Industrial Light & Magic visual effects artist Todd Vaziri dropped a bombshell today, one he hinted on Twitter about a year ago.
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If you’re asked to point out where Luke Skywalker made his infamous trench run to destroy the first Death Star in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, and you point at the equator-like line across the surface, well…
You’d be wrong.
As Vaziri explains in a detailed blog post (via io9), Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll indicated that Galen Erso‘s exploitative exhaust port lies in a longitudinal trench as opposed to the iconic one that runs horizontally across the Death Star. Say what?
But if you go back and watch the film, it actually makes sense.
“The equatorial trench is where the major hangar bays are located on the Death Star,” Vaziri wrote. “The hangar bays are depicted in this sequence from [A New Hope], when the tractor beam locks onto the Millennium Falcon.”
That trench is large enough to stack multiple hangar bays and is where TIE Fighters disembark from when flying out for patrols or battle. However, in the final trench run when Luke descends to deliver the killing blow, it is barely wide enough for three fighters to fit in side by side.
This isn’t just headcanon, as General Dodonna actually shows us the trench in his briefing before the battle.
“As Dodonna describes the challenges ahead,” Vaziri wrote, “the audience can see quite clearly that the trench that contains the exhaust port is perpendicular to the equator. It was there the whole time.”
It’s worth reading Vaziri’s entire blog post to learn more about the production of the original film as well as Rogue One. He also goes into detail about how many different pieces of officially licensed media and products get this same detail wrong, despite the truth being right in front of everyone’s eyes.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in theaters now. Directed by Gareth Edwards, it’s the first of the new standalone features from Lucasfilm and Disney, which take place outside the core “Skywalker Saga” of films noted by an Episode number.
Rogue One tells the story of the small band of rebels that were tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star. The story spins directly off the opening crawl from the original Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. In that crawl, it read: “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.
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