The similarity between the dwarf minions from Phantasm, and the Jawas from Star Wars was entirely coincidence, but it should be noted that both Don Coscarelli and George Lucas drew inspiration from Frank Herbert's Dune for their respective films.
Coscarelli makes several references to Dune in Phantasm, while early iterations of Star Wars were more noticeably influenced by Dune than the final version.
One of the references to Dune that remained in Star Wars was the Sandcrawler. However, the design by Ralph McQuarrie is completely different from the similarly named vehicle from Dune, and was modeled in part after NASA's Crawler-transporter vehicles.
Kenner made a radio-controlled version of the Sandcrawler to go along with its 3¾" action figures, which sells for a fortune nowadays. A subsequent Hasbro version without the radio-control features was given an exclusive re-release around 2004, and sells for a smaller fortune.
I have one of these later versions, which measures 16" long, and 8" high. It scales out to about 1/100 scale if we go by the commonly given dimensions for the Sandcrawler.
However, the Hasbro Sandcrawler doesn't look far off of 1/72 scale when compared to the appearance of the full-scale model that was used for filming.
One of the projects that I hope to accomplish someday is to build an interior, add an opening front ramp, and install lighting in this model.
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