LEGO 40407 Death Star II Battle vs Return of the Jedi movie comparison: Did this scene exist?

LEGO just announced the Death Star II Battle as a LEGO GWP (Gift With Purchase) for the coming May the Fourth celebrations.  The set is a little underwhelming from what I personally think. It features the Battle on the Death Star II from Return of the Jedi. Maybe I’m not as big of a fan, but this scene brings me zero memories. I had to re-watch the scenes to refresh my memory to associate it back to the build below. In this article, I tried taking several screenshots to trigger capture the essence of the set that was built by LEGO. What I learnt is that this particular scene setup does not exist in the movie. It likely could have happened “in the Star Wars world” when the cameras were rolling elsewhere — read on to find out more.

I tried searching for scenes where I could find the TIE interceptor together with the A-Wing in an “outdoor” environment to link it back to the build created and I could not at all. Let me try to explain. This outdoor scene shows the X-Wing, A-Wing and Millennium Falcon being on the surface of the Death Star II racing to find the entrance to the reactor core. 

You can recognise the red metal towers showing how ‘unfinished’ the DSII was. Yes, looks like the bad guys do paint everything in grey after they finish work, and the red parts are like unfinished metal works. It also is shown on the ground where the space crafts hover over. 

As it zips across the surface, there are those little towers with turrets. I think most of them are firing ‘very carefully’ so as not to hit their own surface. Technically, you can’t fire at your ship yeah? - you’d damage your own goods so for sure. So they’re meant for firing “up” at most, horizontal to the plane. So, a smart pilot would simply just hover below the height of the tower turrets. 

Here you can see a tower firing as the good guys fly down into the reactor core. And up to this point, there are NO, ZERO, ZILCH, NADA TIE Interceptors nor regular TIE Fighters chasing the Rebel forces. They’re just flying to avoid the turrets that are seemingly firing down on them. 

Having said that, only once INSIDE the core reactor flight path, do TIE Interceptors (and TIE Fighters) appear. And the surroundings of the scene are no longer like what you see in the sets. There are no turrets (inside) and it’s not as flat as the build. Therefore, the scene created by LEGO for this set is really an “assumed” shot… we assumed somewhere when George Lucas’s camera was not filming, they did get attacked on the surface by TIE Interceptors. You can watch the whole scene here just to get a re-cap of the whole destruction of the Death Star II. It takes away all the cut scenes and just focusses on the DSII chase and destruction.  

I know I’m picking a bone with it all, but let it be known, these types of ‘imagined’ scenes happen a lot with the liberty taken when creating toys - but I was just curious enough wanting to try to find the exact scene that my memory could not register. For what its worth, Return of the Jedi is where TIE Intercepts first made their debut (#funfact). And no prizes for guessing — the reason of all other ships that could have been featured, like the X-wing or Millennium Falcon, the A-wing was chosen because, well, the A-wing was just announced days ago that it’s the next lineup in LEGO’s Ultimate Collector Series (UCS) release for 2020. 

There you have it… small useless bits of information that you didn’t really need but just nice to know brought to you by the folks from Brick Hello. Until the next time, stay safe, and may the force be with you.