The first thing Carly King said when she walked through the doors of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles was that it felt like a spaceship had just landed. She was not wrong. The building rises over the park like something conjured from a distant galaxy, and inside its 100,000 square feet across more than 30 galleries, over 1,300 works from a collection of 40,000-plus items wait for you to find them. What happened next, over the course of a single evening visit before the museum opened to the general public, was the kind of experience that makes a grown person cry in front of a robot.
When the Lucasfilm archives came out of the dark
Most of what fills the Star Wars wing lived for decades in the Lucasfilm archives, accessible to almost no one. That changed when the museum opened and moved the collection into permanent public view. Walking through the galleries, King passed the original Princess Leia Endor costume mounted on a speeder bike, a scout trooper suit nearby, and a Ralph McQuarrie painting behind them. She stopped in front of the Millennium Falcon from A New Hope, restored to its original look with the kind of patience that makes restorers legendary. The Boba Fett costume, which had spent years sitting in the archives, now stands in the open air of the gallery. ‘It’s no longer chilling in the archives,’ she said. ‘It’s now here and we get to see it in person.’
Nearby sat Jabba’s sail barge and sand skiff from Return of the Jedi, a pod racer from The Phantom Menace, Luke’s original costume, the landspeeder, a cluster of Jawas, B1 battle droids, and the AAT armored assault tank. The Y-wing, another piece that restorer John Goodson worked on, hangs in a display designed to make it look like it is flying through space.
A crashed AT-AT and a moment she did not expect
Nothing in the building stopped King the way the fallen AT-AT from The Empire Strikes Back did. The model, originally created by Joe Johnston, had been in rough condition before Goodson spent months meticulously repainting it and bringing it back to the look it had in the 1980s. King had spoken with Goodson about the project at a convention just before the museum opened, seen photos of the damage, and still was not prepared for the scale of it in person. She stood there gasping. ‘This is probably one of the best days of my life,’ she said, her voice breaking slightly. The piece is bigger than she had imagined, and the restoration is so clean it reads, as she put it, like it has been brought back to the 80s.
The original R2-D2, the very first one, turned out to be the moment that undid her completely. She had to step away from the display, still crying. R2-D2 was the character that made her fall in love with Star Wars as a child. She had worn an R2-D2 shirt constantly. Seeing the actual physical object that started all of it standing a few feet away was, by her own account, unbelievable.
A single restorer’s brush stroke still drying
One detail from earlier in the evening stood apart from the grand spectacle. Near a freshly completed floor painting, someone pointed out that the artist had finished the work only that same day. There was still wet paint on the floor when the group arrived.
The evening ended on the Skywalker Grill rooftop with a view across Los Angeles spread below, the kind of view that makes the whole day feel like it could not possibly have been real. King described herself as in awe of how the museum turned out. She had walked in expecting artifacts. She walked out having felt something.
