** Ralph McQuarrie SW world vastly different from G.Lucas Sequels**

It had to do with a lot of the art being placed in one time period. McQuarrie was a master at showing a world that had not already existed. ESB and ROTJ became a product of the times and a need for business. I don't think they got lost in translation, but rather that they were built upon an unexpected success.

 

(Can the spelling mistake in the thread title please be corrected as we're talking about the contributions of Ralph McQuarrie?)

As a buyer of the original McQuarrie "Portfolios" that were released with each film, I never felt this way. For Star Wars (A New Hope) all the original designs were still in a prototype stage before the designs got finalized, by the time of the pre-production of ESB the essential designs had become a standard McQuarrie could rely upon in his further contributions.

But because of that, before the release of ESB, some of us thought that what McQuarrie depicted would be translated exactly into the film, e.g. snowspeeders with cannons cannibalized from X-Wings or Hoth riding creatures that were lizards, not mammals.

 

Don't forget, roughly as much of Ralph McQuarrie's Star Wars work was done AFTER Return of the Jedi had been made as was done before that point (around 24 for Star Wars and another 40 for Empire).
McQuarrie did work on Jedi, but very few of his designs were used and he parted company with LucasFilm during production. Lucas later asked him to do some new paintings depicting key scenes from the movie after production had finished, which were used for the ROTJ Portfolio book.
He was also commissioned to create some new paintings for the Illustrated Star Wars Universe book in 1995.
His Alderaan painting was one of those new images, I believe:

His concept for Alderaan dating from production on the first movie looked like this, and was later recycled as Cloud City for TESB:

 

Up to this day it saddens me that George Lucas did not use McQuarrie's 1995 depiction of Alderaan in ROTS.

In the original, early drafts Alderaan was an Imperial prison facility in the skies where the Princess was held.

 

The fact that george lucas never made his sequels and that mcquarrie is still inspiring the new sequel trilogy and George Lucas is just an advisor is because George Lucas had only concepts and the sequel trilogy was only planned after the success of the original trilogy. But, the prequels were always going to come first. That's why Mcquarrie had lots of unused concept arts and Lucas only had a few concepts but if you look at the force awakens most of the ideas from that were resulting from original ideas from its production, most were unused. Now, something like rebels is what Mcquarrie's art really goes towards, Zeb being chewbacca's original design etc.

 

Frankly, my feelings towards Rebels and how Lucasfilm utilizes McQuarrie's artwork is rather ambivalent.

I never understood the need why George Lucas felt compelled to alter McQuarrie's depiction of the Great Temple on Yavin IV.



McQuarrie's temple was circular and had a flat top, according to his known production sketches.

If the producers of the Nu Lucasfilm productions were really in earnest about "respect" for Ralph McQuarrie, they could have considered his original temple as depicted in the original version of ANH.

Instead we got this Special Edition *improvement* for the worse, first in Rogue One, and now in Rebels and SW Battlefront.