20 pieces of trivia you need to know about Star Wars

That’s no moon (it’s a potato)

Anyone who has ever made a Star Wars costume knows that a little can go a long way. Wear tissue boxes on your feet — great, you’re now a GNK droid! Wear pastries on your head — you’re Princess Leia! Naught but a waistcoat, a fake blaster and a smirk annoying enough to knock someone’s pastries off is all you need to actually become Han Solo.

This economic and efficient way of making things was something that the production team took to heart. For example, the Tantive IV escape pod that C-3PO and R2-D2 use to elude Darth Vader in Star Wars: A New Hope was created from two paint buckets. No wonder it crashed on Tatooine!

The ILM team was similarly resourceful when it came to creating asteroids for Empire Strikes Back. So annoyed were they at being criticized for making asteroids that looked like potatoes (they had tried multiple times to get the look right), they actually included a few of them in the distance during the Millennium Falcon chase scenes.

Keep an eye out, too, for a wayward shoe posing as another asteroid in the scene. The legend goes, according to Flickering Myth on YouTube, that, just as with the potato incident, the creative team were so fed up of George Lucas’ demands on them that they included the shoe to see if he’d notice. He didn’t and was apparently only told about it years later.

Not sure we’d want to be in their shoes when he found out!