No vehicle from the Star Wars saga is more iconic than the Millennium Falcon. Han Solo's saucer-shaped freighter is the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, dodging asteroids and TIE fighters with equal aplomb. It's also a key locale in the saga, the place where R2-D2 learned to let the Wookiee win, where Luke Skywalker took his first tentative steps into the larger world of the Jedi, and where Han finally won a kiss from Princess Leia. The Falcon is a quirky character in its (or, if you prefer, "her") own right, with secret compartments and peek-a-boo laser cannons, a balky starter and hyperdrive, and a dialect protocol droids deride as "most peculiar."
The Falcon is an icon in the toy world, too. The original Kenner toy appeared under countless Christmas trees in the late 1970s and early 1980s, then returned with new decoration and electronics to help anchor Hasbro's new line of Star Wars toys in the 1990s. And now it's back in spectacular fashion. At nearly three feet long, Hasbro's new Falcon could easily be mistaken for a movie prop.
The two Falcons hit toy-store shelves nearly 30 years apart, but they share a crucial connection: Hasbro veteran Mark Boudreaux, something of an icon himself in the toy industry, played a key role in both designs.
The Millennium Falcon is a legend, but Boudreaux first saw the ship as part of a project from a movie with uncertain prospects as a toy line.
It was also a chance for a young co-op employee to prove his mettle. In 1977 Boudreaux was a 21-year-old industrial-design major at the University of Cincinnati working at Kenner's preliminary design department, which brainstormed and mocked up toys before turning them over to the toy company's production department.
Boudreaux recalls being part of a group called to a Kenner conference room to take a look at a potential property; an epic space-fantasy film by a maverick California director. "We just went nuts; we'd never seen anything like it before," he says. But their employer didn't necessarily share the designers' enthusiasm. "Back then, doing things with Hollywood was a fledgling undertaking," Boudreaux says, noting that TV properties such as The Six Million Dollar Man were considered better bets than movies because kids could see them weekly.
When Kenner made the decision to produce Star Wars toys, preliminary design work on the Falcon fell to Boudreaux. "They said, 'Hey Mark, you want to work on this big vehicle?' I said 'Sure.' We thought that Star Wars was pretty cool, but it didn't have the 30 years of history we have now."
In those pre-computer days, the preliminary-design team had its own model shop, complete with vacuform machines, lathes, and milling machines. Boudreaux's task was to figure out the Falcon's scale, what play features it should include, and to handcraft a rough model of the toy for Kenner management.
"We knew the figures would be the 3 3/4" scale," he says. "Based on the size of the figures, I looked at the photographs we had from Lucasfilm and figured out how big the vehicle could be."
Boudreaux deflects attempts to give him credit for the original Falcon, noting that Jack Farrah did the production development. The original, released in 1979, gave kids a chance to recreate key scenes from A New Hope. Han and Chewie could fit in the cockpit and a figure could man the topside laser cannon from a rotating chair in the hold. Figures could be seated at the chess table while others could hide in a secret smuggling compartment. Luke could practice his lightsaber skills with a remote suspended on a thread. (Vintage Falcons aren't hard to find, but good luck getting one with all the pieces of that remote!)
Hasbro acquired Kenner in 1991 (the Cincinnati office closed in 2000), and reused the original Falcon mold, with updated sounds and decoration, when it relaunched the Star Wars toy line in 1995 (another update of the ship would follow in 2004). According to Boudreaux, Star Wars fans owe Farrah and his colleagues thanks: they took such good care of the original tooling for the classic Kenner toys that they could be reused to produce vehicles in the mid-1990s. And that, he says, was a big reason Hasbro stuck with the 3 3/4" scale when revisiting the line.
"If it wasn't for the folks who took the time to crate the tools and put them away properly, we would have had a very difficult time relaunching Star Wars," he says. When Star Wars figures returned after a decade's absence, Boudreaux began to think about what a new version of Han Solo's ship might look like. A new ship would let him draw on all three movies in the original trilogy, and reflect the fact that "technology had caught up with what we wanted to do."
The argument for a new Falcon received a major boost a few years ago when Hasbro saw that the carbide-steel tools for the old mold were starting to break down. "The thought of not having a Millennium Falcon just didn't sit very well with us," Boudreaux says. "So we proposed the Falcon that we'd always wanted to do."
In early 2006, Boudreaux and other Hasbro designers sat down to discuss the new vehicle. A key question was size. Boudreaux says the team knew it couldn't be four feet long (though truth be told, he still sounds a tad rueful about that), and discussed the case for a small, medium and large Falcon. Taking a page from Goldilocks, they "decided middle was just right" and made their case, complete with a foamcore model, to Hasbro's upper ranks, which gave them the green light.
Read the full interview in issue #106 of Star Wars Insider. Click here for more information.
