As long as we’ve had “Star Wars” toys on our shelves, we’ve known that manufacturers did the best they could to mould the characters, vehicles, weapons and worlds into reasonably shaped, plastic facsimiles of the big screen counterparts. However, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” saw a rare reversal of that formula — a toy design inspired Rian Johnson to tweak the shape of one of the ships in the film.
ILM VFX Supervisor Mike Mullholland rolled by the VFX Festival in London, and revealed that Kylo Ren’s TIE Silencer — seen in the early battle sequence that results in Leia Organa being sucked out into space — had a different design, until Johnson saw what the toymakers had come up with.
“Initially, the plan was to have missiles on the underside, and shoot them off, and that was it. But halfway through production, Rian got a toy, a prototype toy of the Kylo fighter. And they had the missiles on the side wings! So we went and redesigned a bit of it [in the movie] so that we could open it up and pop them out,” he explained. “I’ve heard of the toys’ influence in the past, but that was the first time for me.”
So there you go — that’s why the missiles fire from the wings of the TIE Silencer. There’s a little piece of nerd trivia you can use to impress the super intense “Star Wars” fan in your life.
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is still in cinemas if you want to see how that ship looks one last time on the big screen. [Radio Times via io9]