Long Live The Greeble
If you take a look at the Millennium Falcon’s exterior, it is sprinkled head to toe in random pipes and ducts and do-dars that the original model makers referred to as “Greebles”. Long before the advent of CGI, these details were mostly made from random parts of model kits that were cut out and glued to the exterior of the main shape in a process still referred to as Kit-Bashing. Parts of miniature tanks and fighter planes were utilised to give life to what would have been a fairly lifeless spaceship or building. For the last four decades and beyond this technique was used in everything from 2001 A Space Odyssey to The Mandalorian.
For those who worked in the medium of traditional model making, it is no secret that the advent of CG has all but extinguished the humble Greeble, at least in its physical form but the body count may not end there.
For me, the Greeble is a symbol. On its own, it may well be an unused section from a miniature anti-aircraft gun but when glued to the surface of the Death Star or the hull of Discovery One the Greeble becomes a small nugget of story, it becomes life. The audience might ponder: “what does that thing do?” Or “I wonder what is in those pipes” And most importantly they would never receive an official answer, our brains would fill in the gaps and we would get to play a small part in the world-building.
Enter — The Kessel Run, perhaps the most famous greeble in the whole of Star Wars. Sure, the fabled Han Solo flex might not have been a tiny piece of a model Messerschmitt, but it served the same purpose from a story point of view. It was a piece are arbitrary dressing that gave the story life and weight. Audiences watching A New Hope were handed something they could have ownership of, they were trusted to be creative. There are many of these story-greebles in sci-fi films from around this time from the Space Jockey in Alien, to the “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion” in Blade Runner, all nuggets that were entrusted to the audience to have fun with.
This is the part where I convey my dismay that over the last ten years or so, those nuggets have been slowly taken from us thanks to the onslaught of prequels to some of our favourite stories. The Space Jockey, The Kessel Run and Dumbledore’s 30’s no longer belong to us, the creators took them back as their trust in us diminished.
Sure that is all very over-dramatic and in honesty non of these things keep me up at night, but I think it is worth noting that this might be the more heartbreaking casualty of the CG revolution. There might be a lesson to writers here, if one’s story idea is the naked body of the Millennium Falcon or the Nostromo, we should not ignore the humble Greebles we have at our fingertips. In a world where information is so abundant, never have storytellers had such free access to the little plastic bits they can stick to the side of their story. Podcasts, documentaries, Medium articles, the list is endless. You never know when a YouTube channel about long haul shipping infrastructure might inspire something peripheral in your sci-fi story that gives it life. Long live the Greeble!
