adam savage here in my cave with a show and tell
that involves you probably already guessed it
lightsabers yeah i have a large collection of lightsabers
um for a while while i was making tv money every time i came across a
lightsaber that was less than 100 bucks i bought it um i no longer of that habit
or that income uh but i thought it would be instructive to show you
an early lightsaber this is not the lightsaber we're here to talk about
this is actually a blank um purchased on the replica prop
forum a few years ago um the thing to understand about lightsabers in general
is that we know almost all the things uh
there are there are details and there are different lightsabers from different
scenes and different movies but like the amount that we now know about
even down to the uneven distribution of the spacing between
these uh uh cut-ins these are known measurements
enough stunt savers and real savers have been have been measured
and and quantified so that we know all the things
so we could consider this to be a a uh like a perfect blank and it needs you
know it i somewhere i have the activation box and the little d-ring
and some other stuff but like there you go that is what the
lightsaber should look like this is a nearly
oh to the eighth degree exact replica of luke's saber
so 26 years ago now the very first museum exhibition
of lucasfilm archives objects uh went up at the yerba buena center for
the arts in san francisco so 26 years ago december
in december lucasfilm did a 25th anniversary
so it would have been in the fall of 1994 yeah
right a long time ago in 1994 they put on display a bunch of original
lucasfilm stuff and of course i went to this exhibition and uh
before i get to the lightsabers a word about the five-foot millennium falcon
from star wars there's been so much writing over the
years about how great the millennium falcon is how it's
just super important seminal ship a culturally
important thing
if you get the chance to see the original
five foot shooting miniature of the millennium falcon the one made
for new hope they had to make a smaller one
for empire because the motion control rig needed a smaller ship and they
didn't have sound stages big enough but the original five footer is
literally one of the most beautiful objects i have ever seen it is a
freaking masterpiece of model making and it's it's it's kind
of mind-blowing to see it up in person so if you get a chance it is still i
believe traveling around the world um but another object in that exhibit
caught my fancy and i took a bunch of pictures this is with a film camera
there was no digital cameras in 1994 with a film camera and again
i wouldn't work at lucasfilm for another six years
i was working in special effects for jamie i just started
uh and i took some pictures of luke's lightsaber and i went into
jamie's shop uh during lunch and during i think three
lunch hours and out of a chunk of aluminum i had
bought this specific billet of i think two inch by 24 inch aluminum
uh rod and i hand machined my very first lightsaber and there
and there and there it is ladies and gentlemen
this is my
version and i i just this is a really good thing to take note
of because you can see these two objects
are not the same there there are a lot of differences but
you can see that i actually got topographically all of the topographic
elements are there there's you know
the outer little thin ring and then the step and the step a second step right i
got all the steps correct i think i have yeah i got all the steps correct um and
the size is not too far off um even down to the hand wheel i managed to
use a um what did i use to do that that is
eight-sided
i'm trying to remember how i did that i think that what i did
was
i just really curious i can't functionally remember how i made
those cuts uh in the early days of my machining prowess
um but this goes to show that like if i handed you this and you
weren't uh the level of star wars geek that i
am you'd be like this amazing it feels amazing
i will say that when i made this i made two of them and gave one to my friend
davey davey ended up directing a movie with
mark hamill in it and when mark came over to my friend's
apartment in santa monica he was like walking around my friend's
apartment he picks up a lightsaber that i built
off of the mantle piece and he's like oh this is really cool and my friend is
sitting there going mark hamill's in my house and he's
holding a lightsaber so davey had mark sign that lightsaber
there's a a sister to this one and it has mark's
signature on it um the fact is is that when we set out
to replicate with imperfect reference material we are always going to make
imperfect replicas but and and i have covered in the past
in great detail how much a lack of fidelity will make me want to go
back in and unpack something again and rebuild it and i've done many props
multiple multiple times sometimes twice sometimes four or five times
but this one there's something so pure about it there's something so
there's something so 1994. me in 1994. it's a time
capsule and i really appreciate it seeing it
next to uh what i was attempting i i can here is the exact thing that i was
attempting to achieve and here is how close i got which is in some ways not
close at all and in other ways right on the money
yeah there you go this is a old bit this is i think this might be one of
one of my very first prop replicas one of my very first like
official like prop replica i'm gonna make something i wanna i want the
experience i want the thing and this has been traveling around me
for the last 26 years and it will probably travel around with me
for the next 26. i hope to be here for at least another 40. that's my goal
all right as long as we're all on the same page i thank you guys for joining
me for this brief show-and-tell into my
lightsaber history there's certainly more to tell about
lightsabers but this will do for now thanks guys see you next time