With filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung playing the Y-Wing pilot, you could be forgiven for not realising that the vessel he’s piloting is a part of Star Wars legend. With the red flashes of Adelphi Squadron emblazoned on their vessels, it was the perfect time for the iconic Y-Wing the Red Jammer – built fifty years ago but never seen onscreen – to make its cinematic debut, and here John Knoll gives more information on this classic craft.
“We have a scene where part of the New Republic fleet gets involved with an aerial battle, and there are X-wings and Y-wings in that fleet,” Knoll explains. “For various story reasons, the Y-wings that are part of the Adelphi squadron have red stripes on them. John Goodson, our modelmaker, who built the 48-inch Razor Crest, had been doing some work for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and mentioned he had done a restoration on the Red Jammer Y-wing model. Apparently, that model was the first Y-wing that ILM built back in 1976 when, in story, they were still Red Squadron and had red stripes on them.
They built this model and sent it to England to be the reference for the art department to use to build the full-size exterior cockpit set. The model got damaged on its way back, was partially restored, and recently John Goodson had done a full restore of it. After a lengthy negotiation, George Lucas gave us permission to borrow the model. We shot two motion-control elements of it. It’s in the movie and will go by quickly. Unless somebody points it out, you won’t notice it, but there are two photographed elements of a 1976 original model from Star Wars,which has never been seen onscreen before.”