The title card of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Still from the Olympics trailer. Photo: Disney/Lucasfilm

Rogue One has its share of pure digital trickery, but one space battle simply relied on some never before seen shots to pull off some magic.

Note: Perhaps obviously, this article contains spoilers for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and in particular, its climactic final battle. We know a lot of you have already seen it, but everyone else is forewarned if you read on.

Rogue One required some creative use of computer graphics to bring some characters to life whose actors have either died or simply aged since Star Wars was first released in 1977. Still other cameos took some decent-sized effort but utilized techniques that aren’t quite so modern.

Namely, sharp-eyed fans took notice that some of the pilots who take place in the massive space battle toward the end of Rogue One are the same ones who participate in the Death Star run in Star Wars. It’s a great bit of fan service that didn’t even take anyone digitally inserting any faces over other actors’ bodies.

Director Gareth Edwards told Radio Times that all it took was some Star Wars footage from the cutting room floor, and that he stumbled across it by accident.

“We went to Skywalker ranch, and there’s the archives there. “And as we’re walking around, and doing all the cool things and looking at the Millennium Falcon and trying on Han Solo’s jacket and things like that, in the back at the bottom was all these cans of film. And we said ‘what are they?’ and they said ‘Oh, it’s Star Wars.’ “And you go… ‘has someone gone through all this? And it’s like ‘not really, they’re not fully like digitised at all.'”

I don’t know about you, but the idea of deleted scenes from Star Wars just sitting around at Skywalker Ranch has to rank right up there among the “coolest fanboy wishes that might actually be true.” Needless to say, Edwards realized what a golden opportunity he had to make some direct connection between his film and the original.

“Through the magic of ILM [special effect studio Industrial Light and Magic] they cut round them and manipulated them and stuck them into our cockpits. “It’s the sort of thing you think, ‘how many people will notice?’ Do you know what I mean? It’s like, is this a lot of effort for very little reward?”

He needn’t have worried. At least at this writer’s opening night Rogue One show, there was an audible buzz through the crowd as soon as Red Leader and Gold Leader popped up on screen.

Miss them the first time through? Might be time to consider a second viewing, which Edwards probably wouldn’t mind at all.