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Star Wars Death Star's famed feature was a complete accident

Film artist Colin Cantwell tells Reddit how the iconic trench came to be. And it turns out the X-Wing owes its life to a night of drinking.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read
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The Death Star's famed trench was a happy accident.

Lucasfilm

Most of us make mistakes like scraping our car misjudging the Starbucks drive-thru. When Colin Cantwell makes a mistake, legends are born.

Cantwell, 84, was a concept artist and spacecraft designer on the original "Star Wars" film, at the time called "The Star Wars." That's certainly not all he's done, but for some sci-fi fans, that alone would be enough.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything on Tuesday, Cantwell discussed his contributions to space and sci-fi history, including a certain Death Star trench that turned out to be a happy accident for the Rebel Alliance.

"George Lucas gave me the project of designing a 'Death Star,'" Cantwell wrote on Reddit. "I didn't originally plan for the Death Star to have a trench, but when I was working with the mold, I noticed the two halves had shrunk at the point where they met across the middle. It would have taken a week of work just to fill and sand and refill this depression. So, to save me the labor, I went to George and suggested a trench. He liked the idea so much that it became one of the most iconic moments in the film!"

The X-Wing fighter resulted from a similar almost-accidental moment, inspired by a night out.

"It had to be ultracool and different from all the other associations with aircraft etc.," Cantwell said. "In other words it had to be alien and fit in with the rest of the story...A dart being thrown at a target in a British pub gave me the original concept and then it went forward from there."