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One who is not is Chewbacca (he doesn't), the 8-ft.-tall wookie. A lithe and elegant simian, Chewie is co-pilot of the Millennium Falcon, the souped-up space freighter that takes the intrepid rebels to their battle with the dread Death Star. Like Artoo Detoo, Chewie is voluble without actually being able to talk. In a voice that is somewhere between a hoarse lion's roar and the braying of an outraged donkey, he bullies little Artoo or retreats, in moments of danger, to a position of forthright cowardice. Inside the fur is Peter Mayhew, a porter at London's Mayday Hospital. More than 7 ft. tall to begin with, Mayhew is made to look even taller by thick boots and a top-heavy mask.
The real wonder of Star Wars, however, is not the robots or the monsters, good as they are. It is rather the wizardry special effects, many of them never attempted or never possible before. Artoo Detoo, for instance, routinely delivers his message from Princess Leia by beaming a foot-high holographic projection of her, moving and talking in 3-D, right into the room. Later, in one of the movie's funniest scenes, Artoo and the wookie play a variant of chess with holographic figures. Instead of a bishop capturing a knight, a little dinosaur jumps a small, ectoplasmic BEM (as sci-fi fans call bug-eyed monsters) and proceeds to devour him. (Losing makes wookies so dyspeptic that Artoo is sagely counseled to let Chewjbacca win.) All science fiction movies these days are measured against Stanley Kubrick's monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But even by that standard, Star Wars is tops. To work out the photographic special effects, Lucas hired John Dykstra, an expert in the field. For his space scenes, Kubrick had used what is called composite opticals: he would put one -part of a scene—a spaceship, say —on film and black out the background. Then he would cover over the spaceship, roll the film through the camera again and put in another part of the scene, such as the moon behind the spaceship. And so on. This process of multiple exposure was not only enormously expensive and time consuming, but also limited in what it could achieve.
Lucas and Dykstra had the advantage over 2001 of another decade of com puter technology. They were able to link the camera to a sophisticated calculator, which recorded and memorized every shot. By consulting it they could add new elements to their scenes in far less time than it took Kubrick. The result is a breathtaking series of space shots unlike anything seen before in a science fiction film. Says Dykstra: "We have spaceships crossing over planets all the time, and Kubrick never did. His ships are almost invariably linear and can be seen only from one angle. Ours are seen in all conditions and from all angles." Whereas Kubrick had only about 35 different effects, Lucas has 363. His accomplishment is even more impressive given his smaller budget. 2001 cost $10 million in less inflated '60s dollars; Star Wars cost only $9.5 million in the puny currency of the '70s.
Not all the effects were computer inspired or controlled. For shots using miniatures, Lucas' crew cannibalized more than 300 model kits and collected parts from old tanks and World War II planes. When recasting their finds in plastic, they roughed them up as well. The result is a refreshingly lived-in, even beat-up, space world.