Imperial Star Destroyer from "Star Wars" (1977)

Scale: 1:4200
Initial Release: 1980
Medium: Polystyrene
Kit Rarity: 3

About the Design

While Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) may have set the modern standard for sci-fi spacecraft design, George Lucas' "Star Wars" (1977) took that ethos to the next level, creating a wholly credible future that not only looked lived-in but, thanks to major breakthroughs in computer-aided motion-control photography, also moved in ways never before seen on the silver screen.

George Lucas' rule for designing spacecraft for his evil Galactic Empire was simple: Keep them rigidly geometric.  There's plenty of geometry overload here as the Lucasfilm designers combine triangles, rectangles and geodesic spheres to produce a simple but sinister interstellar battlewagon. The Star Destroyer's first appearance -- flying overhead in what seemed like an endless tracking shot that made the ship look five miles long -- was the visual signature that announced that computer-aided special effects had arrived -- and that the movies would never be the same.

About the Kit

First released in conjunction with "The Empire Strikes Back," this was a large but only minimally accurate kit widely criticized by many for its lack of surface detail.  The kit came both in this standard form and, later, in a fiber-optic version with internal lighting.

This model was built from an original 1980 issue.