Solo VFX Supervisor Explains Question From The Original Star Wars Movie

Solo: A Star Wars Story might have been a commercial flop, but a lot of Star Wars fans loved the Han Solo spinoff because of all of the different Easter Eggs and callbacks to the franchise littered in the movie.

This includes the scene where fans get to see Chewbacca and Beckett (Woody Harrelson) playing Holochess together onboard a fresh-looking Millennium Falcon – an obvious callback to Chewie's game of Holochess with C-3PO in A New Hope.

Now, speaking in an interview with Tippet.com, Solo's VFX Supervisor Chris Morley gives the answer to one of the oldest questions in the franchise: Why did Chewie and C-3Po have an incomplete set of Holochess in A New Hope?

As it turns out, George Lucas only chose eight out of ten characters for the final shots of the original Star Wars movie.

"For [A New Hope], Phil Tippett and Jon Berg designed and created 10 stop-motion creatures for a scene aboard the Millennium Falcon. Out of the 10, George Lucas chose eight of those characters to be used for the final shots," Morley told the publication.

Creating the call back to the Holochess sequence in Solo, the film's creative team decided to bring back the two Holochess characters that got chucked out of the first Star Wars movie.

"In Solo, the Millennium Falcon is new and clean, much different from the grimy, heavily modified version we see in the later years of its service," the VFX supervisor elaborated further. "We decided that it would be a good idea to pitch bringing back the two Holochess characters that didn't make it into the first film in 1977, as if in the Solo movie the Dejarik table was in full working order with all pieces intact. This led to capitalizing on a very serendipitous moment during the shoot where, in one shot, Chewie slams his paw down on the Holochess table in frustration. The force of the blow broke two buttons off the screen right side of the table set piece."

This tiny little tidbit might not seem much to newer fans of the Star Wars franchise, however, eagle-eyed fans easily noticed the difference, bringing up the question online. Now, it looks like they finally have the answer.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is now available on Digital HD, Blu-Ray and DVD.

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