Wow. I had no idea that this blog post of crazy Star Wars concepts would get picked up so fast and spread around the web. So welcome, new readers! Go check out the post on Mister Dog, you won’t regret it! And stick around next week for Toy Fair; we’ll have big pictures of lots of crap shown this year at the show in New York!
A few things I did want to clarify about the "Rejected" Star Wars concepts: "Rejected!" is the name of my ongoing series of unmade stuff. But not all of these were rejected by Lucasfilm. We don’t know how many of these were actually seen by Lucasfilm- they were presented to Pepsi first and then those concepts they liked were sent on to Lucas Licensing. So possibly a very small sample was shown to Lucasfilm. Also
That brings me to another point: most of what is shown are "Dealer Loaders". Those items are offered to retailers (in this case to those stocking Pepsi) and function both as an incentive AND as a display. Once the display is no longer needed, the retailer can keep the item or raffle it off. So it wasn’t quite that we could make anything under the sun. It ideally should be a functional item that a non-Star Wars fan might want, but be cool enough to grab your attention in store. These would not be for sale at retail items. And keep in mind that these are all from 10 years ago when there wasn’t quite so much Star Wars stuff to be found.
Also, it seems the most frequent comment so far is that the Princess Leia headphones were taken from Mel Brooks’ "Spaceballs". Maybe they were, I didn’t come up with that idea. Personally, I’ve never seen "Spaceballs", so I had no idea (it came out when I was in high school, and I didn’t think the trailer was that funny so i never went to see it). But really, that is one of the most no brainer ideas shown. Again, I’m amazed that ALL of these haven’t been made by now. We came up with hundreds of concepts and this is just a small amount. Heck, why weren’t more of these in Mel’s movie? Anyway, as far as I know we came up with the idea independently from the film, "from a certain point of view".
Lastly, I saw a comment somewhere saying that one of the concepts looked like it was from MAD magazine. Ironically, Steve Ross wrote & drew for MAD before he came to work for us, so it makes sense that it looked like that. He also was an FBI sketch artist, did lasers for KISS, was a roadie for ZZ Top, did 3D animation, was a stand-up comedian, and can tell you every President, vice-President and their wives off the top of his head. Seriously, the guy is crazy talented.
I’ll post more concepts after Toy Fair!
Jason, apparently your story has been picked up by NPR…
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89025323&ps=bb3
Hi I stumbled upon you’re blog while doing research on my marketing thesis about the SW franchise. Very cool stuff indeed. It sounds for a SW geek this was certainly an opportunity of a life time. A vivid memory was brought up for me when you mentioned your team designing some of the retail marketing gadgets for pepsi. I remember around 98-99 when prequel buzz was abound a local gas station had an R2-D2 ice chest that served, thats right, cans of pepsi product. I remember thinking how awesome it was to be living at a time when Star Wars was coming back in force (pardon the pun). I had just graduated high-school and my senior year was marked by the re-release of the original trilogy, which was the first time anyone from my generation had seen a Star Wars film on the big screen. Anyway was wondering if that cool little R2 canister was your teams’ design…
will you be adding some more, it’s been a while since toyfair
you have some great ideas
give us non creative people more to think about
I saw a “cockpit sunshade” in the Sky Mall magazine a few months ago. It was the Millenium Falcon cockpit from A New Hope, although you probably already knew / heard that.