'the original Star Wars & Lego connection'

[Jedi-Bendu]

On his FB page Charles Lippincott (the great marketing/publicity supervisor of Star Wars) posted this:

Pete Vilmur (a former Lucasfilm employee) posted this as a reply:

I recently found a 1981 document that stated that LEGO had absolutely NO interest in pursuing a Star Wars license. Surprising now, given how successful it's been for them, but there has always been a strong faction within LEGO that has resisted purchasing licensed properties.

[Chills]

Very cool, thanks for posting.

TLG in 1981=Facepalm!

Imagine if TLG started producing SW sets back then, how much they would have evolved by now. And we definitely would have had more than one UCS Millennium Falcon! lol (maybe we'd have a UCS AT-AT by now, too)

[Robert_88]

Imagine if TLG started producing SW sets back then, how much they would have evolved by now. And we definitely would have had more than one UCS Millennium Falcon! lol (maybe we'd have a UCS AT-AT by now, too)

But imagine how these set would look like...

[AwesomeBantha]

Wow, that's really interesting to see.

SW was LEGO's first real license, and it was only with EP.1 that they released it.

It's a shame they didn't start earlier!

[HJR-Holland]

Luckily there's someone from Japan named "maestro s.fujita" who started building LEGO Star Wars sets back in 1992 (so well before the start of the licence) and is able to give you a great idea of what the sets would have looked like back at the start of the nineties (OK, that's later than 1981, but still...)

This is really a must-read for everyone here :-)

[Brickdoctor]

Luckily there's someone from Japan named "maestro s.fujita" who started building LEGO Star Wars sets back in 1992 (so well before the start of the licence) and is able to give you a great idea of what the sets would have looked like back at the start of the nineties (OK, that's later than 1981, but still...)

[snip]

This is really a must-read for everyone here :-)

That site still exists! It was one of my favorites back when I first started following LEGO fan sites. Thanks for the link; I need to go read the whole thing over again.

[HJR-Holland]

You're welcome

I also have got a copy of the entire site on my harddrive

[Lego Otaku]

Let's not forget there would have been early LEGO SW short video that would have been done with stop motion photography and not with computers. Computers used for Tron and Last Starfighter was pretty expensive just to make film, I doubt it would have been used for LEGO animation for many years, mid 90's at the soonest.

[neoconagenda]

This is simply superb work. When we are frustrated with an element thats not perfect we need to look at the Lego limitations that others had overcome...