I just sorta thought it was commonly accepted that Leia and Threepio came in the Y-Wing. It was that way in Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and the two-seat version was shown (with Luke and Threepio) in animated form in the Holiday Special.
Lando and Chewie left in the
Falcon, with Luke saying he'd meet them at the rendezvous point on Tatooine. I just always grokked that the
Falcon went straight there (since that's where everyone knew Fett was taking Han) and stayed there as Lando established his situation as a palace guard. Then Luke and Leia flew there in their respective fighters, and the Y-Wing got ditched there. No explanation. I have a fun headcanon notion that Jawas made off with the astromech left to guard the ships, and Our Heroes were just fortunate enough to get there during the storm, which the Jawas intended to head back to scrap those nice juicy starships as soon as it passed.
I also had one of my characters in the old Star Wars RPG from West End Games happen upon the Y-Wing shortly after becoming lost in the storm, getting it going, and taking it as his personal craft after jumping ship on his old posting.
So yeah. I've known there was a Y-Wing there and why since sometime in the '80s. I'll go back and check the novelization and storybook and such to see if I can track down where I first ran across it for it to be so ingrained as an "obvious" part of the lore...
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ETA (revised): Okay. Went back and grabbed the novelization first, since I read it right around when the movie came out. Even did a book report on it in third grade.
For a few steps, the dark shapes grew darker; and then out of the darkness, the Millennium Falcon appeared, flanked by Luke's X-wing and a two-seater Y-wing.
Which is pretty much straight from the script, embellished slightly for prose purposes.
Also, a bit I've also long internalized, but in light of this conversation, just read with new eyes... As Lando heads aboard to start preflight and Han is thanking Luke, Han says, as Luke heads toward his ship:
Why don't you leave that crate and come with us?
Interesting implications. That his (and perhaps the general) attitude toward the fighters the Rebellion has is that they're only one step removed from scrap and aren't considered important enough to salvage. Leia didn't bat an eye at leaving her ship. That Han considers them interchangeable enough that Luke can "just get another one" once he's back with the fleet... Heck, Han doesn't even really know how long he was out. For all he knows, Luke's just been dinking around in that thing since the evacuation of Hoth and it's ready to fall apart.
It's one of the things that still bugs me about all of the "Rogue Squadron" nonsense. Yes, Luke was commander of Rogue
Group on Hoth, but I'm pretty sure that was the airspeeders defending the base. Because once he got to his X-wing, it was the same beat up Red 5 we saw in ANH. And again in RotJ, so he or someone apparently retrieved it from Cloud City. The ILM modelers could have easily painted over four of the hatch-marks on each wing to make it Red 1, but they didn't. Pretty sure Wedge, the senior surviving pilot, was bumped up from Red 2 to Red Leader -- a position he was still in in RotJ.
Anyway.
Thanks to both the contemporaneous Making-of book and the more recent, exhaustive, and awesome Making-of book... Well. After principal photography, after pick-ups, after the Director's Cut of the film, Lucas finished his revision, the Fine Cut, in late November of '82. There's a "new sequence" of placeholder footage: Vader in his meditation chamber, taken from TESB, telepathically communicating with his son; action figures standing in for the droids and a stand-in for Luke, sitting in a cave, hearing his father while building his new lightsaber; and footage of the droids wandering in the desert from ANH standing in for them leaving the cave.
The makers' commentary on it is that it was in the script early on (a misremembering on I-don't-know-who-all's parts, as the scene in the early drafts was not in a cave, nor was Luke building his saber). George pulled the scene out. Most of them felt it wasn't necessary, but after the first rough cut, George said "Yes, we're going to shoot that". The makers had been asked at conventions following TESB "how Luke gets his saber back". Marquand (the director) was opposed to the sequence, and felt it was unnecessary. But Mark was called in to shoot that scene and his new X-wing cockpit scene (thanks to the sandstorm scene being scrubbed). A lot of effects work was still placeholder or unfinished. I wish George had kept the story element of the Emperor ordering the
Death Star to target Endor once the shield was down. And this was also where the scene of Luke setting Vader's funeral pyre was added to the story.
There followed a very chaotic period in post-production when George basically took over the movie, was adding and slashing whole sequences, turning ILM on its ear, gutting effects artists who'd been working on sequences for months... Somewhere in here, Marquand walked off the picture. Somewhere in here, the saber-building sequence was cut once more. By April, when the Final Cut was locked, it wasn't included.
So. Relevance to the sandstorm scene? I'm not sure when that matte painting was done, but definitely late in post-production. Almost a year after the sandstorm scene was shot. A lot of people, myself among them, think most of the obscured shots of Luke in the saber-building scene looks more like "stand-in" than "Mark Hamill". I had also never seen the unassembled lightsaber before then. It wasn't in the Visual dictionary or any other '80s or '90s Star Wars reference. I think the footage shown as a "deleted scene" is an amalgam of the stand-in footage, the photo-double, Mark, out-of-focus action figures, and that matte painting. The call sheet for the sandstorm scene has, amongst its many notes, this line:
CONSTRUCTION: STANDBY to remove Y-wing and position X-wing.
This would be for the last part of the scene where Luke boards his fighter. Given the X-wing in the matte painting is where the Y-wing was on the stage, it seems whoever painted it only saw a production photo or similar with the X-wing in place and no Y-wing. Good chance the matte painter just had a set photo of the
Falcon and X-wing as reference and didn't realize a Y-wing was supposed to be in that spot (the X-wing was filmed solo, so its position relative to the other ships is conjectural, beyond Luke heading to starboard of the
Falcon -- though the script and novelization
do say "flanking"...).
Alternate explanation. That matte painting takes place a short but indeterminate amount of time prior to seeing the droids walking along the road to Jabba's palace. It could easily imply Leia isn't there yet, or else is running an errand while Luke tends to other preparations in the cave.
--Jonah