Via Smh.com:
It’s been built, battered, blasted and rendered in Lego. It can be bought in miniature, as a plastic playset for action figures. The deck plans can even be downloaded from the internet.
So how did a new picture of a really old ship – the Millennium Falcon, the iconic starship from the Star Wars franchise – end up making so much noise on social media?
The answer is, perhaps, it’s a sign of the times, where everything old is new again, and reinvention, rebooting and resurrection are the orders of the day.
That and the fact that it’s made the cover of Fortune magazine, the billionaire’s equivalent of New Idea.
The famous ship, first glimpsed in 1977 along with its pilot Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), has become an iconic piece of starship architecture.
It is a modified YT-1300 light freighter manufactured by the Corellian Engineering Corporation.
The audience first saw it when Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the venerable Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) chartered it to take them from the desert planet Tatooine to Alderaan, so they could deliver the stolen Death Star plans to the Rebel Alliance.
It is also returning to the screen almost four decades later in the upcoming film The Force Awakens, the seventh film in the Star Wars cycle; the first of a final trilogy hinted at by Star Wars creator George Lucas as far back as the late 1970s and early ’80s.
It is also the first Star Wars film to be cranked out of the Disney studio since the company acquired Lucasfilm for $US4 billion in 2012.
And that’s actually why it’s on the cover of Fortune magazine: as a photo prop in a profile of Disney boss Bob Iger who, the magazine declares, “brought the coolest innovations from Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel and ESPN into the Disney galaxy.”
The magazine is pushing the line that it’s the first “close-up” look at the new Falcon, though with respect the “new” Falcon isn’t much changed from the “old” one.
The most significant change is a new rectangular radar dish which replaces the old round one, which was destroyed during the attack on the second Death Star in the sixth Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi.
But that isn’t a revelation: fans first got a glimpse of that when Disney released the teaser trailer for The Force Awakens in November.
Perhaps of more interest to die-hard fans is an image of the Millennium Falcon standing on a film sound stage at the iconic Pinewood Studios in England.
And the real thrill there is not even in the detail the image offers, but confirmation that in an era where CGI effects have largely overtaken blockbuster filmmaking, The Force Awakens’ director J.J. Abrams has built a life-sized Millennium Falcon prop to play with.
Tragically, however, even that is a bit of a fudge.
The magazine has confirmed Iger was photographed in New York and digitally matted into the Pinewood image by Lucasfilm’s special effects division, Industrial Light & Magic.
