Leia`s slave costume

in the Rocket City
Leia’s slave
costume
Forget the awesome space dogfights
and the showdown between Luke and
his papa. The thing that fans — many
of them pre-teen boys in 1983 — remember the most about Episode VI
is that ... thing ... Princess Leia almost
wore as a captive in Jabba the Hutt’s
palace.
Costume designer Aggie Guerard
Rodgers told Wired magazine there
were two versions of the outfit. “One
was a hard metal piece that (actress
Carrie Fisher) wore when she was
not doing any stunts, and one was a
rubber piece that we formed so that
she would be comfortable when doing stunts,” she says. “It was lined
with leather so it wouldn’t chafe
her body.”
However, the costume didn’t hold
together well. Fisher reportedly
refused to use the standard remedy
for such issues — namely, doublesided tape. As a result, IGN Entertainment reports: “Several scenes
had to be re-shot when ‘wardrobe
malfunctions’ occurred.”
Fisher writes on her website that the
outift “had the tendency to make
my now not-so-private privates
quite public. Especially for the actor standing behind Jabba, playing
Boba Fett [Jeremy Bullock]. From
where Boba stood, so straight and
tall and severe behind his mask —
to put it simply and weirdly, Jeremy
could see beyond my yawning,
plastic bikini bottoms all the way
to Florida.”
Sleep on that one, guys!
Graphics and research by
Charles Apple/Special to The Times
Interviews and research by
Lee Roop/The Huntsville Times
Sources: “The Science of Star Wars”
by Jeanne Cavelos; “Star Wars: Where
Science Meets Imagination” by National
Geographic and the Boston Museum of
Science; “Star Wars: The Complete Visual
Dictionary” by David West Reynolds and
James Luceno; NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory; Wired magazine;
StarWars.com; Internet Movie Data Base;
www.the-numbers.com; IGN Entertainment;
CarrieFisher.com; Lucasfilm Ltd.
Images: Courtesy of Lucasfilm
inside the science of episode
I
II
III IV V
VI
ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY
Two of the more astounding – and, perhaps, improbable – things we see in the
entire “Star Wars” saga are the Death Star space stations. The man-made
globe in Episode IV is supposed to be 100 miles in diameter; the second
Death Star in Episode VI, right, is meant to be 600 miles in diameter.
How might engineers bring gravity to a space station this size?
An attractive problem
The Death Star — and all the other
ships in the Star Wars saga, for that
matter — “have some type of artificial
gravity,” says David Smitherman,
a technical manager in NASA’s Advanced Concepts Office at Marshall
Space Flight Center and who has a
background in space architecture. “We
do not understand how they would do
something like that, although we would
love to be able to do that.
“From my perspective as an architect,
what I would look at doing is creating
some type of rotational facility where
you can generate gravity.”
Jeanne Cavelos, a former astrophysicist and mathematician at NASA’s
Johnson Space Center and the author
of “The Science of Star Wars” says it’s
all about acceleration.
“Since acceleration is caused not only
by slowing down or speeding up but by
changing directions, an object moving in a circle undergoes a constant
acceleration,” Cavelos writes.
EPISODE VI:
Return of the Jedi
In the epic conclusion of the saga, the Empire prepares to crush the Rebellion with a more powerful
Death Star while the Rebel fleet mounts a massive
attack on the space station. Luke Skywalker confronts his father Darth Vader in a final climactic
duel before the evil Emperor Palpatine. In the last
second, Vader makes a momentous choice: He destroys the Emperor and saves his son. The Empire is
finally defeated, the Sith are destroyed, and Anakin
Skywalker is thus redeemed. At long last, freedom
is restored to the galaxy.
“When I saw that movie I was a student in Architecture at Auburn University,” Smitherman says, “My first
reaction was ‘No, no, no, that’s not the
way you would build this.’
For movie purposes it looks so cool
[but] I would have built a large inflatable, like a big balloon, so you’d
have a pressurized atmosphere, and
then go inside and build this thing.”
Directed by: Richard Marquand
Presumably, Smitherman would
also have advised the Empire to
do something about the thermal
exhaust port where Luke Skywalker
fires his torpedo.
Released: May 25, 1983
First weekend gross: $23.0 million
Total domestic gross: $309.2 million
Total worldwide gross: $572.7 million
Academy Awards: Nominated in four categories,
including original score, sound editing and sound
mixing. Won none of those awards; however, the
movie was given a special achievement award for
visual effects.
“If we envision
a spaceship as a
giant, rotating, hulahoop-type tube with
the passengers inside
the tube, the rotation
would push them against
the outermost part of the
tube” Cavelos writes.
The good: Leia’s metal bikini. We had to sit through
two movies’ worth of frumpy robes to find out what
she was packing.
The bad and the ugly: There are too darn many
Muppets in this movie: Jabba’s pets and house
band, Yoda and those truly annoying Ewoks.
“When we look at doing missions to Mars where you’ve got a six-to-nine-month
travel time on the way out and then the same on the way back, and then living
on the surface in just one-third [of Earth’s] gravity, that’s a concern,” Smitherman says. “There have been missions where we have looked at concepts for
rotating the habitat so you would have at least a one-third gravity on the
way out there and higher gravity on the way back.”
“A bad feeling about this”: 1) C-3PO, as he and
R2-D2 enter Jabba’s palace. 2) Han, as the Ewoks
attempt to grill him.
What would be really cool ...
Nature imitates art
“There have been times when I wished movies like that
would do scenes where, all of a sudden, the artificial gravity
goes out and people start floating around,” says Smitherman. “Because there’s no mass there, so they’re having to
generate it through some type of power supply, some way.
Remember that scene in
Episode IV when Obi-Wan
Kenobi realizes it’s a space
station and not a moon?
“Of course, we don’t understand how they would do that, but
if the power went out it seems like that gravity would go out
also. And that would be really cool,” says Smitherman.
Well, guess what: See that
photo at left? That’s not the
Death Star – that is a moon.
Of Saturn, to be precise.
It’s called Mimas and is
396 miles in diameter. The
circular crater — which, in
this picture from NASA’s
Cassini probe, does look
at lot like the Death Star’s
laser weapon — is 88
miles across.
Limbs chopped off: Luke slices off Vader’s
artificial arm during their lightsaber duel on the
new Death Star.
Great quote:
“You’ve failed, your
Highness. I am a Jedi.
Like my father before
me.”
- Luke Skywalker