There were a lot of subtle nods to the greater “Star Wars” universe in ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story‘ that would fall in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it category and one of them relates to continuity for the Millennium Falcon. It might be hard to imagine, but a minimal change occurred to Han Solo’s ship which visual effects supervisor Rob Bedrow shared with ABC News. This is something that many may have missed outside of the most keen-eyed of “Star Wars” fans.
The area of question is that in ‘A New Hope’ the Millennium Falcon only has three pieces of landing gear, but by the end of ‘The Empire Strike Back’ it has five. What we learn from ‘Solo’ is that it initially had five but loses two during the film.
As Bedrow explains:
“So if you watch really carefully in the middle of the Kessel Run when we’re coming up to that ice, that giant carbon berg Han does the slide on, we actually rip off the front two landing gears.”
That means that from the events in ‘Solo’ until sometime after ‘A New Hope’ the ship remains damaged. That doesn’t sound too surprising, and you can only imagine Han wouldn’t have been thrilled about spending money to fix a problem that wasn’t hindering him this entire time. You can almost picture that once he was part of The Rebellion and they were footing the bill, he was suddenly interested in having the landing gear fixed on their dime. This logic works as Bedrow:
“Great, we’ll break off two of the landing gears. We’ll be down to three of the landing gears, back to our New Hope version. And we’ll say well, in-between A New Hope and Empire, they had to add those two landing gears that Han busted off at some point between the two movies.”
I can’t help but feel that Han would have taken advantage of having free repairs done on his ship, at least those that didn’t directly affect his own smuggling modifications.
Are you thrilled that the story team for Lucasfilm has put this much attention to detail into the “Star Wars” universe in “Solo: A Star Wars Story’? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Source: ABC News
