We're trying to draw from all over from Star Wars.
A lot of the stuff that we're doing, a lot of the designs and things
are things from old video games, like the incinerator trooper.
Uh, the E-Web cannon goes back to, I think, Empire Strikes Back.
Play it like it's twice as heavy.
And, uh, we got the death troopers from Rogue...
Rogue One, so from the sequels and the other properties.
We're using a lot of stuff that was built for other movies,
like aliens and suits and things.
So, um, in the spirit of television, we're using resources from the features.
We go down prop rabbit holes all the time, trying to figure out...
Can we please talk about the ice cream maker?
Talk about your ice cream maker.
It's a specific type of ice cream maker. I think it's...hard to get.
I think the ice cream maker is the most specific...
It was the camtono, the thing he carried the Beskar around in.
Bryce, you got such good acting. You're acting interested in this.
I am. I'm very curious about this real ice cream maker.
It was in your episode.
It was.
It was in your episode.
You didn't get the Camtono, so you don't know the joy of this prop.
No, no.
Allow Jon to regale you the joy of this.
To me, it's the deepest, deepest cut.
This is based on Willrow Hood's famous ice cream maker.
There it is.
There's a bunch of people at Celebration
that dress up as a character that they've named Willrow Hood...
It is. I don't know where the name comes from. Continue.
It's somebody running in the background
at Cloud City as everything's going crazy,
running with a prop that...clearly, he was a deep background character.
So it's just an off-the-shelf ice cream maker.
So it's a bucket with a little motorized thing on it that you plug in to make ice cream.
It's amazing.
And this thing has become such a focus of the fans
that they have people who dress up and find that ice cream maker
so that they can go to Celebration in the jumpsuit...
It is hard to get it.
It's so sought-after.
It's hard to find the ice cream maker.
And then they have...it's a highlight of Star Wars Celebration
that they have the running...what's it called?
"It's a highlight".
The running...might be a stretch...
What is it?
It's the running of the Willrow Hoods.
They're gonna expect you to do it now, once this gets out.
Get your jumpsuit ready.
Some make their own and go through.
They'll make you one.
With everybody dressed as stormtroopers, as Mandalorians, as rebels...
And then you have a bunch of orange jumpsuits...
Running with ice cream makers through the Celebration.
And everybody goes berserk. They love it.
Because if that's not true,
if that's not the essence of being a fan, I don't know what is.
Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
Yeah.
I was like...
He has an action figure.
He has an action figure, too. He has all sorts of fan fiction.
There's been such outcry. He got an action figure.
So we took the ice cream maker and made it the thing like in Pulp Fiction
when you open the...the golden briefcase light.
This is a big, big deal.
We reveal what was inside.
But I love, with this show, they had...
At the same time we're doing this, there's the big Episode IX going on,
and ours was like,
let's take...in my mind, it was like,
let's take the most obscure characters that were right on the edge of not...
Of being kind of not that cool and not...
that you really have to love Star Wars.
Peg-warmers.
To give permission to yourself
to like these things and to take the characters
that are normally deep in the background and put them center stage.
So that's why IG-11 was like IG-88.
He was the most absurd Bounty Hunter that you saw.
They clearly were just stacking things up behind Boba Fett.
You are free to use any methods necessary,
but I want them alive.
They built him out of parts of the old cantina set from A New Hope.
"What's left? You gotta build us a robot".
But then we, as children, were like,
"That's the coolest assassin robot. It must be a killer Bounty Hunter".
It's standing there.
It doesn't move because it's so badass.
It's so stoic.
No, it didn't move 'cause it was bolted to the floor.
It didn't have feet designed for it.
Subparagraph 16 of the Bondsman Guild protocol waiver
compels you to immediately produce said asset.
IG Unit! Stand down.
Affirmative.
Taika's voice on him is amazing.
It's so funny.
That's Taika Waititi on there.
Stop that.
Identify yourself!
I am IG-11.
I am this child's nurse droid and require that you remand him to me immediately.
Hey.
And Jon's like, "With these elements, we could launch Disney+".
But there is something with satire or with storytelling,
where you take the most mundane and elevate it,
and if you're taking something that's really elevated,
make it on a small scale.
Like, bring it down to the grit of it.
So the Quarren is...what's a Quarren, Dave?
Explain, you'll do a better job of it.
You at first see it in Return of the Jedi, in Jabba's palace.
It's one of the aliens. They were called, "Squid Head".
It's your choice, but I warn you not to underestimate my powers.
His species is the Quarren, and they hate Ackbar's Mon Calamari.
It's a trap!
You can watch that whole war in Clone Wars.
The two aquatic species fighting...
They don't get along.
It's like Siamese fighting fish.
But the first takes we did of our Quarren were almost too real, remember?
That was a big thing.
So we had the first Quarren, and it looked like Davy Jones with...
Everything going on.
Yeah.
They're gonna know that's not...
It feels like we're reinventing.
It's too much.
The blurrgs are from where? Where do the blurrgs come from?
Pixomondo did the blurrgs.
But where did it come from in Star Wars?
It's a deep cut.
Part of our goal was to take...how do you describe it?
That our big brother took all...
Yeah.
All the good toys away.
Our older brother took all the cool toys, and then we got left with
Ugnaughts and Jawas and other peg-warmers,
but somehow, we got a Boba Fett figure,
and then we painted him silver and made him cooler,
'cause sometimes you make it your own.
Here's the strange thing about blurrgs. I don't know why
every Star Wars story I've been associated with has a blurrg in it.
You had blurrgs in Clone Wars.
- And Rebels. - In Rebels.
You said, "I'm gonna put blurrgs in".
Like you were doing something nice, and I'm like, "These things don't make any sense".
And Ugnaughts, right? What's the Ugnaughts from?
Cloud City.
Cloud City. That's right.
They're like little worker bees over there.
And IG-88's actually in the corner, shot in that scene.
And we made him like our Yoda. We made him our mentor...
He's, like, the spiritual center.
I have spoken.
There was a funny story there,
where originally...people don't know this.
You had the idea the Ugnaught didn't speak English
and we had these actors temping the scene...
I wrote it. It was gonna be subtitled.
And Ugnaught was speaking Jawa back to the Jawas.
With a pig...it sounded like a pig talking.
And Dee Baker, my friend from Clone Wars,
was doing the temp voicing and was like...
Snorting and stuff while he was doing it...
And then we have, "We have traveled a long way".
The Jawas are like...
For 15 minutes.
I'm like, "We can't do this".
They're going back and forth like this,
and you and I are sitting there in the edit, watching it, and we're both really quiet.
And thank you for not...
But without that...
You let me find my way to it on my own.
I liked it. It was strange.
"Is this gonna work?"
I didn't know if this was live-action.
No. Plus, it's also a dude and a bucket for his head
and a dude with a pig mask on and then a Jawa.
There was nothing to cut to with any human expression,
and then there were subtitles.
Another interesting trivia bit, the way this show runs,
the first human face that I ever shot in live-action was Werner Herzog.
In that story, there was nobody...
It was good.
And Tate and the guys in the bar.
But, really, the first lens I looked through and saw a human being,
and I'm looking at Werner Herzog,
"What is this?"
You could do worse.
His enthusiasm outweighs his discretion.
If you see this, you remember it from New Hope.
That light pattern, you remember it from New Hope.
Please. No. No, no.
We're doing fan service, creatively. Like, would this be cool?
For those who know, they'll appreciate it.
Those who don't, it looks like a cool Star Wars thing.
Now in walks this...or here's a vehicle.
We should make it the Kenner Troop Transport,
where six stormtroopers stand on the side.
That wasn't based on the movies. Let's put it in.
Somebody's gotta torch the bar. Let's use the incinerator stormtrooper.
Can we do that? We don't have one. Paint it like this. We're painting, it's there.
And then who you cast also.
People who are either fans of Star Wars
or people who have a body of work from other things
that when they come into the Star Wars world,
the fans are like, "That's cool".
So, let's just do this job.
We get in, we get out, and you don't have to see our faces anymore.
Because we're not George Lucas, because we're also...
We're just filmmakers who grew up watching it,
just because we say it doesn't mean it's cool.
We're definitely thinking about,
how is this gonna play with fans?
It has to work on a story level and a character level.
Tiny.
And then the fan gets the little bit of gold in there,
and then people...what is that? Why are you excited?
That's because it's this droid that was in Empire Strikes Back,
it just stood there and looked menacing, but I had the action figure of it.
And you're like, "What? Did it do anything?"
No, didn't do anything, but it did something in my mind.
And there's many layers of that.
But to me, it's just using the universe that was created.
It's not taking it in a different direction.
It's not just throwing a term in there for the sake of winking,
saying, "See? I get it". That's something that takes practice.
Goodness gracious me!
Well, there are two banthas down there, but I don't see any...
Wait a second.
They're Sand People, all right. I can see one of them now.
Tusken Raiders.
I heard the locals talking about this filth.
Tuskens think they're the locals.
Everyone else is just trespassing.
Whatever they call themselves, they best keep their distance.
Yeah? Why don't you tell them yourself?
AT-ST.
Imperial walker. What's it doing here?
I don't know.
The AT-ST. You wanna talk about the AT-ST at all?
Let John talk about the AT-ST.
Where'd that appear?
That's from Return of the Jedi.
- Return of the Jedi. - Oh.
There's a chicken walker that's different in Empire Strikes Back.
We're going deep nerd now.
What's the difference between a chicken walker and a AT-ST?
I didn't know this.
In Empire Strikes Back, there is, I think, just one shot of a two-legged walker
running around that I think Joe Johnston did just kind of...
- On a whim. - Uh-huh.
As a lark.
But George really liked it, and then later in Return of the Jedi,
it got upgraded to the full-on...yeah.
Again, one of the least intimidating
pieces of mech in the originals that we upgraded
to the Big Bad in our Seven Samurai episode.
Go. Go!
Well, and I like the work you did on that,
and the animation because you had done a lot of tests for Rogue,
where they would animate the CG walker right over footage of the old stop motion.
And if you don't get that kind of hitch in its giddyup, it just...
it doesn't feel like the walker.
It needs to have that kind of staccatoed motion.
'Cause now we could do it smooth, but it just doesn't...
It lacks the character,
and part of our walker is that it's supposed to be more like a creature
than it's supposed to be the old military one,
'cause ours is beat up and repurposed.
Just a few more steps.
Both the blurrg and the AT-ST began their life as stop-motion...
Their cinematic life as stop-motion creations,
so it was useful on the blurrg to go back and actually do some stop motion
to kind of figure out...
Stop motion doesn't look strictly real,
just because of artifacts inherent in that technique,
but there's a magic to it,
and so figuring out how to tease out some of that magic
but still have something that feels like a modern visual effect
that's gonna blend well with live-action is super tricky.
Yeah.
Something we can't jump over, either, is in 3, we have an array of Mandalorians
rocketing out of the sky and landing,
which is something for me, as a kid, I would've just died to see.
Because we all ordered the Boba Fett figure
by sending in our proofs of purchase from the back of the package,
and we got this figure before he ever appeared on-screen.
You could get Boba Fett in the mail before the movie came out,
and the only time we'd seen him was the Holiday Special,
which you know, 'cause you put the gun in.
Let's talk about that gun.
Yeah. The fork gun from the Holiday Special,
that Boba Fett carries.
Yes, that was one of the deep cuts that we had,
the zapper that he uses to corral his...
Whatever that dinosaur he's riding in the swamp is.
I remember when you were all proud when George came to set.
Did you see the gun we have?
Yeah.
Do you know that that was an homage to...that's canon, right?
- Because you wrote it. - Not really.
You said, "We put that gun in from the Holiday Special".
And he goes, "I had nothing to do with that".
I need passage to the yards.
What? It's just a little mousey.
Come here, little mousey.
Burg.
Mousey, come here. Come here.
Burg.
We pulled in for the final episode...
The darksaber.
So the way the darksaber came about was I was a character on Clone Wars,
a Mandalorian named Pre Vizsla.
This lightsaber was stolen from your Jedi Temple
by my ancestors during the fall of the Old Republic.
Since then, many Jedi have died upon its blade.
Prepare yourself to join them.
It's like a katana. It's pretty cool.
It's really cool.
And you're figuring out how to show it on-screen.
John and I are working on that.
We've gone around and around.
So how do you make a thing that has no light but just has...
But what we're digging is actually that...
Much like the old lightsabers, that there's actually a practical element
that has weird anomalies that makes it look...
That makes it look like those reflective dowels that they used.
And actually, one of them is a spinning reflective dowel for the old one?
That's something we have to kind of experience, which is when we do take things that...
It came from The Clone Wars.
We have to think that, in that show, they are stylized
and that that was an animated style of something from live-action,
and it's not about doing any of those things one-to-one,
but it's about saying,
"That's based on something".
How'd he have done it?
That's through the lens...
How would George do it?
This is Mos Eisley Tower.
We are tracking you.
Head for bay three-five, over.
Copy that.
Locked in for three-five.
Come along, R2.
Picked up this Bounty Puck before I left the Mid Rim.
Fennec Shand.
In episode 105, we get to go back to Tatooine,
and we go inside the Mos Eisley Cantina, which was awesome.
It was great. The art department did an amazing job.
A-mark.
You're walking into a bit of history there.
Camera, and action!
We were treating that like a museum piece.
In the original bar in Tatooine, they had green on this side,
and they had red on that side,
and so every detail in here has been duplicated.
So that's what I'm doing. Hope you guys appreciate it.
It should look very faithful to the original.
We did a little bit less than half of the build,
and the rest was on the screens, so unless the screens were up,
you were just seeing a little part of it,
and then, click, you turn on the switch, there it is.
We were able to build a recreation of EV-9D9,
which is now the bartender droid.
Mark Hamill came in and voiced the droid,
who had appeared in Return of the Jedi.
Unfortunately, the Bounty Guild no longer operates from Tatooine.
He now serves drinks.
It's smoother if you're slower, but if you want to do a quicker...
And I really liked this aspect,
that in the original, droids weren't allowed in the bar.
Hey. We don't serve their kind here.
What?
Now? Yeah, sure.
Droids are working the bar, and for all we know,
they might own the bar, so I thought that was a great twist.
And then I'm driving R5-D4 through the scene.
It doesn't get much better than that.
Hey, droid, I'm a hunter. I'm lookin' for some work.
R5-D4 was great
because we had that particular type of droid, but he wasn't painted like R5.
And then I was looking at it, and we were gonna shoot Mos Eisley,
I went to Josh and I said, "Can you repaint this thing to look like R5?"
And he said, "Yeah, sure. Why?"
And I said,
'cause I don't think he ever got off Tatooine.
I think he's been stuck there and is probably working.
There's a lot of EU stuff about, that he's a Jedi special...
Yeah, I know.
But you even made him paint the restraining bolt thing.
The busted restraining bolt, yeah.
And where his motivator got shot.
This R2 unit has a bad motivator. Look.
Where was his bad motivator?
This one? Yeah.
Gunk that up and let it come down the side,
just oil and grease stains on this guy.
Gotcha.
We made it a little burned up on top of his head.
And now he's in the cantina.
Behind me is a TIE fighter in its landing position,
with landing gear out, which hasn't ever been shown before,
and the wings are gonna be added in CG,
where we fold them based on Doug Chiang's drawing.
It was a design that was done years ago that was never used,
and we saw it and decided we wanted to pull that into our story.
I think my favorite moment of just shooting this and being involved was...
It was the first day that I was shooting.
It was coming onto the outside set, the backlot,
and kind of in my head, I'd seen the previs,
but you know, none of it's real until you're on set
and I could walk around the corner and there's 60 stormtroopers
just standing around in that courtyard,
and I just remember walking past and just going, "Okay".
And instantly, I was like, get my phone out so...
No one's gonna see these.
Stormtroopers! Oh, my God, so amazing.
I kept taking photos of stormtroopers,
and I was so impressed, 'cause there were so many of them.
What was that gang?
What's that secret? It was probably no secret.
The 501st?
They brought those guys in.
And they were...their suits looked amazing.
Well, we were in a production meeting preparing for that shoot,
we were around the table going through the script,
we said, "How many stormtroopers did you get?"
They're like, "We got...", what was it? 30?
Yeah, it wasn't a lot.
It was a lot of like...
It sounded good when we planned it long ago...
But we had maxed out the costumes.
Yeah.
It was the costumes.
Yeah.
So it was like, what are we doing?
Then he and I leaned into each other, 'cause it was...
I knew that George Lucas, when he would do an appearance or something,
he could call up the 501st, and he'd have 100 stormtroopers show up for an event.
Yeah, easily.
And I was like, "Could we call them?"
He knows 'em all, and he was...
Now I may not remember.
Yeah.
But you already were in.
I was already in, yeah.
So you were like,
well, let's see. It's Southern California...
they'll fly down, come in. I could probably get about...
And he made some calls, and they showed up.
But the funny thing was that they showed up,
and they didn't know what they were coming to.
What calls do they usually get?
They get calls for...they'll do premieres.
If you see them at a Star Wars function, appear, a lot of times, the 501st,
they do, on their own, visits to hospitals.
They do a lot of charity things.
They do a wide array of things, and they are called often to represent
for the company at public appearances related to Star Wars.
So Lucasfilm will call them up if they're...
If they're at a convention or an appearance or there's a parade
or events where they want background stormtroopers. They know that...
- But not a movie. - Yeah.
So they show up not knowing where they're going, and they literally are
driving them into the middle of the set in front of camera,
and they were realizing that they're gonna be in the show.
In their armor that they made themselves.
That's significant, right?
Yeah.
Because suddenly, the dream of anybody
that makes your own suit of stormtrooper armor
is that you would have an actual screen-used prop, gun or mask,
but the minute you walked on our set and got shot,
your armor that you made became screen-used, which is pretty cool.
It's episode 108, the big finale.
We got our whole cast here. We got the 501st.
We got them on camera as part of our background.
It's been a real treat, real fun.
The 501st Legion is the world's largest fan-based costuming group.
We do things mainly for charity.
We're bad guys doing good.
But we're also big kids, so we do this for children
and these children as well.
We love dressing up and costuming and playing the part.
My armor is about six years old, oddly enough,
but I do take care of it, because I invest a lot of time in that kind of stuff.
It starts off as a piece of white ABS plastic,
and then they're vac-formed into shapes to fit your body type, basically.
A lot of it's fairly generic. It comes in a certain size,
but you have to shim it and shape it and get it to conform to your body.
Otherwise, you don't look right, you don't articulate correctly.
You're not gonna look like a stormtrooper.
You'll look like something trying to be a stormtrooper.
Lucasfilm put out a last-minute call, yeah, and here it is.
We were able to get some folks from our garrison in the Bay Area
and bring a few people down to join...
A few hundred miles down here.
...our friends in SoCal.
You guys came down from San Francisco?
All right. Go, Oakland.
We got here, we got into our armor, we got bussed over to the set.
It was cool, 'cause the PAs were like,
"Hold on. You're gonna have a moment".
And then we walked around and saw what we were walking into,
and everybody lost it.
I don't even know what to say.
I had absolutely no clue until he told me this morning what it was.
I just thought it was an event, a high-profile event.
It's my first one here, and it's a doozy.
This one's big. I had no idea.
Making Star Wars.
I had no idea. None.
So they walk onto our set, and they're right in the middle
of the filming of The Mandalorian, which they'd been hearing rumors about,
and it was fascinating.
We'll do some marching today. We'll look good, crisp, and feel good.
Yeah.
Right on! Right on.
You're walking in, and seeing all the props and the detailing
in every single door, every single accessory,
and it's like, "I'm in Star Wars".
Like, this is a dream.
A-mark!
We're all like, "Oh, my God. This is real".
I think all of us started crying a little bit.
It's good we wear helmets. Nobody could see us cry.
You bring in the 501st, they're professionals.
And lo and behold, I think 25 people show up.
In addition to the stunt people and the people in costumes,
we had over 50 of them.
Members of my escort have completed assembly
of an E-Web heavy repeating blaster.
It looks huge. Fills up our entire set. Looks great.
And they know exactly how to act like a stormtrooper.
You direct them, but they know how to move.
They know how to stand.
They are stormtroopers.
They were wonderful. They did a great job.
We got so much energy from them.
Action.
You will have until nightfall.
And they could not have been better, more professional, cooler.
We'll take some pictures with you. We'll hold onto them...
We'll give them at the end once it's out.
Cool.
- Thank you. - Thank you.
You had people who were all walks of life.
You had mothers and daughters, once they popped the helmets off.
I'm Rick Alpi, TK 50311, and I'm from Mission Viejo.
Jacko Luong, TK 88808, from Huntington Beach.
My name's Mark Edwards. My TK number is TK 7328. I'm from Los Angeles.
My name is Jacob Gonzales, TK 86267 of the Inland Empire squad.
Chris Elguera, TK 87007, part of the Inland Empire squad.
Sam Newcomer, also known as TIE Racer, TK 54548.
The camaraderie is more important than anything, and then love for Star Wars.
We all have a common bond that binds us together, like the Force.
It's come full circle from watching New Hope,
dreaming about being a stormtrooper
to actually being a stormtrooper in front of the camera.
Just amazing.
Let's take some pictures.
Say, "whiskey"!
Maybe let's finish on talking about the X-wing pilots.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Both of you have been X-wing pilots.
Have you?
Yeah, John's been...John appears in Battle of Yavin, don't you?
Yeah, I'm actually all the X-wing pilots.
You're in Phantom Menace, too.
You have a close-up in Phantom Menace.
I worked on some special edition shots.
Wait, wait, I'm worried about this one.
Jon looks worried.
You're all of them?
You're gonna ruin it for him.
The CG model of the X-wing, there was a figure, that's my head.
Every time. No close-up.
You're on-screen in Phantom Menace.
I am the only Naboo pilot you see get killed.
In The Mandalorian, we have a few X-wing pilots.
One of them is Deb Chow, who you mentioned.
One is Deb.
One of them is Dave Filoni,
and one's Rick Famuyiwa.
The leader of the squadron.
It looks like something from the '70s, that sequence.
Your direction for me was, "Act disinterested and bored".
And I was like, "I can do that".
I got a clear signal on the tracking beacon.
That I could...but honestly, it was critical.
It's great, because you ever see...
It was critical advice.
Pilots, no matter how nervous,
if you're on a bad flight,
they sound so calm, talking to the military people.
Like in Apocalypse Now, you hear them calling in the...
This is my day. I'm trying to shoot second unit for Rick.
I'm out in the mud, in the pit,
and yet, all day, I know looming is this X-wing pilot shoot,
and Rick and Deb and I have been texting each other all week.
"Are we really gonna do this? I thought this was a joke".
"I know, but Jon liked it". So now we're kind of screwed.
I was not giving up on this one.
He wouldn't let us out of it.
I had a vision.
Deb was mad at us 'cause we decided. She didn't think we were doing it.
"You have to show up today. We're gonna do this".
Then I'm thinking, I have a flight...
And if my second-unit shoot goes long, I have a good excuse. I've just gotta go.
And then I get a text from this guy,
"If you leave without shooting this scene, I will never let you hear the end of it".
Now I'm weighing my options.
I'm like,
Okay, so I cannot shoot this and be happy with that,
but I have to weigh that against Jon having something to give me crap about.
Constant harassment.
He already gives me crap about a bunch of things,
like the cartoon, the Daytime Emmys. Different things, you give me a little...
I'm just jealous.
I know. Well, that's fine. Just fine.
I was only nominated for a Daytime Emmy.
You can come look at mine.
So I talk a big game.
So I'm weighing, am I gonna do this? Am I not gonna do this?
I finally decide, you know what? I'm gonna do it.
There's something valuable in it. And I always take...
Coming as an actor, there's so much that I can learn from that,
'cause I don't deal with live-action actors in this way.
You've given me so much knowledge...
Playing the X-wing gave you insight...
It actually did. I had to tell you, it did,
because what it was, was like,
okay, what is their preparation like, from having to put a costume on...
True. It is vulnerable.
What is that fit like?
Now they gotta walk onstage.
Now there's all these people waiting for you.
Now you're getting in there, and it almost felt like,
the closer I got to the X-wing cockpit, the narrower my vision was getting,
'cause there's so many people and all these lights,
and the X-wing itself was a funny story.
'Cause that wasn't a normal buck that you sat in.
It was a whole X-wing...
It was a whole X-wing.
How did we get it? 'Cause we're very...we use all parts of the buffalo here.
It was for Galaxy's Edge...
It was shipped down to Florida.
To Orlando, Florida.
For the theme park.
The X-wing you see in Orlando, Florida,
is the X-wing cockpit that we all sat in, in Mandalorian.
The one sitting outside.
What's your character's name, by the way?
Trapper Wolf.
Trapper Wolf sat in.
But the thing is this.
I couldn't believe we didn't have an X-wing cockpit in California.
Like, you gotta be kidding me. That's insane.
They brought it...
We kind of hijacked it.
We hijacked it. It was being transported.
We pulled it off.
We cut it up.
Because it had to be reinforced for storms or whatever.
There's a big steel bar right where you put a chair.
So we had to remove it and replace it, and he...
Chuck a seat in there.
And then they put...they dressed that thing up.
Looked like an X-wing with lights and everything.
But we had to climb up there in this platform, way off the ground.
It should've been right here.
And so I'm up a ladder in this.
I look like a grapefruit in this outfit.
Yes.
And I get in this seat...
It's not your color.
It's not my color.
And it felt dangerous getting in there. And then you're...
There was no dialogue for these pilots...
So I had to give you some.
...and then on the day you decided...
I would feed you lines.
You were like, say something like, "They're launching a gunship".
And I'm like, "Okay". "And don't be interesting".
Yeah, that's a gunship. All right, I'm going in. And then...
And then, it's so cool.
It's so cool.
You think I'm kidding you. It is the coolest...
We're in a review of Rick's first cut of this episode and we're watching it,
and as we're watching it, it dawns on me,
I'm like, "No, we're about to watch the X-wing scene".
And then we come out, I hear...
And everybody's just business, and this guy is going out of his mind.
I love it.
It looked like found footage of...
The fans are gonna love that sequence.
Really B-rate, C-rate actors.
Wait'll you see cosplay.
But it looks like what you would've had in the '70s.
I copy, Gold Leader.
We're starting for the target shaft.
We're in position. I'm going to cut across the axis and draw their fire.
Are those X-wings?
Yep, that's definitely a tracking beacon.
Looks like they're launching a gunship.
Copy. Goin' in.
Is there anything to say
before we break up this party, about anything?
Thank you.
"Thank you"? Good. Thank all of you.
The most fun part I've had on this show has been,
when I have a little idea or we talk about something and we push it out there
and the art department starts drawing cool stuff
then the people at ILM start to come up with techniques
and styles and suggesting things.
It feels like we're an after-school club
that are making our own YouTube videos of Star Wars.
And we have really rich parents.
It's a cumulative excitement,
because you're excited about your idea, I get excited hearing it,
Doug gets excited drawing it.
We look at the drawing and go, "Oh, my gosh, there's more ideas",
and so the energy builds on itself.
Once you accept that each step is gonna get better than where it was...
Some people tried to hold on to their original idea,
and nothing will be better than that original idea,
and that suffocates the idea.
But in filmmaking, everything has to progress forward,
and that's what this production has done really well,
is that everybody gets on the same page and carries the ball
farther down the field than the step that came before.
We have some of the most amazing artists
and people with such extraordinary good taste in what they're trying to do.
And they care so much about what it is they're trying to do.
We're always operating at such a high bar that, that pushes everybody.
It's Star Wars. It brings out the best.