The Star Wars Flavor
With The Mandalorian beginning its second season, let’s look at how the Star Wars galaxy is designed, from its iconic vistas to its smallest morsels.
The Star Wars galaxy draws us into new characters and new stories with ease. It doesn’t need to make every tale about the fate of the galaxy — or a fable’s place in any real-world history. Its stories can be big epics and fantastically small. The way those tales play to our imaginations, morals, and emotions makes them meaningful. That’s part of the mythic quality we hear so much about.
I used to argue that Star Wars was by definition a visual galaxy, where imagery was king. After that, music. Then, dialogue and sound effects (the “dialogue of things”). And that’s partly right, from a certain point of view. George Lucas has said that these films were designed like silent movies, with the music doing a lot of work that dialogue might do in other movies. He told Stephen Colbert, for example, “When you get to Star Wars, it’s really a silent movie. And it really lies in the world of movement.”
But I was also wrong. Lucas was describing the cinematic voice of the films, but the Star Wars galaxy exists beyond film in comics, novels, games, television shows, theme parks, and more. So how does the voice and design of the galaxy go beyond visual media — and draw strength from things we cannot see?
Let’s look at how world building works in a galaxy far, far away…
Design Principles from A Long Time Ago
First, let’s center ourselves on those vital visuals and how they move to make the motion pictures. Anything that exists in the Star Wars galaxy is potentially up for an original design, a bespoke refit from our contemporary props and instruments. In The Art of Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, concept artist and designer Doug Chiang — a leading visionary of the modern Star Wars look — wrote:
“[T]he art department and I designed everything from battleships to belt buckles to buildings. We adhered to George’s design philosophy of combining, in unusual ways, seemingly unrelated concepts to create striking forms. […] In order to create a future, we looked into the past, and drew inspiration from history and nature in order to give our fictional creations a realistic foundation.”
When it’s time to design buckles and battleships … how does that work? How do we land within that Star Wars look? What does Star Wars look like? Rian Johnson wrote about that Star Wars-y look in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, joshing around about how truly hard it is to decode the galaxy’s look from any one touchstone:
“Opinions will be expressed about pill lights and coffin-shaped doors, back lines and kit bashing, World War II and Flash Gordon, and then someone who worked on the prequels might say something about domes, and a chorus will rise in response and the game will be on.”
When I was a kid, watching the behind-the-scenes documentary From Empire to Jedi: The Making of a Saga on videotape and playing the original Star Wars Roleplaying Game,I remember learning (and reciting) the lesson that one of the secret design ingredients of the galaxy was a “lived-in” look. It was how the galaxy made its archaic buildings and futuristic spaceships feel real within the same, shared universe.
Roger Christian, set designer of the original Star Wars film, told D23:
“George has always said he didn’t want anything that looked designed, anything that would point it out, ‘Wow, look at this science-fiction thing.’ He wanted everything to be real.”
As writer Phil Szostak put it in The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens:
“Apart from the story challenges, the distinct design aesthetic of Star Wars would also need to be teased apart and reimagined for these new films. In a 1975 interview, George Lucas described his envisaged Star Wars look as ‘very real, with a nitty-gritty feel, which is hard to do in a film that is essentially a fantasy.’
The Star Wars galaxy mashes up antiquity with futurism, at least from our perspective. It’s fantastical vision stretches out into futurism, with starships and laser guns, but also into an archaic history-that-never-was, with domed palaces and sandstone cottages. That they mash up into the same galactic eras creates a kind of familiar strangeness, a contradiction that feels very real: the world has a long history that isn’t quite getting out of the way of the present. The people of the world inhabit a world that has accrued out of the past and into the present moment.
Even if that present is very different from ours, it feels authentic.
That the saga began in the middle of the action, both as a film (fleeing from a Star Destroyer) and as a saga (in the middle of three trilogies), accentuates that feeling. Luke’s journey finds him reconciling with the past as he struggles for a future.
This push-and-pull of historic and futuristic elements is the thing. Neither rules the galaxy. The role of design in the Star Wars look exists at the intersection of multiple, competing influences. Szostak again:
“Lucas asked that every object, costume, vehicle, alien, and set designed for the film in 1975–76 be casual, asymmetrical, mismatched — as if it hadn’t been designed at all.”
Meanwhile, Roger Christian said:
“We were doing something that had never been done before, so I had to train the prop men that when we broke down the jet engine, to keep duplicates — because on a real ship or airplane, nothing’s random. It’s all very carefully structured and organized. There are duplicates and triplicates of everything. I had to train the prop men how to dress this stuff into the walls and make it look like it’s been engineered.”
Designed: no. Engineered: yes. A contradiction? If so, a healthy one.
Lucas’s casual, not-quite-designed galaxy doesn’t feel designed for us but for life in its galaxy. Casual and causal, emerging not only for its relationship to the real-world audience but rather from the fictional world where the designs “live.”
From the beginning, from the visions of foundational concept artist Ralph McQuarrie to the ingenuity of Roger Christian, both elements — real-world and design and fictional functionality — were in play. Doug Chiang wrote in The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story:
“To anchor us, we all looked at Ralph McQuarrie. His genius was his uncanny ability to create iconic cinematic shapes. Stripped of details, his forms were always graphically simple but striking. He designed vehicles, sets, and environments almost as if they were logos. Details, after all, embellish the form but don’t define it. The best ideas often seem simple and obvious in hindsight, but finding that simple idea can be very elusive and arduous. Design is rarely a straight path.”
And yet? Famed designers Charles and Ray Eames once wrote, “The details are not the details; they make the product.” And here’s the thing: they’re all correct.
Icons. Grime. Deadly spheres and lopsided flying machines. Simple shapes and kit bashed chaos. That designed-but-not-designed tension puts power into the imagery, making Star Wars look more captivating and authentic than real-world design or far-off galactic engineering can achieve on their own. Tension is a powerful force of design and engineering. It has the attention-grabbing simplicity of a logo and the scuffed, leaky messiness of an old engine. It encompasses TIE Fighters and the Millennium Falconsimultaneously.
The galaxy contains multitudes and yet still has a look.
Background, Playground
The Star Wars galaxy is known for a deep bench of colorful and intriguing characters, from foreground to background. But background characters aren’t inherently compelling. They aren’t inherently boring. By default, they are often just there.
Background characters require the world they inhabit to suggest that those characters have stories to tell — captivating stories — if an audience of readers or viewers is going to lean in and ask “What about them? What is their story?”
The roles of design and detail can work magic, but they aren’t foolproof. They can suggest stories, support and enhance stories, but if you want a story nothing but a story can do the trick. Doug Chiang wrote:
“Design needs to be more than just beautiful art. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, it needs functionality. And foremost, the design needs to support the story rather than detract from it. In every instance, we sought to determine whether a design was successful, while at the same time determining whether or not it was appropriate to the story.”
In The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Gareth Edwards wrote:
“McQuarrie was to some extent doing the same thing with his designs as George was doing with story: taking ideas grounded in history and mythology and adding just enough futurism to make them feel fresh — unrecognizable from their origins. But I learned pretty quickly that this was a very simplistic view of what is truly a delicate balance. If you take things slightly too far, it just isn’t Star Wars anymore; not far enough and you are just copying what Ralph and George had already done.”
Sometimes the difference between a background character and a foreground character is all in the camera. A world that teems with storytelling possibility lures us back to point the camera at, and center new stories on, additional characters. One audience’s tertiary character is another’s heroic lead. One movie’s Wedge Antilles is a novel’s, well, Wedge Antilles. What’s foregrounded depends on where the camera is pointed.
Star Wars has this feeling like you can point the camera in almost any direction and find someone going about some kind of anecdotal story or interesting activity. It is full of familiar things in unexpected ways. Doug Chiang wrote in The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story:
“The key to successful collaboration was to understand that the boundary between ‘what is Star Wars and what is not’ can be obscure. That gray area was for us to play in. George [Lucas] often encouraged us to explore this boundary, because he knew that was where we would find the most exciting ideas. He pushes us forward into unexpected places.”
This isn’t a simply a case of Star Wars having “cool-looking characters” that make us wonder. Personally, I wonder about the fates of interstellar fighter pilots as often as I wonder about the lives of ordinary blokes and yokels in Mos Eisley or pilgrims in Jedha. Cool designs aren’t enough to make a character worthy of a background-character anthology; they need to inhabit someplace that suggests their tale’s worth telling.
Getting that vibe, creating the sense of a world full of stories, can involve the smallest details and designs. A single bar or music venue can be full to bursting with stories without an interstellar cast of scum and villains. What it needs is atmosphere — and maybe a bite to eat.
Galactic Umami
“The thing about Star Wars,” Lucas told Colbert, “is it is kinetic.”
Still, a dial set to maximum all the time gets boring. From inside a vehicle rushing along at max speed, the world outside is a blur. It gives no time for the background (or its details) to register, much less pop in our imaginations.
Sometimes, Star Wars movies relax and breathe. These moments can be like negative space in the moving composition or they can provide exposition, emotion, and fuel for story head. Luke Skywalker sits still long enough to drink blue milk with his aunt and uncle while we get some exposition and a sense of normalcy within this far-off galaxy. Luke Skywalker contemplates the horizon and its setting suns on Tattooine. A sense of place and time.
Consider this: Travel shows are a thing. Cooking shows are a thing. They show us aspects of our real world that we might not otherwise get to see — or smell, or taste. They remind us that the world goes on and on, farther than this place, this moment.
That the Star Wars galaxy feels lived-in, contradictory, vast and tactile gives is a sense of place and a feeling that it extends off the current page. The imagery expands beyond whatever canvases it plays on, from silver screens to comic-book pages. Star Warsseems to sprawl out backward and forward in space and in time, so the pieces of the galaxy we see in the movies are just that: parts of something larger.
Simply put, Star Wars stories are period pictures, historical adventure yarns, and costume dramas.
The first episode of The Mandalorian is a slice-of-life story, showing us how ordinary adventures on the job play out for this Mandalorian bounty hunter — at least at first. And much of the series captivated me for the same reason that Rogue One and Solo appeal to me: they show life in the Star Wars galaxy beyond the Skywalker saga. In some cases, they zoom into much smaller stories in less common nooks of the galaxy. We hang with shrimp farmers and camp with thieves.
Glimpses of foodstuffs, of meals, of street vendors, these make the world feel tangibly alive. We may not know what the stewing tentacles in that Jedha street vendor’s cart areor how they smell, but they add depth to the universe all the same by being there. We imagine their odor and their taste and the galaxy expands beyond the moving picture, widened by little details.
Mileage and Fuel
Roger Christian tell us:
“Being out in Tunisia [northern Africa, stand-in for Tatooine], and being in these ancient worlds, and dressing it in these little bits of elements that turned it into another planet, but it was so familiar — I knew then. I knew that there was something special here.”
That something, that Star Wars flavor, means adding technological elements to ancient worlds and adding historical grime to an epic space fantasy. Putting wear and tear on the robots and starships suggests they’ve got some miles on them and puts fuel in the tank for future stories. How did the Millennium Falcon get so scorched? Why is that droid dented? Where did those stolen plans come from?
Distinguish here between the value of the question and the need (or lack thereof) for an answer. Sometimes wondering is the joy. The blanks on the map (or the timeline) give us room to imagine. Tolkien knew this. Lucas expanded on it by giving us a galaxy-sized playground — a whole lot of map and a whole lot of room to get lost.
Think of it like this: it’s about mileage and fuel.
Mileage on the objects, places, and people of the galaxy suggest not only that the world has a history but what kind of history that is. A crisp, shining helmet suggests a different story than half-melted, carbon-scored steel armor. What are these holes? Those are from a dragon’s teeth, because there be dragons here. Mileage is permission to wonder and just enough of a sketch to get you started. Otherwise you’re dealing with a blank page.
Those most loaded questions in the galaxy, those stories pleading to be told, those knots that cannot abide, those are loaded with fuel. They can be burned to tell new stories. The rebel spies in the opening crawl of A New Hope were the fuel for Rogue One. In turn, Rogue One added mileage and fuel to the galaxy, so there’s more to wonder about and wonder with. Not less.
(The risk inherent in any prequel lies in burning too much fuel — or in burning up blank pages that audiences were writing on in their daydreams.)
The Star Wars galaxy feels big and granular, authentically lived-in and fascinatingly new, with wobbly old starships and shiny-new space stations, and it’s all more than any one movie can contain now. But just like the real-world never has to get boring, that galaxy far, far away can continue to entice if it remembers to describe itself to us in new ways, to suggest new flavors and vistas waiting just over the next dune, and to gather more fuel than it burns.
Even if we could crack the code of the Star Wars design DNA, reading that decrypted code wouldn’t replace spending time in that world. It might make designing for the Star Wars galaxy easier — for better or worse. The difficult work of design, at its toughest, can lead to the easiest designs to appreciate. But the galaxy is bigger than its ingredients, intriguing in its contradictions, and compelling in its tensions. That is the way.
