I’ve never noticed this before. How the hanger shot is duplicated in the distance.
Yeah, originally they wanted to use an actual hangar for the shot, but they ended up using the sound stage at Shepperton Studios in England. It wasn’t anywhere near as big as what they wanted, it was only 250ft deep, so John Barry and the crew faked the back half of it by building a forced perspective set, and they used large cardboard cutouts of the fighters at various scales in the background, and then left a space for the shots of the two actual fighters in the foregorund to be repeated via an optical comp after the scene was shot.
I think there is only one full size X-Wing and one Full size Y-Wing in the shot. I have a photo somewhere of them being dropped into position on the sound stage.Originally the fighters were meant to be lined up outside of the rebel hanger, but they ran out of money, so the shots were re-written to take place inside the ‘hangar bay’.
I recall a shot of the set without any opticals or foreground matte paintings got published somewhere back in the day. You could easily see the Y-Wing in the foreground was three pieces not really attached and a smooth dome where an R2 unit should be!
I’m kind of surprised Lucas didn’t have them SE this shot.