoted as saying he wished he could smash every copy of the show with a sledgehammer.

Although it was only ever broadcast once, on 17 November 1978, it has lived on ever since, especially since the rise of the Internet.  Aspects of the show have even been slyly alluded to in The Mandalorian as a fun bit of fan service.

Anyway. The show featured the ILM-revised ANH RC R2, as seen below.

At your public service

An interesting bit of trivia is that C-3PO and R2-D2 starred in a couple of American public service announcements (PSAs) that were broadcast on TV. The first one exhorted parents to immunize their children, sadly topical again these days, and was released in 1978. This PSA was unusual since it was filmed in Britain, using parts of the original Death Star control room set that was brought out of storage. The second one was somewhat bizarre, and features a R2-D2 somehow smoking, with C-3PO of course reprimanding him. It came out later - in 1983.

Modified for sound

This shot, of the RC R2 unit's interior, is quite interesting. The ANH three-legger was modified in 1977 by ILM's Bill Shourt for sound playback for live public appearances; an upgrade that was known internally as the "talkie" conversion. None of the on-set R2s had any audio capabilities, of course, because the beeps and whistles were all added to the movie soundtrack in post-production.

Fibreglass Strikes Back: the Robots of Empire

The first gen R2 droids from Star Wars looked wonderful, but posed some real problems during filming. As they were mostly built from sheet aluminium the two-legged versions were quite heavy for performer Kenny Baker. The sole radio-controlled droid famously had many functional issues related to mechanics and radio technology.

One of the visually memorable droid moments in Empire - R2 swiftly spins around while his head rotates in the opposite direction. This shot would have been impossible with the ANH droids.

When it came to the sequel, memories of unreliable droids were undoubtedly still fresh in the minds of the filmmakers. So the decision was made to construct brand new, what I call “second generation”, R2 units. There were a number of visual differences amongst the ANH (as the 1977 film is now referred to retroactively) droids, but the second-gen ESB robots were all mostly consistent with each other.

Unlike Star Wars, which had a single radio-controlled droid, Empire had two hero RC droids, with a third on-hand for redundancy. Time is money, especially on film sets where a delay can be exorbitantly expensive. Being able to roll in a replacement robot in seconds can make all the difference between getting a shot in the can and keeping the whole set and crew idle. It also means that if two units are shooting simultaneously in different places, and both require R2-D2 props, they can both keep working.

A new team

Star Wars' massive success, and an Oscar, represented John Stears' career high water mark by any measure. He was not asked to return as effects supervisor when production began on the Empire Strikes Back. He continued to work in the industry, but died in 1999, aged only 64.

Special visual effects on the new film was credited to two key personnel: Brian Johnson and Richard Edlund. Edlund had worked with John Dykstra on Star Wars, and on Empire he focused on the ILM side, which had moved from Van Nuys (Los Angeles) to San Rafael (north of San Francisco). Johnson had actually been approached by Lucas and Kurtz to work on Star Wars, but had to decline since he had already committed to working on the second season of the ITC television show Space: 1999. He was later hired for Empire, and split his time between the live action special effects in England and the visual effects at ILM.

Construction of Empire's replacement droids was thus Johnson's responsibility. He oversaw a small group of technicians based at EMI who performed the motorizing, mechanizing, and lighting. The Peteric-built aluminium droids were mostly retired, and Johnson made the decision to build lightweight fibreglass bodies that would be easier to operate and which wouldn't serve as Faraday shields, blocking radio signals.

The Oxfordshire-based White Horse Toy Company, a small firm that made children's rocking horses, was subcontracted to build the lightweight shells. This may have been a surprising choice of contractors, given that the company wasn't in the film industry, but Johnson had bought a rocking horse from them and was impressed by the quality of its detailed plastic construction.

Plastic fantastic.

The new team's droids were built with minimal weight in mind, and all had identical fibreglass body barrels, cast from the same rigid mould.

There are eight Artoos in use for The Empire Strikes Back. Kenny Baker uses two and they are lighter and more comfortable than the one (sic) he used in Star Wars. Three are dummy versions which can be damaged when the story calls for it, and three are remote-controlled.

– Alan Arnold. From his fantastic book Once Upon a Galaxy: a Journal of the Making of the Empire Strikes Back.

One might assume that they were created by moulding an original 1976-era Star Wars body. However, this was not the case. Here's a photo of Kenny Baker with one of the ESB-era droids under construction.

Note how the panels are all shallow recesses, there's a large cutout for the two manipulator arms, and certain features such as the coin slot holes are missing. This clearly shows that the fibreglass shells weren't cast from moulds of previous droid bodies, but from a custom pattern.

All about fibreglass

Sculptor and pattern maker Francis Coates, who did the principal fibreglass work for White Horse, told me in a phone interview that fibre-reinforced polyester resin was used, though some sources have claimed epoxy. Some droids were built with two shells one within the other, the gap filled with polyurethane foam, resulting in extremely strong bodies. The dual layers meant the interior had a smooth surface free of sharp edges, to help keep Kenny Baker comfortable. Behind the scenes photos, such as the one below, suggest that the non-Kenny droids may not have had this double-layer construction, but were made of a single fibreglass shell.

Coates and fibreglass expert Tony Donaldson handcrafted this new body pattern using industrial styling clay and wax; the same stuff used for prototyping car bodies and appliances in the era before computer-aided design. These materials are easily worked and can hold sharp details very clearly. The pattern was then used to make a sturdy fibreglass mould. The rigidity of this structure ensured that each droid had identical shapes and dimensions, unlike a cast from a soft and flexible silicone or latex mould.

Panels and panel doors were made to fit the recesses, using a mixture of fibreglass and vacuum-formed pieces. The original plan was to use fibreglass, but Coates says that problems with the moulding resulted in the switch to vacuformed styrene sheet.

A couple of the droids had aluminium legs, presumably for additional sturdiness, with body and feet from lightweight fibreglass. Other droids were completely made from fibreglass.

Droid differences: solving the great body panel mystery

To recreate R2-D2 the White Horse Toy Company was supplied with an original ANH droid, and a set of blueprints, for reference. However, they produced a droid body mould which differs subtly from the original ANH droids. In particular the area by the front octagon port, discussed further in the body panel section in the next chapter, has a number of panels which are rotationally offset relative to their ANH predecessors. How did this relatively minor change occur?

The mystery has been a subject of much debate for many decades. It now appears that, thanks to R2 researcher Robert Jackson, we may know why. The reason stems from a change in the original blueprints drawn up in 1976.

Essentially the draftsperson at EMI who drew the original blueprints, Peter Childs, produced a series of blueprints numbered 52 through 56. The numbers refer to the sequential order of the blueprint in the overall set of plans produced for Star Wars, including sets and props. Some of the drawings depict front, side, and rear views of the droid, and some depict cross-sections at various heights of the body. Copies of these blueprints were shipped to Peteric, who went to work with sheet metal.

At some point the production team decided to make some last-minute alterations to R2-D2. The shoulder horseshoes were moved from the inside of each leg to the outside, amongst other changes. They had Childs draw up a new set of blueprints, which were numbered in the high 60s. These revised plans were sent to Peteric, who were instructed to start over. Dr David Watling, who managed Peteric at the time, has confirmed that there was such a reboot in droid construction, no doubt to their consternation since it obviously slowed production. So in the end the ANH droids were built entirely around the 60-series blueprints.

Fast-forward to The Empire Strikes Back. Once the decision was made to construct new droids the production team pulled out the original blueprints. Unfortunately it appears that the 50-series cross-section blueprints were shipped in error, along with some 60-series blueprints, to White Horse. And if you build a droid following this particular combination of plans, particularly given blueprint 67/1, you can end up with a slightly different set of panel arrangements on the lower front of the body. In fact, the front view of 67 of the ANH blueprints show the ESB arrangement!

It's not known why the shoulder button orientation was changed from the ANH droids, or the reasons behind any of the other subtle variations between the robot types.

Domes

It was thought for some time that the R2-D2 domes for Empire were all made from fibreglass. Such domes would have had vacuum metallized surfaces, like C-3PO’s gold finish. Metallizing, also known as vacuum deposition, is a technique for making something look like it's actually made from metal and not merely, say, painted with sparkly silver paint. The process involves placing some metal in a vacuum chamber, heating the metal until it boils, and allowing the metal vapour to condense and bond onto your target object.

However, according to Francis Coates, vacuum metallizing over fibreglass was attempted but did not produce acceptable results. Accordingly a new set of spun aluminium domes was made for the robots instead, much like those used on the ANH droids. The Smithsonian's ESB R2, for example, clearly has a metal dome.

It is known that there were some fibreglass domes, however. These were painted up, and do not look the same as the metal domes. It’s possible that these were the experimental fibreglass domes, recycled for use on background droids. Or perhaps additional fibreglass domes were made.

Conjecture: only the “hero” droids boasted the aluminium domes, though at least one motorized dome had a shiny dome, since it was used for public appearances and briefly appears in the finished film. Did the droid ejected from the Dagobah swamp, for example, have a metal or a fibreglass dome?

Mechanizing and detailing

Once the White Horse team completed the body shells they were sent to EMI, where a team of technicians transformed the hollow shells into finished droids. Andrew Kelly and Ron Hone were credited with "robot fabrication and supervision" for the production and mechanical effects unit. Hone was responsible for both overall integration of the various components, and coordination with the subcontracting firms. He also produced the patterns for many of the detail components seen on the droids. Other team members included Roger Nichols, John Hatt, Rob "Doom" Dickinson, John Pakenham, and Yves De Bono.

Dome mechanics

The ESB droids had a very different dome and ring design from the ANH droids. On ESB, both rings appear to have been attached to the dome, and rested on a separate rotation system attached to the top of the body barrel. A raised internal ring associated with a ball race is a giveaway that you're looking at an ESB robot. You can also see the belt-drive rotation mechanism on the crossbar.

Occasionally in the film you can see a noticeable gap between dome ring and barrel. The posts for the internal ring are then visible, as are light leaks from the internal bulbs.

Foot and shoulder mechanisms

According to Ron Hone in a phone interview, the droids were driven by "pancake" motors in the two outer feet. These are a type of brushless DC electric motor known for smooth and powerful operation. The wheels were initially driven using belts, but chains were substituted soon after the droids were completed, since the belts proved unreliable. In particular, the salt used to simulate snow and ice on the Hoth hangar set could build up on the belt, causing it to snap. The new drives really worked. There's behind the scenes footage of an R2 just tearing across the set, presumably as a test.

Large lead-chemistry batteries were used, but unlike modern lithium cells these took some time to charge. Fortunately the droids were designed with modular components linked by plugs and sockets, making maintenance much easier and swifter than with the Star Wars droids, which had non-removable drive batteries.

Both Hone and Johnson confirm that one of the Empire R2s was capable of middle leg movement. Hone says it could even do full 2-3-2 motion - it could revert back to two-leg standing mode from three-leg rolling mode. However, although this capability was apparently filmed, it never made it to the final cut of the film. In fact, even 2-3 simple leg-drop motion is never shown in either Empire or Jedi.

Vacuforming

The ESB crew also made vacuum-formed domes from thin plastic. There's a surviving dome that was designed for vacuum forming (below), some of the robots in the ice hangar have clear domes, and the shot of Kenny Baker above has a dome on the floor that looks like thin white vacuum-formed plastic.

But were these vacuformed domes used for R2-D2? It appears not. Vacuum-formed plastic is relatively thin and easily dented. The vacuum-formed domes couldn’t have been metallized, because the flexible plastic could cause the metal coating to crack. It seems that background droids, including the "R3" units with transparent heads rolling around Echo Base, used the cheap vacuum-formed domes.

Additional conjecture: it's believed that the clear-domed R2 droids used as extras in the Disney Star Tours amusement park ride were equipped with recycled clear vacuform domes originally made for the Empire Strikes Back. The photo below shows a pair of rather sad beat-up looking droids used as props on the tour, with peeling tape and stickers and scuffed-up bodies. Note how different colours of paint are exposed in many areas.

Electronics

The radio systems may have been upgraded from the 27MHz Futaba radios used in Star Wars. Alan Arnold wrote in 1980 that "Andrew Kelly ... claims they are very nearly foolproof, incorporating silicon-chip circuitry and refinements never before used in radio-controlled models," though the specific details were not mentioned. And, speaking of radios, the Kenny droids were equipped with two-way walkie-talkies so that the actor could communicate with the outside world.

Four of the ESB droids being prepared for action. Interestingly, the fifth droid on the right appears to be the old riveted-up radio-controlled R2 from ANH, minus its internal electronics.

Story differences

The second gen droids were generally less beaten up and dented than the first gen droids were on-screen. There are obviously real-life reasons for this. The metal droids would dent if hit or dropped, and that sort of damage definitely happened during filming.

However, arguably most of the differences between the two can easily be explained narratively. After all, at the end of ANH, R2 gets badly shot up by Darth Vader’s TIE fighter. The faithful droid is then repaired, just in time to appear, gleaming, on the dais at the award ceremony for the end of the film. So it makes sense that he’s in generally better shape at the start of ESB. Admittedly this only really explains the condition of the robot before he gets stuck in the slimy mudhole of Dagobah, but so it goes.

ANH droids in ESB

The second-gen ESB droids were reused for filming ROTJ. But were any of the original ANH droids reused for ESB and later? Initially it seemed that they weren't. But subsequent research shows that in a couple of instances they were.

For example, the original RC R2 was present in Elstree during the filming of ESB, as the photo above shows. And in 2020 a Mark Hamill fan site posted the following photo. It shows two proud little boys in their Sunday best, standing in front of the repainted ANH RC R2. You can tell it's the RC R2 since it has the bracing bars and signature holes in the middle foot and battery box. The photo was apparently sent by Tony Ryan, who visited the ESB set as a child, and is presumably one of the boys in the picture.

This orange-painted droid seems to be one of the droids used as set decoration for the Hoth hangar set. It can be seen next to the X-wing fighter parked next to the Millennium Falcon during the "all right - don't lose your temper!" scene. What a sad end for the original RC droid: a static prop, painted an ignominious 1970s orange, without even any lights on! A wire on the middle foot suggests the droid was simply pulled around.

Two-legged ANH R2s also appear to be used on-screen briefly in ESB (when R2 falls into the maintenance pit in the hold floor) and in ROTJ (when R2 topples after being cut loose by the Ewoks). Stunt droids!

Promoting Empire

After the resounding commercial success of Star Wars in 1977 there was of course immense public and media interest in its 1980 sequel. The filmmakers were ready, and the droids made a number of high-profile appearances to promote Empire.

Surprisingly, an ESB-era fibreglass droid was used for even the earliest outings, even though the film hadn't even been released yet. This gave the operators additional capabilities, such as rapid steering motion and control over the front holoprojector, over the earlier ANH RC R2. Note I say "operators" - as with the ILM-modified ANH droid, the RC droid used from 1979 onwards required one operator to drive the robot, and the other to operate the head.

For the American childrens' show Sesame Street, former Lucasfilm director of fan relations Craig Miller writes in his autobiography, Star Wars Memories: My Time in the (Death Star) Trenches, that he was the head operator and ILM's Ed Breed did the driving. “I operated his head, spinning it one way or the other, wiggling his eye (front holoprojector), and blinking his lights.” The Sesame Street footage shows this new motorized holoprojector clearly. However, the robot did not have third-leg drop capabilities, and it did not have any sound playback.

The 1990s and the prequels

While there obviously weren't any Star Wars films between Return of the Jedi and the first prequel, there was still demand for public appearances of everybody's favourite droid. Lucasfilm archivist Don Bies and others worked on some of the ESB-era droids used in Jedi, and got a pair of working hero units together for publicity purposes. When the decision was made to film the prequels, the archived droids were all shipped over to Britain, where the effects team refurbished and rebuilt them.

Unfortunately the rebuilt droids proved to be less reliable than Lucas and producer Rick McCallum wanted. The droids were approaching 20 years old by this point, and hadn't lead the gentlest lives. They had also been reworked by the UK prop team at Leavesden. Frustrated with droids crashing into doorframes and falling over floor cracks, McCallum decided to set a challenge. He phoned Don Bies, Grant Imahara, and Nelson Hall in the US, and asked them to build a reliable droid that could carry the production through filming. He told the UK prop team the same thing. The story is documented in a promotional webisode released to support Episode I.

The result of this competition was a pair of mechanically more reliable robots. The British team came up with a droid sometimes called the “monster truck” droid, though it was known to the production team as the “sand droid.” It has a visible crossbar joining its noticeably wide outer feet, and a visibly high stance for improved ground clearance.

The California team came up with a droid that Don Bies dubbed the “Uber” R2. It had a carbon fibre body moulded from an ESB-era droid, and a reused ESB metal dome. This particular droid had a built-in video camera to assist with line of sight problems with operation, though in practice the camera was never apparently used. However, it's an easy tell for distinguishing this droid from all the others - there's a tiny hole in the front of the skirt.

Both have numerous visual differences from the Original Trilogy droids they were based on. Notably the Episode I droids have very flat paint, whereas the revised II and III droids have a more transparent blue scheme that Bies devised, in an attempt to more closely resemble the droids of Empire. They also have minor differences in the paint scheme (such as blue dome bumps and inverted rear PSI panel colours), and generally have a slightly higher stance.

Where are the droids now?

That's a good question. It's clear that George Lucas has an interesting attitude towards the physical artefacts (or artifacts if you prefer) of his films. On the one hand, he's been very possessive about them all, keeping them in a well-organized warehouse. These Lucasfilm archives were not part of the Disney sale, and many of the objects will be exhibited in the upcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Very few original props have made it out for general auction sales.

On the other, he hasn't been overly precious about them either, since many existing props were reused in later productions. Many of the ESB-era R2s, for example, were refurbished and repainted for use in the Prequel Trilogy. None, however, were used in the sequels. Disney's deal for Lucasfilm did not include access to the original props, which is why new droids were built for the Disney-era films and TV shows.

Still. A key point is that there are no Original Trilogy droids still in their original condition today. Certainly none in their factory-new condition, since lots of changes were made during filming. But post filming they were used for other purposes, were refurbished and revamped, and generally altered. The folks who worked on the prequels only knew the robots in their heavily altered state – none had worked on the OT. So contemporary visual images, comments from the people who worked on them, and the final images in the films themselves, are the best records we have as to the First Droids made between 1976 and 1979.

• The R5-bodied R2 unit used in the ILM pickup shots for ANH toured the world as part of the Star Wars Identities exhibition. This part-aluminium part-fibreglass droid, commonly referred to as the Identities droid out of convenience although it has also been displayed with many other exhibitions, has some unusual features, and differs in some details from the all-metal RC R2 and Kenny droids. In addition to being a bit beat-up it’s also missing its silver neck ring these days, giving it a rather squat look.

• One of the two-legged fibreglass ESB-era R2-D2 props was donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.  This droid, often just referred to as the Smithsonian R2, is in pretty decent shape. It has also been extensively photographed, and the images are a valuable resource on Astromech.net for people who want to build ESB-type droids.

• Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination was a touring exhibition (mostly in the US), which concluded in 2014. It included an R2 unit. Judging by photos it appears to have been a refurbished and repainted ESB-era two-legged unit.

• The Magic of Myth touring exhibition had a repainted R2 that looks like it had an ANH body with ESB legs and feet. The droid was apparently painted at an autobody shop, which is why it has a much glossier and plastic-like paint finish than any screen-used droids. This droid was used in ROTJ and has been seen in other exhibitions, such as a show in Madrid and the robot exhibition in Dundee, Scotland in 2019. It was also shown at the California Museum in Sacramento. It’s often called the Magic of Myth droid out of convenience.

• The Disney Star Tours attraction appears to have had a pair of original droids equipped with transparent “R3” type domes. Supposedly they were in the corner of one of the ride’s sets. The whereabouts of these props, since Star Tours is closed, is not known to the public.

On to part IIIa: On Creating the Illusion of the Tatooine Desert

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