LEGO learned from ‘the struggle with Chewbacca’ when designing C-3PO
The LEGO Star Wars team took lessons from ‘the struggle with Chewbacca’ when approaching this summer’s brick-built 75398 C-3PO.
Joining 75379 R2-D2 and 75371 Chewbacca on shelves next month comes 75398 C-3PO, a 38cm-tall recreation of the protocol droid that stands to scale with its two brick-built companions. And it’s already been better received than last year’s Wookiee, which arrived to a decidedly mixed response from the LEGO Star Wars community.
That’s perhaps no surprise given droids are easier to recreate in bricks than organic creatures, but C-3PO still has human-like proportions, so success was never guaranteed. What helped the LEGO Star Wars team was that Chewbacca’s designer César Soares actually mentored C-3PO’s designer Jackson Hughes, in what César calls a ‘full circle’ moment, and Jackson was able to learn from César’s approach to the Wookiee.
“Jackson drew some feedback from the struggle that I had with Chewbacca,” César tells Brick Fanatics. “He drew up some bullet points like, how is the figure standing and what pose should we do? The only pose you could have for C-3PO is the one we have, so right from the beginning that was the goal. But then should it have a base, should it not have a base, and if it has a base what kind of base?
“But it was very clear from the beginning that he would need a base because his feet are very small, so for it to be able to stand properly on the shelf we needed a base, and we opted for the desert sand base because that goes back to the scene where he’s with R2-D2 [on Tatooine].”
Even if figuring out the initial boxes to tick with Threepio was relatively straightforward, César says it was still a ‘massive challenge’ to bring him to life. And yet it was still an easier process than he had faced a couple years prior with Chewbacca – just as piecing together 75398 C-3PO is simpler than muddling through Chewie’s exhaustingly brown part selection.
“Brick-built figures are very hard to get right, but droids are more aesthetically pleasing and easier to build,” César says. “I’m going back to Chewbacca, which I’m sure is very hard to build – everything is brown, everything is very similar elements, while C-3PO has a much bigger palette of elements.”
So Threepio isn’t brown: great. But if anything, his gold plating was arguably a trickier prospect for the LEGO Group thanks to the way that colour behaves in the moulding process.
“We had the idea of doing a brick-built C-3PO for quite a while, but there were a few limitations because of the colour scheme of C-3PO being gold,” César explains. “As you might know, [the LEGO Group] tries to have a very strict quality on the elements and the colour, and the flow lines on the gold elements can vary wildly from one element to the other. So that put us off for a while. But we eventually decided to just try and do it.
“We had to do a lot of testing with the elements to see how the flow lines would go and which ones were acceptable. So it was a huge task. And, of course, we had to do some compromises with the colour – there are some dark tan pieces here and there, because some of them are just not possible to mould in gold, or not advisable to mould in gold.”
Compared to something like 76191 Infinity Gauntlet, the proportion of dark tan to gold in 75398 C-3PO is actually fairly minimal. But this protocol droid relies more heavily on pearl gold, matching Threepio’s current LEGO Star Wars minifigure, than the drum-lacquered gold of Thanos’s glove. The result is a droid that’s still shiny if not totally reflective, and incorporates details including his silver right leg and exposed mid-riff.
With all that effort poured into figuring out the precise flow lines of each of the pieces – and how the gold elements work in tandem with one another – there was never any room to consider an even bigger protocol droid, to scale with 75308 R2-D2, which launched in 2021 and is still available at LEGO.com right now. And that’s what ultimately led to 75379 R2-D2 arriving on shelves earlier this year.
“That would be very hard to do in terms of stability,” César smiles. “It would also be a very high price point. So we didn’t even consider that. But when we were developing a smaller R2-D2, we were developing C-3PO at the same time to be in scale with R2-D2, that’s for sure. You can’t have one without the other.”
75398 C-3PO is available to pre-order now and launches at LEGO.com and in LEGO Stores on August 1. Head here to check out our full review of the LEGO Star Wars 2024 set.
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- I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.
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