E.T. the Extra Terrestrial and the creator of Star Wars toys

29:43Michelle actually considered quitting early on, but it was a chance meeting with civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King who convinced her to stay because of the huge significance of her role. She was also supported by Roddenberry, as she told Professor Richard Clay in 2017. He was one of the most brilliant men on the planet and if somebody came up and said that doesn't make sense, he'd hold a conference with them And he said, that comes from your limited point of view. I'm talking about the big picture. What were his ideals like? In a word, we are one. Your performances are so strong, partly because you really feel the message that Gene Roddenberry's sharing.

30:32Absolutely. because we were doing something that we really believed in and you had something to hold on to, to hold up.

30:48Just a year earlier, in 1967, a law banning interracial marriage was lifted by the US Supreme Court. And only months before this broadcast, a TV scandal erupted when British singer Petula Clarke touched the arm of black actor and musician Harry Belafonte during a duet. The show's sponsor insisted it be cut, but the American programme makers refused, sparking international headlines. So you'd think an actual kiss would blow people's minds. I'm so frightened, Captain. I'm so very frightened. That's the way they want you to feel. makes them think that they're alive. And they said, when the kiss went on, you know, this was an interracial thing.

31:35And I simply said, yeah, because that's what my whole family is. They wrote my life. Michelle's paternal grandfather was a white man from America's South who married a black woman. She explained the storyline of that famous episode that was called Plato's Stepchildren in her interview with Gloria Hunniford. Captain Kirk and Spock are beamed down on a planet and they have ulterior motives for the crew of the Enterprise. And they bring down, beam down Uhura and Nurse Chapel and for their own amusement they dress them as goddesses, mine is like a Cleopatra, and the men as well, and put them in an arena, and through their kinetic powers, which they can force you presumably to do something against your will, attempt to make us make love before them in this vast arena, like the Roman gods that they fashioned themselves after.

32:42And ours was to resist forcing us to do anything to their liking. And thus the trauma of Uhura and Captain Kirk embracing and speaking about how dare they do this to us. And finally, dramatically, he clenches her in his arms and they yield. And was the kiss good? He's a good kisser. In her autobiography, Nichelle revealed that they ended up filming two versions, one with an on-screen kiss and one with the kiss taking place off-screen, but they deliberately messed up the lines on that one, so the shot with the kiss would have to be used. But it wasn't until 1993 that British audiences would get to see that kiss, because the sadistic treatment towards the characters was deemed unsuitable for its early evening TV slot.

33:48Star Trek would become a worldwide cultural phenomenon airing in 120 countries by the late 1970s Was there an outcry in the States at the time? Was it a very racist thing? Well, the networks were really concerned about putting that on because of the southern market what the South might think that they would not show it and oddly enough, the entire country showed it and they received the largest amount of fan mail they'd ever received to that point and it was almost all very positive.

34:33Michelle Nichols, who was truly a trailblazer, she was even recruited by NASA to encourage more women and African-Americans to become astronauts. She died in 2022. That was Rena Stanton-Sharmer guiding us through the BBC archives, and clips from Star Trek, which was produced by Desilu Productions and Paramount Television. To demonstrate the global appeal of science fiction, we're taking you next to 1982 and into the heart of Turkish cinema. Two years earlier, a military coup had thrown the country into disarray and state censorship was stifling its movie industry. The film director, Chetin Inanc, however, inspired by the Star Wars movie franchise, was still determined to create a cinematic space opera for his home country.

35:19As Louis-Harnett O'Mara explains, it was never going to be easy to make something that would measure up to the original American classic. We didn't live in a world anything like that. Star Wars got it right, but they had the right technical facilities, they had money, they had all the necessary resources. In an interview recorded in 2018 with Turkish film historian Ali Murat Gyevn, which you're hearing now, Inanç remembers creating ambitious character costumes and sets. Then things started to go wrong. Days before filming begins, the villains' costumes degrade under the sun. Our biggest mistake was taking those guys in fur costumes out into the sunlight.

36:01And when the crew leaves the set to fix the costumes, another disaster strikes. While we were busy working on costumes, a storm hit our filming location. Nothing was left of the sets. The young watchman came and told us all the panels and everything had blown away. It would have been impossible to make it all again. The budget was substantial compared to our usual one. It was essentially the budget of two films. We had exceeded it now and had no idea what we were going to do. What results is a movie some regard as the worst ever made. Others call it Turkish Star Wars. Inanc named it Dünyaya Kötar and Adam, the man who saved the world.

36:46Cetin Inanc was born in 1941 in Istanbul's Ortaköy, a neighbourhood on the bank of the Bosphorus Strait. Istanbul is an enormous city. I am from Ortaköy, one of the best districts. His family was hard up, but his imagination was rich, raised on a mixture of superhero comics and fantasy movies. Going to the cinema was a luxury when I was a kid. Looking back, those were formative times. Just as I was figuring out where I came from and who I wanted to be, fantasy films started to appear. The first movie I ever watched in my life was The Conquest of Constantinople, a Turkish movie about Sultan Mehmed II, The Conqueror of Istanbul.

37:32I watched that movie seven times. I used to constantly play out scenarios in my imagination, wondering how a person becomes a superhuman. Inanç's answer came sooner than expected. As a young man, he was approached by his brother's former colleague from a building site. The colleague had pivoted into moviemaking and wondered if Inanç might be interested in helping him out. He introduced me to a famous director, but I realized the work wasn't for me. I solved the whole weird hierarchy and the way things were run, and I just took off. A couple days later, work got back to me that they were asking about me again.

38:10He was asking, where is that kid Chatin? He's got potential. Bring him here to work as my assistant. Marriage, conscription to Cyprus, and a brief stint studying law all intervened. But Inanc had already arrived at the career in which he'd spend the rest of his life. Work was challenging but regular for Inanc through the 1960s and 70s. High taxes on foreign movie ticket sales drove audiences towards cheaper domestic film screenings across Turkish towns and cities. In Izmir alone, there were 10 or 12 open-air cinemas, each holding about 3 ,000 people. Yusil Samstreet in Istanbul became the epicentre of Turkey's film industry.

38:54I'm talking about 300 to 400 films being made each year. And Inanç, nicknamed the jet director for his prodigious output, played no small part. From roughly 1971 up until about 80 or 82, we made more or less 60 to 70 films. We were shooting 10 to 15 films a year. Inevitably, the films lacked the same polish as their Hollywood counterparts. All the stories were basically adaptations. There was not enough 35mm negative film stock, not enough money. Sometimes even paying a screenwriter was too much. You had to find the cheapest camera and cameraman. You had to use the cheapest crew. There were other producers making big productions.

39:40But since we didn't have those resources, this was the path we had to take. Either we did it this way or we just walked away. Often these conditions demanded some creative solutions. For instance, in many night time shootout scenes. I used those toy cup guns, the kind kids play with, for the white sharks. They actually produce a better muzzle flash than real guns. In many films, if a gun didn't actually fire, we would fix it in the studio, we would scratch the negative with a pin and insert bullet traces on the emulsion. And sometimes, working as fast as he did, Inanj resorted to what he calls borrowing.

40:23I used to shoot a movie in two days. I would start in the morning and by the evening of the second day, the film was finished. How did we finish it? We would insert footage from other movies for the missing parts. In my film Bombalovski, the one about flying men, we shot, shot, shot, but for the flying scenes, we just used footage from another film. Everyone was doing that back then. With no enforceable copyright laws for foreign movies, filmmakers in Turkey regularly lifted characters, scenes and soundtracks from other movies to use in their own. This practice gave rise to a whole genre, Turkish copy cinema.

41:02Titles include Turkish Superman, The Turkish Exorcist and Three Giant Men, a crossover that sets Captain America and a Mexican wrestler against a Spider-Man-like villain. This, as it turned out, was Inanc's solution after his set for Turkish Star Wars blew away. I went to the theatre and watched Star Wars twice. I thought to myself, man, how are we going to swipe a 35mm distribution copy of this? One night, Inanj bribed a cinema projectionist for a copy of George Lucas' Star Wars, produced by Lucasfilm, and promised to return it before anyone noticed. I took the copy I had obtained to the studio.

41:42We quickly selected five scenes set in space and made new copies from dossiers. The next day, I added these scenes borrowed from Star Wars to the appropriate places in the film. He projected the original Star Wars clips onto a screen behind his actors, who wore borrowed motorbike helmets for their space pilot attire. These background scenes came out noticeably squashed, however, as Inanj didn't have the correct lens for his projector. Undeterred, he brought to life an elaborate storyline featuring mummies, wizards and a golden brain, splicing in elements from more than a dozen films. That film contains clips taken from 16 different movies.

42:22Cicaret faces, space imagery, shrines, pyramids, and so on. Since Star Wars is so well-known, everyone assumed the footage was from there. But we actually used material from several other films, my friend. This material included scores from Indiana Jones and Battlestar Galactica, along with fight scenes from the fantasy classic The Magic Sword. On release, the movie was a national blockbuster, Its success helping Inanç and his team to buy an office and pay off their loans. Today, it's seen as the prime example of Turkish copy cinema, which has since disappeared as copyright laws have become more prevalent.

43:02Dünyaya Kütaren Adam, or Turkish Star Wars, now has fans all over the world, some ironic and others sincere. As far as Inanç is concerned, though, even if it's a failure, it's a triumph. They call our film the worst. If being the most, the ultimate, is what matters, well, we are the ultimate too. Louis Hanet-Omara was our guide through an archive interview with Çetin İnanç, originally recorded by the Turkish movie historian Ali Murat Guven in 2018. It was an Ember production. Next, we go back to the original Hollywood Star Wars directed in 1977 by George Lucas. It was intended as a big showpiece bit of filmmaking, transporting the viewer to exotic new worlds, and a drama played out on an epic scale.

43:57History tells us it succeeded, but it also changed toy marketing forever. Rowan Bridge has the story. Boxes would come down the aisle to a toy store, and kids were ripping through the boxes before the stuff even got on a peg. We'll come back to that moment later. That voice you heard, though, was Jim Swearingen. Fifty years ago, he was a toy designer at Kenner, a mid-sized toy company in America's Midwest. They were always looking for inspiration for toy ideas, and one day a movie script came in that had already been turned down by the big beasts of the toy world. Jim took it home. As I'm reading through the script and just all the descriptions of the action, you know, there's Han Solo, the pirate.

44:43Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, man. And I'm not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money. Luke, the young starstruck guy. I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm here to rescue you. And then when it came to the dogfights and chasing the Millennium Falcon. That's Han Solo's spaceship. I just knew we had to do something with it. I couldn't wait to give it to Dave Okada, my boss, and say, go in your office and shut the door. Take a couple hours, read through this thing. We got to do this. So he followed direction. He went in and read the script and came back out and said, you're right, we got to do it.

45:17But it was a massive risk. It was difficult from the point of view that it was a movie. Could be in and out of theater in weeks, maybe months. It was science fiction. And the toy buyers at that time had been turned off to science fiction because of Star Trek, because they still had a lot of Star Trek on the shelf. And it was opening in May, which is completely counter to the toy business. We sold toys from September to December, and here was opening in May. Despite the risks, Jim was convinced the toys would sell, but it wasn't the action figures he had faith in. It was the spaceships. Now, I was 27 while I was doing Star Wars, and I always relied on my 7-year-old or 8-year-old self to come and look for toy ideas.

46:02What would I, as a little boy at 8 or 7, what would I want to play with? And the easiest thing was when they started talking about the X-Wings and the TIE Fighters and the Millennium Falcon, which we really didn't know what they looked like or anything. But when they're talking about the dog fights... I got him! Great pass! Don't get cocky! That was the essence of the toys that I thought an eight-year-old boy would want to be doing. So that was the star of the show. And the figures and the storylines and stuff were kind of second to that. At the time, most action figures like Barbie or G.I. Joe were 30 centimetres tall.

46:39But that would have meant an X-Wing that was 90 centimetres long, way too big for a seven-year-old to have a dogfight with. The figures would have to be smaller, and now Jim had to come up with some prototypes. I had to really quickly come up with a way of showing the characters, and I relied on Fisher-Price toys, The Adventure People. Fisher-Price presents The Adventure People. They happened to be about the right size, and they gave me something to start with. They're about nine and a half centimetres. I would use my X-Acto knife and body putty to mock up the characters. What's an X-Acto knife?

47:16It's a very sharp knife for cutting. It has a razor blade sharp blade on it. So I'd hack things together and the body putty was easy to mock things up. They became the first 3D examples of the characters. Princess Leia started out as a nurse. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, they all were lumberjacks and Fisher Price firemen. became Darth Vader originally. The project's going forward and Jim goes out to California to meet with Lucasfilm. Then it's like, OK, well, do you want to see Dailies? What they've shot in the days before they all get reviewed. So I was like, I'm going to see the movie. So we're just walking through and they go into this room full of ugly old couches.

48:03We sit down and the lights go down and I'm psyched now. I'm thinking I'm going to see the Death Star blowing up. And all I see is a black screen with some twinkling lights down the one corner. It's like blinking colour. Somebody in the back says, hey, that's great, that'll work. And the lights go back up and they all leave. I was just like so disappointed. If the preview was disappointing, the finished product certainly wasn't. Jim got to be at the first ever public screening of something called Alaska. I went out to San Francisco to the North Point Theatre. none of these people knew anything about it.

48:42They'd been told about a premiere for a film called Alaska. It was just the greatest fun, because you sit down and the lights go down, and when Lucasfilm popped on, and then Star Wars, you can tell people are talking to one another, like, what the, you know, what's this? And then as the crawl started, so in a galaxy far, far away, I say, you could hear there's some people that can't read without speaking. And they're all very quiet about it, but you can kind of hear a little galaxy far, far away. And the crawl finishes, and then the blockade runner comes by, and the excitement started building.

49:23And then when the destroyer started coming overhead, the subwoofers started coming up. And when the engines were in view, they had the subwoofers. You can feel it in your seat. And then we were off to the races.

49:41You know, now they're into it. OK, we're not seeing Alaska, we're seeing something else. And when the Death Star blew up, there were people out of their seats, cheering, and that virgin audience were the only ones that really experienced Star Wars completely unaided. Great. Jim's convinced they have a hit on their hands. Toys will fly off the shelves. The only issue is there's no way they'll have the product ready for when the film comes out. It's being released in May 1977, but they won't have figures ready until the following year. It just takes too long to develop them, even with Kenner throwing everything they have at it.

50:21People are, like, throwing out ideas, what we could do. Somebody came up with the idea of basically marketing a promise and what now has become the early bird. We sold a pack at... Jabraka, Luke, and Princess Leia. They are the Star Wars Early Bird set of figures. These action figures are not yet available, but this Star Wars Early Bird certificate package was in stores. A big envelope promising the people that purchase it the first figures. We were going to sell a promise. You'd get the first four figures if you bought this thing and sent in the coupon. It wasn't so much the numbers that we sold, But the brilliant thing about it was that every TV station would run a storyline about this outrage.

51:07Can you believe Kenner Toys is selling a cardboard envelope promising that you get your Star Wars figures? And we couldn't afford all the energy in that PR. Whoever actually did it deserves great credit for Star Wars being such a success. Because it could have backfired terribly. I mean, you could have had parents going, why are you charging me for a piece of cardboard? My kid wants a real toy for Christmas. It could have gone either way. Luckily, the movie was still in the theatre. I mean, if the movie had been gone like a normal cycle, opened in May and it closed in even August, it would have really fallen flat.

51:48But Star Wars was in the theatre, over a year in first-run theatre, so it worked out pretty well. When the toys finally hit the shelves, it was pandemonium. boxes would come down the aisle to a toy store and kids were ripping through the boxes before this stuff even got on a peg.

52:10Almost 50 years on now, looking back now, what does it mean to you? It really is exhilarating for me to see how long and how well Star Wars has done. I was really just a teeny-weeny part of a galaxy far, far away.

52:40A galaxy now populated by countless Star Wars toy figures and spaceships. Jim Swearingen was speaking to Rowan Bridge. Today, some of those original toys from the 1970s can fetch hundreds of dollars at auction. Finally, for this week's Sporting Witness, we veer away from the world of science fiction and return to Earth for a bit of good old-fashioned sporting history. And for this, Umar Doriswamy takes us back to 1981 and a piece of extremely famous football commentary that has amused English sports fans for 45 years. Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher, your boys took a hell of a beating.

53:21Your boys took a hell of a beating. That's Norwegian commentator Bjerger Lillian. I know from that it's perhaps hard to tell if he's angry or happy, and we'll hear more of it in a bit. But trust me, Bjerger is very, very happy. Norway at the time were footballing minnows compared to their opponents, England. But Norway had just beaten the English 2-1, and it's his commentary that has become part of sporting folklore. But don't just take my word for it. Let's cross to the BBC's football correspondent, John Murray. It must be one of the most famous pieces of sporting commentary and I am old enough to remember when it happened originally and the wow that it made.

54:05It became a real thing of the time and was widely, widely quoted. Told you. Thanks John. He recorded that in Atlanta airport in the United States on his way to cover, guess what, the Norway-England World Cup quarterfinal in Miami. See, this programme isn't just thrown together. More from John coming up, but let's get the insider's view. I'm really, really happy that his work is remembered and stands out. I think it's quite obvious that that piece has passed the test of time as well, because it's being played all over again. You know, it's a big pleasure. It's really nice to know that his work is appreciated that way.

54:45It belongs to the people now, so that's good. That's Marius Lillian, Birger's son. He was very passionate about his work, but very quiet and quite a different person off the mic when he was at home. A lot of presenters or artists switch off when they're on their own. He was like that. He was really chilled at home and a different person when the red light was on and he was on the mic. It was like being in two different worlds, really, because we grew up in just a very average Norwegian neighborhood. And I had my friends, my school time, and my everyday life was like everyone else. But then on the weekends, I used to go with him to the matches and spend time just beside him in the commentator's box.

55:31When it was in Norway and not too far from home, I went with him from four or five years old until I was like 16, 17. I went every weekend. In 1981, the Norwegian team were completely different to the footballers of today. Only a handful of them were full time. So playing England in a World Cup qualifier was a major event for the country and for 16-year-old Marius. England was a big deal in Norway. We had match of the day on television in Norway from the early 70s. So English football has been a big, big thing in Norway for decades. So that was probably the biggest match in Norwegian football history at that time.

56:11But how do you prepare to commentate for a match that big? Still waiting for his flight is John. As a commentator, I imagine that he did think, what will I say if Norway beat England? But probably thought, well, that's not going to happen. Marius? He never scripted anything. He just prepared in the morning on the match day. He went for walks with a dog and preparing different angles and just preparing himself, but he never scripted anything. So I think with this, he'd just been going through his head. What if the impossible happens and we beat England? Where do I go? I think he had a sort of an idea, but it didn't script anything.

56:49I've got to ask, what was your dog's name? Beauty. So thanks to Beauty's daily exercise, Bjerga was ready for the game. Marius went with him. I was watching the game from the roof at the old commentator's box at the stadium in Oslo. So I was just standing just a few feet above him. The match kicked off and in the 15th minute, Brian Robson scored for England. But then Norway equalised 21 minutes later and then went ahead just before halftime. Norway had to hold on, defending for the whole of the second half. Marius, sensing that an unimaginable victory was close, moved closer to his dad. I was standing just beside him.

57:28I heard the whole thing.

57:34England, Champions Föderland, Lord Nelson, Lord Bebebrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, we have slotted them all together, we have slotted them all together. Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher, your boys took a hell of a beating. Your boys took a hell of a beating. Maggie Thatcher, Norge has shot England with football. It was as if Bjerger had been harnessing all of Norway's underdog passion and relief and unleashed it on national radio, shouting that Norway were the best in the world and repeating it several times, yelling that it was unbelievable to have beaten England, the home of giants.

58:25Starting off in Norwegian, he listed the great and the good of British political and cultural society before really hitting his stride. He then switched to English, which he was fluent in, making it even more powerful when he belted out the words...

58:42It's the random selection of the names that is so beautiful about it as well. The fact that Lord Beaverbrook is mentioned alongside Henry Cooper and Clement Attlee. It's a brilliant selection of famous English names and that makes it. But the names he shouted didn't really register with his teenage son. I didn't think too much of it back then because he did things like that and my mind was on the game like everyone else I guess. Did you know who those names were? I knew some of them, of course. I wasn't surprised. I mean, he was a big reader. He was a news reporter before he became sports reporter.

59:24So I wasn't surprised. I didn't know all the names, though, but I know the newest one, the people that were alive, I knew. 45 years later, the words, your boys took a hell of a beating, is a well-known phrase still used to insult any English sports fan. Even now, that piece of commentary stands forever, really. And I know people have tried to imitate it, but of course, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and the original is always the best. Final call for John Murray. John Murray to the boarding desk. Thanks, John. Hope you catch a flight. But it took a while for Marius to realise the cultural impact his father's words had had.

1:00:06I was working for a period of time in the music industry then, And I remember meeting musicians from Scotland or Ireland or something like that. And they just told me about it. They didn't know it was my father, but they knew that piece of commentary. Of course, it's not too difficult to imagine that it went down well with the Scots and the Irish. So that was the first time I really knew that this piece had travelled. And watching his father work since he was a child clearly had an impact on Marius. He's now one of the directors of NRK, the station Bjerga broadcast on. That was, of course, big, big inspiration for me.

1:00:44I wanted to be a journalist from the time I realised I couldn't be a professional footballer. So that was a big inspiration. And I started doing radio when I was like 18 or 19. I've been doing that a long time as well. Although they were underdogs in 1981, Norway can now boast they have one of the best strikers in the world. What would your dad make of Erling Haaland? I've been thinking about that quite a lot, actually, because that would be something he just dreamt of. My dad worked at a time when Norway wasn't particularly good at sports, not good at any sport, really. The whole Norwegian sports revolution came in the 90s after he passed away, so it's a bit sad that he never got to enjoy the times when Norwegian footballers and athletes was world class because that wasn't the situation back then.

1:01:38Definitely not. Mariusz Lillilian was speaking to Uma Doriswamy and our thanks to NRK Sport for letting us use Bjorga's original amazing 1981 commentary. A moment which, despite the obvious humiliation at the time, has made English football fans smile ever since. That's it for this edition of the History Hour. We'll have another selection of first-hand stories from the past for you next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson. From all of us here, thanks for listening. Goodbye. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there.

1:02:14We weren't going to ask permission. We were just going to do it. It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. He started to write a story about how he came up with the idea for the red and yellow cars. I got to go. We cried a bit. We laughed a bit. It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Supporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:02:59we explore how our underwear has changed throughout history and whether TV depictions of Regency-era ladies in their lacy underwear are truly accurate. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.