14 Star Wars Original Trilogy Easter Eggs You Need To See

6. The Wilhelm Scream

The Wilhelm scream has become something of a cliché that manages to cross genres to appear in all manner of film. Originating in western Distant Drums (although named after a character from The Charge At Feather River, which also used the sound), Ben Burtt resurrected the scream for Star Wars as a sound designer in-joke, using it in all his subsequent films as a personal calling card. Other films, however, got in the act, with it now having appeared in over two hundred different movies.

What makes it worth mentioning in a list of Star Wars easter eggs, however, is the sheer number of times it's used; there's bound to be one you've missed. In A New Hope, the clip's first appearance post-resurrection, it's used when a Stormtrooper is knocked into a Death Star chasm. In Empire it's screamed by both a Rebel soldier during the Battle of Hoth and the Stormtrooper Chewie throws off the carbon freezing platform. In Jedi two of Jabba's guards scream it when thrown into the Sarlacc, while it's also audible when we see the previously mentioned crowd-surfing Stormtrooper.

There's one sound clip often credited as the scream that actually isn't; for his on-screen death Burtt recorded his own reproduction of it (see previous point).