Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 10 Design Secrets You Probably Didn't Know
So that's where the Falcon got its new radar dish from.
The world finally got to feel the awakening back in December 2015, but Star Wars Episode VII had been in development at Lucasfilm for a whole three years, ever since the company was bought up by Disney in October 2012. And in that time an awful lot of ideas were thrown about.
At first it was just aimless scribbling - without a director, concept artists would just throw out there what they imagined would have happened in the galaxy far, far away in the thirty years since Return Of The Jedi. Once J.J. Abrams came on board the project began to gain direction, and with that came a vision obsessed even more by a love of the original Star Wars.
As a result, the finished film is absolutely full of intricate influences, some obvious (you may have seen the orphan growing up on a desert planet dreaming of a planet-hopping life before), but some so incredibly subtle they go right over your head until somebody comes along and points them out. So guess what we're doing today!
From The Art Of Star Wars: The Force Awakens book, as well as some of the panels from the Star Wars Celebration, here's ten crazy trivia factoids from the design and production of Episode VII.
10. The Oscillator Is The First Order Logo
The Oscillator is a
pretty essential location in the film – it’s where the pivotal emotional scene
takes place, of course, but also serves as Starkiller Base’s bumper size
exhaust port. And while it’s rather flippantly set-up, there was still a lot of
time spent on its design and how it would be realised.
The exterior structure is particularly interesting. Fitting with how factions in Star Wars have designs influenced by very simple recurring shapes, it’s actually made to be a three dimension riff on the First Order logo (itself an update of the Imperial insignia) – you have the hexagonal shape, along with the lines pointing in.
Oddly enough, in extending the Empire logo, what the oscillator’s final design winds up looking most like is the logo of the Hutt Empire, something that is obviously pure coincidence (unless – new theory – Snoke is Jabba’s son from The Clone Wars).