Book Review: STAR WARS ART: RALPH McQUARRIE Is A Giant Heavy Treasure Trove

Here it is: a big, BIG cassette, with an early design painting of R2D2 and C3PO on the front.

And by BIG, I mean 13.2" x 4.0" x 17.5" (which is 33.7 cm x 10.2 cm x 44.4 cm).

The big, BIG cassette holds two big, BIG books!

Both books taken out.

I've mentioned size a few times now already, but that is because it's such an obvious feature of this edition. When the mailman handed me the package and I took it casually with outstretched arms, I had to re-balance myself. As I went "WhooooaaaaAAA!" the mailman helpfully added: "Careful, it's heavy!"

So... yeah, the white packaging box it comes in states 21.5 lbs, and it ain't lying. If my fingers look strained in that middle picture, it's because holding even one of the books up like this means trying not to let slip over 10 lbs.

It's not just weight either. The books are freaking large, and at 400 pages each they dwarf nearby objects, like my head or a DVD.

The first book covers the initial conception of Star Wars, and details the designing of the major characters and look of the universe. You'll see many sketches with Skywalker as a female protagonist, Han Solo with a cape, a white Darth Vader, stuff like that. That ship in the picture above is the Millennium Falcon, when it still looked like a rebel blockade runner.

Then, the book moves on to the actual production, the impact, the endless merchandise... and the starting up of The Empire Strikes Back, arguably the high point of all things Star Wars.

Book two covers the production and merchandising aftermath of The Empire Strikes Back, and the beginning of designing Return of the Jedi. That last bit is rather short, as Ralph McQuarrie's involvement with the final film in that trilogy was limited. He dropped out soon after pre-production started, citing he felt burned out after the immense workload of The Empire Strikes Back.

Here we see the very beginning of some of film history's most iconic spaceship designs. Thumbnail scratches, leading to more detailed designs.

Most of the images in the book are far more advanced designs though, and production painting showing everyone what George had in mind. The book is a treasure trove of images, and especially the plotlines which were changed or abandoned are interesting, as they have brilliant design art attached to them which ended up not being used.

The book allows you to dream how alternate versions would have looked like. There's stuff about Luke fighting a giant white spider on Dagobah, there are unvisited planets, and here is a painting which shows the early idea of having two death stars built at the same time, which was George's initial solution to upping the ante for the finale of Return of the Jedi.

On the stuff that DID ended up being used, it is fantastic to see the conceptual changes leading to the final used version, like with the asteroid worm seen here.

For both Star Wars and (especially) The Empire Strikes Back, Ralph McQuarrie created matte backgrounds actually used in the films. Here you see the Bespin ventilation shaft, and only the white area in the picture would end up being actually shot on set with actors. The rest is all painting.

Here is the evolution of early pre-production logo art for what was initially called The Star Wars, and shows the iconic font popping up in the final version.

My mind got blown several times during the reading of these books. What I never knew was that many of the toys, games (very early videogames even) and adverts had artwork done by Ralph McQuarrie himself!

As someone who has lived through those years as a primary advert target, I had a big sense of deja-vu while flipping through the pages of those chapters. You literally couldn't open a magazine in those days without seeing some Star Wars adverts, and I was surprised to discover how many of those had actually been done by the great man himself.

Another mind-blower: remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana and Marcus explain to the Government agents what the Ark of the Covenant is?

Well, the picture they use to show what the Ark looks like... is done by Ralph McQuarrie.

I'll finish this review with one last mindblower, and it's a good one. Rest assured the book is loaded with them, but this particular bit actually made me pop in the film's disc immediately, to see it for myself.

Remember the stomach-churning shot in Star Wars when the rebels dive into the trench on the surface of the Death Star? I knew that the trench was a very long model, which had a camera on a boom moving through it.

What I didn't know, is that the first half of that sequence, the trench approach from the air, is actually a painting by Ralph McQuarrie. They shot the second half of that sequence first, the part where the camera races through the trench. Then they the took the first frame of that shot, and Ralph McQuarrie painted a massive painting (seen above) around that frame.

Then, the first half of the sequence was shot with a camera approaching and crash-zooming the painting, until its last frame matched the first frame of the second shot. Edited together seamlessly, the final effect is almost unbelievably well done, and an absolute high point of the era of non-computer-generated special effects!