At Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016 I got a chance to sit down with Star Wars Rebels creator/showrunner Dave Filoni to talk about the future of the Disney XD animated series. I haven’t published the interview yet because I didn’t want it to get buried in the madness that was Comic-Con. But with San Diego behind us, let’s begin to take a look at some of the interesting bits that Filoni revealed.

Star Wars Rebels follows the Rebellion in the five years before Star Wars: A New Hope, but we’ve yet to see an X-Wing appear onscreen. So one of the first questions I asked Filoni is when we’ll finally see some X-Wings in Star Wars Rebels. Find out what he said about Star Wars Rebels X-Wings, after the jump.

By my calculation, we’re about two or three years away from A New Hope on the Star Wars timeline and we’ve yet to see a squadron of X-Wing fighters in the rebellion. Last season we got that fantastic episode that gave us the origin of the B-Wing. And the upcoming third season will feature Y-Wings. But when will the rebellion get their hands on some X-Wing fighters?

Everybody wants X-Wings, you know. It’s a tricky thing in Star Wars because now we have so many things going on across so many platforms. That, you know, when you’re creating a show and you’re able to create, you know, stories in Star Wars, I try to see well how can we make this different? So one of the choices that we made early on was that we weren’t gonna have X-Wings at least early on in the show. We’ve done B-Wings. Now we’re doing Y-Wings. But I’ve tried to stay away from a lot of the original trilogy kind of New Hope backbone stuff, because that, I want that to be clearly this is not that story. We’re a different cell.

So does that mean we’ll never see X-Wings in Star Wars Rebels? Not so quick — Filoni has already had discussions with Lucasfilm story group head Kiri Hart about how they will be introduced, and it seems more of a matter of when.

If and when X-Wings do show up it’ll probably be awesome. Kiri Hart and I always talk about Empire of the Sun. We love the movie Empire of the Sun. And to me the X-Wing moment, this is probably a giveaway, will be like the Cadillac in the sky moment when the P-51s come to the camp where the kid is. It has to have that kind of feeling behind it. That you’re so excited to see these things. Then they have value again. As opposed to just saying, oh look there’s an X-Wing. You know, I want them to appear in a moment of oh my gosh, I’ve been waiting for this.

Sounds like a pretty cool take. Here is the moment from Empire of the Sun which Filoni references:

Over the coming week, we’ll be publishing more from our exclusive interview with Dave Filoni. Keep an eye out.

Star Wars Rebels Season 3 will premiere in fall 2016.