Help me find the "Space Lords" Explosion Sprite Source

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Holy shit, it's a Tie Fighter explosion from Star Wars?! Mind blown! (pun intended) Excellent find, @coinopper!
 
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Is that actually the same explosion though?

Comparing to the one in the OP, I'm not seeing it. They look different to my eye. Similar, but not identical.
 
Is that actually the same explosion though?

Comparing to the one in the OP, I'm not seeing it. They look different to my eye. Similar, but not identical.

By comparing the shape and the way the flames move about in the footage, I can tell it's definitely the same explosion; however, the sprites do look slightly different, especially in color. I think this is due to several things:

1) whoever made the explosion sprites probably ripped them from VHS or laserdisc so that probably softened some details
2) adjustments to brightness and contrast were possibly used to help make the details in the fireball more noticeable
3) maybe a color overlay was used as well to make the fireball more orange? Color palette limitations are a factor here as well

Even though the original source is now understood to be Star Wars, this still leaves some unanswered questions. I think it's still plausible that this explosion showed up in some clip art or stock footage library (more than likely without licensing). I also think it's possible that multiple devs coincidentally had the same idea about extracting this explosion since it's easy to matte it out, give it a transparent background and insert it into a game.

Regardless, it's nice to finally get an answer on the original source. I can sleep more soundly at night now. :p
 
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Holy shit, it's a Tie Fighter explosion from Star Wars?! Mind blown! (pun intended) Excellent find, @coinopper!

The more I looked at that gif you made, the more sure I felt I've seen it before somewhere else, and not in a game. I immediately thought it was from Battlestar Galactica, but BG reused so many of the few s/x shots that were made, I quickly realized it wasn't from that. 80scoinops mentioned Firefox, so I looked through it, but there's only a few explosions in that, and none of them were it. I then went back to Star Wars and first thought it was from the speeder bike chase, but it wasn't. For a second I thought it might have been from the asteroids scene in Empire Strikes Back, and that's when the dogfight scene from the original came to me. What's odd about that scene is the first 3 Tie-Fighter explosions are basically in b&w and obscured by the ship's canopies, but that 4th one is so different - very colorful and huge. It's not a model blowing up like the ships in the Death Star trench. Using frameskip in YouTube ("," and "."), it goes from a frame of the ship to a frame showing a fireball. The background starfield also doesn't move at a constant rate. It's moving up quickly but the instant the explosion starts, it slows down and moves very slowly up. Near the end of the explosion, it stops moving, and right before it cuts back to Han Solo, it moves to the right :) It's a terrific explosion, though, and very isolated as you mentioned, making it ideal to grab and reuse. Was it created by someone other than ILM? I doubt it. It looks like something Bruce Logan did. He's the ILM tech who did the Death Star and Alderaan explosions (he also worked on Firefox - https://tinyurl.com/246psc2j). If I had to guess, the Tie-Fighter explosion was an 'outtake' of the Death Star explosion. It's possible Lucas was shown the Tie-Fighter explosion and he wanted more of a twinkling fireworks show explosion, which was more memorable:


Games like Gorf and Defender (and eventually Atari's Star Wars) certainly tried to recreate that effect, and the ending of Buck Rogers was a great variation of that.
 
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It's a terrific exposion, though, and very isolated as you mentioned, making it ideal to grab and reuse. Was it created by someone other than ILM? I doubt it. It looks like something Bruce Logan did. He's the ILM tech who did the Death Star and Alderaan explosions (he also worked on Firefox - https://tinyurl.com/246psc2j). If I had to guess, the Tie-Fighter explosion was an 'outtake' of the Death Star explosion.

Oh no, Bruce just passed away last month?!

I actually met Bruce Logan in 2016 at a convention, he was a very awesome guy. I went to his panel and he talked about all these great stories about his animation work for the HAL 9000 monitor displays on 2001: Space Odyssey and nearly getting fired by Stanley Kubrick. He was also the director of cinematography on Tron, which is how I first heard about him. He even gave me his business card which I still have...now I wish I had reached back out to him sooner.

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