It raked in nearly $250 million in its first weekend, garnering critical acclaim along the way.

"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is well on its way to becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time.

In 2013, "Chicago Tonight" met the local computer scientists who helped make some key special effects in the very first "Star Wars" movie. This week, we take another look at Ash-har Quraishi's May 2013 report.

Flashback: May 2013

Thirty-six years ago this weekend, “Star Wars”exploded onto the screen and made cinematic history. The blockbuster film began what would become a multibillion-dollar empire for George Lucas, and spawned companies like Industrial Light & Magic and Pixar.

One of the movie's pivotal scenes had help from a Chicago institution.

When the original“Star Wars” movie was released, the sci-fi space odyssey used innovative in-camera techniques for most of its groundbreaking special effects. But, for at least one particular scene, George Lucas required a cutting edge 3-D computer animation never before seen on film.

That 3-D computer animation was to be used in the film as part of a military briefing, engineering a plan of attack against the evil Empire's planet-destroying Death Star.

The animation itself required a 3-D computer rendering of the Death Star and the trench through which X-Wing fighters would travel to ultimately exploit its weakness.

But in 1976, 3-D computer animation was in its infancy and few could create it.

So, Lucas turned to 27-year-old Larry Cuba, a research associate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Cuba was working with cutting-edge computer animations at the Circle Graphics Habitat -- now known as the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, or EVL.

“Computer graphics was advanced enough back then to even show shaded models,” said EVL director Jason Leigh. “But, in looking at what we were able to provide back then for computer graphics, George said, ‘Actually we want to take it a step back’ because the general public wasn't fully aware of what computer graphics was yet, so he wanted a more iconic image of computer graphics as opposed to a polished version of it. So, what you saw in the film was actually three generations back of software that we had already developed."