EWOKS VS. CHICKEN WALKERS
One sequence in the film takes place on a planet inhabited by little fuzzy creatures called Ewoks. The Ewoks are intent on roasting our heroes on spits over the fire until C3PO steps in to save the day. He is responsible for convincing the Ewoks to fight alongside the rebels against the Empire. This particular alien landscape was created primarily with matte paintings, but there is one part where the Ewoks attack an ATScout (Chicken Walker). Lorne Peterson explained:
"There is a log roll set and there is a part where these fuzzy little creatures do the equivalent of cutting the rope so the logs roll down to crush something (a Chicken Walker). The film cuts from the live action to us. We had to have a miniature bank with weights underneath the table to manipulate the logs so they looked like the real thing. They had to fall like real logs would—tumble and twist. When we first tried it they would come down too fast like a couple of pencils rolling down, as opposed to massive logs falling and hitting each other, bouncing and twisting. So we had to change it.
Paul Houston came up with an idea that would keep the logs bouncing around and hitting each other longer. The problem was solved through some mysterious combination of a track down the embankment, strings and jacks (the kind kids play with). The whole thing was filmed at high speeds to slow it down."
The other problem in the sequence was the Walker itself. This particular one had to be crushed by the logs. Peterson continued:
"We made a four foot tall walker with many different kinds of heads. There were wax heads, epoxy heads and nickel heads that we could place on the same legs for different effects."
Peterson's background, like many of those on his crew, is in industrial design. Before he made a career of the movies he worked in industry for a company that designed and manufactured motorcycle helmets. Peterson was responsible for carving the originals. After the prototype was done the next step was to make a mold off it. The way that is done in the motorcycle helmet industry is to nickel plate the prototype. Then the inside is chemically stripped away so that all that is left is a metallic surface. Since, as Peterson said, "You can nickel plate anything!" The technique was adapted for use on the walker heads.
"Paul Houston was working on this, " said Peterson, "and he came up with a method of making a head out of plastic. Then we would sent it to a company in L.A. that does nickel plating. They would plate it with about .015 inches of nickel and then with acids eat away the plastic head leaving a real thin tin head.
"Certain inside supports were made so that it actually had little men inside it. The little guys never showed up... We were hoping as the door flew open one would flop out. They even had lead weights in their bodies so that they would flop correctly rather than bounce like little rubber men."
In other scenes the walkers have to explode. The tin heads would not have worked for those sequences because they were too strong. They would have just blown apart at the seams. "For the explosions, said Peterson, "some of the heads were urethane and some were wax. We used an extremely brittle wax, almost like carnuba wax. It is used in candle making, actually. Sean (Casey), and Wesley (Seeds), our mold makers, became real masters at painting the stuff into the back of RTV (rubber) molds. If you don't get consistent coats of wax—if you start painting in the backside and kind of glob it up here and get it thin over there, it falls apart. You have to be real consistent so that the stress is equal...You want to keep making the molded heads more and more delicate, but then it makes it harder and harder and harder to handle. I think they were getting so they could pretty consistently do a little bit more than a sixteenth of an inch over the whole surface of the mold.
"A lot of model making is dependent upon having good mold makers, because you have to do multiples of things so often."
[ continued on page 3 ]