Largely unseen bar in extreme longshots, many aliens delegates had close-up and reaction shots filmed for the Republic Senate meeting debating the Naboo Crisis. All of these characters, part of one hundred and forty separate creations - both new or classics revisited (such as Rodians and Twi'leks) - were brought to life by Nick Dudman and his team of fifty-five craftsmen, filmed by a second unit at Leavesden, mostly headed up by Roger Christian. Some unseen creatures would ultimately appear in new environments, like the Tatooine Pod racing sequence, playing spectators, or appear in future films, once again in extreme background shots. The Twi'lek Bib Fortuna (played by Alan Ruscoe) was to have been seen here but was ultimately deleted and replaced with Matthew Wood in the role for a scene opposite Jabba the Hutt on Tatooone, a move handled in EPISODE I's post production phase.
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| Bib Fortuna (Alan Ruscoe) listens to the drama. |
The many practical creatures were built with little pre-production time-literally six months from January 1997 onwards, due to Lucas ironing out what creatures were to be handled via CGI, and what would be more cost-effective built as puppets and masks.
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| Nick Dudman and colleague supervise the care of an actor in the creature suit. |
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| The greedy Twi-lek senator Orn Free Ta (Jerome Blake) and one of his aides (possibly actress Daisy Donovan) - his scene never made the final cut. |
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| In honour of Steven Spielberg, E.T. and his friends made a special one-off cameo. |
One of the most important returning species cameos would be from the Wookiees. Actor/puppeteer John Coppinger would play Yarua, and his character would be filmed/ superimposed three times in one scene to make it look like there was a trio of them in their senate pod. One of the surviving original Chewbacca costumes was loaned from the Lucasfilm archive and given restoration and re-working to serve as the new character. Three all-new Wookiee masks were seemingly rejected.
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| John Coppinger as Yarua the wookiee. |
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| Specially made Wookiee masks by for the three senators were ultimately unused. |
Though not an alien creature, another important character cut from the movie's senate related scenes would be rising star Alderaan delegate Bail Antilles, as played by Adrian Dunbar, originally inhabiting the role as Bail Organa, Princess Leia's adopted father.
More info here:
https://starwarsaficionado.blogspot.com/2013/04/classic-blog-2007-adrian-dunbar.html
https://starwarsaficionado.blogspot.com/2012/09/deleted-scene-speaker-for-alderaan.html
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