Why Does the Podracing Scene Still Look So Realistic After 20+ Years?

I love TPM and the podracing scene is great! Thanks for shining a light on how it was made because more people need to know how hard the scene was to pull off.

Mad props to the sound design in this scene too.

Sebulba's pod racer is up there with the seismic charges Jango Fett uses in episode II for me, it sounds so good

The fact this scene is over 20 years old is absolutely insane

i wish the pod racing game would get a remake. still one of my favorite racing games. amazing tracks, amazing environments, hi speed, hi adrenaline. pure gold.

The visuals get a lot of attention, but can we also take some time to recognize that it's a auditory masterpiece?

It's a staggering scene, it never gets boring and maybe whats really interesting is how much of it if just motion blur, once the pod racers are on the move the illusion of any real detail is purely an illusion. Magical in many ways

you literally dont see anything else like this racing scene anywhere ever. Even as a kid I recognized how alien this whole thing was and how interesting it is. I would watch just this scene 100s of times.

A lot of people have no respect for how groundbreaking the cg was.

I love that they never used music. Straight-up sound design

Ive always thought that the criticisms towards TPM were unfair, particularly it being "boring". Within the first 15 minutes, you have a ship exploding, lightsabers out, and a planetary invasion. By the end of the first act, you have essentially a coup de tat, underwater monsters, and the introduction of darth maul. The second act has POD RACING. It has all sorts of other things too, but, like, cmon, space nascar. And then the third act is an explosive finish through three separate fighting fronts. Space battle, infiltration, and Jedi vs Sith. Boring? Come the fuck on. And the plot was good! Economics and politics are how wars start and republics turn into dictatorships!! Boomers always talk about millenials having low attention spans, but imo the complaints about tpm tells me that they were no better.

I was 4 when Phantom Menace came out. I had the OT on vhs, so I already loved Star Wars. Phantom Menace is my favorite, always will be. This scene rules.

The podrace is one of those moments when the sound of my TV is going to max, the engine and race sounds mixed with the action packed race is just brilliant! Always gives me goosebumps

This scene will go down through the ages as 1 of the greatest VFX action scenes of all time. Mad respect to Industrial Light & Magic

I never knew they did the environment digitally by capturing miniatures using photogrammetry! That's awesome, and a really smart way to conserve computing power at the time. It reminds me of how in early video games they'd often pre-render the shadows of static objects into scenes so they could reduce the amount of real time lighting they had to render. It's ironic how the discussion around TPM is all about how it was wrong to replace practical effects with CGI when they built so many models, sets, props, and costumes for the movie as well. A lot of the movie simply wouldn't be possible without the help of computers, but at the same time they built more miniatures for TPM than for the entire original trilogy!

I was in college when Episode 1 came out, and it sure looked like the future was here when I watched it. It had everything I expected out of a movie made in what I thought of as "the future," including that amazing podracing scene. I even made a mock video game magazine cover for a graphics class featuring a scene from it.

I think the reason why I was able to really enjoy the Phantom menace was because I focused on the good parts and they are good, Liam Neeson is a great Jedi, Even McGregor was superb as Obi-Wan. I got immersed into the world that was created very quickly and saw the Jedi for first time doing the things I always imagined the Jedi was capable off. The Podracing was awesome, I had never seen such a thing before and the music is still great to this day. Just, if only the Jar Jar silliness had been toned down by a lot, then the TPM would have been so much more enjoyable.

For me, the few glimpses of heat distortion and distant mirage effects really set the atmosphere (literally?) and grounded the race as feeling like a real place.

Interesting! Also funny how the real problem with the PT is expectations, not movies themselves. In Russia we saw both PT and OT almost at the same time (because of everything West being banned in USSR), and many people really liked PT. When I first heard of how people bashed the story and CGI I thought it was a joke, some sort of meme.

When the Phantom Menace came out I was 22. My grandfather had passed away about a year earlier and I knew my grandmother hadn't been to a movie theater in probably 30 or 40 years. So I took her to go see it. She never spoke at all through the entire movie and after it was over we got up to leave so I asked her what she thought. This 70 year old woman that had never really showed any interest in science fiction looked at me and said "I want one of those laser swords." I know gramma, we all do.