Reimagining one of the most iconic ships in all of pop culture is something of a daunting task, but that’s what James Clyne, the design supervisor for Solo: A Star Wars Story, and his team had to do.
The task was to take Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon from the original Star Wars films and make a new (for the films), but also older (in the timeline), version for Lando. It had to look unique and cool, but also instantly recognizable as the “old” Millennium Falcon from the other films.
“The way I saw it, it’s like ripping a tablecloth off,” Clyne told StarWars.com. “You know those magicians that rip a tablecloth off and everything is still there? All the things that we know and love about Han Solo’s ship is underneath that. That was kind of the starting off point.”
To eventually get to the design seen in the film, Clyne and his team designed about 60 different concepts of what Lando’s Falcon might look like. There’s one above, and here are 29 others that you have to see to believe.
How incredibly awesome are those?
Of course, though, they’re all just concepts, and it’s unlikely any were ever close to actually being in the film. Designs like these happen when a bunch of wild concepts are created at the start, then the filmmakers ignore the bad, keep the good, blend them together, and eventually settle on a final look—which, of course, was this:
What you notice about the concepts, though, is that each has the original Falcon in there, it’s just layered over with all kinds of different references. There are TIE Fighters, Y-Wings, Blockade Runners, Ralph McQuarrie drawings, and so much more. It almost looks like the designers took a Millennium Falcon toy and just started building onto it—which, in fact, was one thing Clyne and his team did during the design process.
You can see even more designs, including ones with hot rod-themed paint jobs, and read more details (like the adding of the escape pod) at the below link.