Ralph McQuarrie
Died: March 3rd (age 82)
Profession: Designer
Known for: The entire look of Star Wars, and thus a good deal of what science fiction in general looks like. He was with George Lucas on the production of the series from before it was even actually in production, turning Lucas’s ideas into conceptual drawings that were used to sell studios on the idea. Thus, without McQuarrie, there would probably be no Star Wars at all, and who knows what the pop cultural landscape would look like in that case. He also worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the original Battlestar Galactica, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET.
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