Planet of the bad special effects.

Sunday, December 7th, 2008


Some Sunday mornings I’m a bit nostalgic. So I give you: the Millennium Falcon landing in WTBS’s West Peachtree studio, circa 1980. Careful study of this frame tells you: 1) I was allowed to play with expensive TV equipment in the middle of the night. 2) I had a large model of the Millennium Falcon…in fact, I was apparently willing to spend some of my meager disposable income on a model kit in my early twenties. 3) Our Grass Valley 1600 switcher really didn’t do that good a chromakey. Oh, and 4) we still had Norelco PC-72 cameras.

What this frame doesn’t show is the blast of “landing exhaust” that came from discharging a fire extinguisher right behind the model. Convincing!

Why, you ask? Bill Tush was interviewing Harrison Ford, and I wanted to do something special.