May the ABS be with you

SEATTLE — Almost four decades since a little film called “Star Wars” first brought viewers to a galaxy far, far away, the story and characters George Lucas created live on in popular imagination.

With a seventh installment to the saga on its way this year, many of costumes from first six films are showcased in a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition, its first stop the EMP Museum in Seattle.

Some of the franchise's most memorable visuals — a soldier's grimacing helmet, a droid's polished shell, a villain's shadowy silhouette — were achieved using plastics.

The soldier

To craft the ultimate soldier — the stormtrooper — costume makers produced dozens of sets of identical white battle armor, vacuum formed in ABS. With variations appearing in all seven “Star Wars” films, the costume has become a seminal image of the “Star Wars” franchise.

When “Star Wars: A New Hope” (as it was eventually retitled) was being developed in 1976, vacuum forming was not commonly used to form movie costumes, Laela French, senior manager of archives and exhibits at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, told Plastics News. Costume makers sought out a plastics manufacturer in England — “Star Wars” was filmed at Elstree Studios near London — to help bring their plans to life.

“For the stormtrooper helmets, they went out and found someone that worked in plastics but not in costumes,” French said. “This person in England was making ponds and other forms of molding plastic, and so they kind of consulted with them. … ‘Star Wars' was probably one of the first to really revolutionize costuming using vacuum formed ABS plastic in that sense.”

Early stormtrooper helmets were molded in khaki-colored high density polyethylene, but the material, once painted white, did not provide the look and durability George Lucas and costume makers desired, French said. Although some of the HDPE helmets do appear on film, a different version made from white ABS was used for close-ups. Subtle differences in appearance between the HDPE helmets and ABS helmets can be observed on-screen, due to challenges molding undercuts in ABS vs. the more malleable HDPE, writes Brandon Alinger in his recently published reference book “Star Wars Costumes: The Original Trilogy.”

Costume makers continued to use vacuum forming to produce stormtrooper armor for subsequent films and promotional tours. The armor of fan-favorite Boba Fett also was vacuum formed, supplemented with a glass fiber-reinforced plastic helmet and backpack.

Following “A New Hope”, the techniques developed by “Star Wars” costume makers were adapted for use throughout the film industry, French said. Today, costume armor is commonly produced using 3-D printing, with iconic characters like Iron Man and Robocop completely created using that method.

The droid

“Star Wars” costume makers turned to plastics again to translate humanoid robot C-3PO into a wearable costume. The droid's polished shell looks like metal, but the costume is actually a variety of materials including glass fiber-reinforced plastic and vacuum formed ABS.

Using largely plastic instead of metal reduced the costume's weight, helping mitigate the discomfort of long days spent filming in the desert, French said.

“It wasn't so much about cost, it was really about weight,” she said. “Because once [the actor] was dressed in his costume, he then was stuck in it all day. … All they could do was take his head off and on, because it was too long to dress him and undress him.”

C-3PO's head and torso are glass fiber-reinforced plastic, metalized to achieve a brassy finish. The costume's original shoe covers and trunks, vacuum formed for “A New Hope,” were swapped for more flexible urethane foam in subsequent movies, according to Alinger's book.

Another well-known droid, “trash can on wheels” R2-D2, was actually built from aluminum for “A New Hope.” In subsequent movies, a lighter-weight fiberglass prop was created, lined with an interior shell to protect the actor working inside from raw glass fiber ends.

The villain

Covered head-to-toe in black armor, Darth Vader has become one of the most recognizable images from the “Star Wars” universe. Costume makers used fiberglass to create the villain's dramatic flared helmet, which attaches to a plastic face mask painted black and gunmetal silver. A second version of the helmet was created for scenes that required a greater range of vision, French said.

“Even though they had these bubble lenses that were plastic for [the actor] to see through, his vision was still very restricted, so they made one helmet where underneath the cheeks and the mouth area is actually a type of plastic that is black but you can see through it. And so it gave the actor more range of vision for all the stunts,” she said.

Though Darth Vader is briefly unmasked on-screen, the character's enduring appeal is largely inextricable from his iconic armored look, French noted; in effect, the costume becomes the character.

“Darth Vader then becomes this great icon for evil. And he's masked, which makes it even better, because it's not an actor's face, so it's more generic … an iconic image,” she said. “And same with the stormtroopers, the faceless evil. And I think that is why it's with us to this day and we reference it time and time again, and kids growing up kind of get it intuitively and organically, and also rediscovering ‘Star Wars' even now.”

Keeping the story alive

Once filming has wrapped and costumes are retired, museums often take on the task of preserving these icons for future generations. For a public that demands authenticity in even its newest relics, original artifacts are irreplaceable.

“Our goal is really to do very little,” French said. “We don't want it to be a copy of itself, we want the original integrity of the piece there. So we'd rather reglue or reattach an item rather than replace it and remold and make a new one.”

The Lucas Museum's plastic items are fortunately some of the more stable pieces in the collection, French said. But there is an intrinsic challenge in preserving artifacts much longer than their intended lifespan.

“Our museums — and most museums — are collecting increasing amounts of plastic now as plastic becomes more and more and more common,” Odile Madden, a research scientist at the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute, told Plastics News. “And once something enters a Smithsonian collection — it could be a plastic disposable fork — but if it were to enter a Smithsonian collection, we transform its service life from a few hours to in perpetuity. So things in the Smithsonian collections we store in theory forever.”

Madden studies the long-term stability of plastics and works to develop non-invasive, non-destructive methods of identifying the material an artifact is made of. Since plastic is a relatively young material in museum years, museums are still learning how some plastic materials will behave over time, she said. And because plastics come in a myriad of formulations, each with their own unique vulnerabilities, choosing the best preservation methods is not always a simple process.

“The first challenge we have is actually understanding what the plastic is,” she said. “What they used in 1976 for the first Star Wars film is not necessarily what they'd be using today. So trying to figure out what the polymer is, if there are plasticizers added, what kinds of stabilizers, fillers, pigments — all of that is something I look into. And I do that by working in the laboratory with analytical instrumentation.”

Museums tend to focus on preventative conservation to slow the process of degradation, Madden said. By controlling conditions in storage and in galleries — heat, humidity, light levels and dust all impact the deterioration process — museums will ideally delay or reduce the need for repairs, which carry their own set of complications.

“If the plastic should break or distort, it becomes really a challenge to intervene after the fact,” Madden said. “So for example some of those stormtrooper helmets are made of HDPE … it's very hard to adhere to polyethylene, so we wouldn't want a situation where we had that cracked. And some of these plastics are actually quite difficult to repair, so we'd like to stop any kind of shrinking, cracking, distortion from happening in the first place.”

As emblems of culture, movie props and costumes take on meaning beyond “plastic armor” or “fiberglass helmet,” Madden noted.

“The movie studios — Lucasfilm and others — they make immense amounts of plastics in their costumes and their props, and these become the movie. The story becomes sort of immortal, and the look of the thing becomes somewhat immortal,” Madden said. “But what happens to all these props and costumes over time? And which ones should be preserved and which ones shouldn't and how should they be preserved?

“There's this interesting interplay of objects that were meant to make this intangible art project — a movie — but then the object takes on value of having been a prop in the movie, but also being the embodiment of [the world of the movie]. So like the stormtrooper costume. It is the stormtrooper.”