Trivia / A New Hope

• Adaptation First: Both the novelization and the Marvel Comics adaptation came out before the movie. Given they're based on earlier scripts, there are discrepancies, particularly in the comic.
• Awesome, Dear Boy:
  • Mark Hamill took interest in playing Luke Skywalker because he thought the project sounded amazing — bear in mind that this was long before any visual effects were released for the film, and during a time when interest in making the film was pretty low. Of the three leads, he was the most excited to see his face on a cereal box.
  • Among the older and more experienced actors, Peter Cushing enjoyed his role as Grand Moff Tarkin so much he regretted the fact that Tarkin dies in his debut, making Cushing unable to appear in the sequels. This ironically serves as stark contrast to Alec Guinness, whose character is a hero but never liked the film^note Guinness didn't truly actively dislike it at first, it was the film becoming utterly gigantic, and totally overshadowing all his earlier roles that he was much prouder of, that caused him to begin to think poorly of the film, though never outright hating it or Obi-Wan, while Cushing, whose character is a villain (and the Big Bad, no less), actually liked it.
  • While Alec Guinness' dislike of the dialogue in Star Wars is legendary, he jumped at the chance to work with George Lucas, and appreciated the film's special effects and technical accomplishments. He also enjoyed working with the then-young cast, who have always spoken highly of his professionalism and work ethic and said that playing a Merlin figure had been a personal goal for him. It's unclear the extent to which this remained true as Creator Backlash set in for him in later years.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • Many think Obi-Wan said "I sense a disturbance in the Force.", but in actuality, he said "I felt a great disturbance in the Force."
  • Obi-Wan never says "May the force be with you" in this film or anywhere in the original trilogy. He says "Use the Force, Luke," and "The Force will be with you always," while it's actually Han who says "May the force be with you" in an O.O.C. Is Serious Business moment in this film. And before Han said it, it was uttered for the first time by General Dodonna while dismissing the rebel troops.
• Blooper:
  • In the scene where Vader and Tarkin discover the Rebel base isn't on Dantooine, Vader's dialogue has very clearly been changed by ADR, as his movements don't match up with the dialogue at all (including an awkward pause that lasts for several seconds while Vader raises his hand, seemingly for no reason).
  • A rather famous one: in the scene where stormtroopers break into the room in the Death Star where C-3PO and R2-D2 are hiding, one of the stormtroopers further back in the squadron smacks his head into the doorframe and gets stuck just before the camera pans away, leading to an audible "clunk" (easy to miss in the original cut, due to the sound being almost identical to the sound of the stormtrooper's comm-units). Rather than edit or fix it in the Special Editions, the editors leaned into it by making the noise even louder and more noticeable.
• Breakthrough Hit: This film made George Lucas the media titan he is today.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • George Lucas briefly considered casting Peter Cushing as Obi-Wan Kenobi.
  • Lucas originally wanted Orson Welles to do Darth Vader's voice, but decided against it, feeling that Welles' voice would be too recognizable. Welles did, however, narrate the teaser trailer.
• The Cast Showoff: Alec Guinness had some fencing training, so he was able to do some of Obi Wan's duel with Darth Vader himself.
• Costume Backlash: Carrie Fisher disliked Leia's famous side buns hairstyle, finding it extremely unflattering. By the time of the next films, she had more input into her hair, which is why the side buns were never seen again.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Despite the film's staggering success, Lucas is very modest regarding the film. In J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars, he admitted he's never been satisfied with the movie's script despite the numerous rewrites it went through. He also disowned the original theatrical cut and went out of his way to bury it after the mid '90s in favor of the Special Editions and subsequent re-releases based on it.
  • Producer Gary Kurtz has expressed dissatisfaction with the changes done in the Special Edition of the film, with him singling out the restored Jabba scene as the worst change because it added absolutely nothing to the story that wasn't in the Greedo scene.
  • Jabba the Hutt's original sculptor, John Coppinger, likewise disliked the CGI Jabba from the 1997 Special Edition.
    John Coppinger: Very hard to be objective here, but there's no doubt the first CGI Jabba was awful. I actually think it was a brave attempt, given the state of CGI then, but I believe they tried to do too much. The subtleties of facial expression were really beyond CGI at that point, even on face as large as Jabba's! One aspect of "our" Jabba was how many people it took to make him live. There were always at least three people operating his face from outside, not including David Barclay and Toby Philpott who were inside as puppeteers. They were moving his arms, his head, body, jaw and tongue. But despite that I think we co-coordinated a better result than CGI. And Jabba was really there for the other actors and performers to react and relate to.
  • Alec Guinness, though the extent of this is often exaggerated. Contrary to popular belief, he never truly hated Star Wars or his role as Obi-Wan, but merely grew annoyed with it over time as it came to overshadow his other roles in popular consciousness (roles he was far more proud of, but also roles that had been far less prominent in America, and with the ascendancy of American pop culture...)
• Creator Breakdown: George Lucas's experience with directing A New Hope — along with the demands of the studio, which threatened to pull the plug on the project — proved to be so exhausting that he didn't direct another film for more than two decades. He still remained onboard with the franchise to write and produce The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi before writing, producing, and directing The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith with complete control. In the case of the latter films, he had the benefit of both an established reputation, financial security, as well as a very controlled in-house environment to create his films in, preventing a lot of the misery he dealt with while filming A New Hope.
• Creator's Favorite: Peter Cushing considered this film one of the best in his filmography and expressed disappointment that he wouldn't get to participate in sequels.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In the Navajo dub, C-3PO was voiced by the female Geri Hongeva-Camarillo.
• Deleted Role:
  • Garrick Hagon played Biggs Darklighter, a friend of Luke's who leaves to join the Rebels early in the film and dies in the attack on the Death Star. The actor was reduced to a nameless fighter pilot in the theatrical version, just credited as "Red Three," while Luke does mention him in the line "Biggs was right, I'll never get out of here." (his scenes included other characters Luke hung out with, which is who Owen referenced as Luke's friends). He was cut out because the majority of his scenes with Luke were eliminated as Luke himself was delayed from appearing in the story until meeting the droids. The Special Edition included a new scene of them happily reuniting before the Death Star attack, and several Deleted Scenes have surfaced showing his part in the story.
  • Additional deleted roles include Koo Stark and Anthony Forrest as Camie Loneozner and Laze "Fixer" Loneozner, respectively, who were friends with Luke and Biggs on Tatooine. Jenny Cresswell played the character Jenny, who appears to be a minor love interest to Han Solo during the original version of his introduction at the cantina. Declan Mulholland appeared as a human version of Jabba the Hutt but had his scene cut, and then was replaced with the canon version of the character through CGI when the scene was added to re-releases.
• Deleted Scene: See here.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Anthony Daniels had plenty of gripes against the C-3PO costume in his memoir, as it was tight to the point he risked permanent nerve damage and preferred not to even think about falling down, sand entering the suit in the desert locations made things even more uncomfortable, and the suffocation was enhanced by the small mouth hole.
• Enforced Method Acting: Stuntman Peter Diamond played the Tusken Raider who attacks Luke. However, he was blinded by the headgear and couldn't see where he was swinging his weapon. The look of fear on Mark Hamill's face is real.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: George Lucas had the idea for a space-fantasy film back in 1971. However, he has said that he had the idea long before then. He began writing in 1973 and production started in 1976.
• Fake Brit: Leia's brief accent change could be explained as indicative of speaking formally because she is a senator, much the same way Amidala's manner of speaking changed when she was under cover as her own handmaiden, and later when her term as queen ended. Another possible explanation: the scene where her Fake Brit accent is most prominent — when she's arguing with Tarkin on the Death Star. She's talking down to him, letting him know she is his equal and will not be intimidated... but when he points the Wave-Motion Gun at her home planet, she drops the pretense and the accent. Carrie Fisher later said that she put it on just because the line "I recognized your foul stench the moment I was brought on board" begs to be spoken as poshly as possible. (She also admitted something the novelizations and such went with, that being surrounded by the Imperial Evil Brits made her talk like them.)
• Follow the Leader: The film drew from many sources. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are two of the most obvious influences — the whole movie was meant to be a big love letter to the former, and at one point was even planned to be a Flash Gordon film. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a big influence on the film's aesthetics and effects work. The Hidden Fortress connection is well known, and Admiral Motti even starts to say "the Rebels' hidden fortress", but only gets halfway through the last word before Vader chokes him. The Dune-Tatooine inspiration is pretty obvious. You can tell George Lucas must have seen at least Space Battleship Yamato episodes 26, 1, and 8, in that order, so we can probably pin his famous trip to Japan down to early 1975, when the series went into reruns. Isaac Asimov noticed some similarity to his Foundation Series, but didn't take it personally. Vader himself was inspired by the appearance of the villain in Kikaider. The entire Rebel Base sequence has elements of many other World War II pictures featuring the U.S. Army Air Corps, and the climactic trench run owes its existence to The Dam Busters. The medal ceremony is straight out of Triumph of the Will.
• Inspiration for the Work: According to Lucas, the plot of the film was inspired by Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress from specific shots such as the shootout at the Tantive IV to an aging general and a Rebellious Princess as the protagonists alongside the droids who were inspired by bickering peasants. Indeed, earlier drafts of the script were even more similar to The Hidden Fortress.
• Method Acting: For the scene where Han ad-libs his response to security over the comm, Harrison Ford only skimmed over the script and instead ad-libbed Han's ad-libbing, to make it seem more genuinely spontaneous.
• The Merch:
  • Famously, the toymakers at Kenner were caught with their pants down, and were so desperate that they ended up selling empty boxes, containing a display stand and a coupon to get the actual first 4 action figures once they were available.
  • Not only them, but the studio executives also didn't think the movie would do well and not only gave Lucas all merchandising rights, from which he has almost certainly made far more money than from the films themselves, but allowed him to retain sole ownership of the franchise as well. The reason they did this? George used his cachet from the success of American Graffiti, as well as agreeing to take an incredibly small salary (basically, the studio thought they were giving up things of no value and getting a new film from an up-and-coming director for a bargain). They also stopped paying fees for a storage unit containing many of the film's props, although some were rescued such as the Death Star model which now lies in a collector’s home.
• Money, Dear Boy: Alec Guinness was not a fan of the script, but he took the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi because he knew the film would do well and he was given a generous payroll of about 2.25% of the box office gross.
• Network to the Rescue: Lucas was dumped by almost every studio in Hollywood (even Disney) when he tried to pitch Star Wars to them. Eventually he went to 20th Century Fox, who were also reluctant to put their resources in the film due to then-recent financial issues caused by various box office bombs and the Fall of the Studio System, but then-studio head Alan Ladd, Jr. managed to cajole the executives into giving the film a chance (by forcing theaters who booked one of their movies to show Star Wars too).
• No Budget: The initial budget was only $8 million,^note $35,430,904 when adjusted for inflation in 2021. and producer Gary Kurtz stated that for two weeks, Lucas and his crew "didn't really do anything except kind of pull together new budget figures", until it grew to a still meager $10 million (and one extra million was spent by the end due to the Troubled Production). For comparison, the Bond movie made that year had a $14 million budget.^note Again, $62,004,082 when adjusted for inflation in 2021. This despite the fact that Bond, a long-standing and popular action franchise, would only end up in 200 theaters, while Star Wars ended up in 1,750. It's often been said over the years that every penny which was saved in front of the camera was reinvested into the visual effects, which paid off in spades as they were literally unprecedented at the time.
• No Stunt Double: Literally, as they couldn't afford stunt doubles. The only stuntman played the Tusken Raider who attacks Luke as well as the cantina patron who alerts the stormtroopers about the incident inside. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher performed the swing across the Death Star pit themselves in one take, and that's really Alec Guiness and David Prowse doing the lightsaber duel.
• Novelization First: The adaptation of the film, credited to George Lucas but ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster, was published months before the movie came out. It contains signs of Early-Installment Weirdness, especially a paragraph that hints that Obi-Wan Kenobi might be aware of Earth (or, at least, its birds).
• Orphaned Reference:
  • Luke's line, "Oh, Biggs is right, I'm never gonna get out of here" refers to a Deleted Scene where we meet him much earlier and persuades Luke that he's needed on Tatooine. Similarly, Luke joking around with Biggs about "Beggar's Canyon back home" during the Death Star fight may have confused some first-time viewers who wondered how this new pilot was supposed to know anything about Luke's homeworld, seeing as the reunion scene between Luke and Biggs on Yavin Four was also cut. Another reference to this cut subplot comes from Luke complaining to Uncle Owen ("But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!"). Tosche Station, located within the settlement of Anchorhead, is Luke's favorite hangout and where the deleted scenes with his friends took place.
  • Han's parting words to Jabba in Mos Eisley, calling him a "wonderful human being," made more sense in the scene as originally filmed and then deleted. At that time, Jabba was not yet the giant sluglike alien canonized in Return of the Jedi and digitally edited over the original footage when the scene was restored in the Special Edition. It still works in context, though, just becoming a little more sarcastic than it was before. Though the intent had always been to matte over the performer with a decidedly nonhuman creature, the stop-motion of the '70s just wouldn't permit it.
  • The 1997 special edition added in a shot of the Outrider from Shadows of the Empire, a reference to the then-year-old multimedia event. With the 2014 reboot having decanonized Shadows of the Empire, the reference seems lost.
• The Other Darrin:
  • During the Yavin briefing scene, Wedge is played by Colin Higgins instead of Denis Lawson, who plays him in the rest of the trilogy. Higgins was a rookie stage actor who had never worked in film before, and the stresses of production led to him falling ill and leaving the project after a single day. Lawson, originally an extra, was chosen to replace him for the Battle of Yavin, with the helmet and the fact of the character being dubbed by a third actor being counted on to smooth the transition. From a Certain Point of View would later retcon Higgins into a separate character known as Col Takbright.
  • A similar example happens with TD-110. When he does a traffic stop in Mos Eisley to ask Luke if he knows about the droids his squadron's looking for, he's played by Anthony Forrest, with his voice dubbed by Terry McGovern. When he bumps his head on the Death Star later on, he's played by Laurie Goode. This is due to the character of TD-110 being created and retroactively applied to the two stormtroopers decades after the fact in a short story from From a Certain Point of View.
• Permanent Placeholder:
  • Harrison Ford didn't even audition for the movie. Having previously worked with him on American Graffiti, George Lucas hired him to read lines for the actors auditioning. Lucas soon realized that Ford was better than any of the actors he'd been brought in to help, and subsequently cast him as Han Solo.
  • Anthony Daniels was hired to provide the body of C-3PO with the intention of dubbing him over later. Some thirty voice actors auditioned, until it was decided to keep Daniels voicing the character.
• Post-Release Retitle: A New Hope was only given that name once The Empire Strikes Back came out. Initially, the film was simply called Star Wars before that became the name of the series, rather than the name of the original film.
• Release Date Change: The film originally going to be released around Christmas 1976 (much like how The Force Awakens was released in December of 2015), but the Troubled Production pushed it to May 1977.
• Romance on the Set: Carrie Fisher revealed to People Magazine in November 2016 that she and Harrison Ford had an "intense" affair during the three month production of the movie in 1976 (although it had been an Open Secret before then for decades). Ford has explicitly neither confirmed or denied the claim.
  "It was Han and Leia during the week, and Carrie and Harrison during the weekend."
• Science Marches On: Since Yavin is in the Goldilocks belt, it should be light gray, not orange.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot:
  • Grand Moff Tarkin is mostly seen from the waist up because the boots provided for Peter Cushing's Imperial uniform were too small for him. So, he primarily wore slippers while shooting his scenes.
  • Greedo speaks in an alien language in-part because his dialogue was originally intended to directly relate to Jabba the Hutt. When Jabba was cut, it was easier to dub Greedo into an alien language and subtitle it to something new rather than trying to fit brand new English dialogue into the footage they already filmed.
  • In the Special Edition's restored Jabba scene, Han walks behind Jabba and comically steps on his tail. This is because the scene was shot before it was established that Jabba was a big slug monster, and he was at that point conceived as more of a humanoid bear-thing, so Han just walked behind him uneventfully. The remaster couldn't remove Han walking behind Jabba, but it could edit it enough to square with the now-established canon.
• Sleeper Hit:
  • Few people, not even Lucas himself, expected the film to do well prior to its release.^note The exceptions were Peter Cushing, who'd been in plenty of genre films that were initially dismissed, but went on to be hits, and Alec Guinness, who while he didn't like the script, realised it would be a hit and his paycheck offer of 2.25% of the box office take would make it well worth his time. Hoo, boy, were they wrong.
  • Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher were probably the most optimistic of its chances and expected it would do well. However, according to Mark, what they had in mind was that it would make $30,000,000 and become a cult classic with stoners "and fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show."
• Star-Making Role: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford became famous for their roles, and went on to have successful careers. Ford himself even stated that playing as Han Solo in this movie (as well as in the original trilogy as a whole) helped boost his career.
  Mark: [to Carrie and Harrison, on seeing a crowd gathered at the airport] Hey, guys, I think there's someone famous on this plane!
• Technology Marches On: A lot of the technology references are dated to computers and electronics of the '70s.
  • Admiral Motti refers to the "stolen data tapes", suggesting the galaxy still uses something akin to video/cassette tapes. To be fair, magnetic tape data storage, albeit mostly unknown by consumers of today, is still widely used in data centers[1]. Maybe the princess stole an un-encrypted backup tape from the Empire.
  • Wire frame 2D graphic displays are also used in some sequences, most notably the Death Star Trench Run briefing. This at least has become Zeerust Canon, as while other movies often use elaborate holographic displays for similar sequences there is the occasional reminder that some interfaces in the setting still use Atari graphics. Which fits the Used Future aesthetic.
  • The lightsabers also suffer from this. Here, they're largely a practical effect with the actors wielding poles covered in reflective tape. Unfortunately, this means that, combined with the more dated fight choreography, the actors couldn't get it in like Flynn and really go to town. The only duel is between Obi-Wan and Vader; Prowse was hampered by the armor and Alec Guinness did his best, but he was a 62-year-old man wearing bulky robes. Later films took advantage of digital effects this film didn't have access to and gave the actors much more gracile plastic rods (with the actors supplying the woom woom sounds themselves).
• Throw It In!:
  • The scene of Han trying to talk the Stormtroopers out of investigating the shootout they've just had. Depending on who you talk to, Harrison Ford forgot his lines, never read them at all to increase the tension and spasticness, or just learned them shortly before shooting. He even cringes when he realizes how he sounds. It's hard to tell if Ford quickly decided that Han would cringe after realizing he didn't sound believable or professional to the Imperial officer on the other end, or if Ford cringed at how bad his ad-lib sounded but they left it in because Han would have done the same thing after sounding so dumb. His snark of "Boring conversation anyway" after shooting the control panel was also ad-libbed.
  • Luke's line "I can't see a thing in this helmet!" wasn't scripted. Mark Hamill didn't even deliver it in character: he thought the cameras had stopped rolling.
  • The joke about Luke and Han facing the wrong way when the elevator door opens behind them was improvised on-set by Hamill and Ford.
  • The stormtrooper on the right smacking his head on the low doorway. Instead of trying to edit it or even ignore it in later releases, they in fact did the exact opposite by lampshading it with a very audible "thunk" as it happens.
  • Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher were allowed to make up their own dialogue due to confronting Lucas over what they thought was a poorly written script.
  • The humorous moment when Chewbacca frightens a skittish mouse droid was thought up on set and not scripted.
  • The Death Star equator was added when the maker of the prop was having difficulty hiding the seam on the model.
• Trolling Creator:
  • "Greedo always shot first." Made even more amusing by the fact that George Lucas was seen wearing a "Han shot first!" shirt during the filming of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
  • It's been speculated that the "Maclunkey!" line in the Disney+ version of the film was added as one last troll from Lucas, even though the same scene featured an Author's Saving Throw to some extent by having Han and Greedo fire at the same time instead of having Greedo shoot slightly before.
• Troubled Production: It would be a fitting analogy to say that Lucas getting his film made was a feat as Herculean as the Rebels' fight against the Empire. Both the documentary Empire of Dreams and J.W. Rinzler's book The Making of Star Wars go into great detail about how much of an uphill battle it was to make the film (which turned out to be just the first Star Wars production to go awry, as a whole page of them is found here). No one believed in the movie, ranging from the studio, who gave a paltry $8.25 million budget which escalated to $11 million as things went wrong:
  • The cast and crew didn't really understand or care for the script and often ridiculed it. Dialogue made no sense so they had to say some of the most insane things with a straight face. Lucas always had an attitude of writing and filming like a documentary, which included A LOT of material that had to get whittled down. After a disastrous first screening with Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma, they helped him pare down the extra-long Opening Crawl to the essentials and brought in two editors, including his then-wife Marcia Lucas, to rebuild the story from the ground up.
  • While filming the Tatooine scenes near the Libya-Tunisia border, Libya got concerned about a large military vehicle and began to mobilize their military. The Tunisian government then asked Lucas to move the Jawa sandcrawler further in the country.
  • Filming had rainstorms in a frequently dry Tunisian region, malfunctioning props, and things got so behind schedule that the crew had to split into three units to meet deadlines, the teaser trailer had just whatever footage was available, and the film was still delayed from Christmas 1976 to May 1977; post-production had Lucas hospitalized for extreme stress, followed by supervising the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits turned visual effects team doing a year's work in six months after blowing half of their budget on shots that were thrown out.^note Before Lucas arrived, most of their time and money was spent setting up their equipment rather than actually filming, and the only salvageable scene they did was the escape pod's release.
  • Overall, the experience was so miserable, that Lucas quit directing and left the two sequels to other directors, and wouldn't direct another movie until The Phantom Menace two decades later.
• Wag the Director:
  • The three main actors all absolutely could not stand Lucas' dialogue, which was filled with a lot of Techno Babble and Cryptic Background Reference for Worldbuilding but no-one had a frame of reference for what any of it meant (Toshi Station, Kessel Run, navicomputer, etc.) and the phrasing itself could be extra blunt. Mark Hamill allegedly protested that "George, people don't talk like this!", while Ford, in naturally pithy fashion, told him "You can type this shit, George, but you sure can't say it." This filtered into the movie itself as annoyance and exasperation, doing a lot to make it palpable.
  • In another example of this trope that undoubtedly helped the film, Ford absolutely refused to wear his costume until a major part of it (a ginormous robin's-egg blue collar on his iconic shirt-and-vest combo) was removed, saving the galaxy's most infamous smuggler from a seriously stupid outfit.
• What Could Have Been: Enough for its own page.

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