During The great Ralph McQuarrie is rightly remembered as the primary visionary behind the look of the war of stars universe, he wasn’t the only artist who played an important role in the making of the original trilogy. There was too Colin Cantwell.
boronn 1932, Cantwell had an incredible career that went well beyond artistic pursuits. From working at NASA on Apollo 11 Mission (He was responsible for relaying information about the mission directly to television Presenter Walter Cronkite) In addition to helping Hewlett Packard design computers, he also wrote two science fiction novels and helped create the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick 2001: A Space Odyssey
It is for his early work war of stars, although he has become best known. Used early in the development of the original film, 1974-75, Cantwell is the originator of Many of the most well-known and memorable ships in the series, including the X Wing, Y Wing, TIE Fighter, Star Destroyer, Landspeeder, Sandcrawler and Corellian Corvette (which was originally going to be the Millennium Falcon). He was also the original designer of the Death Star.
While other artists like McQUarrie and special effects guru Joe Johnston later tweaked these designstheir original vision – of the crossed, foldable wings of the X-Wing to the TIE Fighter fly silhouette—everything was cantwell as you can see in the pictures below:
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While every single one of the designs you can see above has been modified in some way by McQuarrie and Johnston, there is one Cantwell creation that made it into them war of stars without anyone changing anything. In one of the scenes, just after Luke first meets C-3PO and R2-D2, he is seen sitting back and playing with a model T-16 Skyhopper. This is a model built entirely from Cantwell’s sketches.
Cantwell was 90, and reportedly suffered from Alzhemiers for several years. He is survived by his partner Sierra Dal.