A few weeks ago, someone @'ed me and Matt asking about that celestial object seen out of the medical frigate window at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. It's been the subject of speculation and changing definitions over the years. A thread...
The current consensus is that it's a protostar, which Matt answered. That works. But don't think you're alone if you thought it was *the* galaxy. There were a few sources suggesting that.
So what was the intent? The original shooting script calls it a "large red star... with one small planet." The conformed published script (found in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK NOTEBOOK, 1980) says "a dense, luminous galaxy." (As an aside, I dislike conformed scripts).
The novelization, released April 12, 1980, well over a month before the film, went with the shooting script version, calling it “a large red star.”
ILM called it a nebula. Or, did so when supplying interviews and information with CINEFEX #2 (1980). "Joe Johnston prepares a model nebula for photography. The swirling star formation was filmed with a slight rotation and incorporated into the final sequence."
Here's Joe Johnston and Dennis Muren setting it up. It's baking soda and glass beads on a tabletop covered with black velvet.
Model maker Lorne Peterson called it “The Empire Nebula” in SCULPTING A GALAXY, a book we worked on that came out in 2006.
Proponents of the protostar definition point to this nebula history as reason to back their take. Also -- not that science ever really enters into SW all that much -- they may say that it's spinning way too fast to be a galaxy. I have no particular space dog in this space fight.
It rarely comes up in storytelling, since it's quite literally cosmic windowdressing. But I remember Tales of the Bounty Hunters (1996) having 4-LOM and Zuckuss meet up with the Rebel fleet "out of the galaxy at a point near the galactic equatorial plane," favoring the galaxy POV
Here's an early attempt to make a nebula outside the window. This design wasn't to be.
Some of you may have The Empire Strikes Back Storybook (1980) from Random House/Scholastic, with this memorable image of a red nebula out the window.
This composite image made it into the Empire Strikes Back photo keyset, which means it appeared in many places. Trading cards, magazines, etc.
This is just conjecture / head canon or whatever, but I'm convinced that red nebula artwork is what Archie Goodwin had in mind when he wrote The Crimson Forever for Star Wars #50 back in the day. It's a gas cloud at the very edge of the galaxy.
That red nebula art is in the Lucasfilm image archives and has shown up as graphical elements over the years, like these great title pages in 1997's Star Wars Chronicles.
The most striking use, imho, is in the 1987 Star Warriors tabletop starship combat game, where it's the background of the enormous hexmap.
The color is just cosmetic - it has no bearing in the game, unless you use it when playing the module RIDERS OF THE MAELSTROM (1990), which takes place within a red nebula called the Maelstrom, and the nebula art actually has a gameplay effect. Fun stuff.
Anyway, that's just an info dump of history and past definitions. A split-the-difference definition is that it's a protostar far outside the galaxy. This is one of those things that since it has very little tangible effect on the story, let it be whatever you want.
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Oh wow, we're on Rogue One. I think I coined Delta-class even though there was an extant Delta, because its triangle shape just made that irresistible. But I figure each of the abecederian shuttles has a series number that helps further differentiate
Also, I got to use "abecederian" in the accompanying guide, and I love that word.
Moisture vaporators are such an iconic design that they've moved off desert planets. One rationale is that groundwater is contaminated enough, naturally or otherwise, that condensed air-captured water is preferable.
The REPUBLIC GALACTICA is dead. Ruthless
trader barons, driven by greed and the
lust for power, have replaced enlightenment
with oppression, and "rule by the people"
with the FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE.
Until the tragic Holy Rebellion of "06",
the respected JEDI BENDU OF ASHLA were the
most powerful warriors in the Universe.
For a hundred thousand years, generations
of Jedi Bendu knights learned the ways of
the mysterious FORCE OF OTHERS, and acted
as the guardians of peace and justice in
the REPUBLIC. Now these legendary warriors
are all but extinct.
Those were two separate discoveries. The 'Lucasfilm is making more movies' came first, in the summer of 2012. Then 'George is selling the company' in the fall.
(Though the change in leadership in June made it easy to guess that production was in the future. You don't hire a producer to just re-release older content)
The enormity of the Star Wars timeline is one of those things that shines a light on the artifice of storytelling, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but you start to question how specific notions of canon can be and realize why it's better to treat it all as myth or narrative.
If you wanted to get super granular and try to define things as specific as, say, accents in stories, such specificity falls apart when you stretch that level of scrutiny across a vast timeline....
Like, really, if you did a story set 4,000 years before A New Hope, would they really be speaking recognizable [Basic]English? No, so then you concede that the whole thing's been translated for your benefit as a viewer, and that brings in the artifice of storytelling.
In the original animatic of this shot, these were not explosive trails coming off a destroyed Banking Clan frigate, but rather a volley of missiles deliberately fired by the ship. I like how the DK guide description attributed the shot to a SPHA-T walker in a Venator hangar.
This is the clone pilot with the Boba Fett chest sigil on his helmet.
This shot of Luke's X-wing from Empire (left) is at the 36 minute mark, just a minute off where it is reused in Return of the Jedi (right) at 37 minutes. The recycling of this footage spared Red 5 from being, presumably, forgotten at Cloud City. It was almost a different X-wing.
This scene was originally going to showcase the larger size X-wing built by ILM. Sculpting a Galaxy talks about it how it was designed with an articulated Luke in the cockpit. Its head movement was meant to match Luke's action of putting on his glove over his damaged hand.
This large X-wing has made it to museum tours even though it never ended up on screen. Though it has Luke in the cockpit and R2-D2 in the droid socket, its wing has three stripes, not five. So maybe a late editorial change kept Red 5 in the mix for future stories.