Adam Savage Unboxes Max Rebo Concept Maquette!

hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a show-and-tell um from a friend of tested we have covered tom spina uh and his regal robots team's work many times here on the channel among other incredible illustrious things he has built in this space my chewbacca mask is one of my favorite objects i just covered it in another video and in this box is one of the latest offerings from regal robots from tom spina's team and it is part of their archive series where they went up to the lucasfilm archives and were able to both see and scan props that are in the archives for replications and this one has one more degree of connection to us here at tested because it is a maquette for return of the jedi that was sculpted by the legendary phil tippett um so yeah regal robots archive collection max rebo concept metcat replica so what a concept maquette is is you know the script is the first thing that gets written in a film and then once everyone's got the script they're like okay there's the scene in jabba's palace and there's a band what does the band look like what are the names of the characters in the band and at some point someone says okay if max rebo is one of the band members what the hell does max rebo look like and phil tippett goes away and makes some scopes and comes back with something and they eventually choose a thing but this is part of the creative process of making a movie is the sculptural maquettes and it's one of my favorites because you often get to see there's the the label you get to see the the first pass that was made of the thing it's like it's the origin story for the aesthetic problem solving that led to a movie that you love right that's what i find really thrilling about this so i've got uh he released a tauntaun a couple of years ago i've got one of those in the collection and i have one other which i'm drawing a blank oh the rancor was the rancor spinas no that was somebody it was yeah that ranker was incredible so what they got to do was to go up to the ranch yeah there's a max rebo in here they got to go up to the ranch they got to scan the original and i don't want you to think that because they have access to digital scanners that that makes their job really easy um it only oh dude oh my gosh oh so pretty ah wow wow this is gorgeous so here we have max rebo with a bunch of i don't know oranges or juggling balls some sort of planetary fruit or meat who knows uh within the star wars universe let's see this is an addition of only 250 pieces each one of these is hand painted and hand numbered um again i want to say don't fall into the trap of thinking that because they had digital scanners that that makes this a really easy thing to replicate at this level of beauty and subtlety because that just gets you in the digital scan and the 3d print from that digital scan just gets you in the room it is not like oh you get to scan it and like pull a lever like a star trek replicator and out comes the prop no no no no um there's always going to be artifacts from the scan whether it's a laser scan or lidar scanner or photogrammetry there's always going to be artifacts there's going to need to be cleanup and that cleanup is really really tricky to get right when you get it right when you have your print and you have your final piece then you've got to paint it and they're trying to replicate if memory serves a phil tippett paint job from 1982 right and they're trying to give it the same kind of feel that phil had so this is this is phil working from maybe a drawing maybe the briefest of sketches or maybe and this is one of the ways that george liked to work phil would just be sculpting character after character after character and george would sometimes place them in the movie oh yeah this guy should be that guy that guy should be over here um one of the let's just talk about the figure itself this is a fascinating a fascinating uh physiology we've got here we have a being with super long ears we have a being with super long ears this wonderful proboscis this big fat snout it's almost like a like a hippo but then he's got these two legs and there's webbing here this is great and how like how does he run what does that look like and he's got this hilariously pendulous ass that is just settling itself on i look i know that well if you ever meet phil tippett you might think of him as a little bit of a grouchy old man because that's definitely the sort of affect that phil can uh can bring but he has a really really wonderful deep and dark sense of humor and of the absurd and to be honest it's informed all of phil's work throughout his whole career mad god his film which is just getting released this this month i think and which went through the festival circuit is a masterpiece and it really demonstrates at the deepest possible level because it's such a personal project of phil's that sense of humor and that sense of the absurd but i think all of that is extent in his characterizations of the star wars characters this is gorgeous i mean it really is something alien i don't feel like i have any connection between this and animals that i've seen on earth and yet it feels authentic and honest biologically i don't feel like i'm seeing a thing stuck on a thing i don't feel like i'm you know i just did a live stream in which someone was asking me what it's like to build from concept art and the answer i gave was longer than i'm going to give now but it is about not just building what the what the art director drew but interpreting it and when phil is making something like this he's making a character but he's also got to make that character an authentic thing in and of itself and that's where artists like him really excel because they bring all this physiological knowledge not only that phil's in addition to being an amazing sculptor a master animator and so how things move is deeply invested into his sculpts the physiology of their movement so while i ask how does this thing run i'm quite sure phil has a clear idea of what this thing looks like when it runs i think that he's putting that kind of potentiality and possibility into every piece and now you have the opportunity to collect one of these and put it in your collection and frankly it's masterful the paint job is beautiful and subtle i'm seeing at least three shades of blue plus a shade of purple uh it is washed out in some places that feels very much i mean these are hand by tom spina's team i can tell you having done high-level painting for models uh when you're trying to do a museum replica like this it is hairy scary high-wire act kind of work you get to be the tiniest bit interpretive but you really want to hit these notes that make it feel like like i said like it is a thing in and of itself and since phil sculpted and painted this the regal robot painters have to bring it that paint job to that level of fidelity to make it feel right and they really really did this is just gorgeous i'm gonna i've got a lovely phil tippett collection building in my in my i i curated into the office where i do most of my zoom meetings here at the cave because i like to stare at these things while i'm in phone meetings and max rebo is now the newest addition to that shelf i really i can't get enough of his coin slot here of his rear end this is just there's something so hilarious to me about yeah about the shapes and the gravity and the weight like this is a character he's really sitting there what a treat what a great piece of film history um thank you guys for joining me for this show and tell links on where you can obtain one of these are in the description below and uh yeah it's a good thing to bookmark uh regal robots and toms being a site because they are always always making new and amazing star wars stuff in addition to all the other things that they do it's masterful work tom

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 47,119

Keywords: tested, tested adam savage, star wars, adam savage star wars, regal robot, show and tell, star wars celebration, inside adam savages cave, max rebo, celebration 2022, star wars replicas, max rebo figure, max rebo action figure, max rebo full body, star wars (film series), regal robot star wars, unboxing action figures, star wars maquettes, phil tippett, phil tippett star wars, phil tippett max rebo, Max Rebo Band, cantina band star wars

Id: tcl8njbjvmI

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/penguinosaurus]

Max Rebo with an absolute dump truck

[u/zeroanaphora]

god that's cool. Ages ago I made a 3D Baby Max Rebo using what scarce photos of that maquette existed. Almost included the weird skin flaps but couldn't grok the topology.