Mythology Gag / Rogue One

---

• The black armored elite Death Troopers borrow multiple design elements from the Dark Troopers of the Legends game, Dark Forces, being hyper-elite and hyper-dangerous black-colored infantry deployed in small numbers. In addition, according to a visual guide, their name was also taken from a secret imperial project involving Stormtroopers, albeit ones that are now zombies.
  • Speaking of Dark Forces, Baze's gun is basically a backpack-powered Imperial Repeater Gun from the original game.
  • The black armored Death Troopers are elite soldiers that also work bodyguards for high-ranking Imperials (Krennic here, but in other works they'd be seen guarding Tarkin and Darth Vader). Legends had the Novatroopers, Stormtrooper honor guards chosen among the most skilled Stormtroopers that wear black and gold armor.
• The name "Jyn Erso" sounds a lot like "Jan Ors", the name of a Legends character involved in stealing the Death Star plans. She also has several personality traits of Kyle Katarn from the Dark Forces Saga. Cassian Andor's role as a senior and trusted Alliance Intelligence agent sent to handle the more rogue Jyn Erso makes him sound like a Gender Flip of Jan Ors. Additionally, although her backstory is completely different, Jyn has some personality traits in common with Bria Tharen from the Legends canon and just like the entirety of Rogue One, Bria's Red Hand Squadron also all gave their lives to get the Death Star plans to Leia.
• This film is not the first Star Wars work with a character named Galen who has close ties to the Empire, defects, and aids the Rebel Alliance in a significant way at the cost of their own life.
• When the Death Star arrives above Jedha, it appears upside-down from our perspective. Some early promotional material from the Kenner toy line back in the late 1970s showed the Death Star in this exact way◊, as did the Japanese poster for A New Hope. Furthermore, the scene of the Death Star firing a low-powered shot at Jedha is reminiscent of the Death Star destroying Despayre, where it was built in Legends.
• In the original rough draft of A New Hope, the Death Star was a capital/city destroyer rather than a planet destroyer. Here, it's shown to be able to do exactly that when firing at a fraction of its full power.
• Director Orson Krennic, other than having a name similar to a villain in the Rogue Squadron novels, is an Imperial elite officer in charge of a special project that has his own group of black-armored Stormtroopers, making him superficially similar to Blackhole/Lord Cronal. Comparisons have also been made to General Mohc from the original Dark Forces. The flamboyant costume, especially when he's with his special cadre of troopers, also makes him reminiscent of Warlord Zsinj.
• According to All There in the Manual, Cassian was a senatorial contact on Darknell at some point in the past. There is a Legends story called Interlude at Darkknell that describes how Senator Garm Bel Iblis of Corellia discovered evidence of the construction and existence of the Death Star two years before the events of A New Hope, immediately leading to the official formation of the Rebel Alliance. Presumably, this is Broad Strokes, as the story contradicts with what has been established in new canon, and Senator Bel Iblis has yet to be recanonized.
  • It could be argued that Saw Gererra is an Expy or Suspiciously Similar Substitute to Garm Bel Iblis, seeing how both of them were members of the Rebel Alliance before ideological differences between them and Mon Mothma led them to forming their own distinct faction. The biggest difference is that Bel Iblis feared Mon Mothma was accumulating too much power among the Rebellion and later New Republic, and would install herself as a new Emperor should Palpatine be overthrown. Gererra on the other hand didn’t believe Mothma was willing to go far enough in the fight for freedom.
  • Likewise, one episode of Star Wars Rebels depicts Gererra investigating Imperial shipments of Kyber to seemingly random points in space and concluded it must be for the construction of a superweapon a year or so prior to the battle of Yavin, not unlike Bel Iblis in Interlude at Darknell.
• Chirrut is connected to the Whills — a race or group that hearkens back to the earliest drafts of A New Hope. A brief statement he makes with his first appearance — "May the Force of Others be with you" — is the original version of the now-famous line.
• During the infiltration on Scarif, K-2SO starts to say the series catchphrase "I have a bad feeling about this" but is interrupted before he completes it, reflecting the fact that this is not a standard series entry.
• One of the X-wing squadrons attacking Scarif is Blue Squadron. In the original script for A New Hope (as well as the novelization and the comics adaptation) the squadron that attacks the Death Star was named Blue Squadron, but the colour was changed to Red during shooting to accommodate the use of blue screens. Blue Leader's X-wing even bears marking and weathering patterns similar to the prototype "Blue One" X-wing model built in 1976. Blue Squadron was completely wiped out, explaining their absence in A New Hope.
• The Empire's cover story for Jedha's destruction, that was a mining accident, seems like it should be impossible to believe, until you remember Peragus II, which was an actual mining accident that was just as destructive.
• Several of the project code names are references to Legends events or projects. "Black Saber," for example, is a clear reference to the Darksaber superweapon, which was based on Death Star technology. They couldn't actually use the name Darksaber because of the canon palette-swapped lightsaber from The Clone Wars.
• As the team arrives on Eadu, Bodhi Rook tells them to fly low in the planet's canyons as Imperial sensors are scattered everywhere and they would be detected at higher altitudes. The Rogue Squadron video games had missions in which the players had to do exactly this to infiltrate Imperial installations and wreak havoc on them. This is a touch of truth in television, as flying low to hide from radar behind the curvature of the earth is a fundamental tactic used by real fighter pilots.
• In keeping with the immediate prequel nature of the film, Darth Vader is in his original costume from Episode IV rather than the redesigned one used for the rest of the series, red lenses and all.
• Vader's personal residence being a fortress built on a field of lava comes from an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back, and the idea was also revisited in several Legends works.
• Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus have a relationship that seems to be at least partly based on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, with Chirrut being a spacey and romantic Cool Old Guy who models himself after an extinct order of chivalric warriors, and Baze being his long-suffering companion who keeps him down-to-Earth. This Shout-Out may have been inspired by "Don-Wan Kihotay", a blatant Don Quixote Expy from the original Star Wars (Marvel 1977) comics who thought he was a Jedi.
• In A New Hope, it was noted the Death Star plans were on "data tapes". Here, the original Imperial storage unit for them is a hard drive-like object with round shapes on it that imply tape spools, fitting its original description. By the time it reaches the Rebel fleet, of course, it's on the datacard used by Leia and R2-D2 in the original movie.
• The ion torpedoes used by the Rebel Y-wings to disable the Star Destroyers appeared in X-Wing Alliance as well as a bit of other material.
• One All There in the Manual: Senator Pamlo, the dark-skinned woman in the white robes who appears in the Rebel base, is the senator from the planet Taris, the world bombarded by the Sith in Knights of the Old Republic.

---