At some point after that scene was filmed, unbeknownst to Cuba, the design change to the Death Star array took place. ' To be clear, Cuba's completed graphics were rear-projected on-set during first unit shooting. I don't think it would have been that difficult to change.

Cuba says, 'I don't know *when* in the course of the production the decision was made to change the design, but I wasn't notified of it.

Update: Larry Cuba reached out to me to correct and add clarity to the timeline of events. There simply wasn't enough time to change Cuba’s already-in-progress graphics to reflect the design change, due to the massive complexity of the creation of the computer animation the graphics based on the original Death Star design was projected in the General Dodonna scene for the final film. Cuba had already started animating when director George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic made a design change to the Death Star, moving the array to the northern hemisphere. This early design of the Death Star had its equatorial trench bisecting the dish array. He was given a single matte painting to base his graphics upon (shown above). Larry Cuba was tasked with creating the computer graphics for the film, depicting the stolen Imperial plans. If you asked me, I would also have said the equatorial trench. I asked dozens of die-hard fans, including many co-workers at Industrial Light & Magic, and nearly every single person pointed to the equatorial trench. Nearly everybody points at the equatorial trench of the Death Star. Look at the photo of the Death Star at the top of this post: can you point to the trench that Luke and the Rebels flew down to fire upon the exhaust port that would ultimately destroy the space station? But there’s one little detail from “Star Wars” (1977) that might surprise a lot of fans, and the reality of this detail is different than our collective head canon.Īt the end of the original film, Rebel ships fly along the Death Star trench in an attempt to blow up the space station.

Star Wars fans pride themselves on knowing each and every detail from the original trilogy. Today, and I learned a detail about “Star Wars” (1977) it’s totally right there but we never grasped it.

Death star designer game