Phil Tippett talks about the original 1980 Wampa! 

Phil is so comfortable in his own skin, his disposition has zero pretension or doubt. Everything he says comes with a sense of confidence and pragmatism. He doesn't seem to suffer fools lightly and has the resumé to not have to. Even his old interview in the 80s were the same. lol

Phil Tippett working on a new stop-motion film is nice to hear!

Phil is a legend! I saw Empire in theaters the summer of 1980 as a nine year old kid and it changed everything for me in how I saw movies.

Watching this with the little stuffed wampa toy I've had since I was a little kid.

“It looked like something out of ‘Lost in Space’, only worse!” LOL… 😜

We can confidently mention him in the same breath as Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen Nothing less than a legend

Now I REALLY feel like you’re taking home a real part of Star Wars with your out of this world wampa!!

Glad George still listened to people then.

Build a Bear has a Wampa with a Velcro arm that rips off. The Perfect combination of innocence and GORE. All hail the Wampa!!

What a legend. Just seems like a really chill guy. Cool. :D

the Wampas are so cool. After-all, the Abominable Snowman is one of the coolest cryptids. There's a Wampa on Hoth trying to survive with one arm. I think he's managing well enough.

All I know is when I saw the Wampa pop up into the frame as a seven year old in 1980, it scared the daylights out of me!

I read the novelised version first (that I ordered from Weekly Reader) and really wanted to see the scene where the probe droid encounters a wampa and where one bursts through a cave wall in the rebel base. So when I finally saw the film I was like, "...oh, okay."

George needs people like Phil to keep him on the right path.

Phil is my hero

Great interview, Great upload, i love all his work, Have you seen, Mad God.

Please do many more of these interviews. If you can, also do interviews about the making of the character outfits, especially the Imperials.

Excellent, what a great interview, I wish this was part one of many.

This is great! Thanks for the great info! Also, love the contrast in the facial excitement between Tom and Phill lol

My "Christmas" tree is a white Yeti Tree and I have my original Hoth Wampa action figure as one of the ornaments. Originally, he was just "ice creature" but TOYS NEED NAMES! All hail the Wampa!!

Great interview!

Love this interview!

I swear Phil looks like the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

This video is Electric!

Phil Tippet is a great creator of Stop Motion which to me is reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen back in the 50s of early Sci fi (horror) movies.

Amazing interview! It's really nice to hear Phil's non chalant perspective and to learn alittle bit more about their process back in the day

No cgi really in 70s to early 80s only magical guys who were highly skilled and imaginative

awesome interview! watching these interviews always makes me feel like a kid again watching from star wars to jedi video. seriously Tom, you need to put all these interviews together for a fun blu ray video someday.

I did a monster suit with the bucket legs for All Wrapped Up. I built a bicycle helmet into the head for when I fall over. In the final movie, it doesn't wind up walking at all. We got to location and it had rained the day before. The buckets just stuck into that mud.

Legend

Phil, you’re the reason I have a Lego wampa on my shelf. Thank you.

I always wondered why the Wampa in the extended Empire scenes looks so different to the other Wampa. I think the lack of ears is the biggest and most obvious discrepancy, but the proportions, fur color, facial,features and “horns”, etc etc. so they really don’t look like the same animal at all. And if -as some fans have suggested - that it’s 2 different Wampa,then why the heck do they show the new earless Wampa eating and hearing Luke, then Luke reacts to it coming -quick shot to the Wampa with ears striding toward him and Luke slices off its arm and then cut back to the new earless Wampa roaring with its arm sliced off at the shoulder joint and appearing like its in the same part of the cave where it was eating in the first shot, not in the cavern where Luke was! And I know this guy wasnt responsjble, but this made me think of it and thought he might know and could have shed some light on it if the interviewer had asked. They should have given the new Wampa ears and made it to look just like the OG Wampa (why they didn’t is just bizarre given they had the reference material and knew it would be spliced in!) or at the very least co,platelet replaced the Wampa footage with the new less scary Wampa. I think it just annoys me how much George Lucas changes his originals which is fine, but doesn’t fix obvious annoyances (like when Luke activates his lightsaber in Ben’s hit the first time…why do they keep that freaking jump shot in there? FIX THAT! It’s the first time we see a lightsaber and it gets lessened by the obvious frame jump! Smooth it out with cgi so the attention is on the saber and Luke’s reaction to it, not the missing frames!)

Wow! You got to talk to the great master! What a thrill!

Phil is in the same league as my other hero in old school special effects....rick baker!

One tidbit about Phil Tippett that I thought was really cool was that when they were doing The Force Awakens, they brought back Phil to do the 3D chess board again. But what makes that even neater is the fact that the scene you see in the movie is a direct continuation of how the game ended in A New Hope! Most people would not notice it, but I was pleased to find this out. Speaking of the Wampa, I always thought it was odd that Luke didn't stay in the cave after killing the Wampa for protection from the elements. They should have had the cave collapse or something so that Luke had a reason to abandon it. [trivia: When they do a close-up of Luke's lightsaber stuck in the icewall, supposedly you can see "Made in New York" or something on the bottom of the handle, but even on blu ray I can't quite make that out. Either that's not really true or they figured that it would never be visible on VHS which was the only media available at the time of the film.

You guys are talking about the really tall guy in a Wampa suit and on small stilts trying to drag a dummy of Luke in the snow and it wasn't working out for them, as the guy kept losing his balance and falling over. Years later I wondered, since it was just the Wampa and Luke in the frame and there was no sense of scale in that shot and it was all just white snow all around, why didn't they just use a regular sized guy in a suit dragging a small version dummy of Luke? I thought of that years later, but I'm surprised they didn't think of that then. Is there a reason that couldn't have been done?

I can see the resemblance.

Cool interview, I wonder if Phil knows who voiced the Gorthok whom he animated in Coneheads?

Great video...👍

If you like that, you'll LOVE this - I have an entire Yeti bathroom and there are MANY versions of the Wampa. I kid you not. I am a geek and I OWN IT.

If you think the battle scene at the opening was pirates, check out the scene when the pretorians are attacking proximo's dwelling.

Is your Wampa replica an actual puppet that can be operated or is it just a prop?

Such a cool bastard

Phil Tippett telling George Lucas that something looks stupid and he changes it says everything about Phil's contributions to Star Wars. There weren't many that could pull that off especially toward the prequels. He needed more like Phil as the years wore on.

Isn't that big guy with the hammer in Resident Evil 8 a wampa?

Sounds like circumstances forced them to use the "Hitchcock strategy". It's not what you show, it's what you don't show. Don't show too much of the monster. Imply it with quick edits and scary sounds, but keep it just off camera, and let the audience's imagination scare themselves. Brilliant little touch that helped make Empire the masterpiece it is. Spielberg was forced to use the Hitchcock technique when filming Jaws... of course the "updated" version of Empire ruins the whole effect by needlessly showing the wampa.

The original cut where you barely see the wampa is great. The newly produced shots ruin the magic. And they look stupid.

Work on some new stuff. How about Alan Dean Foster's? Y'all stuck on memory lane.

Why are they even talking about "George?" He didn't direct the movie (and he didn't write it, either). Irvin Kirshner was the director, Lucas wasn't really involved with the movie in any capacity