We've all just assumed that Luke drives a landspeeder. He doesn't. Special thanks to Angelos Karderinis for research. Made possible by over 200 amazing supporters on Patreon: / echenry
I was gonna say, considering luke's landspeeder for years was on display at some events prior to TPM, i doubt it was repainted, considering it's still in it's original colours to this day, it would be a very, well built replica of the one from ANH, i doubt lucasfilm would have repainted the original considering its' history
There might have been multiple landspeeder models/sets/props during filming. Just as they used multiple R2 droids during filming. One might end up in a museum while another gets repainted and put back on film.
I can't really explain what happened... but the Luke's Landspeeder on display in the Petersen Automotive Museum, for instance, (allegedly the original 1970s speeder vehicle) is almost 100% certainly the one that appeared in TPM. Both share weathering and physical damage (specifically in the radiator grills) that match ANH perfectly. It doesn't sound right, but it seems to me that the speeder was repainted green for TPM, and then repainted again to match the ANH coloration when it went on display. Other examples of Luke's Landspeeder, such as the one that appeared at the traveling "Where Science Meets Imagination" exhibit (and perhaps the one you have in mind), is a replica.
@@pwnmeisterage There is another landspeeder that appears in the film, which is the one that was attached to cleverly-hidden poles, or attached to a huge offscreen carousel to simulate a floating effect. None of the display versions I've seen seem to match the details from that prop, however.
@@ECHenry Thanks for the additional info, Sounds pretty interesting, to know that the original was pulled out of storage, repainted, then painted back (or possibly had the new paint removed, idk). But hey, it makes sense at the end of the day, props are reused all the time, hell they pulled out ROTJ costumes for the filming additional scenes for the special editions, i take it they must have had some kind of restoration/corrective work done to them. Kinda reminds me of disney (or ILM, idk) Repainting the Rex animatronics from the original star tours, and using them as static props (i assume they're the aluminum originals, possibly backup animatronics, as their details are a perfect match, and seem a little too "gritty" to be recreations)
I think it would be funny if Henry actually spent MONTHS making fake-looking wheels to put on the landspeeder in TPM JUST so he could make this video on April Fools.
Landing gear. Just, landing gear. I mean, when you shut the thing off; when you shut the repulsors down, does it hover in the void a foot off the ground forever? No. And if you need to wheel it around while it's shut down, a nice BIG set of wheels makes the job a lot easier. Especially when you consider that repulsorlift technology makes finished road surfaces ancillary to a star wars city. You could stop that thing just about anywhere, on any terrain, and you might need to wheel it around a little in dirt, gravel, etc. Would suck to try that with skids.
@@fresh2924 Must be some good batteries on those things. Or maybe like modern fighters, they have ground external power hookups. I wouldn't expect the same thing from the space backwater equivalent to a Toyota Corolla.
@@fresh2924 Naboo Fighters are much higher in rank than a simple landspeeder I wouldn’t doubt that because the Naboo military was much richer, they could make something much higher in quality and in efficiency than speeders
Also Naboo fighter is plug in to the hangar's wall socket via it's 'tail' for recharge. That would surely keep it's repulserlift on hence keep it floating.
That looks like a classic Not My Problem on the part of the FX team. "The wheels are visible." "Erm, throw a couple of stock background characters in front of them." [work order goes out to FX artists: 'Add two stock characters in front of green speeder'. The vital 'to conceal wheels' is omitted] "In front of the speeder. Right. Done. Next shot."
I recall in the Lord of the Rings, there's a scene where one of the characters has their vest vanish. They shot part of the scene after lunch, and the first take, he'd forgot to put the best back on. The team spotted it after the take, so he got it back on and they did a bunch more reshoots. Problem was none of them were as good as the first take was, so they just decided to live with it and use the shot with the missing vest.
Maybe the wheels are landing gear. Presumably whilst doing maintenance on the repulsor lifts engineers would still want to be able to move the vehicle off the ground and it would be enormously fuel inefficient to have it constantly levitating, so some form of movable landing gear would be needed
Yes, my thoughts exactly. It has to have some kind of gear - it would be too low to get in and out if it just sat flat on the ground, and you'd need a place without rocks to set it down. It would also be impractical to have to set it down on a special stand. So the idea of retractable wheels makes a lot of sense, not just for maintainance but in general.
Seems reasonable to me. The wheels automatically pull up during normal use, deploy automatically when in park, and (possibly) can be manually deployed and are self-powered (or at least one is) for things like moving around a shop. The cornering on a landspeeder doesn't seem great, so maybe you go to wheels in tight confines (when the higher-speed jet-and-antigrav mode wouldn't help anyway).
This seems alot more reasonable than the idea that the model of speeder was once a fixed wheel vehicle. And this still fits the idea that Luke as an tinkerer would get rid of the wheels for weight reduction or some other hotrodding shenanigans
@@solidblockofsunrise yeah. I can't recall the dialogue exactly, but the Star Wars radio drama had a scene of Luke haggling with the guy he sold the speeder to. They never brought up it being a conversion. Interesting theory, but no. Landing gear for maintenance makes more sense.
Repulsorlifts don't use fuel. They're explicitly so energy efficient that they never need to be shut off. They're made from stable space-time knots produced by black holes, and only need power when actively maneuvering. To station-keep and remain in one place requires very little power. They're apparently so energy and space efficient that medical stretchers, chairs, observation droids, etc. all use them, needing next to no power to do so.
i kinda doubt that repulsor lift adapters are that difficult to install, i believe to remember that in one clone wars episode they moved some crates by attaching a device on them and they begun to float. would be no problem to just remove the tires, add a few generators in the new free space, and add repulsor lift emitters in strategic places and adjust the power output until the desired handling and drive feeling is archived.
@@zeux5583 I don't feel comfortable taking strange details such as the repulsor lift emitters from TCW at face value. They probably only created those emitters for the story because characters carrying the crates themselves would take more time and money to animate than what they had left over. For a similar reason Captain Rex gained temporary super strength in the episode Trespass where he just slung the pantoran Chairman over his shoulder and then on his speeder, while the Pantorans limbs violently shaked around like a marionette. I think the writers expect the audience to extend their suspension of disbelief to those elements, much like how in Rise of Skywalker First Order captain allegedly all have a Captains Medallion when personal authorization codes have always been stored in code cylinders before. Or in Force Awakens when Snoke and Hux had a weird discussion and explicitly stated their motivation to destroy the New Republic to be that the Republic could help Luke if he returns, in spite of the rest of the story and world informing us that the First Order wants to replace the New Republic, to which the Jedi would usually be the factor that is preventing the villains from achieving this goal. It would be easier to discuss fiction if everyone could agree that anything that was added to a story to facilitate easier understanding for its audience or to facilitate an easier production is not supposed to be taken as an unshakeable fact of the reality of the fictional universe. This would then make issues such as everything that people didn't like in the sequel trilogy into the actual discussion of taste that some people want it to be, but then also separate it from the discussion that lore fans want to be about how well the story integrates into the rest of the universe or how much it contradicts previously established facts, wherein we can collectively deduce what elements should or shouldn't be part of canon.
It took me way too long to realize this was an April Fool’s joke. Still, I kinda appreciate it because it’s still interesting and informative, presuming the information in the video actually is true.
It was an April Fools joke? I just checked my Phantom Menace blu-ray and the speeder with wheels really is there. So is the wheel resting against a wall.
I like the Hybrid theory better lol. Wheels retract when the Repulsorlifts fail. Or when parked for a prolonged period of time (Don't wanna waste precious energy keeping that thing above ground when not in use). It's actually quite practical...
Given that there are panels open or missing on Luke's vehicle in ANH, despite being on a desert planet (sand gets everywhere, as Anakin knows), it's not unreasonable to suggest that he tinkers with it, a lot.
There are a handful of things in ANH that suggest that Luke was an apt tinkerer... like, for starters, he's the one who reattaches Threepio's arm after the Tusken attack, rather than leaving Artoo to do it.
Or that it broke down a lot. Luke may be a great mechanic but he's in the Outer Rim. The only place you could probably get parts would be a Jawa sand crawler and if a specific part would act up I doubt that Luke would want to take the time to pry off a panel every time it broke down.
From my observations, it appears that the landspeeder in episode 4 is always depicted as being active and running. The one in this scene is depicted as being inactive and parked. Both theories have their merits, but I believe it would be more along the lines of the fact that the repulser lifts take a lot of power, and there is no reason to have them constantly active when you are not using the vehicle. Similar to how you'd use an automobile engine, you don't run it when you park the car.
At the time when episode 4 was in development, it's depiction of the landspeeder was probably meant to imply that repulsors are some kind of natural "anti-gravity material" that somehow always floats at a constant height without the need for a power source. Not until The Empire Strikes Back do we see repulsorloft vehicles (snowspeeders and Cloud Cars) that are able to change their altitude, which suggests that repulsors are a futuristic gravity-defying technology that requires power to operate, but can be controlled. Or maybe I'm just reading way too deeply into all this, and Luke just left his landspeeder idling because it was more convenient for a quick stop (or he wasn't sure if it could reliably start up again).
@@InventorZahran The repulsor lifts are made from material that are taken from the regions surrounding black holes. They contain sub-nuclear knots of space-time. These can distort nearby spacetime and thus create an anti-gravity effect. I'd liken this to how in our world the wings of an airplane or the shape of a helicopter's rotors distort nearby airflow as they move through it thus allowing them to generate lift. I guess you could say that wings are a sort of anti-gravity just like repulsor lifts are.
"There is absolutely no way that anybody doing that kind of work in that part of the frame could just miss..." Come on. You're more familiar with the history of Star Wars special effects than that.
Spotting details in the background like this makes me wonder how zoomed-in Henry's watching Star Wars. All joking aside, love these sorts of videos so much
Henry [sitting in a darkened apartment, his face illuminated by a computer screen], "Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance. Stop. Move in. Stop. Pull out, track right. Stop. Center and pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right or-and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute. Go right. Stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Gimme a hard copy right there."
A hover vehicle makes a lot more sense out in the dunes than a three-wheeled vehicle anyway, so it might be less of hot-rodding and more of a practical conversion.
..I'm struggling to tell whether this is a joke or not, with how serious you were there.. Regardless, I feel it may well be a case of not having time to paint them out. Things just slip through sometimes. And the other wheel may have just been thrown in representative of something else tbh.
Could have replace the repulsor lifts with wheels after they burnt out. Lots of junkyard engineers in Mos Eisley, making do with what they have lying around.
Ignoring that the today is April 1, franchises with the obsessive fan bases like Star Wars and Star Trek have to go about explaining every visual detain in everything. So a prop in the background over the years gets a ridiculous amount of story, even though it's in the background and not meant to be scrutinized.
It’s a budget base option , when parked repulsers need energy, the budget option offered landing wheels so when parked or moved around for services it doesn’t consume energy - that or one of the tech crew couldn’t be bother hence bumping stormtroopers
Great idea, I was coming to say the same thing. Plus, you really wouldn't want to get stranded in the desert without your vehicle - So if the repulsorlift failed, but one or all of the three turbines in back still worked, this could get you home in an emergency, or at least make it easier to tow the vehicle.
That's a really cool observation! It just tells me my original toy landspeeder with the three retractable wheels is actually functionally accurate to the movie version. I loved that soft suspension. It would glide like a Cadillac across cobble stone. I didn't get why it was even retractable though.
I like the idea of Luke modifying an old wheeled speeder. Just seems to be a thing a young farm Kid would do and ties him a bit more into being like his Dad. Engineering and all that
Wether or not it was intentional, it’s cannon now, which means it requires an in universe answer, and I think the one you gave is perfect. Luke always loved flying so I would understand if he were to retrofit an old car with repulsor-lifts to make it hover
Definitely intentional. A comment a bit further up said that the toy for the land speeder had retractable wheels with suspension. Whether they are just landing gear or actually powered is a different matter entirely, but the existence of the wheels was intentional.
I remember going to a museum exhibit as a kid centered around showing off all kinds of props, memorabilia and set design pieces from the OT and PT, and while they had everything from Darth Vader’s original helmet to Obi-Wan and Anakin’s lightsabers, seeing Luke’s original landspeeder is by far the most significant part of the exhibit that stood out to me as a kid. Obviously at the time I had no clue it was a wheeled vehicle for filming, but as soon as I saw it, I nearly toppled over some other people in front of me trying to get a look at it and begging my parents to let me ride it. It was amazing to see in person! And while I never got to ride in it (for obvious reasons), I made up for it a little bit years later by being able to sit in a screen-used snowspeeder from ESB while wearing Luke’s fighter helmet (a reproduction but still felt awesome to wear).
Um, no, they just overlooked the wheels because they assumed they would be obscured in the background. Just like the extension cords coming out of Obi-WAN’s lightsaber in ANH and Queen Amidala’s dress in TPM.
My personal theory is that should the repulsors suffer catastrophic damage of breakdown the wheels allow the speeder to keep moving but at a reduced speed.
I think it could be like one of the Back to the Future movies where they were converting old cars into flying vehicles. Doesn’t change everything, just recognizes that they could coexist. (Unless we say that A New Hope was an under-budget wonder and had mistakes they thought nobody would really see in 1977, which they wouldn’t. Even so, it does not address any mistakes made during the production of The Phantom Menace.)
I love how at first it sounds like a normal video, but if you listen closely, as the video continues you can hear a cheeky smile in his voice. Love it. Very good April Fools video! 😁
Ok, this is an actually interesting subject though. I know the "Same as Luke's Landspeeder" thing is a joke, but unless Wookiepedia & Disney+ changed their versions of this scene just for today to mess with us, that landspeeder DOES have wheels & there IS a random wheel down an alleyway. I guess someone had a landspeeder & when it broke down, not having the parts to repair the repulserlift, they switched them out for wheels. Does make you wonder how prominent wheels actually are in Star Wars...
Replacing the repulsor lifts with wheels was exactly what I thought. Mos Eisley has roads, don't need repulsers to get to the cantina and back home. Or to send a slave out to do a chore without worrying about them trying to get away, since the wheels get stuck in the sand.
@@jtjames79 Landspeeders aren't meant to hover that much off the ground unlike Airspeeders, so there wouldn't be much of a difference between it & a wheeled vehicle on a 2D plane. Still, that would make alot of sense. PLUS repulserlifts are known to create a ton of heat & in a "crowded city" on a desert planet they aren't ideal...
In the Phasma novel, two-wheeled motor-driven cycles appear in several chapters. They're said to have been made from speeder bikes with irreparably damaged repulsors, so the idea of replacing repulsors with wheels *does* have canonical precedence.
the wheels could be landing gear, allows the speeder to roll forward in emergencies and keeps the bottom of the speeder undamaged and clean not meant to be used for long periods of time kinda like a spare wheel
or it's pop-up “Landing gear” that you activate if the ground is unstable under you or you simply dont wanna scratch your landspeeder while not wasting battery with repulsors, you know in my head canon i guess i’ll go with just parking device :) great observation 👍 and great video 👍
@@leemiller7165 I mean that's still assuming it was the same vehicle (or that Luke didn't turn it into a whole project to restore it with new repulsorlifts)
I like the idea that it’s retractable landing gear and that it’s just a normal way of parking the speeder. After all, the only time he’s seen parking it in the film he’s in a panic to find Owen and Beau, so might not have bothered parking it properly.
How about the possibility that the animators thought “no one is going to see this”. Twisting yourself in to knots trying to justify or to retcon the 1977 landspeeder because of some half assed computer artists in 1999 is the height of stupidity. Even Lucas would have told them not to waste their time, they had more important things to do.
Well, with Luke living out in the boonies, with sand all about repulsors might be the more viable option? I'd still keep the retractable wheels though because that's more economical for parking and stuff, but that might just be me?
I was at opening night of Star Wars Episode 4 in 1977. In that film, and in the original VHS release (not re-touched)...you can actually see the wheels under the landspeeder! The original film was rushed out to theaters and the "paint out" of the wheels was poorly done, as well as several other special effect gaffs that were missed. When I purchased the first VHS version, immediately looked at the landspeeder shots to confirm that the VHS was released in the films original form. I suspect that prior to the DVD (digital) version release, Lucasfilm fixed many of the special effect "issues" in the original film version. In the later film, I believe the wheels are showing, due to a propmaster screw up, and then saving the cost of painting out the problem...since most viewers would not catch it. Cost will always trump attention to detail, if they can get away with it (and the director does not care).
My hypothesis is that the image showing the landspeeder's wheels in "The Phantom Menace" was an oversight by the film company that had a lot of details to wrangle. Repulsarlift technology was very well established in Star Wars at that time, and I doubt Lucas intended to re-imagine Luke's landspeeder as a modified jet car.
In A New Hope, when Luke sold his landspeeder (for a decent chunk of cash even), he complains about how his model isn't worth as much as it used to be after a newer model coming out, which I think implies that Luke's landspeeder is (or at least was recently) new, as opposed to being like 50+ years old. A simpler explanation might be that this is an older model that just had wheel-ish landing gear.
According to Wookieepedia, which draws a lot of its facts from official Star Wars reference books, the landspeeder seen in The Phantom Menace is an X-31 model. Luke's is an X-34, presumably a newer generation of the same vehicle family. The speeder that made Luke's obsolete was the XP-38, which was very recent at the time when A New Hope takes place.
Hey, Henry? What happened to the wind tunnel video you did on some of the Star Wars fighters? It's really interesting and I am curious as to what program you used. I don't expect an answer but I just wanted to ask.
My theory; those are rubberized landing gear. After all, how much sense does it make for a ground-effect vehicle like a landspeeder to just *set the belly down* when the engine turns off?
It would make sense for a backwater area like Tatooine to have durable vehicles that might need alternate forms of movement incase something decides to burn out or malfunction. Hover technology is common place around the galaxy, yet we do see tracked and wheeled vehicles in cannon. I would imagine that in areas like the core worlds Hover tech is so common that a malfunction likely is a minor issue especially if the vehicles have multiple backups and of course the vehicles can be parked with hover on or clamped to something. In a backwater or place where such technology is more a luxury and fixing is expensive. Alternate backups might be considered. Having wheels so your vehicles can rest without straining the hovor tech or to be in use should it fail sounds very reasonable and definitely should allow a person to maintain hover tech for sufficient amount of time or be be useful in a emergency situation. Its likely that Lukes speeder is designed for off roading or to navigate areas where hover technology wouldn't fare well like tight canyons or paths where a ground wheels would keep a vehicle control good unlike a hover craft which would likely drift as seen in the SOLO movie.
Eric made me think of the Transformers character Blurr who there is also a degree of uncertainty about him having wheels or not. But this does legitimise Tracked and wheeled vehicles we see else where in the Prequel era a little more too - such as the Turbo Tank. I had an additional thought like how Back to the Future Part 2 borrowed prop vehicles from other franchises entirely like The Last Starfighter and Blade Runner, I wonder if Star Wars has "appropriated some stuff" I think people did see the odd Indiana Jones prop here and there in places they shouldn't be - but those are likely an intentional joke. But I have to wonder what things were laying around in say the UK studio that got roped in to being used. It would be fun if there was an entire recognisable object from Doctor Who or some such in one of the Movies.
Whether or not it's the original hero prop or an extra backup prop they had on hand for the original film, I do find it fun to think that they used an old prop of an old, beat up vehicle, to represent the "newer" version of that same old, beat up vehicle in a movie made 20 years later.
Heres some head canon the wheels might be landing gear so the speeder doesn't have to constantly consume power for its repulsors. Probably very useful for a planet with little industrial capability like Tatooine.
Those "wheels" are galactic cinder blocks for when the repulsorlift is broken. That's why we don't see it moving. Watto's step cousin has been planning to fix it for 3.97 galactic years.
even with the date that the video was published ive always assumed that the wheels were for lower speeds and they retract and use the repulsor/jet engines at higher "cruising speeds" similar to an airplane
I was gonna say, considering luke's landspeeder for years was on display at some events prior to TPM, i doubt it was repainted, considering it's still in it's original colours to this day, it would be a very, well built replica of the one from ANH, i doubt lucasfilm would have repainted the original considering its' history
There might have been multiple landspeeder models/sets/props during filming. Just as they used multiple R2 droids during filming. One might end up in a museum while another gets repainted and put back on film.
I can't really explain what happened... but the Luke's Landspeeder on display in the Petersen Automotive Museum, for instance, (allegedly the original 1970s speeder vehicle) is almost 100% certainly the one that appeared in TPM. Both share weathering and physical damage (specifically in the radiator grills) that match ANH perfectly. It doesn't sound right, but it seems to me that the speeder was repainted green for TPM, and then repainted again to match the ANH coloration when it went on display. Other examples of Luke's Landspeeder, such as the one that appeared at the traveling "Where Science Meets Imagination" exhibit (and perhaps the one you have in mind), is a replica.
@@pwnmeisterage There is another landspeeder that appears in the film, which is the one that was attached to cleverly-hidden poles, or attached to a huge offscreen carousel to simulate a floating effect. None of the display versions I've seen seem to match the details from that prop, however.
@@ECHenry Thanks for the additional info, Sounds pretty interesting, to know that the original was pulled out of storage, repainted, then painted back (or possibly had the new paint removed, idk). But hey, it makes sense at the end of the day, props are reused all the time, hell they pulled out ROTJ costumes for the filming additional scenes for the special editions, i take it they must have had some kind of restoration/corrective work done to them.
Kinda reminds me of disney (or ILM, idk) Repainting the Rex animatronics from the original star tours, and using them as static props (i assume they're the aluminum originals, possibly backup animatronics, as their details are a perfect match, and seem a little too "gritty" to be recreations)
@@ECHenry I did not even think of the "roundabout" one, huh, maybe they kept both
I think it would be funny if Henry actually spent MONTHS making fake-looking wheels to put on the landspeeder in TPM JUST so he could make this video on April Fools.
is that what happened
So I just put on TPM to check and see, and no, he didn't they are right there in the movie.
@@Tensen01 Lies.
I think it’s an Easter Egg
I feel special to have added the 420th like to this comment
Landing gear.
Just, landing gear.
I mean, when you shut the thing off; when you shut the repulsors down, does it hover in the void a foot off the ground forever?
No.
And if you need to wheel it around while it's shut down, a nice BIG set of wheels makes the job a lot easier. Especially when you consider that repulsorlift technology makes finished road surfaces ancillary to a star wars city. You could stop that thing just about anywhere, on any terrain, and you might need to wheel it around a little in dirt, gravel, etc. Would suck to try that with skids.
naboo fighters didnt have landing gear, they literally just floated there
@@fresh2924
Must be some good batteries on those things. Or maybe like modern fighters, they have ground external power hookups.
I wouldn't expect the same thing from the space backwater equivalent to a Toyota Corolla.
@@fresh2924 Naboo Fighters are much higher in rank than a simple landspeeder
I wouldn’t doubt that because the Naboo military was much richer, they could make something much higher in quality and in efficiency than speeders
@@fresh2924
1. Those are royal star ships. They have the budget
2. We see them on racks in the hangar
Also Naboo fighter is plug in to the hangar's wall socket via it's 'tail' for recharge. That would surely keep it's repulserlift on hence keep it floating.
That looks like a classic Not My Problem on the part of the FX team.
"The wheels are visible."
"Erm, throw a couple of stock background characters in front of them."
[work order goes out to FX artists: 'Add two stock characters in front of green speeder'. The vital 'to conceal wheels' is omitted]
"In front of the speeder. Right. Done. Next shot."
Having done VFX, I am almost 100% certain this is the explanation.
It's like playing telephone
exactly
I think it’s an Easter Egg.
I recall in the Lord of the Rings, there's a scene where one of the characters has their vest vanish.
They shot part of the scene after lunch, and the first take, he'd forgot to put the best back on. The team spotted it after the take, so he got it back on and they did a bunch more reshoots. Problem was none of them were as good as the first take was, so they just decided to live with it and use the shot with the missing vest.
Maybe the wheels are landing gear. Presumably whilst doing maintenance on the repulsor lifts engineers would still want to be able to move the vehicle off the ground and it would be enormously fuel inefficient to have it constantly levitating, so some form of movable landing gear would be needed
Yes, my thoughts exactly. It has to have some kind of gear - it would be too low to get in and out if it just sat flat on the ground, and you'd need a place without rocks to set it down. It would also be impractical to have to set it down on a special stand. So the idea of retractable wheels makes a lot of sense, not just for maintainance but in general.
Seems reasonable to me. The wheels automatically pull up during normal use, deploy automatically when in park, and (possibly) can be manually deployed and are self-powered (or at least one is) for things like moving around a shop. The cornering on a landspeeder doesn't seem great, so maybe you go to wheels in tight confines (when the higher-speed jet-and-antigrav mode wouldn't help anyway).
This seems alot more reasonable than the idea that the model of speeder was once a fixed wheel vehicle. And this still fits the idea that Luke as an tinkerer would get rid of the wheels for weight reduction or some other hotrodding shenanigans
@@solidblockofsunrise yeah. I can't recall the dialogue exactly, but the Star Wars radio drama had a scene of Luke haggling with the guy he sold the speeder to. They never brought up it being a conversion. Interesting theory, but no. Landing gear for maintenance makes more sense.
Repulsorlifts don't use fuel. They're explicitly so energy efficient that they never need to be shut off.
They're made from stable space-time knots produced by black holes, and only need power when actively maneuvering. To station-keep and remain in one place requires very little power.
They're apparently so energy and space efficient that medical stretchers, chairs, observation droids, etc. all use them, needing next to no power to do so.
I love the "Luke is a genius mechanic" angle, as it fits so well with Anakin's tinkering in creating C-3PO and his own Pod Racer in the movies.
Also, both Luke and George Lucas were hot rodders, so it makes sense that the speeder would have aftermarket modifications.
Just like his father.
i kinda doubt that repulsor lift adapters are that difficult to install, i believe to remember that in one clone wars episode they moved some crates by attaching a device on them and they begun to float. would be no problem to just remove the tires, add a few generators in the new free space, and add repulsor lift emitters in strategic places and adjust the power output until the desired handling and drive feeling is archived.
@@zeux5583 I don't feel comfortable taking strange details such as the repulsor lift emitters from TCW at face value. They probably only created those emitters for the story because characters carrying the crates themselves would take more time and money to animate than what they had left over.
For a similar reason Captain Rex gained temporary super strength in the episode Trespass where he just slung the pantoran Chairman over his shoulder and then on his speeder, while the Pantorans limbs violently shaked around like a marionette.
I think the writers expect the audience to extend their suspension of disbelief to those elements, much like how in Rise of Skywalker First Order captain allegedly all have a Captains Medallion when personal authorization codes have always been stored in code cylinders before.
Or in Force Awakens when Snoke and Hux had a weird discussion and explicitly stated their motivation to destroy the New Republic to be that the Republic could help Luke if he returns, in spite of the rest of the story and world informing us that the First Order wants to replace the New Republic, to which the Jedi would usually be the factor that is preventing the villains from achieving this goal.
It would be easier to discuss fiction if everyone could agree that anything that was added to a story to facilitate easier understanding for its audience or to facilitate an easier production is not supposed to be taken as an unshakeable fact of the reality of the fictional universe. This would then make issues such as everything that people didn't like in the sequel trilogy into the actual discussion of taste that some people want it to be, but then also separate it from the discussion that lore fans want to be about how well the story integrates into the rest of the universe or how much it contradicts previously established facts, wherein we can collectively deduce what elements should or shouldn't be part of canon.
It all pales in comparison to the Singularity Engine. A true testament to Anakin's skill in engineering.
It took me way too long to realize this was an April Fool’s joke.
Still, I kinda appreciate it because it’s still interesting and informative, presuming the information in the video actually is true.
It was an April Fools joke? I just checked my Phantom Menace blu-ray and the speeder with wheels really is there. So is the wheel resting against a wall.
I think it’s an Easter Egg.
I like the Hybrid theory better lol. Wheels retract when the Repulsorlifts fail. Or when parked for a prolonged period of time (Don't wanna waste precious energy keeping that thing above ground when not in use). It's actually quite practical...
And “practical” is basically what anyone on Tatooine will go for, any time , any day.
Given that there are panels open or missing on Luke's vehicle in ANH, despite being on a desert planet (sand gets everywhere, as Anakin knows), it's not unreasonable to suggest that he tinkers with it, a lot.
There are a handful of things in ANH that suggest that Luke was an apt tinkerer... like, for starters, he's the one who reattaches Threepio's arm after the Tusken attack, rather than leaving Artoo to do it.
@@Dee_Just_Dee ..Not to mention the T-16...
Or that it broke down a lot. Luke may be a great mechanic but he's in the Outer Rim. The only place you could probably get parts would be a Jawa sand crawler and if a specific part would act up I doubt that Luke would want to take the time to pry off a panel every time it broke down.
Luke's landspeeder is the Star Wars equivalent of a shitbox
From my observations, it appears that the landspeeder in episode 4 is always depicted as being active and running. The one in this scene is depicted as being inactive and parked.
Both theories have their merits, but I believe it would be more along the lines of the fact that the repulser lifts take a lot of power, and there is no reason to have them constantly active when you are not using the vehicle. Similar to how you'd use an automobile engine, you don't run it when you park the car.
At the time when episode 4 was in development, it's depiction of the landspeeder was probably meant to imply that repulsors are some kind of natural "anti-gravity material" that somehow always floats at a constant height without the need for a power source. Not until The Empire Strikes Back do we see repulsorloft vehicles (snowspeeders and Cloud Cars) that are able to change their altitude, which suggests that repulsors are a futuristic gravity-defying technology that requires power to operate, but can be controlled.
Or maybe I'm just reading way too deeply into all this, and Luke just left his landspeeder idling because it was more convenient for a quick stop (or he wasn't sure if it could reliably start up again).
@@InventorZahran The repulsor lifts are made from material that are taken from the regions surrounding black holes. They contain sub-nuclear knots of space-time. These can distort nearby spacetime and thus create an anti-gravity effect. I'd liken this to how in our world the wings of an airplane or the shape of a helicopter's rotors distort nearby airflow as they move through it thus allowing them to generate lift. I guess you could say that wings are a sort of anti-gravity just like repulsor lifts are.
"There is absolutely no way that anybody doing that kind of work in that part of the frame could just miss..."
Come on. You're more familiar with the history of Star Wars special effects than that.
I like the idea of it having (retractable) wheels to stand on when it's parked so it doesn't waste energy on the repulsorlifts.
the toy had 3 retractable wheels, with springs shocks, deployed by moving a lever between the seats; they were just plastic discs though, no tires.
I can't tell weather or not this is an April fools joke.
Ironically, the Bond Bug would have been a perfect fit for the Star Wars Universe if they were to make a car
Spotting details in the background like this makes me wonder how zoomed-in Henry's watching Star Wars.
All joking aside, love these sorts of videos so much
Extra zoomed
Henry [sitting in a darkened apartment, his face illuminated by a computer screen], "Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance. Stop. Move in. Stop. Pull out, track right. Stop. Center and pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right or-and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute. Go right. Stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Gimme a hard copy right there."
I had a toy landspeeder when i was little and it had retractable wheels.
Everything else aside, I actually kind of like the idea that Luke took a really busted up vehicle and hot rodded it into a landspeeder.
A hover vehicle makes a lot more sense out in the dunes than a three-wheeled vehicle anyway, so it might be less of hot-rodding and more of a practical conversion.
It didn't happen
@@DiggitySlice No we decided it did now.
I've always wanted to see more landspeeders in Star Wars, there's a surprisingly limited variety of them on screen
Yeah, I feel like we're always getting to see speeder bikes, but rarely ever some normal landspeeders
@@hendrik7354 And you'd think with a world that has such a utilitarian feel you'd see a speeder truck
@@coltnichols4502 Well, in The Bad Batch we actually got to see a garbage truck on Pantora
@@hendrik7354 that's a fair point, forgot about that one
@@coltnichols4502 I think we saw a speeder truck in Solo on Corellia too
..I'm struggling to tell whether this is a joke or not, with how serious you were there..
Regardless, I feel it may well be a case of not having time to paint them out. Things just slip through sometimes.
And the other wheel may have just been thrown in representative of something else tbh.
Note the date today.
Could have replace the repulsor lifts with wheels after they burnt out. Lots of junkyard engineers in Mos Eisley, making do with what they have lying around.
Poe's law in action
Ignoring that the today is April 1, franchises with the obsessive fan bases like Star Wars and Star Trek have to go about explaining every visual detain in everything. So a prop in the background over the years gets a ridiculous amount of story, even though it's in the background and not meant to be scrutinized.
@@BryceByerley note how I phrased the first sentence
Retractable wheels would make sense… coming to a stop, or loosing power and the wheels would drop and lock into place for safety/storage?
It’s a budget base option , when parked repulsers need energy, the budget option offered landing wheels so when parked or moved around for services it doesn’t consume energy - that or one of the tech crew couldn’t be bother hence bumping stormtroopers
Great idea, I was coming to say the same thing. Plus, you really wouldn't want to get stranded in the desert without your vehicle - So if the repulsorlift failed, but one or all of the three turbines in back still worked, this could get you home in an emergency, or at least make it easier to tow the vehicle.
Such a great channel you have my dude. No one picks apart these movies like you!
I had always wondered how they parked them, whether it was wheels or some kind skid. I now know.
That's a really cool observation! It just tells me my original toy landspeeder with the three retractable wheels is actually functionally accurate to the movie version. I loved that soft suspension. It would glide like a Cadillac across cobble stone. I didn't get why it was even retractable though.
Cars have been in star wars since 1994, in Galaxy Guide 10: Bounty Hunters.
Cannon indeed! I really love your work.
Shout out to Mos Eisley for having achieved a mostly car-free city though.
I like the idea of Luke modifying an old wheeled speeder. Just seems to be a thing a young farm Kid would do and ties him a bit more into being like his Dad.
Engineering and all that
Wether or not it was intentional, it’s cannon now, which means it requires an in universe answer, and I think the one you gave is perfect. Luke always loved flying so I would understand if he were to retrofit an old car with repulsor-lifts to make it hover
Definitely intentional. A comment a bit further up said that the toy for the land speeder had retractable wheels with suspension. Whether they are just landing gear or actually powered is a different matter entirely, but the existence of the wheels was intentional.
Landing gear. Landspeeders need them when they are not powered.
It's landing gear or wheels for taxiing around town, then it converts to a speeder for high speed travel. 😉
They most likely didn't think that anyone would notice!!
This is great! Well done! 😁
star war
I remember going to a museum exhibit as a kid centered around showing off all kinds of props, memorabilia and set design pieces from the OT and PT, and while they had everything from Darth Vader’s original helmet to Obi-Wan and Anakin’s lightsabers, seeing Luke’s original landspeeder is by far the most significant part of the exhibit that stood out to me as a kid. Obviously at the time I had no clue it was a wheeled vehicle for filming, but as soon as I saw it, I nearly toppled over some other people in front of me trying to get a look at it and begging my parents to let me ride it. It was amazing to see in person! And while I never got to ride in it (for obvious reasons), I made up for it a little bit years later by being able to sit in a screen-used snowspeeder from ESB while wearing Luke’s fighter helmet (a reproduction but still felt awesome to wear).
I live for these videos
I forgot that April first isnt over yet. GOD DAMN YOU HENRY!
Um, no, they just overlooked the wheels because they assumed they would be obscured in the background. Just like the extension cords coming out of Obi-WAN’s lightsaber in ANH and Queen Amidala’s dress in TPM.
I love this channel!
I can't believe they painted the original.😵
It's like doodling a mustache on the Mona Lisa and they destroyed its dollar value
Ironically the toys and merchandising always have the wheels on that same way
I guess you could say the one in the video clip was an old speeder no longer functional and can't 'hover' propped up on tires.
Imagine if Luke somehow found an engine out of a Toyota Hilux or something and made it so it could actually be driven around as a car.
Maybe they are some sort of "landing gear" so that the repulsorlift doesn't have to run constantly
My personal theory is that should the repulsors suffer catastrophic damage of breakdown the wheels allow the speeder to keep moving but at a reduced speed.
I think it could be like one of the Back to the Future movies where they were converting old cars into flying vehicles. Doesn’t change everything, just recognizes that they could coexist.
(Unless we say that A New Hope was an under-budget wonder and had mistakes they thought nobody would really see in 1977, which they wouldn’t. Even so, it does not address any mistakes made during the production of The Phantom Menace.)
I love how at first it sounds like a normal video, but if you listen closely, as the video continues you can hear a cheeky smile in his voice. Love it.
Very good April Fools video! 😁
Ok, this is an actually interesting subject though.
I know the "Same as Luke's Landspeeder" thing is a joke, but unless Wookiepedia & Disney+ changed their versions of this scene just for today to mess with us, that landspeeder DOES have wheels & there IS a random wheel down an alleyway.
I guess someone had a landspeeder & when it broke down, not having the parts to repair the repulserlift, they switched them out for wheels. Does make you wonder how prominent wheels actually are in Star Wars...
Replacing the repulsor lifts with wheels was exactly what I thought. Mos Eisley has roads, don't need repulsers to get to the cantina and back home. Or to send a slave out to do a chore without worrying about them trying to get away, since the wheels get stuck in the sand.
@@jtjames79 Landspeeders aren't meant to hover that much off the ground unlike Airspeeders, so there wouldn't be much of a difference between it & a wheeled vehicle on a 2D plane. Still, that would make alot of sense. PLUS repulserlifts are known to create a ton of heat & in a "crowded city" on a desert planet they aren't ideal...
In the Phasma novel, two-wheeled motor-driven cycles appear in several chapters. They're said to have been made from speeder bikes with irreparably damaged repulsors, so the idea of replacing repulsors with wheels *does* have canonical precedence.
the wheels could be landing gear, allows the speeder to roll forward in emergencies and keeps the bottom of the speeder undamaged and clean not meant to be used for long periods of time kinda like a spare wheel
It's more likely that its along the lines of "landing gear" because imagine the energy needed to hover something thats not in use
or it's pop-up “Landing gear” that you activate if the ground is unstable under you or you simply dont wanna scratch your landspeeder while not wasting battery with repulsors, you know in my head canon i guess i’ll go with just parking device :) great observation 👍 and great video 👍
That's a crazy detail! George did it just to mess with our heads!
No Lucas film still has the mold for the land speeder and they still make them. It is not the same one, but it is from the same mold.
Could also be that the repulsorlifts broke down and whoever owned it ripped them out and put wheels in
Except that in universe that would have been the wrong order. TPM happened before ANH.
@@leemiller7165 I mean that's still assuming it was the same vehicle (or that Luke didn't turn it into a whole project to restore it with new repulsorlifts)
You cheeky lad echenry
I like the idea that it’s retractable landing gear and that it’s just a normal way of parking the speeder. After all, the only time he’s seen parking it in the film he’s in a panic to find Owen and Beau, so might not have bothered parking it properly.
I love this kinda fan in-universe explanation
i think that its supposed to be landing gear/ supports so that it can be rolled around and support itself when turned off
How about the possibility that the animators thought “no one is going to see this”. Twisting yourself in to knots trying to justify or to retcon the 1977 landspeeder because of some half assed computer artists in 1999 is the height of stupidity. Even Lucas would have told them not to waste their time, they had more important things to do.
Well, with Luke living out in the boonies, with sand all about repulsors might be the more viable option? I'd still keep the retractable wheels though because that's more economical for parking and stuff, but that might just be me?
I was at opening night of Star Wars Episode 4 in 1977. In that film, and in the original VHS release (not re-touched)...you can actually see the wheels under the landspeeder! The original film was rushed out to theaters and the "paint out" of the wheels was poorly done, as well as several other special effect gaffs that were missed. When I purchased the first VHS version, immediately looked at the landspeeder shots to confirm that the VHS was released in the films original form. I suspect that prior to the DVD (digital) version release, Lucasfilm fixed many of the special effect "issues" in the original film version. In the later film, I believe the wheels are showing, due to a propmaster screw up, and then saving the cost of painting out the problem...since most viewers would not catch it. Cost will always trump attention to detail, if they can get away with it (and the director does not care).
Wait, tires are a notable thing in this universe?
Surprised that this isn't actually an April Fool's joke.
Oh, now I can't wait for ECH to do a video on all of the instances of tires on the Star Wars franchise!
At first I was confused whether or not you were serious. Then I saw when this video was uploaded. Great bamboozle! XD
Car Wars
we should definitely consult jeans guy about this
I was under the impression that these things just glided around on a layer of petroleum jelly.
That was more informative than I thought was allowed on 4/1.
Wheels.
With THAT kind of work?
In THAT part of the frame?
Localized ENTIRELY to this tiny scene in Mos Espa?!
"Yes"
You coudl have talked more about wheels in star wars in general
Another time perhaps
@@Angelos_K the best vehicle in star wars has wheels, the juggernaut
Logical thought here, what if that speeder is broke down, and it's on rollers?
Everything out of this man's mouth is canon for me!
My hypothesis is that the image showing the landspeeder's wheels in "The Phantom Menace" was an oversight by the film company that had a lot of details to wrangle. Repulsarlift technology was very well established in Star Wars at that time, and I doubt Lucas intended to re-imagine Luke's landspeeder as a modified jet car.
Pure brilliance
great video. This is from a former patreon supporter. I hope you are still working at STO
I was expecting something more shocking, like "IT'S A COOKBOOK!"
But with seriousness, cool detail catch!
I believe the one with wheels was an earlier model, while the one Luke got was an upgraded one that could actually hover.
In A New Hope, when Luke sold his landspeeder (for a decent chunk of cash even), he complains about how his model isn't worth as much as it used to be after a newer model coming out, which I think implies that Luke's landspeeder is (or at least was recently) new, as opposed to being like 50+ years old.
A simpler explanation might be that this is an older model that just had wheel-ish landing gear.
According to Wookieepedia, which draws a lot of its facts from official Star Wars reference books, the landspeeder seen in The Phantom Menace is an X-31 model. Luke's is an X-34, presumably a newer generation of the same vehicle family. The speeder that made Luke's obsolete was the XP-38, which was very recent at the time when A New Hope takes place.
Hey, Henry?
What happened to the wind tunnel video you did on some of the Star Wars fighters? It's really interesting and I am curious as to what program you used. I don't expect an answer but I just wanted to ask.
My theory; those are rubberized landing gear.
After all, how much sense does it make for a ground-effect vehicle like a landspeeder to just *set the belly down* when the engine turns off?
It would make sense for a backwater area like Tatooine to have durable vehicles that might need alternate forms of movement incase something decides to burn out or malfunction. Hover technology is common place around the galaxy, yet we do see tracked and wheeled vehicles in cannon. I would imagine that in areas like the core worlds Hover tech is so common that a malfunction likely is a minor issue especially if the vehicles have multiple backups and of course the vehicles can be parked with hover on or clamped to something. In a backwater or place where such technology is more a luxury and fixing is expensive. Alternate backups might be considered. Having wheels so your vehicles can rest without straining the hovor tech or to be in use should it fail sounds very reasonable and definitely should allow a person to maintain hover tech for sufficient amount of time or be be useful in a emergency situation. Its likely that Lukes speeder is designed for off roading or to navigate areas where hover technology wouldn't fare well like tight canyons or paths where a ground wheels would keep a vehicle control good unlike a hover craft which would likely drift as seen in the SOLO movie.
Eric made me think of the Transformers character Blurr who there is also a degree of uncertainty about him having wheels or not. But this does legitimise Tracked and wheeled vehicles we see else where in the Prequel era a little more too - such as the Turbo Tank.
I had an additional thought like how Back to the Future Part 2 borrowed prop vehicles from other franchises entirely like The Last Starfighter and Blade Runner, I wonder if Star Wars has "appropriated some stuff" I think people did see the odd Indiana Jones prop here and there in places they shouldn't be - but those are likely an intentional joke.
But I have to wonder what things were laying around in say the UK studio that got roped in to being used. It would be fun if there was an entire recognisable object from Doctor Who or some such in one of the Movies.
Whether or not it's the original hero prop or an extra backup prop they had on hand for the original film, I do find it fun to think that they used an old prop of an old, beat up vehicle, to represent the "newer" version of that same old, beat up vehicle in a movie made 20 years later.
I mean, it *could* just be a similar looking vehicle, but I do like the idea of Luke taking and old land vehicle and converting it into a speeder.
Meanwhile me watching the complete saga of Star wars while watching your videos in the opening screen
That is so cool, I never thought about that before.
I like the idea of Luke doing a resto-mod
That's great. I like the idea of a retractable undercarriage for landing.
Heres some head canon
the wheels might be landing gear so the speeder doesn't have to constantly consume power for its repulsors.
Probably very useful for a planet with little industrial capability like Tatooine.
Fascinating observation 🤔
Ah, the Phantom Menace was years before EP4. Luke's speeder was just another modern version of the land speeder without wheels.
Short time, too many VFX shoots.
"This is will pass" someone thought.
I can't tell if this is an April fools joke or not.
Open for interpretation
Those "wheels" are galactic cinder blocks for when the repulsorlift is broken. That's why we don't see it moving. Watto's step cousin has been planning to fix it for 3.97 galactic years.
The levels of mental gymnastics on this is just.... fucking hell.
"The wheels demand a canonical answer" Do they, though?
They just didn't expect people to Scour over every inch of the screen
Dude who worked on that shot in TPM probably just went "Eh, no one will notice."
He was wrong.
even with the date that the video was published
ive always assumed that the wheels were for lower speeds and they retract and use the repulsor/jet engines at higher "cruising speeds" similar to an airplane
Lol, halfway through this I had to exit full screen and check the date the video was released