One tusk was broken off and his lopsided smile was born. Watto was also the first CG character that the effects team went to work on. Through his design and motions, the team quickly learned how to achieve what they wanted on featured digital characters. Even just the cord on his tool belt had to have its own computer program written to simulate its movement properly.
Some of the audience members at the Boonta Eve Classic podrace crowd are colorful cotton swabs. Sometimes practical effects work best to achieve just the right three-dimensional look for faraway shots, and a model maker had the creative idea to use the swabs in the arena models. Some of the cheers and jeers emanating from the audience at the podrace are from a San Francisco 49ers game. Sound designer Ben Burtt recorded crowd reactions at the football game himself. Want even more behind-the-scenes from The Phantom Menace?
Kelly Knox is a freelance writer who loves creating Star Wars crafts with her daughter and spouting behind-the-scenes movie facts. Log In. Concept model by Tony McVey. Concept art by Iain McCaig. Concept sketch by Doug Chiang. But in the 20 years since The Phantom Menace hit theaters, some fans have changed their mind about the film, while kids who saw it at the same formative age as their Original Trilogy counterparts have sung its accolades.
In one notable Twitter thread , art historian Glendon Mellow listed off a ton of details about the trilogy that stand out, pointing out some of the design and sub-textual elements that were often overlooked: Lucas developed a world rife with disenfranchisement, colonialism, and politics that holds up.
And at the end of the day, I can appreciate what Lucas was trying to do: build out his world in the way that he wanted it, on his own terms. The Phantom Menace and the rest of the prequels films are very different films — by design — than their predecessors. Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
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Just as surprising was how the film misunderstood the magic of previous Star Wars films: their feel, their facade of a rough, ready lived-in universe.
Replacing the grubby aesthetic of the original films, in which scuffs and scrapes covered every inch of the Death Star and rebel base, was a glossy green-screen sheen. C-3PO was built by Anakin Skywalker, it turned out. The frustrating thing was that The Phantom Menace also did a lot of things right. The movie also certainly did all it set out to achieve commercially. No amount of commercial success, though, could cover up the consensus that The Phantom Menace was a creative failure.
But 20 years later, in a time of factory-line Marvel movies that often — Infinity War and Endgame aside — repackage the same formula and sell it back to audiences time and time again, is there something to admire in its sheer strangeness? In its desire to do something different, twisting Star Wars into new shapes rather than regurgitating the originals? The optimism of the first trilogy was replaced in The Phantom Menace by a cynicism towards bureaucracy-suffocated political systems and the careerists that inhabit them, exploiting them for their own means.
Its explanation of the mystic, ancient force as essentially a blood mutation called midichlorians might have had some fans in despair, but at least it attempted to push the series somewhere new, and expand its mythology. Today, hot Hollywood properties like Marvel and indeed, Star Wars are never entrusted to one auteur and their vision, but loaned out to custodians, one film at a time.
Fifteen different directors, for instance, have manned the 22 MCU films so far. It could be argued that the unruliness of The Phantom Menace , on which Lucas had unmitigated free reign, helped lead to the current way big film franchises are handled, in which multiple directors are kept on short leashes, beholden to a wider, company-led vision for that film series, afraid of another Phantom Menace.
Lucas had the freedom to remould Star Wars as his imagination, and his imagination alone, saw fit in Lucas, who sent in a message to fans, sounded still on the defensive regarding the much-maligned prequel.
It was very very hard. Since then, though, the force has reawakened.
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