Few props define a franchise like lightsabers define Star Wars. So, when you’re making a new Star Wars show, extra special attention must be paid to the elegant weapons—and Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi was no exception.
Star Wars fans have seen Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber before the show (in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) and after the show (in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope), so it was up to the show’s prop team to not just simply grab the Episode III saber or Episode IV saber. It had to be somewhere in the middle.
“His lightsaber was the trickiest thing that we had to figure out,” propmaster Brad Elliott told the official Star Wars website. “The Revenge of the Sith saber is smaller, shinier, and differs in many other details from the New Hope saber that Alec Guinness carried.”
To find a balance between the two, Elliott looked at the story and character. “Kenobi is coming from the loss of the war, the fall of the Jedi Order, and the loss of his best friend and Padawan,” he said. “He’s carrying the weight of his past, so his saber is largely from that past.” That’s why the hilt in the show is closer to the hilt from Episode III, but with an upgraded emitter so it looked more like the Episode IV saber. The team also aged it up to look like it had been buried in the desert for decade, as the show dictated. And voila. You have a saber that fits perfectly into Obi-Wan Kenobi.
A pretty fascinating story, we think, and just one of several you can read over on the official Star Wars website. In addition to the lightsaber, Elliott talks about Obi-Wan’s macrobinoculars, holoprojector, and datapad, as well as that T-16 skyhopper model he gifts Luke, which is then seen in A New Hope. Head to this link for those.
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