Shout Out / Rogue One

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• The Imperial call sign for the hijacked shuttle is SW-0608. Episode 6, otherwise known as Return of the Jedi was the other Star Wars movie where a small group of Rebel commandos used a stolen Imperial shuttle to penetrate the Empire's defences and launch an attack on a ground installation. And Rogue One was the eighth Star Wars movie to hit the big screen.
• Gareth Edwards has described the characters of Chirrut and Baze as the Star Wars equivalent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
• Allegedly, writer Gary Whitta was inspired by Inglourious Basterds for the opening scene, with Krennic filling the role of Hans Landa visiting a farm house and Jyn being forced to run away from it losing her family like Shosanna did.
• The shot of the Star Destroyer emerging from the Death Star's shadow in the Olympics trailer is a spot-on homage to the title sequence of Macross: Do You Remember Love?, where the Macross emerges from Saturn's shadow in the exact same way, with the ship completely shrouded, only the lights visible as more and more of the ship is revealed as it enters the light. Even the camera angle is the same for the two sequences.
• The appearance of the AT-ACT walkers in the Final Battle pays homage to Godzilla's appearance in Gareth Edwards' previous film Godzilla, with the walkers emerging from the fog not unlike how Godzilla emerges from the dust cloud in that film.
• The design of K-2SO and the KX-series droids as biped robots which tower over humans, with a bullet-shaped head atop a barrel-shaped torso, with long and gangly legs and arms and oversized hands, and which (K-2SO at least) is shown to be difficult for an entire squad of troopers to take down, make them similar to the robots in Castle in the Sky.
• A pair of musical shoutouts in lines: "Everything I do, I do it for the Rebellion", and "I'll be there for you".
• In profile and especially from the back, and with guns heavily based on the MG-38, the Death Troopers greatly resemble Kerberos cops.
• A brief sequence during the battle shows Bistan firing a blaster heavily based on the M60 out of a U-Wing at attacking stormtroopers, similar to the door gunner in Full Metal Jacket.
• The Death Star appearing upside-down is visually identical to the Japanese posters for A New Hope, where the Death Star was also depicted upside-down.

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