Prior to Rogue One screwing it up, the visuals and dialogue in ANH indicate the same yellow-red-blue heirarchy seen in clone ranks, Imperial ranks, and Mandalorian Protector ranks. Blue Group would be the rookies, as evidenced by their clean new helmets. Luke tested out well enough, with Biggs vouching for him, to get into the veteran Red Group. And Gold Group are the aces, the elites who get first run at the objective.
I'm not sure where you heard that but it just sounds awful..... just awful.
Which part? The color-heirarchy thing has been present all the way through. It being called "Gold Group" in ANH and ROTJ, rather than "Yellow Group" implies something. They
were the ones to make the first run on the exhaust port, and not because they were bombers or something -- that got added well after the films by game designers to justify something that didn't need justifying. The Phase I clone trooper ranks are blue for Lieutenants, red for Captains, and yellow for Commanders. And so on throughout. It's almost as pervasive as T-visors and extraneous scopes.
If you mean the Luke jumping past rookie status, that's touched on a little in the novelization and fleshed out more in the radio drama. The vouching made it in, albeit in a different place than originally scripted, cut for the theatrical release anyway, and partially restored from the Special Edition on: "Sir, Luke is the best bush pilot in the Outer Rim Territories." They've already got a sense of Biggs' abilities, as
he's flying with Red Group, and here he is saying this about the new kid.
Couple that with there being a
lot of Blue Group pilots in the award ceremony at the end of the movie (like, at least fifty). Why did none of
them get Red 5 over Luke? All those identical, unindividualized, undecorated, blue-insigniaed helmets do not imply pilots who have been flying for very long. Those were made for the unit Luke was going to be flying with until they discovered the blue markings one the models disappeared in the bluescreen process, and they got changed to red. Luke didn't get stuck in a ship for lack of pilots, so something else is in play. To me, clean and undecorated helmets heavily imply "newbie", where decorated and weathered helmets imply "being doing this a while". From the visual storytelling in the film, Red and Gold have more experienced pilots than Blue.
And additionally... Rogue One screwed nothing up. Rogue One is awesome... Simply AWESOME!
There are a lot of good moments and elements, but... agree to disagree?
They re-contextualized Blue Group in a way that does not fit with ANH. They, ah... took creative liberties with the flight suits that do not align with the film that is supposed to immediately follow (notice the repurposed footage of Red and Gold Leaders do not show them wearing cold-weather parkas like all the new pilots -- in all groups -- are wearing). They blow up Red 5, even though the paint on Luke's wings definitely has not been touched up recently. And that's just a bit of the aerospace battle...
Pretty sure you know about my rewrite project. I've deconstructed Rogue One the same way as the rest -- isolating what worked and what didn't, and why, and noodling up how it might have been done differently so as to work better. So I'm not just a hater, or don't know what I'm talking about, or sour-grapes-ing, here. Overall, I do like that film. But it
did make mistakes, storytelling-wise as well as lore-wise and continuity-wise. One can acknowledge that and enjoy the film regardless.
