Lack of Technology Puts Star Wars Series On Hold 309
adeelarshad82 writes "It was back in 2007 when we first heard about George Lucas making a live-action TV series focusing on characters from Star Wars. Almost four years later, it seems the idea of ever seeing this live-action show is still living in a galaxy far, far away. In a recent interview, George Lucas mentioned that the technology to produce the show in a cost-effective way doesn't exist yet, and that the cost of producing an episode is about ten times of what it should be."
Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny how other Science Fiction series manage to incorporate all the special effects they need to tell a story without blowing the bank's budget. Apparently George wants movie-grade FX on a TV budget.
Legacy (Score:2)
He's afraid that it would ruin the Star Wars legacy... Wait, shit.
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The Canadian-made SGU had movie-grade FX on a TV budget (it cost $2.5mil per episode according to Robert Carlyle, the main actor on the show). SGU's FX were the best ever on TV (so far). Just check on Netflix "The Greater Good" episode to see the amount of detail and craftsmanship that went on the FX. But I think Lucas' problem is that he wants to do the FX via ILM, which is an expensive company to work with, even if he owns it. The answer is to go off shore for FX. Either Canada, or even South America.
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Here's a screenshot from the said SGU episode: http://i.gateworld.net//gallery/albums/uni_season2/207-TheGreaterGood/screencaps/sgu_207_0205.jpg [gateworld.net]
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The Canadian-made SGU had movie-grade FX on a TV budget (it cost $2.5mil per episode according to Robert Carlyle, the main actor on the show).
Syfi (SciFi) cancelled Farscape despite its popularity citing cost as the main factor. Farscape was 1.2-1.5 Mil per episode. Stargate SG1 had a per episode budget of ~1.3 Mil until exchange rates flip flopped on them and it shot up to ~2 Mil and subsequently got cancelled (OK they were winding down anyway). You say SGU had a budget of 2.5 Mil and it has now also been cancelled. I'm sensing a trend. Maybe if the Ghost Hunters and Wrestlers insisted on more money per episode we would get some of these shows b
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Actually, SGU at $2.5mil was cheap. Maybe not as cheap as SyFy wanted it to be, but it's cheaper than the average US show, which costs $3mil per episode these days. And that's the average price. Some network shows go up to $4 mil per episode. Cable shows are usually cheaper. "Mad Men" costs $2.5mil per episode too btw (started at $2.3mil in 2008 according to NYTimes).
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Actually, SGU at $2.5mil was cheap. Maybe not as cheap as SyFy wanted it to be, but it's cheaper than the average US show, which costs $3mil per episode these days. And that's the average price. Some network shows go up to $4 mil per episode. Cable shows are usually cheaper. "Mad Men" costs $2.5mil per episode too btw (started at $2.3mil in 2008 according to NYTimes).
Maybe that's why they couldn't afford anyone who could act.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Informative)
Star Trek, Farscape, BSG, SGU, SG1 etc all were "Starship Corridor Shows".
90% of the show takes place in a hallway. Alternately it takes place in: A pine forest, Rock Quarry, City or Desert.
Star Wars is often in exotic and expensive locales and outside of a starship hallway.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
It's strange.
I recall scenes from the three original Star Wars movies set in starship hallways (star destroyer, Vader), a pine forest (moon of Eldor), desert (Tatooine), city (Coruscant) and rock quarry (Mos Eisley surroundings). Corridors? What were they flying along on the outside of the Death Star?
If you want to remove forests, cities and desert variations as possible scenes, along with the interior of space ships you are very quickly running out of options.
Re:Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of location shoots was part of what doomed the later prequels. To much conversation while walking in front of computer generated scenery or conversation while sitting in front of computer generated scenery. Mechanical switching between the camera on person A and the camera on person B. No way for the actors to interact with or react to their environments.
A simple corridor conversation in ANH or ESB would be two people in the frame walking and talking and yelling and stopping and starting and dodging extras with the camera being pulled along on a dolly as a single shot.
The same thing in RoTS would be distant shot of two people walking for 10 meters. Inexplicably they stop and turn to face one another. Close up of person A talking. Close up of person B talking. Close up of person A talking [repeat as needed] Distant shot of the two people continuing their walk. No art. No flow.
CGI made George Lucas forget everything he knew about film making. Not having sufficient technology is the best thing that could happen to a Star Wars series.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Informative)
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Or he can just fire the screenwriters. It's not like Star Wars has actually seen any benefit of good dialogue (with the exception, of course, of Episode V and the Emperor-Vader-Luke scenes in Episode VI).
I don't understand the point of the series anyways. Just make more movies. You'll make shitloads more doing that than you will with TV series. The prequels already proved that Star Wars, whatever its deficiencies will draw in ten year old fanboys just as easily as forty year old fanboys. The franchise
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I'm not sure it was worth skimping on the steadycam for special effects. I can't stand watching it even though I enjoyed the other Stargate series. (Might be an issues with the god damn soap opera acting and dialogue but that's for another topic.)
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I don't know what the going rate per second of CGI is, but George turned many of his actors in Episodes 2 and 3 into digital marionettes. George doesn't trust actors. He was blending parts of multiple shots (use Aniken from shot 6 and Padmé from shot 7) to form a single final scene of them about to kiss. This is ridiculous. There's a reason Hayden Christensen hasn't done anything of note before or since Star Wars. I would not be surprised to find out that of the 142 minutes of run time, over 100 m
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How much did it cost them to make Red Dwarf, particularly the earlier series, before Rob Grant let, take to make? That still stands, in my opinion, as probably one of the best SciFi TV series ever made, and some of the best episodes (like Polymorph) were made in the goddamned warehouse.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, other Science Fiction series have actual plots and don't rely on special effects tricks to hold your attention.
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And dialog. And they leave out 1:30 hours worth of CSPAN (in Space!!!)
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Meesa thinking you don't like Senator Jar Jar! Meesa gonna turn to de dark side and whoop your ass!
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Apparently George wants movie-grade FX on a TV budget.
Maybe I haven't been watching the right films, but I don't think Lucas has ever been concerned with film-grade F/X...
LucasSpeak translation droid at your service, sir (Score:3)
No, I'm pretty sure "lack of technology" is LucasSpeak for "No network in their right mind wants to pick up this piece of shit show."
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Yes, but he was so pained by having to have Han shoot first due to technical limitations. Only in the 2000s did he have the technology to do a crappy digital effect of Han Solo's head moving at faster than the speed of light to dodge the shot. Or such wonders as Han being digitally altered to walk over Jabba's tail which makes him look like some weird marionette. Just think of how pained Lucas was back in 1977 to not have the wonders of such "great" SFX shots available to him.
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Not exactly, but Sci Fi shows are rarely cut for costs. It's always ratings. And those ratings depend on day/time slots.
All I can say is (Score:5, Funny)
Thank God for that.
Re:All I can say is (Score:5, Informative)
Damn right. I'm convinced Eps 4-6 were only made good by accident. The chances of George Lucas accidentally making something that is not utter shit again are quite slim.
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And let's be honest. Only eps 5 is actually a *good* movie. Eps 4 is only good because of the very strong characters and setting. The story is only so-so. Eps 6 is only good because it is riding on the shoulders of 5 and the viewer is still caught up in what happened in eps 5. Eps 5 is actually a spectacular movie, from almost any standpoint. The fact that the tension from 5 carries all the way through 6 is just that much more telling.
Re:All I can say is (Score:5, Informative)
And I'm pretty sure ESB was actually in someone else's hands (Different director or producer or something. Can't remember).
Just sayin'...
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You know, in the time that it took you to type that you didn't know if it had a different director, you could have looked it up on Wikipedia. It's in the first sentence.
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Re:All I can say is (Score:4, Insightful)
And let's be honest. Only eps 5 is actually a *good* movie. Eps 4 is only good because of the very strong characters and setting. The story is only so-so.
I will never understand people who say this.
Star Wars, the original movie (no, it wasn't called "Episode IV"), was pretty much perfect. Yeah, the story wasn't any great miracle -- pretty much a retelling of "Jack and the Beanstalk" -- but it did have strong characters, it did have good settings, and it was an action-packed and enjoyable movie.
The Empire Strikes Back is arguably better shot and better directed. But as a story, you would have no idea what's going on if you hadn't seen the first movie. Worse, it starts at some point mid-story, it ends at some point mid-story, and there isn't really any plot at all. Luke whines, Han Solo introduces us to Lando Calrissian (who betrays him), Leia bitches, and Darth Vader kills his own guys. The end. Yeah, it had some great action scenes -- but isn't tons of action with a weak story the reason we all hate the prequels? It's pretty telling when the most memorable character in the movie is a Muppet. And I remember distinctly as a kid, when Darth Vader told Luke he was his father, thinking, "That's bullshit, Vader's lying." When RotJ came out and they acted like it was the god's-honest truth, I was like, "Whaaaaaat? That's so lame."
The Star Wars series is mostly bad movies. The original Star Wars, on the other hand, remains a near-flawless miracle of filmmaking that will never be repeated.
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I don't buy it at all. Episode IV was a pretty bland action film with the singular difference that, for 1977, the special effects were the best anyone had ever seen (I still remember being five years old and sitting next to my dad and his best friend and both of them just going "Wow" for the whole film). Episode V was weakest when it was concentrating on goings-on of Leia, Han and the droids. But there was a helluva lot of character development and weight to the Luke story arc, and the encounter between
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the encounter between Luke and Vader was taught with tension and actually, for a Lucas film, had effective dialogue that gave us an entirely new window on Vader's personality, beyond being the one-dimensional evil Nazi-type villain that he was in the first film.
I guess I just didn't need that out of my villain in a totally one-dimensional action-adventure series. I'm not saying ESB is a bad movie -- it's not -- but it's hardly the best of the series. I saw the original in the theater seven times. I might have seen ESB 2-3 times, I don't really remember.
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Yeah, but it's nowhere as cool as pinball Yoda!!! [youtube.com] OMG THAT SCENE WAS TEH BOMB!!!
Not an accident (Score:3)
Damn right. I'm convinced Eps 4-6 were only made good by accident. The chances of George Lucas accidentally making something that is not utter shit again are quite slim.
No, it wasn't accident, and what prompts me to say that are the number of other good movies and entire series that he fostered. I think there are a number of factors. One is that the technology available during his best years (Star Wars 4-6, Indiana Jones Trilogy, American Graffiti, etc) was such that it limited him and kept him more focused on other aspects of movie making that he is good at. When he would say "Let's show this doing that in this way" and the FX people would say "No way that's simply imp
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Raiders of the Lost Ark was good because of people *NOT* named George Lucas. Lucas came up with some good ideas, but also some really bad ones that Spielberg and others shot down.
Basically, once Lucas had the initial idea, it was turned into a good movie by Steven Spielberg, Lawrence Kasdan, and Harrison Ford.
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Thank God for that.
iAgree
Can't fully replace people yet George? (Score:5, Funny)
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Why bother for hardware moving around.
He's waiting for a way to take an actor's face and voice from the old movies and somehow use them to make new movies, *convincingly*.
Just capture the gestures from unknown, easily replaced actors that are paid peanuts and voila: big budget look and feel without paying the talent.
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Carrie Fisher said that Lucas owns her face to the point where she has to pay him every time she looks in the mirror.
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It's not the only measure, but it is A measure. It's also a pretty good proxy for popularity. People (generally) liked the prequels. A lot. Kids love Jar-Jar. Deal with it.
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Yes, but needing 3 movies to do that. Pfffft. Avatar made more than that on it's own. And by your logic it has to be the better movie.
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Wasn't it? I had a baby born so I haven't been able to see it yet. I thought most people did, in fact, think Avatar was better.
And Nothing of Value was Lost... (Score:5, Insightful)
Therefore, if they are "too expensive" now, either Lucas has wandered off the ranch, so to speak, and is insisting that it be shot in 100053459348p 512Hz 3HD or and vastly more likely the plan was to shovel a bunch of straight-to-TV/DVD kiddie-schlock and they aren't sure that they can recoup the cost of visual effects that wouldn't be laughed at.
It sounds like the world is on track to be spared an atrocity here.
Sheesh (Score:2)
Gee, I didn't know that the cost of flogging a dead horse is still that expensive. I'd think that Lucas could command a hefty discount, based only on volume.
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The rest of the star wars story (eps 7-9) is actually more interesting and deep than the crap we've got so far. George Lucas drorpped 4-6 to shove us into the center of an incomplete story, like starting The Gap Cycle on book 3. A very inferior story compared to suffering the first book and a half. Unfortunately, the depth of character development that gets explained in the first 3 episodes is ... difficult to do in movies. A long-running TV series would be better; movies are horrible because they put e
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Well look at Lord of the Rings. the full director's cut of all three movies is nearly 12 hours long and is still missing massive amounts of the story.
What I wish, is for more and bigger budget mini-series's. So a story that runs 12-20 hours long allowing proper character development the big side of special FX's. The remake of Dune , Band of Brothers, etc
Something you won't sit down and watch all at once, but you don't end up with 5 seasons of varying quality and actors.
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HBO's Rome!
Hey, maybe that's the ticket? Have John Millius write/direct them?
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>> TV has the same problem in the US, because everyone wants a complete problem-resolution cycle in isolated episodes that don't have to be watched in exact order, as opposed to chapter-style episodic progression.
Luckily the tides are slowing turning that way (for now); the strongest starter was back with the Sopranos. Now, HBO,Showtime, Stars, etc. are full "episodic" material. You could argue that reality TV is that way too.
Two problems:
1. Sci-Fi - Film companies have been scared of it historicall
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The end result is we got somewhat uninteresting action for movies 4-6, because we showed movies 1-3 as movies 4-6. The real depth of actual story starts around episode 4, so that's where the original series started
Wow, dude, you really need to pull your head out of your genre for a while.
The reason science fiction books are always series with a minimum of three books is because that way they can sell you a minimum of three books.
If you'd broaden your horizons a little bit, however, you'd realize that most of the great literature of the world is stand-alone books. Likewise, most of the great movies ever made do not have any sequels or prequels -- The Godfather being one notable exception, which they fucked up when the
I'm sure I speak for all of us (Score:2)
We're very, very disappointed that this isn't going to happen.
Han Solo show! (Score:3, Informative)
You know what would be really cool - a show all about han solo, where he and his rag-tag crew jet about the galaxy in their decrepit but well loved ship, taking on any smuggling job, facing danger together, serving out home-style justice when it serves their pocketbooks, wooing space-ladies.
Oh wait, they already made that show, it's called firefly, and it got cancelled.
Sorry to get your hopes up george
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When I read your first sentence, I seriously thought you were making a joke about The A-Team.
Lack of special effect technology.... (Score:2)
...didn't stop the first movies from happening.
Are all directors this INCREDIBLY LAZY and uncreative?
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George Lucas was ever creative? The only reasons why the first 3 movies didn't suck was because George wasn't doing it solo. Episodes 1-3 suck so much because he thought his shit didn't stink and he surrounded himself with nothing but yesmen and all he churned out was schlock.
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Lucas creative? I don't think so. I never thought so, rather.
Similarly to "if life gives you lemons, make limonade", a real creative can do his/her work even if all the available resources are a few cardboard boxes and silver paint.
Therefore, I don't believe that there is no technology to make ANY series. Everything is possible in fiction. If it's not, you are doing it wrong.
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He's a shitty writer. Ask anyone who read the last Indy script that Spielberg delivered to Lucas for review, before Lucas forced his input on it.
Or, just watch Eps 1-3.
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As a writer, he's not bad.
You're joking, right? Eps 1-3 have some of the worst writing imaginable. The dialogue is horrendous.
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Many many years ago depicting a mere spaceship was a real challenge. They pushed on and managed to do the first SW trilogy. Where is that willpower and creativity now?
Hence, I consider that man got lazy and is not worthy of having fans or even being a "creative" person at all. Pass the seat to the new generation of real creators who live permanently shadowed by this kind of people.
I don't really care about the result, never really been a SW fan, yet, I value effort and real creativity A LOT. I see nothing b
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Many many years ago depicting a mere spaceship was a real challenge.
I assume you mean prior to the 1950s and Forbidden Planet? Or do you mean a "realistic" spaceship -- in which case, the better example would be 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came 9 years before Star Wars (which doesn't really depict spaceships in any real sense at all).
Original Star Trek / Tron Legacy (Score:3)
I'd still watch new episodes of the original 60's Star Trek, as long as the writing/acting was a good as some of the better ones they made then, and the special effects were all but missing in action then.
By contrast, I just saw Tron Legacy again, and it is nearly unwatchable for me. It was distractingly inappropriate as a sequel to the original. Great special effects married with poor writing and poor actor direction.
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It was no Shawshank, but the original Tron wasn't the tripe that is Star Wars Episodes 1-3 or Tron Legacy either. The original Tron also had a production budget of $17M. The new Tron Legacy had a production budget of closer to $170M. Those things need to be taken into consideration.
The first Tron had the novelty of being the first, which buys it cool points, and yes, it was better written and acted, much better than Tron Legacy, where every female character's job was to literally bat their big eyes at at
He still doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you somehow haven't seen them, I recommend Red Letter Media's review [redlettermedia.com] of the Star Wars: Episodes 1-3, which does a better job of explaining why those films are miserable piles of crap than I could ever hope to do myself. Also relevant clip from an episode of South Park. [southparkstudios.com]
Re:He still doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
He has made an obscene amount of money and gotten a whole generation of geeks to worship his half-assed "space opera" special effects films and treat them as if they had some deep meaning.
Star Wars (even the originals) are almost completely special effects extravaganzas. It wasn't Shakespeare and it certainly wasn't good science fiction.
What doesn't he get?
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The second trilogy really only had good special effects, but they wore thin as the plot became increasingly asinine and the characters unlikable.
The point is that good special effects alone can't make a good movie. Hell, there's a decent amount of science fiction that doesn't invest heavily in special effects, but because the characters and story are so compelling we as a community still enjoy them.
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Don't Bother. (Score:3)
If the kind of technology that George Lucas uses was 1/10th the cost then it would be used by good storytellers and he still wouldn't be able to film a TV series.
What should it cost? (Score:2)
and that the cost of producing an episode is about ten times of what it should be."
Most things cost around what they should cost. I think what he meant to say was that it would cost 10 times what it would be worth.
Define cost effective (Score:2)
Try Henson More (Score:2)
Because we want to replace all the non-human characters with CG ones?
I'd rather take my Jim Henson puppets from Farscape, Dark Crystal and Yoda thanks.
Typewriter, George! (Score:3)
Funny, but the technology existed in the early 70's to make the greatest space fantasy film of all time on a mere nine million dollar budget.
I think what's really got him is that his computer-based word processor can't write a decent script by itself. It's lacking the AI that his typewriter had in college. It's lacking the imagination to create anything substantial.
Please George, find a garage sale, and buy a used, beat-up Royal Typewriter, and sit down and write a real script with characters, using nothing but the imagination inside you. Whatever spark of creativity you once had must still exist down there inside you, you've just lost touch with how to access it.
Maybe you need to THROW AWAY all that technology that's got you so befuddled, and go back to something more genuine. You've forgotten that it's the humans in the story the audience is concerned with, not how glitzy you can make the spaceships look.
Story first, then figure out how to film it. It's the most basic rule in all of film-making, and you've forgotten it.
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Um, Star Wars was pretty much just a re-imaging of the samurai film The Hidden Fortress [wikipedia.org]. The creativity that Lucas put into Star Wars was exactly what he's known for: special effects, detailed backgrounds and over-the-top fight scenes. Not sure if anyone could expect anything more from him?
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It's too late. Technology has corrupted him. Darth Lucas is more machine than man.
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He's forgotten what made Star Wars good (Score:2)
Not the George Lucas... (Score:2)
...you're looking for? [youtube.com]
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With his initial dream fulfilled, seems he lost whatever drove him to create the initial masterpieces.
Nub Nub Cry The Ewoks! (Score:3)
Hey Everybody - Remember Me...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pioneer One tells a compelling story with essentially zero FX and a budget that wouldn't pay for nose-candy on most movie sets. Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was rendered in the film-maker's kitchen. The Hunt for Gollum manages to produce a digital Gollum (ok, for a few seconds...) that's not too far off the best results of WETA Digital. Give Seth Green a handful of Star Wars figures and a digicam and he could probably come up with something that stayed within canon in about 20 minutes.
But George Lucas, with all his years of experience, skill, contacts and vast gobs of cash can't make a couple of seasons of a watchable TV show because the technology's not there yet? Absolute bollocks.
Is it already shot? (Score:2)
When asked about the status of the show, Lucas said that the footage “sits on the shelf.”
Does this mean that the the show has already been recorded? He's just waiting until special effects are cheap enough to add them in? Or is the footage "figuratively" sitting on the shelf?
Why doesn't he just use models and puppets? (Score:2)
I mean, the models and puppets Lucasfilm comes up with are heads and tails better than any of the 3D stuff we've been seeing. You can watch stuff like Star Wars Ep 4-6 and see how much better the models look compared to the Ep 1-3 3D effects. You can look at episodes of Star Trek TNG and see how well those models worked in conjunction with 3D effects. Yeah, on the older stuff you can see the model frame splice edges, but today it is trivial to get rid of that and make it all look seamless. GO BACK TO USING
the real reason (Score:2)
More likely George discovered too late that there was already a really successful "Star____" television series out there and realized he didn't want to play second fiddle to that other guy.
He's referring Jar Jar's accent (Score:2)
They can't pay anyone enough to actually talk like that on camera. That's part of the reason they Jar Jar was CGI.
Simple Economics (Score:2)
Give it to J. Michael Straczynski (Score:3, Interesting)
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Indeed. He made Babylon 5 for a $600,000 per episode. Which is amazing, even if you count inflation.
Oh George, I stopped believing your lies long ago. (Score:2)
Why did you make Episode 4 before Episode 1, 2 and 3?
George Lucas: When I began writing the story for Star Wars, it became so big that I couldn’t fit all my ideas into one film. I started to break the story up into trilogies. The first trilogy told the story of Anakin Skywalker’s descent into darkness. The second trilogy gave us the story of how Luke Skywalker defeated the Sith. The third trilogy gives us the time when the Jedi finally find a way to destroy the dark side. I also came up with a fourth trilogy, but it was unrelated to the first three trilogies.
It became clear that I was looking at nine separate movies. I had to decide which trilogy to begin with. At the time, sci-fi movies didn’t do well at the box office. I thought that Star Wars might be a one shot deal in that Star Wars might not make enough money to warrant the creation of sequels. I decided my best bet was to start with the most exciting trilogy and hope that it struck a chord with audiences.
I decided to make the middle trilogy first because I thought it was the most exciting of the trilogies and gave me the best chance to hit it out of the park with the people. Fortunately, my genius was right about it all. It makes me look so gifted in hind sight because there has never been a film bigger than Star Wars back in 1977.
When in reality -- Mr. Lucas started at "Episode 4" and jumped right into the middle of a story arc in order to give the feel of the good 'ol Sci-Fi serials he had enjoyed watching himself... No other scripts or films were planned at that time, hence the lack of a rising action at the end of the movie (that nearly all movies with planned sequels have) -- Indeed Sci-Fi flicks didn't do so well at the time, not many had the production value that StarWars had.
Princess Leia was not planned to be Luke's
What Could Possibly Save Lucas (Score:3)
I don't know why Lucas feels the need to break the bank, though. He could crap pretty much any special effects into a show and the kids won't know the difference. Pair up his shows with some sugary cereal and Star-Wars toy commercials and he's pretty much set to ride that money train for another generation.
He's almost acting as if he expects the rest of us to watch it. Ain't gonna happen, judging form the hate pouring out in this article. Personally, I'd rather curl up with some old Twilight Zone videos. Most of the episodes I've seen have almost no special effects and are mostly psychological. That's some good writing right there. I doubt Lucas would recognize it if someone hit him upside the head with them.
Blame Jar Jar (Score:3)
CGI these days is mostly labour based. A render farm is costly upfront but all the players have massive ones sitting waiting for jobs. The thing that costs money is paying good artists for the huge amounts of work you need. Creating fully CGI characters and sets (like George probably wants because he is an idiot) is a lot different from doing some touching up like removing wires from stuntmen.
Star Wars TV could be done no more expensive then shows like Battlestar Galactica or Stargate. In nearly all the sto
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Blender is free. It has been used to create various animated shorts showcasing what it can do (Elephant's Dream, Big Buck Bunny and Sintel).
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He isn't getting any younger. I mean how many yachts do you need, anyways?
Yes, but he has to think of all the yachts his children might need in the future.
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Exactly. Babylon 5 didn't have the technology to do the FX cheaply (models used by Star Trek, etc. were expensive), so they created their own as they went along.
Sometimes the Babylon 5 SFX team completed the rendering of a scene hours before it was to be uploaded to the studio for broadcasting (rendering scenes on Amigas originally, taking days to complete a simple scene). They even recycled some of the footage (e.g. launching ships) between episodes.
Groundbreaking stuff that showed you could do quality eff
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It would cost 10 times because Lucas has this weird idea that cramming in 10 times the amount of useless background detail into every scene is what makes a good movie
And into the foreground would be crammed the childhood versions of every character who ever appeared in Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi.