The First Millennium Falcon

The “five foot” special effects miniature of the Millennium Falcon, constructed in 1976-77 for the original Star Wars movie, had a somewhat surprising genesis. In fact, the original Falcon wasn't actually round at all. It looked like this!

Described in the early scripts simply as Han Solo’s “pirate ship,” the craft was initially long and linear, with a conical (technically a conical frustum!) cockpit at one end and a mass of engines at the other. This design all started with Colin Cantwell's 1975 sketches and prototype model. The design then evolved iteratively with contributions by conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie and designer Joe Johnston, as gun turrets and rows of cylindrical escape pods were added.

This latter fact had some residues in the final script for Star Wars, when an Imperial officer reports to Vader that “several” escape pods are missing from the Falcon. Yet the Falcon as it stands now doesn’t really have any obvious escape pod hatches built into it anywhere, let alone several! (though the Last Jedi retcons this situation)

The ship design was signed off by Lucas, as creator and final arbiter of the Star Wars universe, and had progressed to the building stage. A huge and expensive model, covered in fine detail, was built in Van Nuys, California. Joe Johnston can be seen airbrushing this model in the photo above, taken in late 1975

And then the British TV show Space: 1999, which had made its UK debut in September ’75, was discovered by the American filmmakers. This show featured a spaceship known as the Eagle Transporter, which was... long and linear, with a rounded cockpit at one end and a mass of engines at the other.

This photo is of particular value to Falcon historians. It shows the original "pirate ship" before its round antenna and conical cockpit had been sawn off and transferred to the new saucer-shaped Falcon. Note how at least one, possibly two, of the four upper cones has been removed. In the screen-used model these were gun turrets, but this photo suggests that they were originally intended to be escape pods. The final ship had eight smaller pods on the underside of that section of the ship, reflecting the increased size of the Blockade Runner. This model also has front landing gear, which is interesting. Finally, note the model of the Eagle Transporter on the table below, which sealed this design's fate.

The Eagle Transporter actually looked quite different from the pirate ship. But at the last minute, and just before the sets were due to be constructed in England, Lucas decided that he didn’t want to be unfairly accused of plagiarism. He declared that he wanted a spaceship design that didn’t look like anything that had been seen before, and assigned the project to Joe Johnston.

There’s a frequently-recounted legend around this, which claims that Lucas said he wanted his new spaceship to resemble a hamburger, but according to Johnston himself this story is totally apocryphal, and was a tall tale invented much later. Johnston is best known today as a successful movie director (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Jumanji, Captain America: The First Avenger), though as a young man he designed many Original Trilogy creations, and drew many of the astoundingly detailed and beautiful storyboards for the first three films.

A new direction

The assymetrical saucer design for the Falcon, an original look free of conventional rocketship nacelles and other tropes encumbering SF, was thus devised by Johnston and built by Grant McCune and Lucas’ team of modelmakers in a very short period of time. No detailed blueprints were made during development – just basic conceptual sketches – and most of the design was worked out by the team as they went. Some components from the original Falcon model, notably the sliced-cone cockpit and the large round radar dish, were removed from the old ship and incorporated into the new design. And, despite the rush, the result was one of the most popular and iconic space fantasy vehicles ever created. A memorable design that conveys the notion of a beaten-up, well-loved, souped-up hotrod. In space.

Fortunately for the modelmakers, their work on the original design wasn’t entirely in vain. The original spaceship had a new cockpit added — two paint buckets were glued on, producing the final hammerhead shape shown here. A new smaller dish was also added which, in addition to the smaller cockpit window, emphasized the increased size of the revised ship compared to its smaller pirate ship predecessor. So rather than being wasted altogether, the model was simply demoted to playing the Rebel Blockade Runner (later known variously as the Corellian Corvette, the Tantive IV, and Princess Leia’s ship) seen in the opening sequence of the movie. It thus gained the honour of being the first ship seen on-screen in the entire film, though of course only for a few seconds.

Ironically the main model of the Blockade Runner was actually much larger than the model of the wedge-shaped Star Destroyer that lumbered on-screen moments later. Each ship was shot as a separate optical element and combined photographically in the same frame to give the radically different sense of scale for the two vessels. A second, smaller, model was apparently used for the scene where the Blockade Runner is hauled into the Star Destroyer’s hold. Also, as noted earlier, the rectangular radar dish from this model served as the inspiration for the revised TFA dish seen on the Millennium Falcon.

Two pieces of the previous Falcon effects model were recycled into the new spacecraft design – the aforementioned radar dish and the cockpit cone. Which partly explains why the interior details of the model cockpit don't remotely match the full-sized cockpit set, designed by Harry Lange and built in 1976. The rest of the earlier model was then equipped with a "hammerhead" cockpit and repurposed as the Rebel Blockade Runner for the iconic opening sequence.

The five footer's cockpit

The five foot Falcon (often called the four foot model by ILMers in reference to the saucer diameter rather than the overall length) cockpit interior differs from the full-size movie set in quite a few ways.

The original miniature has two seats and not four, it has two separate dashboard consoles rather than one crucifix-shaped one, it has boxy CRT-like monitors atop the dashboards, it lacks the narrow padded doorframe, it has two white curved pipes on the backwall, and the arrangement of lights and greeblies on the sides and back is completely different from the set.

It seems to have been based very loosely on Joe Johnston's early production sketches of a possible cockpit interior, shown here. Which in turn was inspired by the round look of World War II era B-29 American bomber cockpits. (not the postwar B-52, as is sometimes erroneously claimed, since the latter doesn't have the characteristic radial front window)

Screen appearances

Brief glimpses of the cockpit are visible in ANH effects sequences, but for the most part you don't get a really good look at the interior. The Falcon doesn't take up much of the screen, and is always moving, resulting in considerable motion blur. The only really noticeable continuity error involves the scene of the Millennium Falcon entering the Death Star docking bay. The model's double CRT-type boxes are clearly visible when the ship enters the Death Star. Then, when the scene cuts to the full-sized set, you can see the single central dash console, since the exterior set's interior detailing replicated the separate full-sized cockpit. Of course, this is a kind of “blink and you'll miss it” continuity error that only true nerds, or people looking out for, would ever spot.

As for the Empire Strikes Back, while the five foot model underwent a few changes between the first two movies, its original cockpit remained intact. The screengrab here is an establishing shot inside the belly of the space slug. Here a strong-willed princess sits and battles with her conflicting thoughts about her budding romance with a dashing yet volatile space pirate. Note how the five foot miniature cockpit is clearly visible, despite not looking anything at all like the full-sized set. The shot here is also one of the few times you see a figure inside the cockpit – possibly a small figurine, as it doesn't look like a matted-in add-on.

It seems odd that the ILM model team never bothered to replace the model interior with a reproduction of the full-sized set. Especially since the miniature cockpit was clearly visible in three different scenes in Empire. But then again, I'm sure 99.9% of movie viewers never noticed the difference, so who cares?

Geeks care!

Indeed. A handful of folks are oddly interested in what the original shooting miniature Falcon had for a cockpit. But I haven't found much information about it; hence this page.

Lighting

This is a very useful photograph, though I'm not sure where it originated. It clearly shows the five foot cockpit under construction, revealing both the internal structure of its design and the lighting that was used. There doesn't appear to be any overall overhead or general purpose lighting. Instead, the lights were intended to simulate actual source lights – dashboards, consoles, screens, etc.

It looks like an incandescent light, perhaps a small halogen bulb, may have been used to backlight the backwall area. And some grain of wheat incandescents were used to illuminate the side control panels via fibre optics. It's clear that the centre console, with its levers and so on, was also lit.

One amusing thing about the model as it exists today is that one of the CRT monitor housing-type thingies on the dashboard has broken off and been lost, thanks to the ravages of time. This has exposed three 5mm LEDs which were used to illuminate the model interior, providing us with useful information about how the lighting worked. A red LED was positioned at the base, giving that crimson glow around the bottom of the "screen". Amber and green LEDs were positioned slightly higher, and were used to produce the display output. Note that LEDs in the 1970s, especially non red LEDs, were considerably dimmer than LEDs of today.

The LS Morgan

Falcon aficionado and 3D modelmaker extraordinaire Joshua Maruska was the first person I know of to point out that two key elements in the five foot cockpit came from a large model car kit. Specifically, the seats and possibly the floor pan of an LS Models 1/16 scale Morgan Plus 8 were used.

The seats and floor piece can be seen here in this photo of an unbuilt kit. And if you'd like to see more of this large and impressive car kit, here's a YouTube review of it. Joshua has also constructed some absolutely amazing 3D models of those parts, and he's published renderings of them on his website.

The pieces

A number of key parts make up the interior, but it's not clear which were kitbashed and which were scratchbuilt. This is the section I hope to fill in with time – so please contribute if you have some answers!

The seats

As above: identified by Joshua Maruska as being the twin seats from an LS Models “Auto Salon Series No. 1” 1/16 scale Morgan Plus 8 Roadstar model kit.

The console base

Identified by Joshua Maruska as being the front floor pan from an LS Models “Auto Salon Series No. 1” 1/16 scale Morgan Plus 8 Roadstar model kit. However, it doesn't quite match up, so perhaps it was cut down in the front centre and sides, and additional components or styrene sheet panels added. Closeup views do suggest that extra styrene pieces, now cracked, were installed in places. It also appears to be resting on a flat piece with a notch in the front.

The CRTs

Two pale grey boxes, presumably intended to resemble CRT displays, sit atop each side of the console. The photo below is not in focus, but the only one I've found that shows the pilot side of the surviving box. Originally both sides of the dashboard were so equipped, but the Chewbacca-side one has been lost, revealing the LEDs. Origin unknown.

White pipes

Two white plastic pipes, slightly curved, sit on either side of the backwall. Unknown if they're just stock styrene tubes or something kitbashed, such as a vehicle exhaust pipe.

White discs

Two small white plastic discs, with T-shaped detailing, appear to either side of the door opening. RPF users "eagle1" and "Rats" have suggested that they could be made from Bandai 1/15 StuG (Sturmgeschütz) IV tank parts. Specifically, the back section are the small freewheels at the top of the tank tread area, and the T-shaped pieces were originally cross-shaped pieces, with one arm sliced off.

Top backwall

A wedge shaped flat panel, painted black with exposed areas for light to shine through, is mounted above the door opening. It has squares and circles and a crude looking letter E. In fact, it generally looks hand-drawn and kind of wonky. Shadows in some shots suggest it might be a thin piece of photo-etched brass sheet, over a piece of milky white acrylic plastic. This backwall is angled inwards slightly, versus the full sized set version which is vertical and perpendicular to the floor.

Here's my first stab at a copy of the black part of the backwall, for laser printing or what have you.

At the bottom of black section is a raised wide rectangular piece with beveled edges and a series of holes of varying sizes, coloured at the back, perhaps with yellow gel.

It appears that a piece is now missing below this area. The ESB screengrabs show that there's an inverted trapezoid of white plastic between the two T-shaped circular pieces. This trapezoid was equipped with black circles and so on, representing instruments. (ie: the negative of the section above) The white plastic is still present on the surviving model, albeit yellowed as seen above, but the markings are now missing.

On either side of the backwall are small angled rectangular blocks with grooves, resembling ventilation panels. Origin unknown.

Console

A pale grey central console fits the gap between the seats quite neatly. Expert model maker Jason Eaton believes it was scratchbuilt. It has very fine wires, representing control levers, on a half cylinder component that resembles a railroad switch lever frame. I've only ever seen one decent photo of it, and here's that photo. The lighting photo above suggests that this was lit from below.

Side panels

Wedge-shaped or triangular panels sit to either side of the seat. They look like they were probably scratchbuilt from styrene sheet, with cutouts on the top for fibre optic lighting. On the left side an analogue clock symbol is clearly visible.

Contact

Well. That's my research on this topic to date. If you have any info you'd like to add, please drop me a line! I'd like to see this page be a good resource for anyone interested in the original Millennium Falcon miniature, and of course I always credit anyone who contributes anything.

I've also opened a new thread on the RPF (Replica Prop Forum) on the subject, for similarly obsessed folks to discuss discoveries and theories!

Note that these photos are not credited. And they really should be. But like most of this stuff - fan photos of exhibition models - there were no watermarks or identifying features, so I actually don't know who took them and where they came from. Sorry about that. Please let me know if there's something here you did.

contact@3dsf.info

Millennium Falcon Notes

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