Y-wing on Tatooine

staermose

Sr Member
Sorry if this has been bought up before.

Yesterday I was watching the the deleted sand storm scene in ROTJ, between blowing up Jabba's sail barge, and leaving Tatooine.

I noticed that besides the Millennium Falcon, and Luke's X-wing there was also an Y-Wing in the scene.
(also notice how Luke tosses his ladder aside, how may disposable ladders does an X-Wing come with?)

The following is jus me speculating, but has any of this surfaced in any other media, books, magazines, online?
I don't think it's a mistake, as the two are too hard to mix up, when setting up the set, and they also filmed the X-Wing in the sand storm, but besides this, I'm curious to what the Y-Wing is doing there.

Lando and Chewbacca came in the Falcon.
Luke and R2-D2 came in the X-Wing.
Leia came in the Y-wing?

How did C-3PO get there?
Did Leia fly the Y-Wing without an Astro mech droid?

Just the Millennium Falcon and X-Wing (matte painting)
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Y-Wing next to the Millennium Falcon
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I thought I remembered reading that Leia flew the Y-Wing. It would make more sense if Chewie and Leia came in the Falcon and Lando in the Y-Wing. However we don't know how long Lando was undercover, so it's hard to say who was with who.
 
I'm glad they took out the sandstorm. It just felt very out of place and weird. Maybe theres more deleted stuff that explained the Y-wing. Or they just threw it in there as a prop without too much thought. Either way, as they left Tatooine, it was surly left there.
 
The y wing is in the first picture?!(matte painting?)

Let’s not forget this exact scene was the first scene filmed for RoTJ.

Maybe they changed the story around, maybe another character was suppose to be at the place with them?

Funny how we can clearly see the nose of the y wing with the falcon. I have seen this deleted scene 100 times and never thought

“Hey why is the y wing there?!” Wicked good catch!

It’s not like at the end of ESB they head right to jabba. Again what happened in between ESB and RoTJ is not canon anymore because back then there was all kinds of adventures trying to get han back before he got to jabba

So lando and chewie didn’t have to be the one who landed the falcon on tattoonie

I like sluis’s theory! What really sucks is if the y wing IS suppose to be there, story wise they left that junk there lol





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What’s funny is this is the only scene the exterior Falcon set is used. It’s a matte painting in the hanger bay.
 
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...

***

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
 
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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...

***

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.

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:

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:

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

Jonah! Thanks so much for taking the time and digging all his info up!! This is totally new to me! I love it!!

I still need to read splinter of the minds eye. I always wanted to but never got around to it

I never knew there was a 2 seater y-wing. This all makes sense now!

As for han thinking the xwing is junk. My grand fathers and great uncles were both in WWII. One of which was a test pilot who was in charge of taxing and doing basic flight operations of b17 bombers once they left the assembly lines in Africa

Towards the end of the war they were still pumping out mustangs ( if my memory is correct it was p51D’s he was testing)

And he would say they are a million dollar piece of crap. Always leaking oil, always having electrical problems, they are brand new and already falling apart

When u were talking about the xwing and then being disposable I thought right away of all the story’s he told, and that was his and many other pilots thoughts of those ships back then. Toss’em

Again thanks for sharing all this great information! I really appreciate it, I’ve learned something new!
 
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.

I remember Richard Edlund alluding to this in the old issue of Cinefex Magazine that covered the film but Rinzler's "Making of" book goes into greater detail about ILM's infamous "Black Friday." It sounds like George tossed out about 100 completed shots (or, more specifically, finished elements). I wonder if they still have that footage in the Lucasfilm archives and what its condition is after all these years. As a fan of that particular time period in ILM and Star Wars history, it would be amazing to see those shots someday.
 
The rinzker books have photos?! I’m gonna have to start collecting these books if they do!


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The rinzker books have photos?! I’m gonna have to start collecting these books if they do!

Yeah, the Rinzler books are packed with lots of obscure details and include some unusual photos and artwork. But the text really makes them something special as each book takes you through the productions chronologically. So you get a good sense of how everything developed — story ideas, then script, pre-production, shooting, effects, post and finally release. If you're into that sort of thing, those books are probably the next best thing to being there.
 
Yeah, the Rinzler books are packed with lots of obscure details and include some unusual photos and artwork. But the text really makes them something special as each book takes you through the productions chronologically. So you get a good sense of how everything developed — story ideas, then script, pre-production, shooting, effects, post and finally release. If you're into that sort of thing, those books are probably the next best thing to being there.

i never knew this! i gotta put these on my christmas list to santa!
 
possibly the worst effect in all of star wars?

Ha! Yeah, thats one of those ones where I scratched my head wondering how we got Jedi Rocks in the SE, but that shot wasn't cleaned up.

- - - Updated - - -


Not sure if you've seen the lightsaber guide I put together over on the prop page-- but if there's any chance you could take a close up pic/scan of this image zeroing in on Luke and his saber, that would be awesome.
 
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