While it might be hard to envisage, the TIE Fighters of A New Hope could ahve been purple. Had George Lucas passed a carton of Ribena while he was filming at Elstree back in 1976? Perhaps he was a fan of Willy Wonka’s dress style? We’ll likely never know, but Gizmodo still investigate this surprising knowledge nugget.
Gene was told by one of the Star Wars model makers that the initial color of the TIE fighter was “a shade of maroon”—which in theory is a mix between crimson and brown. In reality, it looks like a dark pinkish purple on these shots. He points out that “this was an interesting choice as everything in the movie appears to be a different shade of gray or off white. Technically, it was an interesting choice as well since a maroon model probably wouldn’t be as prone to bluespill as a gray model.” I think that by “interesting” he really was trying to say “hideous.”
According to Gene, the team abandoned Lucas’ original idea after doing some composition tests. Apparently, the purple-maroon hue made the TIE Fighters to blend quickly into the black space background, as they went away from the camera. Gene started to investigate and ultimately found proof of the color test in some old wedges—”short pieces of film that test various exposures or lighting configurations and aren’t meant for projection.”