10 Origins Of Star Wars Props You Won't Believe
7. Luke’s First Lightsaber Began Its Life As A Camera Flash
It's 1977, and George Lucas has dreamed up a new type of weapon: a laser sword with the hilt being the only physical part. This presented some design challenges, seeing as a lightsaber needed to look intriguing, but it also needed to avoid looking too much like a flashlight.
After all, what kid hasn't picked up a flashlight, pretending it was a lightsaber? To avoid that, legendary SFX artist John Stears looked to the Graflex 3, a camera from the 1940s. The camera's flash was installed via a separate flash tube connected to the camera through a wire and featured a large reflective dish.
Stears got rid of the dish and the flashbulbs, leaving a sleek metal tube. From there, he glued some hard plastic "T" tracks from a display cabinet he had on-hand for the base (those aren't wiper blades). From there, he got creative and had some fun by adding a collection of switches he plucked off an old calculator.
By Empire Strikes Back, Stears swapped out the calculator buttons for some bits of circuit board. The lightsaber was literally pieced together from items he had on-hand, which is amazing, seeing how important that prop is to film history.