Star Wars Buttons And Lights You May Have Missed (vice.com)

tedlistens writes: At Motherboard, Alex Pasternack writes: "Star Wars is set in a world of wildly advanced technology. But take a good look at the machinery of Star Wars, and you may be surprised to see how wonderfully analog it all is -- buttons! levers! vector graphics! Yes, there are hyperdrives and lightsabers and hologram Princess Leias and droids that know six million languages (including the language of moisture vaporators, along with various etiquette and diplomatic protocols useful across the galaxy). But it's also a world where sometimes you have to hit a robot to get it to work, like an old dashboard radio, a place where the supercomputers are operated manually and where buttons and control panels and screens seem far removed from our own galaxy: tactile, lo-fi, and elegantly simple." May the 4th be with you.

Comments

Re:may the fuck off

[Opportunist]

Fourth of May is "official" Star Wars day.

Please throw your geek card into one of the recycling chutes provided before jumping down a reactor shaft.

Design by cobbling together

[Misagon]

Many of the props and sets in Star Wars (1977) were not meticulously designed like modern blockbusters. This was considered a low-budget movie.
Lots of props and set details were therefore literally built from junk if only to save money. A lot of it was airplane scrap, in fact. The prop makers also had a manufacturer of high-end record players next door from which they got lots of small parts with minor defects.

As an extreme example there is Obi-Wan's lightsaber: it was built from an 1940's airplane engine, a WWI rifle grenade, a 1970's calculator, a WWII machine gun, a 1930's camera flash and a 1970's faucet knob.
One of my hobbies is building replicas of props from movies, and the Star Wars movie in particular. For me it is great that there are real-parts that I could chase down to build something exactly like in the movies. However, it does sometimes get a bit expensive and there have been clashes with for instance, collectors of vintage cameras.

Grass Valley Video Switcher

[tekrat]

The Death Star's "death beam" control panel was a Grass Valley Model 100 Video Switcher, and I know that only because I used one of those at that time.