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How Darth Vader's helmet from the original 1977 Star Wars was found in Australia

Like most kids in Australia in the 1980s, Chris loved dressing up as Star Wars villain Darth Vader.

It was a makeshift outfit: a Vader helmet with drilled eyeholes together with a breastplate and laser gun that never actually appeared in the film.

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Bringing Darth Vader to life

From the concept art and original voice actor to the iconic John Williams theme music, find out how a team of talented filmmakers originally brought the most famous film villain to the screen.

But unlike his friends' store-bought costumes, Chris' Vader helmet was special.

It was an original mould – one of only six crafted for the 1977 film. That childhood treasure – for many years stored and forgotten in a cupboard in Chris' parents' home – was recently valued in excess of $100,000. And there is a bidding war over it.

So how did one of the screen's most iconic costume pieces find its way to suburban Melbourne and into the hands of a child?

In today's media frenzy around Star Wars: Rogue One it can be increasingly hard to think back to a time when Darth Vader was not a household name. But in 1974 he was still just a rough concept in the mind of young filmmaker George Lucas.

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Fresh from the success of American Graffiti, Lucas had decided his next film would be a return to the science-fiction tales of his youth, specifically an idea around "The Star Wars" which brought together his love of Flash Gordon movie serials, Tolkien and EC comics that he had been working on for years.

A huge part of Star Wars' appeal would be its depiction of a used universe, deliberately grimy and lived-in, compared to the clean lines and stark minimalism of Star Trek. But this kitbashed aesthetic was largely born of necessity. The original Star Wars film was shot in Borehamwood, just outside of London.

Elstree Studios offered Lucas an ideal mix of experienced workers and low-cost sound stages. Building a universe out of what was to hand, on a relatively small budget, was something that British prop masters were used to.

Vader was very much a collection of found objects.The outfit was mostly motorcycle leathers while sound designer Ben Burtt provided the trademark wheeze by breathing through a scuba mask.

When it came to Vader's iconic full-face helmet, however, it was originally only intended to be worn while travelling in the vacuum of space. Lucas pictured Vader as a more human figure, with his face only partially obscured beneath a flared samurai-style helmet.

But Lucas was so taken with Ralph McQuarrie's military-style gas mask design that he rewrote the character accordingly. It then fell to costume designer John Mollo, sculptor Brian Muir and the experienced fabrication team at Elstree to bring Vader to three-dimensional reality.

We had a gut feeling it was real but we just couldn't believe it

Allan Croucher worked in the plasterers' department at Elstree. Muir brought the Darth Vader clay model to him to mould. He made a two-piece fibreglass mould, composed of the faceplate and dome, and cast six helmets for the film. These were used in rotation as the helmet was often damaged on set.

At the end of filming, Croucher was given permission to keep two of the moulds. One went to a friend in England. The other he eventually sent to a relative in Australia as a birthday present for their son (along with a Flash Gordon breastplate and laser gun prop from the 1980 Flash Gordon film that Croucher had also worked on while at Elstree).

In Australia, in the early '80s, the birthday present was well-received by Chris. This particular helmet was never used in the film but it saw a lot of action in suburban Australia.

Battle-scored and cracked by a thousand backyard fantasies and weekend wars, Chris eventually outgrew his helmet. His parents wrapped it up alongside the other props and stored them in a cupboard until recently, when Chris picked them up again.

With the renewed interest in all things Star Wars he took the helmet and props to a local collectibles store, Lobos Collectables in Northcote, where the helmet's long, strange history was finally revealed.

"When Chris brought the helmet to us we were stunned," said Dennis Kafkis, owner of Lobos Collectables, "We had a gut feeling that it was real but we just couldn't believe it. It took us about a year to track down the providence and another six months for us to be sure that it was the real deal."

Lobos' store manager Aron Challinger said the pop culture market had become "more and more popular".

"Five or six years ago anything Batman or Spider-Man related were our top sellers," he said. "The week that Disney announced they had bought the Star Wars franchise everything changed and Star Wars has remained our top seller for the last five years."

Now Chris' beloved piece of film history is the subject of bidding wars between auction houses and museums.

It seems that Darth Vader's helmet may still have some travelling to do.

Jason Bainbridge is Professor of Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology.