﻿Hey everyone, I’m Andrew and I made the Kessel Run in 13 parsecs.
Pretty impressive, but I still can’t touch the record held by the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy:
The Millennium Falcon.
Chewie... We're home.
The custom Corellian cruiser is going to be front and center in ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story,’
but before the movie pulls back the curtain on this fantastic freighter,
we wanted to take a look at the design, functionality, and influence of the most iconic ship in science fiction.
This is
Why We Love the Millennium Falcon.
Before anything else, it just looks so cool.
Despite everyone in ‘Stars Wars’ constantly crapping on it,
What a piece of junk!
This bucket of bolts is never gonna us past that blockade.
Blow that piece of junk out of the sky!
nothing touches the Falcon’s timeless
Design
In early scripts, the Falcon was simply referred to as the ‘Pirate Ship,’
and Lucas’ rough sketches looked a lot more traditional.
It had big rockets in the back, a cockpit in the front,
and a long cylindrical body.
He handed off his idea to Ralph McQuarrie and the team at ILM,
who fleshed it out through further sketches, storyboards, and models,
until they landed on the final design.
Then, after months and months of hard work and endless iterations,
George Lucas made a last minute call to ditch everything and start over from scratch.
Ah, yes.
Turns out, a TV show called ‘Space: 1999' started airing in the interim,
and it featured a ship called the ‘Eagle’ that looked a little too close for comfort.
[OFFSCREEN] This is also where the name comes from.
'1999,' one more year, millennium,
eagle, falcon. Millennium Falcon.
George Lucas is a freakin' genius.
It’s not that Lucas was worried about plagiarism,
he just wanted his movie’s most important ship to have a distinct aesthetic,
it needed character and personality to match the cocky scoundrel behind the wheel.
So, after spending a third of their budget on the 7-foot long Pirate Ship model,
ILM went back to the drawing board.
There’s a longstanding urban legend that the Falcon’s shape was inspired by a half-eaten hamburger,
Make the ship kinda like a hamburger, with a bun on the outside and the meat in the middle.
ILM’s Joe Johnston had only four weeks to design, sculpt and build the spaceship,
which is why there aren’t too many surviving sketches or drawings,
there wasn’t enough time.
They kept the radar dish, gun batteries and WWII-inspired cockpit from the Pirate Ship,
and slapped them on a new body made of bashed-together parts from Ferrari and Tank model kits.
If only they had Gundams back then, we would have had a totally different spaceship.
The crew lovingly called it the ‘Pork Burger,’
but they eventually settled on a new name that, unlike Luke and Ben, you’ve probably heard of:
You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?
Should I have?
As for their original model,
some minor alterations transformed the puny pirate ship,
into the bulky blockade runner from the opening scene.
The Tantive IV was too slow to outrun the Imperials,
but the Falcon is all about
Function
The YT-1300 freighter first rolled off the assembly line a long time ago,
Long, long ago in a... Somewhere else.
nearly 100 years before the Battle of Yavin, in fact.
You can even spot it flying around in the prequels, if you squint hard enough.
It’s kind of tough to see,
Enhance. Enhance. Enhance. Enhance. Enhance. Enhance. Enhance.
but the original builders would probably have a hard time recognizing their product, too.
That’s because the Falcon has passed through countless hands over the decades,
with each Captain modifying the ship to suit their own needs,
and reflect their personality.
When we first meet the ship in ‘Solo,’ it’s in the debonair hands of Lando Calrissian,
and in this case, you can absolutely judge a book by it’s cover,
or a ship by its hull.
The Falcon is decked out with a white and blue paint job,
a sleek profile that resembles early Ralph McQuarrie paintings,
and a mysterious new section that fills the gap between its headlights.
Of course, it’s what’s on the inside that counts,
and, as you’d expect from the coolest mother trucker in the galaxy,
Lando turned the Falcon’s interior into the ultimate interstellar party spot.
It’s got a kitchen and wetbar,
a top-of-the-line sound system, probably with an Amazon Echo in there,
a classic Dejarik table,
and of course,
a cape for every occasion.
I got an everyday cape, sister's wedding cape, intergalactic President's Day cape,
this is just if someone gets cold.
Dr. Strange, take note.
Stop.
He basically took a semi-truck and turned it into the Shaggin’ Wagon,
I mean, that bed definitely didn’t fit two people in the Original Trilogy.
Which, begs the question, where did Chewie sleep?
When are you gonna take the couch? I want the bed!
Lando has always been more of a schmoozer than a smuggler, after all,
but the Falcon’s next captain didn’t care much about appearances.
For the scruffy-looking Han Solo,
it was all about speed.
Punch it!
In order to smuggle contraband across the Galaxy,
he tricked out his ride with some extremely illegal modifications.
I don't know WHERE this ship came from, but it is NOT within the set parameters for a civilian transport.
Once Han won the ship,
he replaced the engines with an overclocked new hyperdrive,
salvaged armor and gun emplacements from Imperial destroyers,
and stuffed it full of secret compartments and hideaway blaster cannons.
The result is a vessel with the speed and maneuverability of a small attack fighter,
with the shields and firepower of a slow-moving dreadnaught.
Now, all those alterations come at a cost.
The Falcon’s engines are second to none,
but they’re also less reliable than in-flight wifi.
And it certainly isn’t much to look at, either.
But the ugliness is actually kind of a feature,
You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought.
Nice. Come on!
I mean, if you’re an Imperial officer on the lookout for the fastest smuggling ship ever made,
you’re probably gonna let a flying trash heap slide under the radar.
What about that ship?
That one's garbage!
Garbage will do!
There’s some real-world reasoning behind the Falcon’s foul appearance, too.
George Lucas has a well-documented obsession with hot rods,
it’s basically what launched his career with ‘American Graffiti.’
Within the hot rod scene, there’s a sub-genre called rat rods,
stripped-down, raw vehicles that were intentionally designed to be as ugly as they were powerful,
just like the Falcon.
What a piece of junk!
She might look like crap, but as Han says,
she's got it where it counts, kid.
Not everyone in the ‘Star Wars’ galaxy appreciates the Falcon,
but in ours, it’s had a massive
Influence
We’ve talked about hamburgers and hyperdrives already,
and if you ask me, we don't talk enough about them,
but when you boil everything else away,
the Falcon is pretty much just a flying saucer.
It’s a classic, cheesy sci-fi concept with a fresh coat of paint,
and by that I mean layers of dirt and grime.
Before ‘Star Wars,’
we mostly thought of sci-fi spaceships as shiny chrome rockets from serials like ‘Flash Gordon.’
They’re impressive in a showroom-car kind of way,
but they didn’t look or feel like things people actually drove.
Flash! Ahh-ahh!
The Falcon, on the other hand,
is ugly and weathered and aged.
it's the the used car of sci-fi, and everyone's owned a used car.
That's kinda why people love it so much,
it’s not the pristine Enterprise or the sterile Discovery, it’s a broken-down bucket of bolts.
You can see the authenticity in every oil stain and blaster scar,
and it tells you a lot about the characters behind the wheel.
The ‘used future’ aesthetic had a massive impact on science fiction,
from the filthy space truckers of ‘Alien’ to ‘Blade Runner’s’ grimy future L.A.
But none of that would have been possible without ‘Star Wars,’
the Falcon,
and her crew.
Yahoo!
Every kid, including me, wanted to be Han Solo,
And more than that, we wanted to fly his ship.
The closest we could get was probably the toys,
like the pioneering Kenner playset from 1979.
This bad boy ran for $29.99 in ‘70s dollars,
well over a hundred today,
which is nothing compared to the $800, 7,500-piece LEGO kit that was released last year.
Still, no matter which toy you had,
or books you read,
or games you played,
Star Wars and it’s flagship Falcon had a huge impact on the generation of creators who grew up loving them.
From fictional vessels like Joss Whedon’s Serenity,
to real-world spacecraft like Elon Musk’s ‘Falcon’ rockets,
which are named in honor of Han’s flying heap.
In the ‘Star Wars’ galaxy, the Millenium Falcon is nearly a century old,
but its legacy in the real world could last even longer.