fon wrote:
I have been out of the loop for a very long time, so correct me if my history is wrong. But wasn't there a concensus that the base ESB and ROTJ masks came from the same UK mold and therefore the same? Their visual differences were later realised by the way the final finishing procedure was done by the prop guys.
Or was there a completely new ROTJ mask mould made later? I know Brian Muir has a ROTJ that was production made too.. however I didn't know about there being a new mask mould for ROTJ. I thought maybe the dome was remoulded for ROTJ.
Eitherway it's very intetesting. Sorry to go off topic.
Welcome back to the loop, Fon.
No the ROTJ masks come from a mold made of some kind of template mask that resembles the base mask for the ESB but is probably at least a couple more generations down. For example the template for the ROTJ masks could have been a casting taken from an ESB mold which is why this ROTJ looks generally like a TM ESB mask. But I can tell size-wise it is proportionally smaller (ROTJ masks are smaller proportional to the dome than ESB or ANH). So there would have been a ROTJ-specific production mold and this helmet by all accounts appears to be from that mold, although of course I'm sure the investigation continues. And this would not have come either from the mold the TM ESB came from because the TM ESB is a very specific ESB-derived casting related to the other UK-mask type castings but itself is unique in the mask in the eyebrows while its dome is from the original ESB production mold. The VP and the ROTJ masks do not share the same kind of eyebrows the TM has. But yes they all are derivative of the same UK lineage, but that doesn't mean they all came from the same UK mold, just that there was a common ancestor from that mold that gave rise to that lineage...maybe a few pulls from that mold led to different lines but the idea is the same.