Returning to work at ILM on December 2nd 1979 after a month's break from having completed the Walker animation, Doug Beswick creates the notorious space slug creature from which the Falcon breathlessly emerges. Beswick would recall to CINEFEX in December 1980: “It worked like a hand puppet -- a return spring mechanism would close the jaws. You could stick your hand through the neck and grab it like a handgun or pistol grip. It was pretty heavy.”
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| Views of the armature puppet slug. |
More than fifty takes are shot of the creature over a week, giving it record status for a such a short scene in the film. Phil Tippett covers the slug armature with an exterior of his own design and Jon Berg puppeteers for the first version in a number of takes, with the puppet filmed in high speed by Richard Edlund. The footage is then slowed down in post to make the creature more realistic looking in its actions. In one space slug filming take the creature bursts into song courtesy of Tippett! Great pains had to be taken that the interior of the slug didn’t look like the inside of a creature and spoil the viewers surprise, and yet, at the same time, it had to resemble believable organic creature innards. The cave structure was ultimately ten-foot long and constructed from five-foot-tall segments supported by carved ribs. Joe Johnston created a technique in which strands of glue were littered over the model to look like cobwebs. Lorne Peterson built the hinged slug jaws which were four-and-a half-feet across, with the first five teeth (and others to follow) cast in clay.
The ILM model shop team would cast additional teeth and give them as gifts to visitors who came to see them at the time of Empire’s filming. Ken Ralston recalls some of the fun had during the intense bout of filming effects scenes on the audio commentary for the Star Wars: The Definitive Edition Laserdisc Collection release in 1993: “On Empire, I shot a lot of gag footage... I built my own space slug out of an old sock. and made a terrible stupid-looking puppet. So there's this shot looking down, it's in the movie, where you're looking at the surface of the asteroid and there's a couple of TIE ships above it...What's not in there is the very last moment when you get to the last crater, this gigantic stupid sock puppet comes out and attacks one of the ships...we were on the night shift so we spent nine months six nights a week on Empire.”
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| Lorne Peterson at work on the bottom row of space slug teeth at ILM. |
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| Inside the slug tunnel! |
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| Ken Ralston preparing to film the view inside out. |
Of the final completed effects sequence, George Lucas would recall in his 2004 DVD audio commentary for The Empire Strikes Back: “This scene in the snake's mouth worked better on the page than how it finally turned out. It's a very hard concept to pull off. I think it works, but I always expected it would get a laugh when the ship flies out of the creature's mouth. As it turns out, most people are astonished, and slightly confused, I think. We never really got the reaction we were looking for at the end of this scene. It was based on a mythological motif...”
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