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According to Saving the Star Wars Saga Lucas used 4 different film stocks to cut the negative together!

Remember that hardly anybody had been doing blue-screen at the time for over a decade.

True, although one major exception to this was "The Towering Inferno" in 1974, which had some very impressive blue screen work for its time. The recent DVD / Blu-Ray releases have some great behind-the-scenes info about this, including some unprocessed versions of shots that show the blue screen, compared against the final composite, which actually looks very good in some (but not all) cases. But other than that, you're right; this was all unusual stuff for the time.

Funny other thing about 1977 is that after so much time in Hollywood without much of bluescreen work, both Spielberg and Lucas directed movies that year which required lots of optical compositing, and they kind of stepped on each others toes a bit. Lucas originally wanted to hire Douglas Trumbull for "Star Wars", but he was busy on Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" at the time, and so ended up recommending John Dykstra to supervise the effects work in Star Wars (really great article about the work he did here).

There's more detail and pictures in this American Cinematographer article:

http://www.theasc.com/ac_magazine/July2010/Inception/page1.php

For the record, I worked on the digital effects for that movie, and yes, it is a P.O.S. - but what the f*ck did everyone expect? They gave it to the guy who brought us Independence Day, fer chrissake. I'm not proud of what I do... but Man, I've got five kids to feed!

mitch

Funny thing since ILM has one if not the biggest model shop in the industry. Most ILM projects make use of miniatures including the bake off finalists for these years. Just check the numerous photos in Cinefex to see it with your own eyes.

Some examples:

Hulk: Pear Lake, some of the canyons and desert vistas, Redwood forest
Pirates of the Caribbean: miniature ships
T3: particle accelarator, unedrwater skulls shot, many of the topside future war shots

Even Ep. 2 was one of the biggest miniature shots in ILM history:

Brave New Worlds

Just as well as much as miniatures were used in LOTR there was a lot of CG used as well.

I wasn't even aware that T3 brought anything new to special effects stage.

That's a naive statement on the state of VFX. Not particularly directed at you but a large number of people just go by the looks without knowing what goes on behind the scenes.

T3 was the subject of several SIGGRAPH (the most important conference and organization related to computer graphics) sketches and even one SIGGRAPH paper (one of the highest honors in CG research):

Smoke Simulation for Large Scale Phenomena
Big Bangs
Melting a Terminatrix
The Machines of T3
'T3' -- BETWEEN THE LAYERS
Fight the Future
Terminator 3 Evolves Historic Effect
TechTV Segements on T3 and Pirates of the Caribbean Online
T3: Man vs. Machine
Building a Believable Blockbuster

Not saying that the others weren't outstanding and innovative as well. Thye same point can be made about all the other bakeoff finalists.

Funny thing is that maybe Lucas was unaware that ILM did work on Gangs of New York. They did shots like the pullback after the initial battle, the final NY transition, the attack from the harbor, and actually a lot of invisible set extensions all around, which most people never noticed or knew about.

For its VFX, Gangs of New York was nominated for a VFX BAFTA (the British Oscar) and for 2 VES (Visual Effects Society) awards for best matte paintings and best invisible VFX.

Some info in the VFX are here:

Mean Streets

You do know that both Prequel movies were two of the biggest model shots in ILM history right? Except for Lucas insistence on the CG clone troopers it was up to the supervisors to come up with the best approach. Not convinced? Read this (or the Cinefex article among other things):

Brave New Worlds

In fact, they won an academy award for technical achievement for filming from radio-controlled helicopters.