Icons Unearthed

By the early 1980s,

Star Wars had taken the world by storm.

We're all right! You did great!

Not once... not twice...

but three times.

- I feel like... - Feel like what?

Like we're being watched.

- From the biggest - Box office figures,

To the smallest collectible figures,

Star Wars was a phenomenon.

Star Wars changed a generation.

But Star Wars hadn't only changed a generation,

it also changed its creator.

He had been burned out. He had done so much

with Star Wars...

- The world's best - Loved movie franchise

Had grown into an empire.

Like a famous chicken walker

the man who built it had been brought to his knees.

The chicken walker was a full-scale model.

I said to George, "Would you like to have this

"at the Ranch?" He said...

"Yeah."

So I went to the art director and I said,

"Take it apart carefully

we're gonna reinstall it at the Ranch."

But this was anything but a careful dismantling

because when it arrived...

The man who was building out the Ranch at the time,

he said, "It's been hacked up by blow torches

and we can't put it back together."

For George, it seemed that Camelot

had crumbled into literal pieces of a chicken walker.

To make sure this analogy isn't lost on anyone...

He said, "We'll bury it somewhere

at the Ranch."

Only the head construction guy

at that time knows exactly where it is.

For George Lucas,

Star Wars had been laid to rest,

but he was mourning more than just the end

of his space opera trilogy.

For cast, crew, and fans alike,

The Return of the Jedi marked the end of an era.

The last of the Jedi will you be.

But for George Lucas,

it signaled the end of a ten-year endeavor

that had consumed his life

and didn't help his marriage.

The next chapter for him would be one of recovery.

Both emotional and financial.

When I left we had investment accounts.

Divorce in California is a 50-50 divorce.

So we split that personal money.

When it came to the business I said I would

take a small percentage of LucasFilm...

Own your own business.

And George said, "No."

I said, "LucasFilm will be yours."

George had turned his back

on Marcia and Star Wars.

The last gasps of Star Wars

were these TV movies.

I wish we had furry creatures like you where I came from.

We had two

Saturday morning animated series.

Say you were like me.

You watched Star Wars when you were seven

and, you know, Return of the Jedi comes out

when you're 13 or 14

and then it's like, "What next?"

Well, the things you want at that age

as you become 16, 17, 18 years old

they're not gonna be, you know, satisfied

by the Ewoks cartoon. Right?

They're just not.

The droids and Ewok shows

come and go very rapidly.

By the time you get to 1987, Star Wars is kind of...

faded from the public consciousness.

This was an era

of emptiness

serious enough to have its own name.

There was literally

nothing to cling on to

and a lot of the fans actually today

call that "The Dark Times"

and even when I would talk with George Lucas

and ask him if he was thinking about starting

some new Star Wars films, you know,

he was always very evasive and he'd say,

"Well, I plan on getting to it, but I'm not doing it...

right now."

What George was interested in getting around to

at this point was pushing the state-of-the-art

for visual effects.

George always had it in the back of his mind

that he wanted to make another Star Wars trilogy,

but he didn't want to make it with the same

practical effects that he did with the original films.

He felt like he had taken that technology

as far as he could at that point.

George would talk about technology

that simply didn't exist. Like the word "digital."

And when it came to digital visual effects,

Lucas' own Industrial Light and Magic

was pushing the pixelated envelope.

Lucas created ILM to work on his own films,

but he opened the door to other filmmakers

to use his own technology.

So, all the effects that ILM did

was just George experimenting in public

while people were paying him to do so.

Project Genesis.

You had the first fully computer-generated

sequence in Star Trek 2.

- Fascinating. - Then there was

the stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes

that was the first fully computer-generated

character in a movie.

It served as a window into an as yet unreachable realm

of computer-generated effects.

A totally convincing, computer-generated

lead character.

A concept that Lucas wanted to explore further.

This time in his own film.

- Oh, Jesus. - Oh, no. Not him.

But of different character who also came

down from up high.

Howard the Duck!

George hoped that this would be the quack

heard 'round the world.

The plan early on was to make Howard the Duck

a fully computer-generated character.

What are you, crazy?!

But they realized pretty early that the technology

- just wasn't there yet. - With CGI of the era

not all it was quacked up to be,

Howard was forced to suit up, like his Ewok predecessors.

And the film itself?

It was misconceived and mis-executed.

Howard, you really are the worst.

A humble Lucas

stepped back leaving ILM to resume

lending its talents to other people's films.

But he was still watching and waiting the whole time.

Then in 1989 George received the call

every child dreads.

His mother Dorothy had died

and in 1991 George's father also passed away.

They were getting at a good ti...

a good place in their relationship.

The parents are very proud because it...

Not... not because the kid is a multi-millionaire,

but that their... their kid had a vision...

of who they could be and they not only achieved it,

they achieved it wildly.

Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader, Luke,

that relationship there, you can read that

as telling you something about the relationship

between George Lucas and his father.

It's a commentary on the redemption of fathers

and the idea of the younger generation coming to understand

what their fathers meant to their children.

I won't leave you.

With Lucas being in the situation

where both his parents are gone, you maybe start thinking

about things a little bit differently.

But would those things include Star Wars?

Well, not yet.

George had once revolutionized film,

this time he was set to revolutionize something else.

Lucas decides to make this TV series

about Young Indiana Jones.

For Lucas, it was a return

to his childhood where he grew up watching

adventure serials on TV. The issue was,

some of Lucas' key collaborators

were either out of favor...

I'm not there.

Or unavailable.

George asked me to...

and he told me it was gonna be a year in Europe

and other countries and I said,

"I don't want my kids in London at their schools

and other places. Family's most important."

Kate Capshaw wasn't the only one screaming.

Without Howard by his side, George faced serious issues.

It would take a special man to match

George's filmmaking style

and, so he peered through the looking glass

meeting producer Rick McCallum on the set of Dreamchild

a film about the real Alice in Wonderland.

George said, "Would ya?" And Rick said, "Yes."

And they went about assembling a whole new team.

He basically gets this unit of people

going to produce this show.

Uh, Director of Photography, David Tattersall

and a Production Designer, Gavin Bocquet.

Rick proves that he can handle anything.