page_title: Ralph McQuarrie
section_title: Star Wars sequels
hierarchical_section_title: Ralph McQuarrie / Career / Star Wars sequels
caption_attribution_description: English: Model in wood, plastic and metal of the Mother Ship spacecraft used in the filming of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. source “The ship was conceived by Steven Spielberg, the film's director and screenwriter. It was made by a team headed by Gregory Jein, using model train parts and other kits. When filmed with special photographic and lighting effects, the model appears to be a huge, hovering craft. Rotating, colored lights underneath the ship added to its effects. Looking closely at the model, one can find tiny hidden smaller models which are not seen when the Mother Ship appears in the film. These models were added by the model makers as internal "jokes". They include a Volkswagen bus, a submarine, the R2-D2 android, a U.S. mailbox, an aircraft, and a small cemetery plot.”
context_page_description: Ralph Angus McQuarrie \mə-'kōr-ē\ was an American conceptual designer and illustrator. His career included work on the original Star Wars trilogy, the original Battlestar Galactica television series, the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the film Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award.
context_section_description: When Lucas began work on his sequel to Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), McQuarrie was once again brought in to supply previsualization artwork. His sketches and production paintings established the appearance of some of the saga's most enduring elements, such as the gigantic AT-AT Walkers in the battle on the ice planet Hoth and the wizened elf creature Yoda. McQuarrie's design for Cloud City, a floating city in the clouds, actually originated from his early sketches for Star Wars from 1975, when he was illustrating a concept for the planet Alderaan, as described in Lucas's 1975 draft script, Adventures of the Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars. McQuarrie made an uncredited cameo appearance in The Empire Strikes Back, when he appeared in the film's opening sequence in the Rebel base on Hoth as a character named General Pharl McQuarrie.  In 2007, McQuarrie became part of the  Star Wars action figure range when an action figure in his likeness as "General McQuarrie" was produced for the Star Wars 30th anniversary in 2007. Action figures were also produced based on McQuarrie's concept art, including conceptual versions of the Imperial Stormtrooper, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and C-3PO, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and other characters.
  By the time McQuarrie was engaged on Lucas's third Star Wars picture, Return of the Jedi (1983), he had begun to experience creative fatigue. "It became less fun as time went on. I had done the best part already and I was just rehashing everything. I kept meeting myself in my thinking. It became more and more difficult to keep my enthusiasm up," McQuarrie has said. Despite his earlier success, fewer of his design ideas were included in the final cut of the film.
caption: Model of the Mother Ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, based on McQuarrie's design
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