Put within the context of when and where the starwars saga evolved, the lightsabers are probably the oldest known sword type. They were, after all, created a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.
Lightsabers are the chosen weapon of the Jedi, a powerful order of knights in the Star Wars movies created by George Lucas. The lightsaber consisted of a sturdy hilt with no crossguards and a short laser blade of laser energy that could cut through almost anything it struck. The laser blades were created using a focused blast of powerful energy. This energy was focused by a crystal known as ADEGAN CRYSTALS embedded in the hilt of the weapon. The color of this crystal determined the color of the lightsaber's laser blade.
The colors of the lightsaber said much about a jedi. Each color had its own symbolism. Anakin Skywalker started his jedi knighthood with a blue lightsaber. When he turned to the Dark Side, he switched to the red blade that only Siths use. Jedis are supposed to build their own lightsabers when they come of age, and use this lightsaber for the rest of their days, or until the lightsaber was lost.
Early in the conceptualization of the Starwars saga, lightsabers were not the exclusive weapon of the Jedi order alone. In fact, they were quite ordinary to all as it was also being used by Rebel and Imperial troopers. Then, George Lucas decided to limit the weapon to the Jedi warriors alone. The technique for making a lightsaber onscreen real has varied throughout the years. In the days before computer digital effects, the original trilogy used variety of methods to create the lightsaber effect both on-set and during post-production.
One version had a motorized hilt that spun a blade covered in reflective material. The blade, when lit, did indeed glow in front of the camera, but it lacked the color and glare that surrounded the pure white blade as seen in the finished film. These blades were cumbersome and fragile, and required a power source for the tiny motor. They did not make good sparring weapons, and the glow was colorless and inconsistent -- a tilt at the wrong angle would cause the blade to lose all its vibrancy from the camera's point of view.
Most of the lightsaber luminosity seen in the first trilogy was the result of ROTOSCOPING which is described as the process of laying tracing paper over a blow-up of a film frame, and tracing, frame by frame, the necessary animation. This animation was typically painted onto an animation cel - a transparent sheet of acetate. Those cels would then be photographed one frame at a time, and optically composited into the frame.
The actors on set used simple rods that were colored in such a way as to make the job easier for the rotoscope artist. When a saber needed to be activated, one of two methods was used. A simple editing trick stopped the camera so that a prop man could replaced an unlit saber (which is just a handle) with a lit saber (one with a blade attached). When the film was played back, the saber blade would magically appear. The other method involved the actor using an unlit blade throughout, and the rotoscope artist would draw the growing blade. Since correctly drawing in the glowing blade without the benefit of a prop blade as reference is a challenging task, the scenes where a lightsaber is first activated usually cuts away, to allow the replacement of the unlit prop with a full-bladed weapon.
For The Phantom Menace, rotoscoping was again used to realize the lightsaber blade, but the technique has changed radically since the early 1980s. Now, rotoscoping is done digitally, and the blades are colored and animated with a computer, rather than ink and paint.
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