He blew up a Death Star, probably buys a few looks the other way down in the X-Wing hangar.
Maybe Obi-Wan was hedging his bets on the “certain whole point of view thing”, and popping around the galaxy with some really showy piloting and announcing “Yes Siree, I sure am Luke Skywalker’s father, here in a very memorable circumstance so that if it ever becomes appropriate to need witnesses to Luke Skywalker having a father who is not a giant air release valve in a shower curtain, there are people who remember Luke Skywalker’s father, which I, most certainly,am.”
Look*, how big is an Earth rat? Maybe the size of a baseball?
Willard’s little well-fed friends, maybe the size of a softball?
A Tijuana street-vendor’s chihuahua? Maybe the size of a large cantaloupe.
So imagine% trying to shoot a chihuahua that’s sitting on the side of the road while you’re riding by on a mountain bike and using a pistol$. That sounds pretty tough! Imagine trying to drop two tennis balls on top of that Chihuahua (using the carbine mounted underneath the carriage of your sports coupe) while driving toward it at 50mph.
Tatooine Womp-Rats? Two meters. Just the size of a tall man – just a head shorter than Chewbacca, about the length of a horse from tail to mid-neck – and Luke says he has no trouble shooting one while approaching it at probably a minimum of 200 miles per hour along a canyon (which is probably not a straight line cut in the desert). That’s pretty darn good! However, I would think he was using some kind of SkyHopper-mounted machine gun (strafing) rather than sticking a rifle out through a hole in the cockpit canopy and trying to snipe at them (one shot, one kill).
The Death-Star’s exhaust port? Again, it’s a 2-meter target. Even IF Luke is skilled enough to snipe Womp-Rats, the problem is that the game has changed to using bowling-ball droppers mounted underneath the X-wing fighter and trying to drop two watermelons directly on top of one – bounces, rolls, and pitty-pats don’t count – while being shot at by auto-canons on the rim of the canyon and, later, by a trio of pursuing enemies.
Given how well anyone in the Alliance knows him, I wouldn’t expect anyone to have any confidence in Luke’s ability to hit his target in a game (much less in a galaxy-in-the-stakes for real situation) when the weapon he has to use is as unfamiliar to him as a trebuchet would be to a Roman Centurion.
I think there’s two key issues that haven’t quite been mentioned:
- The Princess has pulled strings to let him join the attack pilots.
- While Han is in it for the money (which he needs to pay off a loan…) Luke may have specified for his ‘reward’ for rescuing Leia that he be allowed to follow his dream of becoming a star pilot. [Although, see #15 and, if I recall correctly, there’s a bit of conversation where someone tells Dad Vader that the tracking device has been planted on the Falcon (so they can follow it back to wherever the Princess is going to be delivered). IOW it’s still foolish to trust him!]
+) Remember that Obi-Wan mentioned that he remembered Luke’s father as an impressive pilot. And if Red Leader says he knew Luke’s father from long ago, some leader-types may have a sense that Luke should be a pretty good pilot due to some kind of genetic skill-transmission).
Thus, as some have mentioned, there’s one (or a few) empty fighter-craft and there’s a new volunteer (or few) and the rebel camp we’re watching needs to throw every last ounce of fight against the approaching Death Star. After all, if they don’t, that thing is going to blast Yavin and all its moons to pieces and then continue on through the galaxy blasting other Alliance star systems to pieces; there’s really no chance these rebels will survive if they don’t defeat that thing so there’s no benefit in keeping even a pocket-knife in reserve ‘in case the attack fails and we need to defend against storm-troopers.’ If this farm boy (H2O plantation, wasn’t it?) says he can fly and shoot at the same time and wants to help against the Empire, go ahead and throw him in that X-wing that was recently vacated.
So everybody is gathered around because every single person needs to know the key strategy: Hit the exhaust port with proton torpedoes.
But I don’t recall anyone saying all fighter-craft are equipped with proton torpedoes. In fact, there’s a lot of stuff going on above the surface of the Death-Star and all of it looks like pulse canons either manually fired from fighter-to-fighter using computer-assisted aiming, or auto-firing from the surface at nearby fighter craft via computer-assisted aiming and triggering. Maybe there’s a shortage of torpedoes, or maybe not all the fighter-craft have PT equipment (storage, igniters, launchers, targeting computer, etc.). Therefore, if your fighter is PT-equipped, wrap your mind around the task when you’re not engaged in sorties or surface attacks; if your fighter isn’t PT-equipped, concentrate on defending the fighters who are PT-equipped so we have as many chances as possible to attack that exhaust port.
So it seemed to me that Luke was given a recently-vacated X-wing that happened to be equipped with PT equipment. Although Red Leader expected to be the one to make the game-winning shot, it didn’t work out that way. Red Leader could have passed the task to the next team (Orange or Yellow or Green, or whatever) but, instead, figured he’d give the other PT-equipped Red pilot a chance first – at least his team could reap the glory – with Biggs and Wedge as defense escorts. If Luke missed, one of the other teams could get their chance.
As history recorded, Luke made the shot during his attack run and no subsequent attempts were needed.
–G!
*This isn’t even a fanwank – this is pure bu||$#!++!n&
%Please don’t try this at home. The SPCA gets irritable about such shenanigans.
$Remember, even if a rifle will shoot more accurately over distances, a pistol is easier and faster to realign than a rifle.
I think the main reason Red leader wants Luke’s team to set up for an attack run is that there just isn’t time for him to come around and try again. Then he get’s blown up.
Maybe he was saying “your attack run” in general, not really intending Luke to take the shot, but to be part of the three fighter team on an attack run. In which case, it defaults to Luke saying “I’m gonna take the shot” and Biggs and Wedge saying “Go for it, farmboy”, maybe because Wedge didn’t think it possible and Biggs knew Luke was better at that kind of thing. I was thinking, and that’s probably the point of the scene where Wedge is the one who says “Two meters, that’s impossible.” That was to convey why later Luke does it over him.
And it is “bullseyeing” womprats, so I don’t think it is strafing them. That might be seeing how many you can hit in a herd, whereas bullseye sounds like targeting a specific beast and then hitting it.
He does say “we” used to bulls-eye them, which indicates his friends did it, too. Maybe he never noticed that his friends always missed? In the novelization, after giving that line, one of the other pilots shuts him down by saying something like, “Yeah? Were those womp-rats guarded by laser towers and squads of TIE fighters?” indicating that it’s not a terribly difficult shot to make under non-combat conditions. Which is another possible explanation for why Luke is on-point, and the experienced pilots his wing-men. Rookie says this is an easy shot for him, but he doesn’t have a lot of experience dogfighting. So the experienced pilots make sure all the incoming fire is on them, giving the rookie as few distractions as possible.
I don’t think they made a different colored model - it was just that the blue on R2 acted like a blue screen itself, and picked up the star field. As someone else noted, they kept using blue screens for the rest of the trilogy. (Green screens would have been particularly difficult on Endor.) It wasn’t an issue in later films because there are almost no scenes of R2 in the Xwing in the rest of the movies. IIRC, just leaving Hoth/arriving at Dagobah in Empire, and none at all in Jedi.
The proof of that would be if we ever see a star through Artoo. Anyone got a screen cap we could check?
So the question I have is after the successful trench run the pilots flee the Death Star, we see, the Falcon, 2 X-Wings, and a single Y-Wing. Luke is one X-Wing pilot and Wedge is the other, but who was the Y-Wing pilot?
or
Brian
Luke says “I” in the movie.
Well, the first one is important. The second less so but still there.
But don’t forget he comes with the greatest endorsement in the galaxy. Obi-Wan Kenobi essentially sent the kid to the Alliance with a ‘Grade A’ sticker on his forehead. It don’t get better than that.
I don’t think the original trilogy used chroma keying. I remember seeing a documentary where they discussed some other method, but I can’t recall what it was. It showed some examples of bleed through in the cockpits of the fighters on Hoth.
<conspiracy theory>…which was The TRUTH! </ct>
Chroma key is a video technique. It usually used green because video cameras pick up green better than the other colors, but it could also use blue.
Star Wars was on film, so it used the blue screen traveling matte process.
How so? For all Leia knew, Luke was just some kid Obi-Wan picked up on the planet he was living on. He got force-ghosted by Vader before he could tell any lies about Luke’s origin or destiny. For all the Rebel Alliance knew, Luke was Obi-Wan’s twink-of-the-week. The only info they had on his piloting abilities came from Wedge and Biggs.
I just rewatched the Death Star battle. R2 could have had his panels done in black for filming, or it could just have been the lighting making them look black.
I did notice the special edition footage had been “enhanced”. There was a tracking shot where you could see the Yavin sun reflecting off the windows of one X wing. I know the models didn’t have glass.
I also caught one thing they missed - there is a shot of the Red 5 X-wing going down the trench when Luke is flying above. They obviously used the wrong model. Now that I know to look at the number of stripes, it sticks out. And when Luke lands after the battle, that isn’t Red 5 he’s climbing down from. The fuselage red stripe is wrong.
George, (or Disney), you have more work to do. 
Luke is just maintaining the fine tradition established by movies like Midway, which has one of the Good Guys taking off in one kind of plane, attacking the target in a second kind of plane, and crashing upon his return in a third type. That goes well beyond the usual “tail numbers don’t match” type of error that Luke commits.
As some photographic proof for this: here’s a photograph of ILM’s John Dykstra sitting in front of a blue screen, along with a TIE fighter model, from the shoot of A New Hope (full article is here, with some interesting information on how they developed and shot the opening crawl).
Not just enhanced, but in a number of cases, the original effects shots (using models) were completely replaced with CGI shots; I suspect that this is the one that you’re referring to. Here’s a comparison of the original shot (top), compared to the CGI shot (bottom).
You are very close. the flash is a few seconds past that.
In glorious 1080p flash at 1:40
There sure were a lot of changes!