The Star Wars Bookshelf

Academy Award winner Marcia Lucas has died. While winning major awards for her work as an editor for Star Wars (alongside a team of editors, including Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew; some of her contributions outside of her work with George Lucas include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York), she mostly disappeared from the public eye following her divorce and essentially retired.

While Marcia dispelled the belief that she singlehandedly saved Star Wars in the edit (and very passionately defended George's craftmanship and ideas, which she felt were undercredited, as well as the work of their team in general), there was a lot of work she specifically did and I thought it would be good to highlight just how much she did and give her credit where it is due. There is a lot that came from her that most don't know about. Most of those examples are from Howard Kazanjian's biography, A Producer's Life, published in 2021.

On some of the uncredited dialogue and story revisions for Star Wars:

On some of her work in Star Wars:

On having the iconic trench run on the Death Star as her biggest work while working on Star Wars:

On her uncredited work in The Empire Strikes Back:

On how her input changed the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

On her joining the Return of the Jedi crew, an emphasis in finding the right cut for actors, cutting together footage of Luke in ROTJ after she and George disagreed with the characterization the director had given to Mark Hamill and unable to reshoot footage:

On editing the climactic ending in the Throne Room in ROTJ:

it's been too long since i last drew the last (4) jedi original trilogy au, so had to fix that <3

It is vintage times. The powers that be have accepted your casting decisions, and are tentatively moving forward with shooting their new science fiction epic, recently renamed Planet Battles. (somebody thought it sounded cooler.) before they print the posters, take a look at the cast you, the electorate, have assembled!

Luke Skywalker—Sabu Dastagir

Princess Leia—Suraiya

Han Solo—Toshiro Mifune

Obi-Wan Kenobi—Takashi Shimura

Darth Vader—Bela Lugosi

Chewbacca—a Ray Harryhausen stop motion

C-3PO—Charles Hawtrey

R2-D2—Groucho Marx

The Millenium Falcon—Flash Gordon's spaceship (I'm joking, I just needed a ninth thing to complete the grid)

happy star wars day! redraw of one of my old sw comics bc i am STILL obsessed with the idea of the twins meeting padmé's family

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

@swshows Week: DAY 1 - Jedi