Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 10 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets We Learnt From ILM

1. The Shoe Mystery Will Never Be Fully Solved

Before wrapping up the interview, I did get a chance to quiz Scott about one of the biggest Star Wars mysteries and one that has intrigued me for years; the hidden easter eggs in the original trilogy space sequences. There's long-standing rumours of potatoes in Empire's asteroid chase and a shoe in Jedi's climactic battle, but nobody has ever found any proof of these (those circled images available online are complete hokum).

He was able to confirm that the potato is a background asteroid, as well as expand on the story behind the shoe, but unfortunately not even someone working for ILM knew where exactly either of them were in their respective sequences. Talking about Jedi, he said:

"The shoe. The legend of the shoe. The shoe belonged to a guy named Ken Ralston, one of the VFX supervisors on Jedi and he was supervising all the space fight scenes. There's one shot, and it's of the Millennium Falcon flying towards the camera and there's billions of spacecraft just flying around all over the place. If you think back to how they did those in Jedi, they shot each model separately. When you've got 300 spaceships in one shot I think it gets pretty boring, so I think Ken did shoot his shoe and put it in the back there, but I think the only person who knows where that shoe is is Ken Ralston."

So there we go. The mystery is solved but the culprit got away. As for whether there's any similar hidden gems in The Force Awakens, Pritchard was pretty coy about it:

"J.J. love to put easter eggs into his movies. I think it's much more fun for fans to find them that we reveal anything. That's no fun."

Something to keep an eye out for on the Blu-Ray then.

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