Filming of Phantom Menace

There is no question that 'The Phantom Menace' pushed technology to the limits of the time. There were almost 2,000 special effects shots in the film and only one scene (the scene where the Jedi get gassed) required no digital alterations. This was the first film in history to have major characters portrayed entirely by CGI. Some of us forget that before Gollum and Dobby the Dwarf- Jar Jar, Watto, Nass, & Sebulba were technological marvels.

Grant Imahara programing R2

CGI aside there were some characters that were done the old fashioned way. Nine models of R2-D2 were created. One was designed for Kenny Baker to climb inside and eight robots. The robots were controlled by technical-genius Grant Imahara. Yes, the MythBuster, Grant Imahara.

3-P0 as a puppet

C3-PO was, for the first time, portrayed as a puppet, with the puppeteer dressing in a green-screen outfit and digitally removed in post. Anthony Daniels read his lines off-camera, and this is the only Star Wars film where Daniels does not actually appear on-screen inside the 3-P0 suit.

What did they do to Yoda?

Though seeing the droids on-screen again is one of the high points of Phantom Menace, Yoda is a different story all-together. How they managed to screw-up the Yoda design is beyond me. In most scenes Yoda is still a puppet controlled by Frank Oz- A soulless puppet that looks like Yoda has been hit by an-ugly-stick. Fortunately, in the newest versions of Phantom the puppet has been replaced with a CGI model of Yoda that matches with Episodes II & III. In one scene where Yoda walks, Warwick Davis is actually wearing a Yoda costume (Warwick Davis actually played four characters in the film) 

Keira Knightly (Left) & Natalie Portman (Right)

One more interesting casting choice is Queen Amidala, who most people know was portrayed by Natalie Portman. Yet fewer people know that Keira Knightly also portrays Amidala in the film (more specifically Amidala’s decoy). Costumes and make-up were designed so that you can hardly tell the two apart and even Portman’s mother could not distinguish between the two of them on-set.


The budget for the film is $115 million dollars and there is no question that at the time Menace was aesthetically pleasing. In addition to computer generated locations, an entire city was constructed in Tunisia to serve as Mos Espa. CGI scenes were beautifully rendered and still are not outdated. The problem was that $115 million dollars was also spent on kiddish-humor and poop-jokes. How much of that $115 million went toward Jar Jar for fuck-sake? Five million? Ten million?

The Mos Espa set can still be seen today in Tunisia 

A lot of people put a lot of time and effort into making Episode I, but it was George Lucas who was the head of the project. If you watch the documentaries of 'Phantom' and listen to Lucas at work he is so unenthusiastic about the project. You can tell that it is something he wants to do, maybe needs to do. Yet ultimately he seems to almost know that he is going to fail. As he directs, he is mopey, uninterested, and sometimes outright lazy.

The Ultimate Yes-Man?

Perhaps Lucas’ biggest mistake is trusting himself to direct this picture. Perhaps his biggest mistake was hiring Rick McCallum as his producer. Perhaps Star Wars would had benefited from Lucas selling out to Disney long ago. Menace was an amazing piece of eye-candy at the time, but today it’s just another piece of CGI garbage that can rot along-side the corpses of "Tron: Legacy" & "John Carter of Mars".


“My soul function in life is to make what George wants physically happen” ~Rick McCallum