Is There a Star Wars Rebels Cameo in Rogue One?

It’s right there in the still, clear as day: a VCX-100 light freighter. For fans of Star Wars animation, they’ll recognize that model of ship, as it can be seen every week on Star Wars Rebels as The Ghost.

The ship being a part of this Rebel Alliance fleet shot may be a nice little nod, an Easter Egg to say “yes, The Ghost is there and still in use.” If that’s all we see, it’s still at least an acknowledgement of the importance of the Rebels crew to the nascent Alliance; of course, Rebels takes place a few years ahead of Rogue One (and likewise Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope), so there’s no way of telling the same crew, or any members of it, would even be on the Ghost at this point. Most notably, it’s almost definite that neither Kanan Jarrus nor Ezra Bridger, the two Force-wielding Jedi of the crew, are on that ship (or, likely, alive and well, sorry kids) at this point.

While seeing the VCX-100, whether or not it’s the Ghost, is cool, fans probably shouldn’t get their hopes up that it means we’ll be seeing Hera, Sabine, or Zeb on the big screen. When asked at the Rogue One press junket if we’d see more animation characters brought to live action in the wake of Saw Gerrera (who debuted in The Clone Wars and is portrayed by Forest Whitaker in the movie), Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy was decidedly non-commital on the subject.

“That isn’t really the approach that we have,” Kennedy said. “We don’t sit down and start isolating a list of characters and build stories around them. We really are starting with the stories themselves, and then if some of those characters might come in to what we want to do or say, we might consider it then. But that’s not part of the strategy.”

Easter Egg or cameo, it’s always fun to spot something familiar in a broad shot of a galaxy far far away.

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits US theaters December 16, 2016. 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 Onetells 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.”

Star Wars Rebels airs Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. on Disney XD.

h/t Jeremy Conrad