I Heart three D Audio. This special three D episode is sponsored by Audible, Conjuring, The Devil Made Me Do It, Ratedar, and World of Warcraft. This episode is brought to you in I Heart three D Audio for maximum effect. Headphones are recommended. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this is part two of a two parter, and in the first part of it we talked about Ralph mcquarie's life as a boy, how he decided that he wanted to become a professional artist, and ultimately how he connected with George Lucas to start developing the look of the Star Wars franchise. And today we're going to talk about how Star Wars became Ralph's most well known area of work, but also how it led to a lot of other iconic visual moments in other films. We left off part one with McQuary having had just tremendous output working on the first Star Wars film in concept illustration, matt paintings, and even logo and poster design. And today we'll pick up just as the film was coming out in May of ninety seven. Once Ralph had wrapped up his work on Star Wars, he went to England to work on concepts for a still very much an early development Star Trek movie. Mcgory worked for about a month and a half with production designer Ken Adam, and according to the artist's account, quote they asked me to go over there and come up with anything that comes into my head and maybe we can work it into the script. Paramount shelved the plans for the movie and sent Ralph home, and then later Paramount restarted the Star Trek film project, but Ralph did not return to that production, and while McQuary had been able to see production shots as Star Wars was being made to review how they were looking, he didn't get to see the finished film in a theater right away. He was still in England when it came out, and he was busy, he was working, and he didn't get a chance to see it until he returned to the States. He later described that experience quote, I was in New York when I returned. I came up out of the subway. There was a theater across the street playing Star Wars. I arrived in the middle of the movie. This is on a Wednesday or Thursday, but the whole theater was full of people, right down to the front row, all having a hell of a good time, shouting and reacting to the movie like I've never seen an audience react before, and I was amazed. He also mentioned in several interviews that he didn't really enjoy the film in the first few times that he saw it because he was looking at the art and trying to see if there were any flaws in his Matt paintings. There were some scenes that were almost exact replicas of the initial illustrations macquarie had turned in. One in particular is when Han and Luke are disguised as stormtroopers aboard the Death Star and they're taking Chebacca in the ruse of a detainee onto an elevator, and this scene looks almost exactly like the painting, including the unique overhead camera angle. And when McQuary got home to Los Angeles, he saw day after day lines around the block at the Grumman's Theater, so he knew the movie, which he said that he had actually forgotten about while he was working in England, was a huge hit. He also told a story on several different occasions of finding a gum wrapper on the sidewalk with a picture of Darth Vader on it and that being the moment where he realized that Star Wars was a phenomenon. The story is so funny to me because you and I have talked about just having no recollection of stuff that we've done on the show before, So it makes sense that he would just like it would just not be in his mind that he had worked on this thing because he had other stuff going on. But for it to be something as massive as Star Wars makes it seems so funny. And I mean, he did hundreds and hundreds of pieces of art. That's kind of why it seems so strange to me. It's like, yeah, that was an investment of time and mental energy. So he had a reputation at this point as just a wonderful collaborator. So soon Ralph found himself with more work in the film industry. Just as George Lucas had seen his work for his friend how Barwood, Lucas's friends saw Ralph's work on Star Wars, and that led him to design other iconic film moments, including the spacecraft in the other big sci fi film of nineteen seventy seven, which was Close Encounters of the Third kind. The story there, in mcquarie's words, was quote Stephen left instructions for me to work on designs for the top half of the spacecraft. He said, let's make it look like something like an oil refinery. So I made a sketch. I came up with this idea of putting a dish shape on top of the hemispherical bottom that I put a small oil refinery on top that with all these lights and tank like shapes. From there, I went to a color illustration. Steven saw it and liked it. Apparently they had a model made that looked just about exactly like my painting with the arms coming out, and they added a lot of red lights which looked good, and they filmed it. It's so simple. If you're wondering why he only got asked to design the top, they had already filmed, uh, sort of that that block like shape that drops down from the bottom. Uh. So they really just needed the top to be added to the design of it. And at the same time that this was going on, the success of Star Wars had of course led to a sequel, and Ralph was just as instrumental in developing the look and feel of the new elements that were featured in The Empire Strikes Back, which he started on in nineteen seventy seven, not long after Star Wars came out. Even before pre production on that film, Lucas still had him working on things like greeting card art. He made one for the announcement that lucasfilm was moving office is and it's very famous and quite charming. It featured the Droids and several Jawas in a land speeder too Banthas with Tuscan raiders riding them, a Stormtrooper riding a motorcycle with Darth Vader in the sidecar, and Luke and Ben on foot in a massive Jawa sandcrawler, all making their way down the l A Freeway in a sort of parade. Ralph's Christmas card art that he produced for years for the official lucasfilm cards, each of which featured Star Wars characters in holiday scenes, is incredibly charming and it's been reproduced over and over in the last four decades. He also worked on the frequently groaned over Star Wars Holiday Special, which came out in November night and established the Star Wars Holiday of Life Day. McQuary painted an illustration of a Lookie treehouse and designed some of the sets. He never saw the finished production, but the painting of Chewbacca and Milla's house is one that he said was his most finished and that he loved working on it. There's a cute notation in one of his things where he's I don't remember if it was working on that, or the the Ewok village where he's like, do they need roofs? Surely the canopy is the roof like the forest canopy. It's really cute to see his his mental workthrough of the logistics of all of it. The first detailed illustration that Ralph created for the Empire Strikes Back was an ice castle on the planet Hath. This was intended to be similar to the way the Massacy Outpost temple on Yavin For that was seen in A New Hope worked. That is the rebel base in the jungle that you see an exterior shot of in a New Hope, which was Star Wars initially. That is the rebel base in the jungle that was installed into what looked like ancient ruins, and this ice castle was meant to be a similar thing, but for their base on hawth And. In this painting, the ice castle is seen almost like an iceberg. You only see a small amount of it visible in the snowy landscape, but there would be much more of it below the surface. In mcquarie's illustration, those castle pieces protruding from the snow dominate the image. Two figures which look like Han and Chewy are shown walking through the snow. They're kind of dwarfed by the architecture. They look very small. Small gusts of snow appeared to drift in the air here and there. The whole image is striking and bleak, and it's quite beautiful. But by the time the painting was finished, Lucas has decided against the ice castle, and so that concept was filed away. Some design ideas that mcquarie had started on back on the first film were revisited for Empire. One of them, and Holly's favorite, was cloud City. Initially, according to mcquarie's recollection, he had worked on a floating city for Star Wars that was going to be the location where Princess Leo was imprisoned, but in subsequent drafts of the script, that plot point shifted its location to the Death Star, but that abandoned design for a floating city made the perfect spot for hans reunion with his old pal Lando, and according to McQuary quote, George thought the floating city idea should be Art deco, sort of a Flashgore type thing. It was to have a long stem down into the clouds holding it up. I didn't know if it was connected to anything. It didn't matter, kind of anti gravity, just floating there. I started with Flash Gordon type cities on a platter, but it just didn't look convincing to me. It should be more complete or more mechanical. So I came up with this idea that looked more like an aircraft carrier in a way. I put some older buildings up on the roof, like temples representative of the spiritual life of these people, and made a painting with gray clouds and a couple of Thai fighters flying in the foreground. I like that painting as well as anything I did for Star Wars. It is really romantic and atmospheric. Coming up, we'll talk about some of Ralph mcquarie's other contributions to the imagery of the Empire strikes back, but first people have a little sponsored break. McQuary also storyboarded segments of Empire, including the scene where Luke is in the his cave on Howth and once again he worked on Matt paintings. Still recall from our first episode he said he just kind of got by as a Matt painter. But looking at these Matt paintings is really mind boggling because some of them look, for all the world like photographs. So for Hawse he created vast, desolate snowscapes for exterior shots, and also detailed images that look, even in print today, like they are photos of a rebel hanger set rather than paintings. When the Millennium Falcon lands on a cloud city landing pad and the heroes exit the craft in the movie, the background vista of the city in the beautiful glowing light of dusk is all hand painted by Ralph McQuary. As we've mentioned, often a design started out for one thing but then got used for something else. One example from Empire is his early sketches for the Imperial officers in command of the snow Troopers. There was originally a very different helmet design from the ones that we see in the film on the Snowtroopers. But while that helmet design didn't quite fit for the Empire's use, it was worked into another place in the film's visuals. It's the beginning of Bubba Fat's helmet, which of course is now the helmet of all the Mandalorians. The visual effects designer Joe Johnston took that helmet image and worked it into his design for the Bounty Hunter, and then that in turn informed some of the Warrior's other art. Yeah, it's one of those many things where you're like, everybody knows what a Mandalorian looks like. It's been particularly prominent in recent years because of of the show, and that all started in this little sketchy did for an Empire. Ralph also worked on a castle design for Darth Vader, something that was not used in the film. Vader's lava plan at Home of Mustafar was something that fans had heard about. It had been mentioned in various places and wanted to see for years, but it actually didn't make it to the big screen until two thousand five in Revenge of the Siths. And if you, like many kids, at least when I was in the theater were completely freaked out initially by seeing that glimpse of Vader's head with no helmet before a machine slips it on. You can thank Ralph mcquarie for designing the mechanism that put that glossy head covering back in place. Reaching back to his technical illustration days, he created multiple sketches of how that armature would work during his work on Empire, knowing that he was working on something that was at that point and in his word, a phenomenon that did shift mcquarie's thinking a little initially, but then it wore off. He said of his mindset quote going into Star Wars, I had no idea that my paintings were going to be reproduced. With the Empire strikes back. That all changed. At first I got a little carried away with putting more of a finish on the paintings. I soon forgot all about that aspect of it and carried on as I normally did. We have talked a lot already about how Ralph kind of hit it out of the park right away with most of his sketches, but one of the creatures in Empire was a little trickier for him, and that was the Tonton. According to McQuary quote, I did a lot of sketches of the tonton first. George said it was sort of lizard like, and I didn't get lizard together with the snow because I'm kind of literal. I know that lizards don't function well in cold weather. They just get lethargic and don't do a thing. So his first sketches, though, look very much like giant versions of lizards that you might find in your garden, which of course is not what a tanton looks like. But he kept working at it and refining it, and eventually the right creature emerged. One of the paintings Ralph created related to Bubba Fett is a painting he did for a decal offered for Star Wars fan club members. This is a gorgeous piece. It's much loved by fans and features all of the bounty hunters seen on the bridge of Vader's Star Destroyer in the Empire Strikes Back. Those are Zuckas, I, G eight, eight, Bubba fet, Bost and Forelorm. They're all standing on a cloud City landing platform with a twin pod cloud car flying low behind them, and the colors of the background are shades of pariwinkle blue and lavender, with brighter tones of gold and orange for the buildings. It's so detailed and so beautiful, it's not really surprising that has been used on multiple pieces of merchandise and reprinted many times since that original creation. Yeah, a lot of Star Wars fans I know that are into mcquarie's work. When you asked them with their favorite pieces, many of them will just spit this out without even thinking twice. They'll go, like, oh, the Bounty Hunters on Cloud Titty. Even before work on Empire was complete, there was already discussion, of course, to the third film, and mcquarie also worked on that project, but at that point he was one of multiple artists just churning out concept art for it. Some of the notable elements he worked on for Return of the Jedi were designs for various characters in Java's palace, including Jaba himself and the adorable little murder bears that e walks. The walks went through a lot of iterations, with some versions looking more like slots and others borrowing characteristics from hedgehogs, and some even being vaguely gnome like, none of McQuary's e Walks made the cut, which was pretty frustrating for him. He thought one of his scarier versions should have gotten the green light. Yeah, he preferred a slightly more frightening you walk to the cuteness that they eventually emerged as. Uh. There is though a really fun production illustration by McQuary for Return of the Jedi that depicts C three p O being carried through the forest by the e walks in their very much cute bear form. Uh. There are more than a dozen of the fuzzy creatures marching along a log that seems to rise at an angle into the foreground, and they're kind of marching towards the viewer. All of the creatures look really small compared to the massive trees in the image, which were modeled on California redwoods, And as your eye travels down the log to the midground, it's initially very cute and you're like, oh, it's sweet. They're carrying C three people aloft, and then you see that this little bear like species is carrying what appears to be Han Solo, lashed to a pole and ready for the roasting spit. McQuary also painted several images of jabas sale barge and the smaller skiff out in the tattooing desert, and some with two huge sale barges. One of the most dynamic of these paintings shows the heroes Luke, Lando Han and Chewy in the foreground aboard the skiff as the massive sale barge burst into flames behind it. The thick smoke hanging in the air, the barge tilting slightly as it falls, and the massive plume of flame elicit a very real sense of heat and danger. There is also a really interesting instance in the production illustrations for this film where you see mcquarie playing a little bit and kind of going off script. I love this painting. In his original depiction of the Emperor shooting his force lightning at Luke in the throne room aboard the Death Star, the Emperor does not quite look like himself. He looks instead very much like a bluish version of Count Orlock from the German expressionist horror film nos Ferat. He's got the point of years and he has a hood, but it looks kind of like the way Overlock's little cap looks. Uh. Ralph didn't get to keep that as the official production image, though, although it does still exist, he was asked to change it to look more like Palpatine, so he just made a totally new painting, although his work is all over the finished film. Ralph concluded his time as an I l M employee before Return of the Jedi had its theatrical release. He felt like all the other in house designers had the Star Wars us that it covered. There just wasn't a lot more he could dream up that would really add to things, and he felt as though he was being outpaced by younger artists, saying quote, it had been frustrating to me in a way to make a lot of sketches that didn't quite come up to what they were doing. I felt sort of burned out and physically tired. I just didn't feel I was contributing as much as I would like to have on the concept area. After taking some time off to work on whatever personal art he wanted for himself, George Lucas asked Ralph if he would work once more on one more project, and that was the Balantine Books art portfolio for Return of the Jedi. McQuary had already done portfolios to the first two films, so he agreed because he liked the idea of a complete set, plus he really liked the idea of making more production paintings, but without the pressure of an actual production involved. It was also around this time in three that mcquarie married his girlfriend, Joan Benjamin. They were married for the rest of Ralph's life. In just a moment, we're going to talk about just a few of the many other film projects that McQuary worked on over the years. At the same time, often he was churning out art for the Star Wars films. But first we will take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Even as the Star Wars films were in production, Ralph was doing double duty, sometimes triple duty, working on films for Steven Spielberg as well as other directors. After Close Encounters, which we mentioned earlier, Spielberg once again turned to McQuary when he started on E T. Ralph designed the titular character Spaceship based on the prompt that it should look something like Dr SEUs would design. If you've watched the film Writers of the Lost Arc, I think most folks have. You've seen macquarie's work on screen in a somewhat surprising way. He was asked to make a special prop for that film, the illustration of the Ark of the Covenant that is shown in a Bible, which shows the arc destroying people with what looks like lightning emanating from it. That was created first as an ink drawing by the artist. Then he had a reverse printing plate created so the art could be printed as an etching to match what looked like old Bible illustrations. It's a cool little detail. He also worked on Cocoon, which came out in five as a conceptual artist, and he was actually part of a four man team that won a Visual Effects Oscar for their contributions to that film. The list of projects mcquarie worked on in various capacities be on what we've already named is long, so long. He made storyboards for sections of Star Trek for The Voyage Home, which also came out in He designed alien concepts for Total Recall. He also did concepting work for the Back to the Future ride at the Universal Studios theme park. In the early nineteen nineties, he collaborated on a book called The Illustrated Star Wars Universe with writer Kevin J. Anderson. This is wonderful. It's basically kind of a fake history book about the world's of Star Wars. It's presented as a guide book to the planet, to the galaxy in that fictional universe. The illustrations of mcquarie provided for the book are based on ideas that he had worked on during the film's production, and because he had a different level of lead time and a different level of involvement since it was all just his illustrations, they are incredibly rich in detail. He worked with Anderson again after that on two Star Wars pop up books that are absolute gems. One is all about the most Icily Cantina and has some of Holly's favorite Star Wars imagery of all time, and the other is job As Palace and it's also both beautiful and fun. Both are very heavy on the alien species and incredibly imaginative and their pop up recreations of the locations from the films. I love those books so much. I love I love them. Um. They're like right at that perfect intersection of like beautiful, like technically just really really well done and kitchy and it's like magic. Uh. When George Lucas started work on the prequel trilogy, McQuary was actually brought in to potentially work on The Phantom Menace, but after he made a visit to the ile M offices to see what had already been done, he told George Lucas that he really didn't have anything to add that the in house team wasn't already doing. He said quote, they were really hitting it right where it should be. I told him I would have to skip it this time. Let them do it. Mcguary retired in the late nineteen nineties do in part to physical issues that were impeding his work. He told an interviewer, quote, I've got tremor which make it very difficult to draw or write, so I can't do any artwork. I'm pretty happy not having to get up in the morning and solve somebody else's problems. It's worked for me, though. I enjoyed it very much, especially Star Wars. I would do it again if I could, but if I don't have to do it, I'm not all broken up about it. Over the years, Ralph McQuary was honored in a number of ways, but one that's kind of unique and marvelous is having an action figure made of the cameo role character he played in the Empire Strikes Back. That was rebellion General Farrel McQuary. H If you blink, you will miss him. In the film, he's carrying a clipboard through the rebel basse at hawf And while some of the other artists on the film who are also in that scene got to have lines in the movie, Ralph laughed as he told an interviewer years later, quote, they didn't trust me with lines. They knew I would flow up. The General Farrel McQuary action figure was released in two thousand seven. McQuary died on March three at his Berkeley, California home, from complications of Parkinson's disease. After his passing, many of the people who worked with him shared stories of their experiences with Ralph, and many of the artists who work on Star Wars today cited him as an inspiration to pursue art as a career. George Lucas released a statement that said, quote, Ralph mcquarie was the first person I hired to help me envision Star Wars. When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph's fabulous illustrations and say, do it like this. One of the really really thrilling aspects of McQuary's work for Star Wars fans is that a lot of those designs he did way back in the mid seventies are still being mined for design content today. For example, he painted a cantina scene for the first Star Wars film that doesn't entirely look like the cantina as it appears on film, but if you look at it today. And this was something that struck me while I was doing research, because I hadn't looked at this picture in a while. Anyone who has visited Galaxy's Edge, which is the Star Wars themed land in Disneyland or Disney's Hollywood Studios my find it very familiar. It feels a lot like the counter service restaurant at the end of the marketplace Toronto Roasters, particularly the furniture. If you watched the second season of The Mandalorian, those ice spiders were very similar to sketches that mcquarie did for Empire back in ninety nine. Those were labeled a quote bog planet tree creature, and then that was refined for a publication in The Illustrated Star Wars Universe, which was published in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, sure, do you love those creatures. There's also a version that looks kind of like them has shown up in the animated series um. There is also a very pastoral landscape that McQuary painted for Return of the Jedi is what was going to be a grass planet called uh Sisamon. I'm not sure if that's the right pronunciation since it never came to existence on screen. That was intended to be the home planet for the Rebels, and it has, you know, this sort of bee hive shape out growth in the middle of the landscape that is both distinctive sort of oddly soothing because it has this rounded coon lake shape to it. And this imagery was recycled later it appeared once again in the illustrated Star Wars Universe. This time it was notated as representing the planes of Princess Leah's home planet of Alderon. But it wasn't until the animated series Star Wars Rebels, which debuted in that this imagery was seen on screen, and at that point it had once again been labeled as something else, this time the planet Less All and while that pointy eared hailer version of Chewbacca that mcquarie designed in the seventies, wasn't how the character ended up looking. The design was used once again on the animated series Star Wars. Rebels was one of the main characters named zeb Aurelios. It's no longer a wookie. Zeb is a species called a Lassat. There are so many similar cases of modern storytelling using designs that Ralph made. He really is the father of the look of Star Wars. Yeah, it is really fabulous. If you watch any of of the you know, more recent Star Wars is and you haven't gone back to look at any of Ralph's production work, it's worth just paging through a book because you'll be a little blown away by how some of those designs are four years old. I came across a quote in a biography for McQuary. It was on the Turner Classic Movies website, and it seemed so perfect in summing up his incredible life's work. It opened with generic titles such as production illustrator or conceptual artist were frustratingly inadequate when discussing the invaluable contributions to film made by Ralph McQuary. But he really didn't see himself as needing any kind of grandiose description. When asked about his role as an artist, he said, quote, my paintings are sort of art. A real artist wakes up and does what he wants, instead of what the client wants, the agent wants, the gallery wants. I consider myself a craftsman, a draftsman. And finally, I wanted to end all of this on a quote from Ralph McQuary that is incredibly delightful. It's really good advice for a lot of people about not forcing creativity, but it also offers some fun insight into kind of his relaxed personality and how he thought about the creative process. He said quote, I used to try squeezing workout, but it's like toothpaste and a tube that will only come out so fast. There's no point pounding my brain. The best thing I can do is collect my thoughts as soon as I'm told what's needed. Then I lie down and let it gill unconsciously. I sort of semi sleep, and somewhere along the way of going to sleep or coming out of it, I get exactly what I need. It's just there, rising like the bubbles in champagne from somewhere inside, so poetic and sweet, yeah, that makes me think maybe I should have a lie down as I figure out what I'm gonna work on next for the show. Well, and I think probably a lot of us have had that experience where when you stop focusing on the thing you're trying to do, the solution comes to you. Mine are often in the shower or as I'm dozing off, So I've gotten in the habit of always having pad of paper by the side of the bed because sometimes I can't type on my phone. I'm not quite there, but I can scribble, which sometimes is hilarious. I once woke up to the words higgy diggy written on a piece of paper. I still don't know what that was, but I thought it was brilliant one time. Um. But yeah, I find McQuary's works so incredibly inspirational and and mind boggling and how beautiful and detailed it all is. Even his you know, allegedly sloppy sketches and his his claims that he got by as a Matt artists cracked me up because his work is so beautiful. Um. For listener mail, I'm doing a little shorty. Um. I won't read her whole email, but I wanted to give a shout out to our listener Andrea. I don't know if she pronounces it Andrea or Andrea, but she earned her pH d and stuff you missed in history class. Uh. She is a school janitor and got to listen to it while she was scrubbing the gym floor. Thank you for doing a very very needed job uh and taking care of the educational process in ways that people don't always take time to appreciate. So need to give her a shout out for completing all of that, and also just thank her for for what she's doing. As with any she writes at the end, as with anyone else who's gone the distance, I feel like I know you girls and absolutely love what you've accomplished and everything you've shoved in my brain over the last year. It's going to be an adjustment having just two or four episodes a week. Thanks ladies. Um. Uh. We would make more if we had the bandwidth to do, but we are humans, uh, and thank you. We can't tell you how much we appreciate it when people devote that kind of time to spending time with us. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at I heeart radio dot com. You can find us everywhere on social media. Is Missed in History and you can subscribe to the show on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or We're at are you listen to your favorite shows. Thank you to our sponsors Audible, The Conjuring, The Devil Made Me Do It, Rated R, and World of Warcraft. This episode was brought to you in I Heart three D Audio. To experience more podcasts like this, search for I Heart three D Audio in the I Heart Radio app i Heart three D Audio

I Heart three D Audio. This special three D episode is sponsored by Audible, Conjuring, The Devil Made Me Do It, Ratedar, and World of Warcraft. This episode is brought to you in I Heart three D Audio for maximum effect. Headphones are recommended. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this is part two of a two parter, and in the first part of it we talked about Ralph mcquarie's life as a boy, how he decided that he wanted to become a professional artist, and ultimately how he connected with George Lucas to start developing the look of the Star Wars franchise. And today we're going to talk about how Star Wars became Ralph's most well known area of work, but also how it led to a lot of other iconic visual moments in other films. We left off part one with McQuary having had just tremendous output working on the first Star Wars film in concept illustration, matt paintings, and even logo and poster design. And today we'll pick up just as the film was coming out in May of ninety seven. Once Ralph had wrapped up his work on Star Wars, he went to England to work on concepts for a still very much an early development Star Trek movie. Mcgory worked for about a month and a half with production designer Ken Adam, and according to the artist's account, quote they asked me to go over there and come up with anything that comes into my head and maybe we can work it into the script. Paramount shelved the plans for the movie and sent Ralph home, and then later Paramount restarted the Star Trek film project, but Ralph did not return to that production, and while McQuary had been able to see production shots as Star Wars was being made to review how they were looking, he didn't get to see the finished film in a theater right away. He was still in England when it came out, and he was busy, he was working, and he didn't get a chance to see it until he returned to the States. He later described that experience quote, I was in New York when I returned. I came up out of the subway. There was a theater across the street playing Star Wars. I arrived in the middle of the movie. This is on a Wednesday or Thursday, but the whole theater was full of people, right down to the front row, all having a hell of a good time, shouting and reacting to the movie like I've never seen an audience react before, and I was amazed. He also mentioned in several interviews that he didn't really enjoy the film in the first few times that he saw it because he was looking at the art and trying to see if there were any flaws in his Matt paintings. There were some scenes that were almost exact replicas of the initial illustrations macquarie had turned in. One in particular is when Han and Luke are disguised as stormtroopers aboard the Death Star and they're taking Chebacca in the ruse of a detainee onto an elevator, and this scene looks almost exactly like the painting, including the unique overhead camera angle. And when McQuary got home to Los Angeles, he saw day after day lines around the block at the Grumman's Theater, so he knew the movie, which he said that he had actually forgotten about while he was working in England, was a huge hit. He also told a story on several different occasions of finding a gum wrapper on the sidewalk with a picture of Darth Vader on it and that being the moment where he realized that Star Wars was a phenomenon. The story is so funny to me because you and I have talked about just having no recollection of stuff that we've done on the show before, So it makes sense that he would just like it would just not be in his mind that he had worked on this thing because he had other stuff going on. But for it to be something as massive as Star Wars makes it seems so funny. And I mean, he did hundreds and hundreds of pieces of art. That's kind of why it seems so strange to me. It's like, yeah, that was an investment of time and mental energy. So he had a reputation at this point as just a wonderful collaborator. So soon Ralph found himself with more work in the film industry. Just as George Lucas had seen his work for his friend how Barwood, Lucas's friends saw Ralph's work on Star Wars, and that led him to design other iconic film moments, including the spacecraft in the other big sci fi film of nineteen seventy seven, which was Close Encounters of the Third kind. The story there, in mcquarie's words, was quote Stephen left instructions for me to work on designs for the top half of the spacecraft. He said, let's make it look like something like an oil refinery. So I made a sketch. I came up with this idea of putting a dish shape on top of the hemispherical bottom that I put a small oil refinery on top that with all these lights and tank like shapes. From there, I went to a color illustration. Steven saw it and liked it. Apparently they had a model made that looked just about exactly like my painting with the arms coming out, and they added a lot of red lights which looked good, and they filmed it. It's so simple. If you're wondering why he only got asked to design the top, they had already filmed, uh, sort of that that block like shape that drops down from the bottom. Uh. So they really just needed the top to be added to the design of it. And at the same time that this was going on, the success of Star Wars had of course led to a sequel, and Ralph was just as instrumental in developing the look and feel of the new elements that were featured in The Empire Strikes Back, which he started on in nineteen seventy seven, not long after Star Wars came out. Even before pre production on that film, Lucas still had him working on things like greeting card art. He made one for the announcement that lucasfilm was moving office is and it's very famous and quite charming. It featured the Droids and several Jawas in a land speeder too Banthas with Tuscan raiders riding them, a Stormtrooper riding a motorcycle with Darth Vader in the sidecar, and Luke and Ben on foot in a massive Jawa sandcrawler, all making their way down the l A Freeway in a sort of parade. Ralph's Christmas card art that he produced for years for the official lucasfilm cards, each of which featured Star Wars characters in holiday scenes, is incredibly charming and it's been reproduced over and over in the last four decades. He also worked on the frequently groaned over Star Wars Holiday Special, which came out in November night and established the Star Wars Holiday of Life Day. McQuary painted an illustration of a Lookie treehouse and designed some of the sets. He never saw the finished production, but the painting of Chewbacca and Milla's house is one that he said was his most finished and that he loved working on it. There's a cute notation in one of his things where he's I don't remember if it was working on that, or the the Ewok village where he's like, do they need roofs? Surely the canopy is the roof like the forest canopy. It's really cute to see his his mental workthrough of the logistics of all of it. The first detailed illustration that Ralph created for the Empire Strikes Back was an ice castle on the planet Hath. This was intended to be similar to the way the Massacy Outpost temple on Yavin For that was seen in A New Hope worked. That is the rebel base in the jungle that you see an exterior shot of in a New Hope, which was Star Wars initially. That is the rebel base in the jungle that was installed into what looked like ancient ruins, and this ice castle was meant to be a similar thing, but for their base on hawth And. In this painting, the ice castle is seen almost like an iceberg. You only see a small amount of it visible in the snowy landscape, but there would be much more of it below the surface. In mcquarie's illustration, those castle pieces protruding from the snow dominate the image. Two figures which look like Han and Chewy are shown walking through the snow. They're kind of dwarfed by the architecture. They look very small. Small gusts of snow appeared to drift in the air here and there. The whole image is striking and bleak, and it's quite beautiful. But by the time the painting was finished, Lucas has decided against the ice castle, and so that concept was filed away. Some design ideas that mcquarie had started on back on the first film were revisited for Empire. One of them, and Holly's favorite, was cloud City. Initially, according to mcquarie's recollection, he had worked on a floating city for Star Wars that was going to be the location where Princess Leo was imprisoned, but in subsequent drafts of the script, that plot point shifted its location to the Death Star, but that abandoned design for a floating city made the perfect spot for hans reunion with his old pal Lando, and according to McQuary quote, George thought the floating city idea should be Art deco, sort of a Flashgore type thing. It was to have a long stem down into the clouds holding it up. I didn't know if it was connected to anything. It didn't matter, kind of anti gravity, just floating there. I started with Flash Gordon type cities on a platter, but it just didn't look convincing to me. It should be more complete or more mechanical. So I came up with this idea that looked more like an aircraft carrier in a way. I put some older buildings up on the roof, like temples representative of the spiritual life of these people, and made a painting with gray clouds and a couple of Thai fighters flying in the foreground. I like that painting as well as anything I did for Star Wars. It is really romantic and atmospheric. Coming up, we'll talk about some of Ralph mcquarie's other contributions to the imagery of the Empire strikes back, but first people have a little sponsored break. McQuary also storyboarded segments of Empire, including the scene where Luke is in the his cave on Howth and once again he worked on Matt paintings. Still recall from our first episode he said he just kind of got by as a Matt painter. But looking at these Matt paintings is really mind boggling because some of them look, for all the world like photographs. So for Hawse he created vast, desolate snowscapes for exterior shots, and also detailed images that look, even in print today, like they are photos of a rebel hanger set rather than paintings. When the Millennium Falcon lands on a cloud city landing pad and the heroes exit the craft in the movie, the background vista of the city in the beautiful glowing light of dusk is all hand painted by Ralph McQuary. As we've mentioned, often a design started out for one thing but then got used for something else. One example from Empire is his early sketches for the Imperial officers in command of the snow Troopers. There was originally a very different helmet design from the ones that we see in the film on the Snowtroopers. But while that helmet design didn't quite fit for the Empire's use, it was worked into another place in the film's visuals. It's the beginning of Bubba Fat's helmet, which of course is now the helmet of all the Mandalorians. The visual effects designer Joe Johnston took that helmet image and worked it into his design for the Bounty Hunter, and then that in turn informed some of the Warrior's other art. Yeah, it's one of those many things where you're like, everybody knows what a Mandalorian looks like. It's been particularly prominent in recent years because of of the show, and that all started in this little sketchy did for an Empire. Ralph also worked on a castle design for Darth Vader, something that was not used in the film. Vader's lava plan at Home of Mustafar was something that fans had heard about. It had been mentioned in various places and wanted to see for years, but it actually didn't make it to the big screen until two thousand five in Revenge of the Siths. And if you, like many kids, at least when I was in the theater were completely freaked out initially by seeing that glimpse of Vader's head with no helmet before a machine slips it on. You can thank Ralph mcquarie for designing the mechanism that put that glossy head covering back in place. Reaching back to his technical illustration days, he created multiple sketches of how that armature would work during his work on Empire, knowing that he was working on something that was at that point and in his word, a phenomenon that did shift mcquarie's thinking a little initially, but then it wore off. He said of his mindset quote going into Star Wars, I had no idea that my paintings were going to be reproduced. With the Empire strikes back. That all changed. At first I got a little carried away with putting more of a finish on the paintings. I soon forgot all about that aspect of it and carried on as I normally did. We have talked a lot already about how Ralph kind of hit it out of the park right away with most of his sketches, but one of the creatures in Empire was a little trickier for him, and that was the Tonton. According to McQuary quote, I did a lot of sketches of the tonton first. George said it was sort of lizard like, and I didn't get lizard together with the snow because I'm kind of literal. I know that lizards don't function well in cold weather. They just get lethargic and don't do a thing. So his first sketches, though, look very much like giant versions of lizards that you might find in your garden, which of course is not what a tanton looks like. But he kept working at it and refining it, and eventually the right creature emerged. One of the paintings Ralph created related to Bubba Fett is a painting he did for a decal offered for Star Wars fan club members. This is a gorgeous piece. It's much loved by fans and features all of the bounty hunters seen on the bridge of Vader's Star Destroyer in the Empire Strikes Back. Those are Zuckas, I, G eight, eight, Bubba fet, Bost and Forelorm. They're all standing on a cloud City landing platform with a twin pod cloud car flying low behind them, and the colors of the background are shades of pariwinkle blue and lavender, with brighter tones of gold and orange for the buildings. It's so detailed and so beautiful, it's not really surprising that has been used on multiple pieces of merchandise and reprinted many times since that original creation. Yeah, a lot of Star Wars fans I know that are into mcquarie's work. When you asked them with their favorite pieces, many of them will just spit this out without even thinking twice. They'll go, like, oh, the Bounty Hunters on Cloud Titty. Even before work on Empire was complete, there was already discussion, of course, to the third film, and mcquarie also worked on that project, but at that point he was one of multiple artists just churning out concept art for it. Some of the notable elements he worked on for Return of the Jedi were designs for various characters in Java's palace, including Jaba himself and the adorable little murder bears that e walks. The walks went through a lot of iterations, with some versions looking more like slots and others borrowing characteristics from hedgehogs, and some even being vaguely gnome like, none of McQuary's e Walks made the cut, which was pretty frustrating for him. He thought one of his scarier versions should have gotten the green light. Yeah, he preferred a slightly more frightening you walk to the cuteness that they eventually emerged as. Uh. There is though a really fun production illustration by McQuary for Return of the Jedi that depicts C three p O being carried through the forest by the e walks in their very much cute bear form. Uh. There are more than a dozen of the fuzzy creatures marching along a log that seems to rise at an angle into the foreground, and they're kind of marching towards the viewer. All of the creatures look really small compared to the massive trees in the image, which were modeled on California redwoods, And as your eye travels down the log to the midground, it's initially very cute and you're like, oh, it's sweet. They're carrying C three people aloft, and then you see that this little bear like species is carrying what appears to be Han Solo, lashed to a pole and ready for the roasting spit. McQuary also painted several images of jabas sale barge and the smaller skiff out in the tattooing desert, and some with two huge sale barges. One of the most dynamic of these paintings shows the heroes Luke, Lando Han and Chewy in the foreground aboard the skiff as the massive sale barge burst into flames behind it. The thick smoke hanging in the air, the barge tilting slightly as it falls, and the massive plume of flame elicit a very real sense of heat and danger. There is also a really interesting instance in the production illustrations for this film where you see mcquarie playing a little bit and kind of going off script. I love this painting. In his original depiction of the Emperor shooting his force lightning at Luke in the throne room aboard the Death Star, the Emperor does not quite look like himself. He looks instead very much like a bluish version of Count Orlock from the German expressionist horror film nos Ferat. He's got the point of years and he has a hood, but it looks kind of like the way Overlock's little cap looks. Uh. Ralph didn't get to keep that as the official production image, though, although it does still exist, he was asked to change it to look more like Palpatine, so he just made a totally new painting, although his work is all over the finished film. Ralph concluded his time as an I l M employee before Return of the Jedi had its theatrical release. He felt like all the other in house designers had the Star Wars us that it covered. There just wasn't a lot more he could dream up that would really add to things, and he felt as though he was being outpaced by younger artists, saying quote, it had been frustrating to me in a way to make a lot of sketches that didn't quite come up to what they were doing. I felt sort of burned out and physically tired. I just didn't feel I was contributing as much as I would like to have on the concept area. After taking some time off to work on whatever personal art he wanted for himself, George Lucas asked Ralph if he would work once more on one more project, and that was the Balantine Books art portfolio for Return of the Jedi. McQuary had already done portfolios to the first two films, so he agreed because he liked the idea of a complete set, plus he really liked the idea of making more production paintings, but without the pressure of an actual production involved. It was also around this time in three that mcquarie married his girlfriend, Joan Benjamin. They were married for the rest of Ralph's life. In just a moment, we're going to talk about just a few of the many other film projects that McQuary worked on over the years. At the same time, often he was churning out art for the Star Wars films. But first we will take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Even as the Star Wars films were in production, Ralph was doing double duty, sometimes triple duty, working on films for Steven Spielberg as well as other directors. After Close Encounters, which we mentioned earlier, Spielberg once again turned to McQuary when he started on E T. Ralph designed the titular character Spaceship based on the prompt that it should look something like Dr SEUs would design. If you've watched the film Writers of the Lost Arc, I think most folks have. You've seen macquarie's work on screen in a somewhat surprising way. He was asked to make a special prop for that film, the illustration of the Ark of the Covenant that is shown in a Bible, which shows the arc destroying people with what looks like lightning emanating from it. That was created first as an ink drawing by the artist. Then he had a reverse printing plate created so the art could be printed as an etching to match what looked like old Bible illustrations. It's a cool little detail. He also worked on Cocoon, which came out in five as a conceptual artist, and he was actually part of a four man team that won a Visual Effects Oscar for their contributions to that film. The list of projects mcquarie worked on in various capacities be on what we've already named is long, so long. He made storyboards for sections of Star Trek for The Voyage Home, which also came out in He designed alien concepts for Total Recall. He also did concepting work for the Back to the Future ride at the Universal Studios theme park. In the early nineteen nineties, he collaborated on a book called The Illustrated Star Wars Universe with writer Kevin J. Anderson. This is wonderful. It's basically kind of a fake history book about the world's of Star Wars. It's presented as a guide book to the planet, to the galaxy in that fictional universe. The illustrations of mcquarie provided for the book are based on ideas that he had worked on during the film's production, and because he had a different level of lead time and a different level of involvement since it was all just his illustrations, they are incredibly rich in detail. He worked with Anderson again after that on two Star Wars pop up books that are absolute gems. One is all about the most Icily Cantina and has some of Holly's favorite Star Wars imagery of all time, and the other is job As Palace and it's also both beautiful and fun. Both are very heavy on the alien species and incredibly imaginative and their pop up recreations of the locations from the films. I love those books so much. I love I love them. Um. They're like right at that perfect intersection of like beautiful, like technically just really really well done and kitchy and it's like magic. Uh. When George Lucas started work on the prequel trilogy, McQuary was actually brought in to potentially work on The Phantom Menace, but after he made a visit to the ile M offices to see what had already been done, he told George Lucas that he really didn't have anything to add that the in house team wasn't already doing. He said quote, they were really hitting it right where it should be. I told him I would have to skip it this time. Let them do it. Mcguary retired in the late nineteen nineties do in part to physical issues that were impeding his work. He told an interviewer, quote, I've got tremor which make it very difficult to draw or write, so I can't do any artwork. I'm pretty happy not having to get up in the morning and solve somebody else's problems. It's worked for me, though. I enjoyed it very much, especially Star Wars. I would do it again if I could, but if I don't have to do it, I'm not all broken up about it. Over the years, Ralph McQuary was honored in a number of ways, but one that's kind of unique and marvelous is having an action figure made of the cameo role character he played in the Empire Strikes Back. That was rebellion General Farrel McQuary. H If you blink, you will miss him. In the film, he's carrying a clipboard through the rebel basse at hawf And while some of the other artists on the film who are also in that scene got to have lines in the movie, Ralph laughed as he told an interviewer years later, quote, they didn't trust me with lines. They knew I would flow up. The General Farrel McQuary action figure was released in two thousand seven. McQuary died on March three at his Berkeley, California home, from complications of Parkinson's disease. After his passing, many of the people who worked with him shared stories of their experiences with Ralph, and many of the artists who work on Star Wars today cited him as an inspiration to pursue art as a career. George Lucas released a statement that said, quote, Ralph mcquarie was the first person I hired to help me envision Star Wars. When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph's fabulous illustrations and say, do it like this. One of the really really thrilling aspects of McQuary's work for Star Wars fans is that a lot of those designs he did way back in the mid seventies are still being mined for design content today. For example, he painted a cantina scene for the first Star Wars film that doesn't entirely look like the cantina as it appears on film, but if you look at it today. And this was something that struck me while I was doing research, because I hadn't looked at this picture in a while. Anyone who has visited Galaxy's Edge, which is the Star Wars themed land in Disneyland or Disney's Hollywood Studios my find it very familiar. It feels a lot like the counter service restaurant at the end of the marketplace Toronto Roasters, particularly the furniture. If you watched the second season of The Mandalorian, those ice spiders were very similar to sketches that mcquarie did for Empire back in ninety nine. Those were labeled a quote bog planet tree creature, and then that was refined for a publication in The Illustrated Star Wars Universe, which was published in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, sure, do you love those creatures. There's also a version that looks kind of like them has shown up in the animated series um. There is also a very pastoral landscape that McQuary painted for Return of the Jedi is what was going to be a grass planet called uh Sisamon. I'm not sure if that's the right pronunciation since it never came to existence on screen. That was intended to be the home planet for the Rebels, and it has, you know, this sort of bee hive shape out growth in the middle of the landscape that is both distinctive sort of oddly soothing because it has this rounded coon lake shape to it. And this imagery was recycled later it appeared once again in the illustrated Star Wars Universe. This time it was notated as representing the planes of Princess Leah's home planet of Alderon. But it wasn't until the animated series Star Wars Rebels, which debuted in that this imagery was seen on screen, and at that point it had once again been labeled as something else, this time the planet Less All and while that pointy eared hailer version of Chewbacca that mcquarie designed in the seventies, wasn't how the character ended up looking. The design was used once again on the animated series Star Wars. Rebels was one of the main characters named zeb Aurelios. It's no longer a wookie. Zeb is a species called a Lassat. There are so many similar cases of modern storytelling using designs that Ralph made. He really is the father of the look of Star Wars. Yeah, it is really fabulous. If you watch any of of the you know, more recent Star Wars is and you haven't gone back to look at any of Ralph's production work, it's worth just paging through a book because you'll be a little blown away by how some of those designs are four years old. I came across a quote in a biography for McQuary. It was on the Turner Classic Movies website, and it seemed so perfect in summing up his incredible life's work. It opened with generic titles such as production illustrator or conceptual artist were frustratingly inadequate when discussing the invaluable contributions to film made by Ralph McQuary. But he really didn't see himself as needing any kind of grandiose description. When asked about his role as an artist, he said, quote, my paintings are sort of art. A real artist wakes up and does what he wants, instead of what the client wants, the agent wants, the gallery wants. I consider myself a craftsman, a draftsman. And finally, I wanted to end all of this on a quote from Ralph McQuary that is incredibly delightful. It's really good advice for a lot of people about not forcing creativity, but it also offers some fun insight into kind of his relaxed personality and how he thought about the creative process. He said quote, I used to try squeezing workout, but it's like toothpaste and a tube that will only come out so fast. There's no point pounding my brain. The best thing I can do is collect my thoughts as soon as I'm told what's needed. Then I lie down and let it gill unconsciously. I sort of semi sleep, and somewhere along the way of going to sleep or coming out of it, I get exactly what I need. It's just there, rising like the bubbles in champagne from somewhere inside, so poetic and sweet, yeah, that makes me think maybe I should have a lie down as I figure out what I'm gonna work on next for the show. Well, and I think probably a lot of us have had that experience where when you stop focusing on the thing you're trying to do, the solution comes to you. Mine are often in the shower or as I'm dozing off, So I've gotten in the habit of always having pad of paper by the side of the bed because sometimes I can't type on my phone. I'm not quite there, but I can scribble, which sometimes is hilarious. I once woke up to the words higgy diggy written on a piece of paper. I still don't know what that was, but I thought it was brilliant one time. Um. But yeah, I find McQuary's works so incredibly inspirational and and mind boggling and how beautiful and detailed it all is. Even his you know, allegedly sloppy sketches and his his claims that he got by as a Matt artists cracked me up because his work is so beautiful. Um. For listener mail, I'm doing a little shorty. Um. I won't read her whole email, but I wanted to give a shout out to our listener Andrea. I don't know if she pronounces it Andrea or Andrea, but she earned her pH d and stuff you missed in history class. Uh. She is a school janitor and got to listen to it while she was scrubbing the gym floor. Thank you for doing a very very needed job uh and taking care of the educational process in ways that people don't always take time to appreciate. So need to give her a shout out for completing all of that, and also just thank her for for what she's doing. As with any she writes at the end, as with anyone else who's gone the distance, I feel like I know you girls and absolutely love what you've accomplished and everything you've shoved in my brain over the last year. It's going to be an adjustment having just two or four episodes a week. Thanks ladies. Um. Uh. We would make more if we had the bandwidth to do, but we are humans, uh, and thank you. We can't tell you how much we appreciate it when people devote that kind of time to spending time with us. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at I heeart radio dot com. You can find us everywhere on social media. Is Missed in History and you can subscribe to the show on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. 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