Producer Brian Volk-Weiss talks of his love of Star Wars with StarWars.com, discussing his hit series The Toys That Made us and the excellent Behind The Attraction which focused on the creation of Star Tours and Galaxy’s Edge.
After seven years of pitching, The Toys That Made Us was finally picked up by Netflix, telling the behind-the-scenes tales of the world’s biggest toy lines.
And the series kicked off — season one, episode one — with Star Wars in December 2017. The Star Wars episode opens with a recreation of the moment that Kenner designer Jim Swearingen visits Industrial Light & Magic to see this new space movie they’re making, and that he’d be making toys of. They’re shooting the sequence from A New Hope in which the Death Star pulls in the Millennium Falcon. Swearingen stands in awe as he sees the Millennium Falcon model, in front of a blue screen, for the first time — a total audience surrogate — before the show cuts to the real Swearingen, today, recounting his feelings. For a generation that loved Star Wars and Star Wars toys, it’s beautiful.
“It was magical. First of all, we shot in the real building where ILM was for A New Hope,” Volk-Weiss says, though he admits it wasn’t the exact location. “My joke about Toys That Made Us, the entire thing was an excuse to replicate ILM. Like, that’s all I wanted to do. The rest was a bonus.”
