waves hand The name of the cell is 3263827. 
I was surprised that the Sequel Trilogy didn’t go there, until the final scene of the final film. When I’d seen the trailers for The Force Awakens, and shots of a desert world, I assumed it was Tatooine, only to be (somewhat pleasantly) surprised that it wasn’t.
[Lucas does the hand-wavy thingy] The cell was in detention block THX and fhe cell number is 1138. The trash masher was THX1138. The Guard standing outside the Millenium Falcon with the “bad transmitter” was TK 1138. The blockade runner was Tantive 1138. As they have ALWAYS been.
Here’s A New Hope thing that always bugged me, if the entire point of the Trench Run was to avoid the surface fire from the AA guns, how is Han able to swoop in and save the day in a glorified freighter without being shot down immediately?
Wouldn’t they switch off the AA guns to avoid hitting Vader?
If I recall, that’s the moment the Gold squadron’s first attack element realized they’d be facing fighter attack: when turbolaser batteries ceased fire.
wasn’t 3263827 actually Mark Hamill’s phone number at the time?
Boy, I’ll say. Vader scared me exactly once in all the SW movies, and that was it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL8bVJhXCM
Once? How about this scene?
Scared the crap out of me when I was 9.
I was 12, and nah. Impressive, but not scary.
My favorite part of that scene has always been how Tarkin watches like he’s tasting a fine wine, just sort of savoring the moment, then realizes he has to get the meeting back on track.
THX1138, of course. (Now let me check your spoiler.)
ETA: lol, I suck.
Not an issue. Simple hyperbole. It may be a backwater planet, but that doesn’t mean it’s far away from the population center. Give what we see of it, it seems dry and inhospitable, with not big cities.
Does all the hamhanded backstory-ing of the prequels move Vader down a bit on the list of “all-time movie villains”?
Yeah, this is Luke’s point of view, and he doesn’t know much about the bigger world. It’s like a kid in Yonkers talking about how isolated he feels (sorry Yonkers); he’s not really isolated because he’s far from the bright lights - he’s isolated because he’s a kid and can’t get anywhere else, just like Luke can’t.
And in a universe where droids have been around for generations, walking talking thinking droids, how inept a couple of imperial gun men had to be to let a pod be ejected from a ship they were pursuing carrying a rather small “death star plans” storage device with a simple “no life forms aboard, let it go”. Not even gonna follow that thing down with a tie fighter? Not gonna mention it to another employee? No one else saw this pod fleeing the scene? Hmmm
The general incompetence of the Imperial soldiers has been widely commented on. I get the sense that the average soldier of the Empire is a draftee who is just doing the minimum to get by. The Empire has numbers and technology on its side, against the passion of Rebellion.
Yeah, I didn’t catch onto this until I saw Solo, where he goes up to a recruiting station and is obviously hiding something about his past but the recruiting officer is so desperate for pilots he doesn’t care as long as he gives him a last name, any last name.
He thought he was signing up to be a pilot, but as the next scene showed, the Empire was just looking for warm bodies to throw into battle as infantry. He didn’t even get stormtrooper armor.
There’s a line of dialog in the script, when Han first hooks up with Beckett and crew, which indicates that he did, in fact, start out at the Academy (presumably to train as a pilot), but got kicked out, which is why he ended up as a grunt.