Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars Fans Fix Up Luke Skywalker's Home
An anonymous reader writes "How far would a Star Wars fan go to preserve a relic from the iconic film series? One devoted fan traveled to Tunisia to rescue Luke Skywalker's boyhood home, also known as The Lars Homestead, as seen in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. On a trip to Tunisia in 2010, Belgian traveler Mark Dermul came upon the modest dome-shaped hut that George Lucas built in the mid-1970s to serve as Luke Skywalker's home. The structure was falling apart when Dermul found it, so he hatched a scheme to restore it. After two years and a lot of cement and plaster, Luke's house is looking better than ever."
That url has 19 trackers and loads a new page for each individual image. Deplorable.
George Lucas will promptly sue him and everyone involved for copyright infringement
http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/5/12/george-lucas-owns-the-universe-a-timeline-of-star-wars-copyright-battles
Weren't there supposed to be people living there now? I remember reading about it about a week ago. Did they arrive after this guy restored the place?
The more interesting part was the desert-sensible underground portion. From what I can see the two parts weren't anywhere near each other, just spliced together on film. From the igloo you could only see the berm around the atrium.
The rest of the house was actually the Hotel Sidi Driss...
http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g293756-d523724-r32974695-Hotel_Sidi_Driss-Matmata_Gabes_Governorate.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c3Mdk_di7Q
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It would be gorgeous in the summer. Great place for Luke to have a barbecue with his family
What. What did I say?
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Most of that must have been spent on the airplane ticket and transport. That structure isn't even a real desert structure, its constructed out of cheap wood (which is not used in the desert as there are no trees), and plaster....it's not a 'real' house or building, its a SET PIECE. Wouldn't it have been more useful to rebuild it from scratch from cement blocks and then open it as a B&B? Or perhaps set up a live-web cam showing the sunset to mimic the scene from the movie. This could have provided a few jobs for local Tunisians, who have suffered great economic hardship due to the revolution. Just another useless hipster stunt.
When I read the headline I assumed that Mark Hamill had fallen on hard times and some Star Wars fans were patching his roof or something.
Maybe while George Lucas threw boulders at it. The actual story is a let down.
I just have one question:
Did he get rid of the corpses?
This is an example of a movie that did have an impact for the general public. So there's no wonder that there are people that takes interest in the history of the sets.
The white makes sense since it reflects heat, and it will over time be worn down and get colored by the sand. The building itself doesn't look out of place in the desert but is actually of a design that you would expect there.
Add to this that this will be a bonus tourist trap for Tunisia.
And I don't think that George Lucas will make much fuzz about that restoration since it will end up creating a lot of badwill.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Surprised? It came straight from the linked bad blog. Here's the link to the Save Lars site. Mark Durmul is a impromptu guide that lead tourists to Tunisian movie locations. In 2010 some fans were surprised by the set's condition and joked about returning to restore it. The rest is in the blog (and very interesting because it contains more Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark set locations). And at the risk of being a dick, this set was rebuilt in 2002 for the prequels so it isn't known if it appeared in the original Star Wars movie (never episode IV, thank you very much).
Between what really happened at the Lars Homestead and "Han Shot First" the Empire doesn't look nearly as bad as it did in 1977.
After a short bit of searching, I was able to bring up the lat/long coordinates on my navicomputer. Check it out: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=33.842823,+7.779038&hl=en&ll=33.842618,7.778471&spn=0.001635,0.004128&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=50.644639,135.263672&t=h&z=19
Of course it is those who are afraid of reality who recoil from something like this like a Gollum from the light.
Outside.
Now.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Nah, just get a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators and get them running again. Luke did grow up on a moisture farm.
Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman visited the original Tunisian set on their motorcycle trek from Scotland to South Africa in 2007. It's included in their travelogue Long Way Down.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
That's never bothered Lucas before.
Lucas never was right in the head, but he did get worse over the years. The only reason the first three movies were any good is because 1) his wife (now ex-wife, since he dumped her after those movies) cleaned up the dialog and scripts, particularly in the first movie, and 2) in the latter two movies, he had other people help with writing and direction. The second movie was the best precisely because he didn't direct it or write it, and the third wasn't bad because he didn't direct it and only helped write it (Kasdan is credited first with the screenplay on IMDB). Heck, if his ex-wife didn't clean up his crappy scriptwriting on the first movie, Star Wars would probably have been forgotten and never spawned any sequels; she's probably the one we really have to thank, and she probably got cut out of all his riches.