Rumor: YAVIN 4 all sorts of a Jedi Academy in ‘EPISODE VII’? Maybe. Who the hell knows!
Holy shit balls! We haven’t had a Star Wars rumor in like a week! That’s insaneo. I was trembling, my nipples groaning from lack of Force-flicking. I can rest easy now however, with this latest rumor surrounding good old Yavin IV.
/Film:
The original base of the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, was on the tiny moon Yavin 4. It’s here that X-Wing fighters were launched against the Death Star and Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca were given their medals. From there, of course, the Alliance was forced to move to Hoth and eventually to some floating ships, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably a pretty special place to the heroes of the original trilogy.
George Lucas used a Mayan temple in the Guatemalan rainforest to double as the temple and shot there for four days in early 1977. That temple has since become not only a fixture in global history, but a big part of pop culture history. More attention is focused on Mayan civilization than ever as we come upon December 21, 2012, the day the Mayans say will mark the end of the world. (Or the end of an age, or perhaps nothing, depending on interpretation of ancient texts and calendars.)
What in the hell does this all have to do with Star Wars Episode VII? In a Reuters report on the Star Wars/Mayan collection, they seem to have come upon a new piece of information. They say the new film will return to this location and the reason, if true, opens up some incredible possibilities.
Here’s a link to the Reuters article where this information comes from, but best bit follows:
Yavin 4 and the rebel base return to the Star Wars plot in the forthcoming Episode VII, announced in October by the Walt Disney Co, in which Skywalker comes back to the planet to build a Jedi Knight academy. However, fans said that Disney will likely film those scenes in a studio rather than return to Tikal.
This might just sound like a rumor, but considering Reuters has some very specific information about Lucas’s original filming, it’s probably safe to assume they spoke to a local tourism department or film society, the kind of group who might know if a certain company has begun scouting locations for a movie that’s set to open in 2015.