Like this book, you will.

Before there was a galaxy far, far away, there were sketches. Models. Storyboards. Puppets. Sets. Costumes. Cameras. And an enormous number of people figuring out how to make the impossible appear on a movie screen.

The Star Wars Archives. Episodes I–VI goes behind the finished films to explore how George Lucas and his collaborators built one of the most influential fictional worlds in modern culture. Across the six films released between 1977 and 2005, the book brings together concept art, script pages, storyboards, production photography, models, prototypes, and images from the films themselves.

And that's where the fun is.

You see C-3PO evolve from Ralph McQuarrie's drawings into a clay model and eventually the droid we know. You see spacecraft being built by hand in the Industrial Light & Magic model shop. You see the machinery behind Tatooine, Hoth, Yoda, and the creatures, landscapes, and technology that somehow made an invented galaxy feel completely real.

It's Star Wars, yes. But it's also a book about imagination, design, filmmaking, and what happens when a wildly ambitious idea has to become an actual thing.

Much to our chagrin, it even makes The Phantom Menace interesting

Details

• Hardcover
  
• 192 pages
  
• 5.5" × 7.7"
  
• Weight: 0.91 lb
  
• English-language edition
  
• Published by TASCHEN
  
• Edited by Paul Duncan
• ISBN: 978-3-7544-0036-4