Star Wars Fixes Plot Hole By Wiping Out Fan-Favorite Hero

Star Wars might be the biggest franchise in the world in 2024, but the first movie was very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants production. As a result, several mistakes made it into the finished film. These range from a Stormtrooper hitting his head on a door to the lightsabers occasionally becoming transparent. And then there’s the most egregious error, Fake Wedge.

Originally, Colin Higgins was cast for the minor role of Wedge Antilles in A New Hope. Unfortunately, Higgins had trouble memorizing his lines and was fired after just one day of shooting. Actor Denis Lawson was brought in to replace him, and he did such a good job that he continued to play Wedge throughout the rest of the original trilogy.

Oddly, one of the scenes Higgins filmed during his one-day onset actually made it into the finished film. Fans were quick to dub Higgins “Fake Wedge,” and for years, his inclusion in the final film was a fun little piece of trivia Star Wars fans could break out at parties. In 2017, however, Lucasfilm decided to retcon Higgins as a separate character and canonized the term “Fake Wedge” in the process.

The anthology From a Certain Point of View included a short story titled “Duty Roster,” which identified Colin Higgins’ Star Wars character as Col Takbright, a different Rebel Pilot. Takbright’s canon story is that he resembled Wedge Antilles in both voice and appearance, earning him the nickname “Fake Wedge” from his fellow pilots. Takbright, understandably, did not love the nickname.

For anyone curious, Col Takbright is easy to spot in the movie. In the scene where the Rebel pilots are being briefed on the Death Star run, Takbright loudly exclaims that the two-meter exhaust port the Rebels are aiming for is an “impossible” shot, “even for a computer.” Fake Wedge is then schooled by Luke Skywalker, who proudly claims that he used to zoom around Tatooine in his speeder, one-shotting innocent animals roughly the same size as the exhaust port.

Fake Wedge is a great example of Lucasfilm’s compulsion to give a canon explanation to every last gaff or flub that ended up onscreen. When it comes to Star Wars, a continuity error can’t ever just be a simple mistake. That’s why we have a whole convoluted explanation for why Han Solo seems to use the term parsecs as a unit of time when describing the Millennium Falcon’s speed.

Rather than accept it as a misunderstanding on George Lucas’s part, authors and filmmakers have instead had to bend over backward to come up with a cockamamie story involving black holes and the length of smuggling routes. By comparison, the Fake Wedge explanation isn’t quite so bad, but it’s still unnecessary.

Sometimes, movies make mistakes, be it continuity errors or dialogue that, in hindsight, contradicts something later on. That’s just how it is. Not every screwup needs a book or comic to awkwardly fit it into canon.