Hello!

Correspondent Steve Iverson forwarded a link to a YouTube video piece by ‘Adam Savage’s Tested‘, a 25-minute video piece by some really dedicated Star Wars fans. A group of enthusiasts constructed a full recreation of the original Industrial Light and Magic model shop.

The level of obsession here is high on the scale. These guys carry those miniatures of X-Wing fighters around the room as if they were religious icons. They’ve duplicated their shop room down to the old model kits on the shelves and the trash in the wastebaskets.

The general look of things certainly feels accurate to me. I saw the ILM’s Van Nuys facility on Valjean several times in 1976 and ’77, whenever they swapped equipment with our much smaller CE3K shop on Glencoe in Marina Del Rey. Their shop indeed looked a lot like this. Just a few steps away were the motion control systems with those adapted VistaVision cameras, shooting models of spacecraft and parts of the Death Star surface. 1976 is before CGI, of course. And also before personal computers. Special effects were a glue-and-paint activity.

I remember a fun detail out by the front door. Greeting arrivals was a poster promising the the movie for Summer 1976 … Hand-printed notes had been added as the release date got pushed back, with messages like “How about Christmas 1976?  Easter ’77?”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson