cjh (01/03/83)
In response to your message of Wed Dec 29 08:47:08 1982: I seem to recall that that scene gave the people doing the filming great headaches. They tried putting dummies in for Obiwan just before Vader strikes him, but every time Vader hit the dummy with the light saber it (no kidding) burst into flames (now there's an effect: Obi Flambe!)! No kidding, eh? it certainly sounds like someone was kidding \you/; the light sabers were solid, room-temperature objects in two models (with and without "blade") with the high-energy effects added afterwards (sometimes in several stages).
tihor (01/04/83)
#R:csin:-23600:cmcl2:9900002:000:477 cmcl2!tihor Jan 3 17:50:00 1983 Interesting. I remember someone at one of the "official" Star Wars sessions at a wolrdcon a while back describing the light saber blade actually was a "rotating" cone in the working versions and that it spun at fairly high speed producing most of the SOUND effects itself although there was some post production work done on them. If they were in fact rapidly rotating cones it seems quite likely that they could cause a dummy to burst into flame through friction effects.