Maybe it’s a funny kind of geek serendipity, but I’ve been seeing a lot of news here on the site and elsewhere about fans building wonderful replicas of their favorite spaceships and robots.
And not all of them are models, like the Firefly Lego spaceship we wrote about several weeks ago. In the case of Mike Senna, he built fully working R2-D2 and Wall-E replicas, and if that’s not dedication, I don’t know what is.
Some time back, we also reported on a fan who built a Millennium Falcon guitar, and the site GiantFreakinRobot.com also reported on a 10 foot long, 900 pound steel replica of the Falcon made out of car parts, which you can see at Ripley’s Odditorium in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Of course, the article used Han Solo’s famous line, “May not look like much but she’s got it where it counts,” but again, to spend the kind of time and energy to construct something like this is really something else, and if this isn’t fan dedication, I don’t know what is.
And I’m sure there are many other examples all over the place of people recreating spaceships and robots with whatever materials they have at hand, whether it be Legos or toothpicks. As I’ve written before here on TG, the great thing about the spaceships in Star Wars were all the tiny little details you’d see as they were cruising through the universe, and it’s often the minutia of the thing that really makes it feel infinite, like looking down at all the tiny lights of a city.
And as a reader of such magazines as Cinefex growing up, I remember learning about model builders like Greg Jein, who worked on Close Encounters and John Carter, and would often put little people in the ships, and funny little things no one could see like a mailbox, or a little R2D2 that looked like a Monopoly game piece.
Like a lot of things technological, it’s all the little pieces and parts put together that can make something awe inspiring. The fact that anybody would put as much work and effort, if not more, into recreating it all in such painstaking detail is pretty incredible as well.
All this painstaking work and effort isn’t just for whoever’s building this stuff. As R2D2 / Wall-E builder Senna told Moviefone, he wanted to bring joy to children, and would bring his robotos over to children’s hospitals to indeed bring joy into their lives. It took him 3,2000 to 3,800 hours to build his own Wall-E, but I’m sure the smile he can bring to child’s face made it all worth it, and then some.
