Editor's note: A shorter version of this story was originally published in 2016. The first thing the creators of “The Empire Strikes Back” snow walker scene want you to know is this: They were not inspired by the Port of Oakland cranes.
The ever-expanding myth is frustrating, because the real story is so much better. A small group of young artists, some with almost no film experience and on a tough deadline, commit to the near-impossible task of one-upping the 1977 film “Star Wars.” And through pure talent and failure-driven ingenuity, they create one of the greatest action and special effects scenes of all time — a sequence in the 1980 sequel that still thrills more than a generation later.
A scene from the 1980 movie "The Empire Strikes Back," which featured several stop-motion animated snow walkers attacking a rebel base.
Jon Berg pops out of a hatch to animate a snow walker on the set of the 1980 movie "The Empire Strikes Back."
“The battle of Hoth is my personal favorite not only because it’s one of the most visually stunning, but because it was a small, creative group of specialists who did the majority of the work,” says Joe Johnston, who designed the walkers and many other iconic objects in the original “Star Wars” trilogy. “There was a true sense of camaraderie and the feeling that we were pushing the frontiers.”
In the spirit of the “Star Wars” holiday “May the Fourth,” we’ve remastered this 2016 tribute to “The Empire Strikes Back” snow walker battle, featuring interviews with the key figures who created the scene. This article started with an attempt to settle an urban legend and ended with exclusive, rarely-seen photos from Lucasfilm — plus a historical account that sounds more like an “Ocean’s Eleven”-style heist than the smooth and well-staffed production that the finished product suggests.
After the exploding Death Star and medal ceremony that ended “Star Wars,” director George Lucas entered “The Empire Strikes Back” needing a huge early action sequence from his Industrial Light & Magic special effects crew. It would establish that the villainous Empire was still ruthless and dominant, surprise-attacking and destroying a rebel base.
“There was a long period of drawing where ‘anything goes.’ We tried wheeled vehicles, hovercraft, tank-like treaded vehicles,” Johnston says. “I personally felt that wheels and treads were too Earth-based, not exotic enough for the Empire.”
Johnston remembered seeing a U.S. Steel brochure while he was in the industrial design program at Cal State Long Beach. It had a drawing by futurist Syd Mead, featuring what looked like a white garbage truck, walking through the snow on four insect-like appendages. Johnston expanded on the design, making the walkers seven stories tall, giving them a “head” with turrets, and a blockier body and gray paint job that matched the Empire’s Brutalist architectural look. The ILM workers called them only “the walkers”; the formal name AT-AT (All Terrain Armored Transport) was adopted by Lucasfilm merchandising long after the sequence was completed.
Syd Mead was a huge inspiration to all film concept designers...his 1969 artwork for snow walkers was the inception for The Imperial AT-ATs in Star Wars Empire Strikes Back...later penned by McQuarrie and Johnston... Mead’s work was so influential. #RIPSydMead pic.twitter.com/dgrM4EOnbv
Adam Savage, a former ILM model shop worker and “MythBusters” star who was 14 years old when the movie came out, calls the design genius, even though a spaceship attack might have made more strategic sense.
“It’s a hilariously terrible idea for a weapon … and yet you’re totally enraptured, and it’s perfect,” Savage says. “The scale of the walkers is terrifying. The idea that you have that a long period of time to watch your doom trudge toward you. The fact that they’re slightly anthropomorphized, but not too much, which is also amazing.”
As the crew got to work in ILM’s old Kerner Boulevard studio near the freeway in San Rafael, it considered making robotic walkers, but Dennis Muren, who had worked on “Star Wars,” helped persuade Lucas to use the comparatively ancient art of stop-motion animation.
The biggest puppets were the size of a greyhound puppy. Ray Harryhausen, at the time almost 60 years old and the most experienced living stop-motion animator, was reportedly approached to bring them to life.
Instead, Lucas ended up with a collection of long-haired artists — Tom St. Amand, Doug Beswick, Jon Berg and Phil Tippett — who could pass for a high school garage band. “I was actually surprised I got hired, because my skill level was not where it needed to be,” recalls Tippett, who was in his mid-20s when he joined the crew.
Doug Beswick, Tom St. Amand, Jon Berg and Phil Tippett post in front of a snow walker puppet. St. Amand was the lead builder, and Beswick, Berg and Tippett animated the walkers.
But that would be a common theme on the set, where Lucas took chances and nurtured talent. Tippett remembers 21-year-old Mike Pangrazio showing up “out of the blue,” and freehand painting the flawless matte backdrop for the frozen planet that appears in the film.
The walker puppets were created by armature builder Tom St. Amand, an artist who had his own machine shop. Tippett and Johnston said there were a few small changes from the original blueprints so they could function as puppets — the legs became chunkier for one — but Johnston's design remained mostly unchanged.
“Jon Berg, Joe Johnston and Tom St. Amand on their own volition got excited about a two-legged walker,” Tippett said. “So they just built it on their own on the weekends, and showed it to George. And he was like, ‘Yeah, throw it in the movie.’”
That two-legged walker, seen briefly in the Hoth sequence, became a centerpiece in the “Return of the Jedi” battle on the forest planet Endor.
Animating the Hoth sequence was a slog. With no animation software at the time, the stop-motion artists had to keep track of walker movements in their heads. But the most challenging shots may have been two scenes where the walkers crash and blow up, which were shot in real time. The FX artists worried it might not work, but the shots mesh seamlessly with the stop motion.
Phil Tippett, left, and Jon Berg work on the snow walker puppets for the planet Hoth battle scene in "The Empire Strikes Back."
Beswick, Berg and Tippett looked like a human game of Whack-a-Mole, popping out of hatches on the volleyball-court-sized set, making almost imperceptible changes to their puppets, then disappearing so the next stop-motion image could be captured on film. They wore masks, or held their breath, because the Hoth snow was actually baking soda, and a sneeze could ruin a scene.
Simulating the mass of the vehicles was a major challenge. To get the “performance” right, artists put chalk marks on the legs of Marine World elephants to study their movements. Sound designers Ben Burtt and Randy Thom chose booming audio cues, including a Dumpster opening and closing, to simulate moving leg joints.
And startlingly low-tech shortcuts were common. At one point, the animators added two more walkers to a scene with photo cutouts.
“The very first time you see the walkers, I think there was like five of them,” Tippett says. “There were three stop-motion puppets. For the background ones, we just took Polaroids, cut the Polaroids out and just threw them back there.”
Joe Johnston, who designed the snow walkers in the 1980 movie "The Empire Strikes Back," works on the leg of a walker.
Puppeteers in 1979 work on the snow walker puppets that appeared in the 1980 release "The Empire Strikes Back."
Jon Berg pops out of a hatch to work on one of the snow walker puppets for the ice planet Hoth battle scene in the 1980 movie "The Empire Strikes Back."
A scene from the 1980 movie "The Empire Strikes Back," which featured several stop-motion animated snow walkers attacking a rebel base.
Filming continued to the drop-dead date, with more animation to be finished, and a new production starting in the space the next day. Then Berg got the flu.
“I got to animate both of the walkers, all day long. It was like, ‘Open one hatch — make your moves — close it.’ ‘Open another hatch …’” Tippett says, laughing. “I couldn’t do it today.”
Muren and Johnston say they were thrilled with the finished product, but no one expected the adulation that followed, from the film’s release on May 21, 1980, until today.
“I would put the Hoth (effects) sequence as one of the three best ever made,” Savage says. “I don’t think it’s an overstatement. It’s just such a flawless sequence. … It makes me sad that I’m not 15 years older. It’s a place that I would have loved to have been, up at Kerner Boulevard in 1979, working on these things.”
As for the rumor of the Oakland port cranes as inspiration, it’s not clear where it came from or when it started. There are popular bootleg T-shirts that stoke the myth, including one with the word “oakland” underneath a port crane that has thought a bubble with a snow walker inside.
Cranes above a ship with containers is seen at the Port of Oakland on Thursday, February 20, 2020 in Oakland, Calif.
“Star Wars” creator George Lucas addressed the rumor directly in a 2007 interview with The Chronicle, claiming, with more than a little exasperation, “That’s a myth. That definitely a myth.”
Johnston also has zero patience for port crane talk.
“The urban myth about the Oakland port cranes comes from the same fantasyland that claims the Millennium Falcon was inspired by a hamburger with an olive stuck to it with a toothpick,” Johnston said. “Who sticks an olive to a hamburger bun unless they’re reverse engineering an urban myth?”
The group involved with “The Empire Strikes Back” walker scene went on to win a combined 17 Academy Awards. Tippett started a Berkeley-based special effects house, Tippett Studio. Muren still works at ILM as the senior visual effects supervisor and creative director. Joe Johnston directed his own films, including “The Rocketeer” and “Captain America: The First Avenger.”
Stop motion pioneer Phil Tippett talks about how he came about animating the AT-AT snow walkers in the "The Empire Strikes Back" at his studio in Berkeley, California, on friday, may 6, 2016.
Johnston says he doesn’t think the “Star Wars” original trilogy effects crew should be remembered as a well-oiled machine or a crack team with a clear road to success. They were something less than that — and also more.
“I firmly believe that the key to the success of ILM lay in the fact that we often had no idea how to solve a particular problem,” Johnston says. “We made a lot of mistakes and shot a ton of film that no one will ever see, but we ultimately put images on the screen that helped make the trilogy a new milestone in cinema. And what better way to learn than from your mistakes?”
Peter Hartlaub (he/him) is The San Francisco Chronicle culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
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ILM visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren poses with a snow walker from the 1980 movie "The Empire Strikes Back."
Stop motion pioneer Phil Tippett talks about how he came about animating the AT-AT snow walkers in the "The Empire Strikes Back" at his studio in Berkeley, California, on friday, may 6, 2016.
The guts of a snow walker puppet. Several were built for the ice planet Hoth scene in "The Empire Strikes Back."
Cranes are shown at the Port of Oakland in Oakland, Calif., Tuesday, March 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle's culture critic and co-founder of Total SF. The Bay Area native, a former Chronicle paperboy, has worked at The Chronicle since 2000. He covers Bay Area culture, co-hosts the Total SF podcast and writes the archive-based Our SF local history column. Hartlaub and columnist Heather Knight co-created the Total SF podcast and event series, engaging with locals to explore and find new ways to celebrate San Francisco and the Bay Area.