Bill George’s Millennium Eagle, originally designed by Colin Cantwell, recently appeared on screen in the second episode of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, “Way, Way Out Past the Barrier,” as SM-33 takes the children to a pirate outpost known as Port Borgo.
The podcast Rebel Force Radio was among those speculating that the spaceship in question was actually Colin Cantwell’s original pirate ship design, which later became Princess Leia’s Blockade Runner after George Lucas decided that Colin’s creation was too similar to the Eagle Lander from Space: 1999.
The truth has turned out to be a Star Wars /Space: 1999 mash-up, courtesy of now-retired ILMer Bill George. It’s a ship known as the Millennium Eagle, and it’s part of a website Bill maintains known as the Sci-Fi Air Show.
ILM asked Bill to borrow the model so they could scan it. “No one ever told me who was behind the request,” he told me, “but when I was asked, I jumped at the opportunity!” I asked him if that means his Millennium Eagle is now officially part of Star Wars canon, and he replied: “I have no idea, but once a model is made, they tend to show up in other media. I’m just happy it made it into the background as kind of a ‘cameo’ appearance.”
Bill told me that the creation of the Millennium Eagle came about because “I’ve always loved the story of how the Pirate Ship design was changed as it was felt it looked too much like the Eagle from Space: 1999. My original concept was to do a mash-up of the two ships. That wasn’t hard at all as they do have similar proportions.”
He added: “The design I pulled from was the completed model of the Pirate Ship before it was redressed as the Rebel Blockade Runner. There are old photos of that particular model out there. I also used the landing gear design from the Ralph McQuarrie paintings. The look of the Pirate Ship evolved from Colin’s prototype models, but they were the genesis of it all.”
Watch Star Wars: Skeleton Crew on Disney+ now.
The post Bill George’s Millennium Eagle Appears in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew appeared first on Jedi News.
