Has any of the actors who played the Rebel soldiers on Endor been interviewed or spoke about it? Was there more footage of them in action filmed, but simply discarded in the editing room, and didn’t make the final cut?
Not that I know of. This could help in tracking down if anyone talked about more scenes in the Endor forest being shot:
^ there is another similar image of the rebel commandos with Luke on the Death Star too.
These two threads are great for deleted scenes and storyboards for Return Of The Jedi, they do focus more on the space battles, but there is some also stuff on rebel soldiers in the Falcon from deleted scenes.
There may be something in there about the battle footage for the Forest on Endor scenes in the links or storyboards?:
Return Of The Jedi’s ‘Black Friday’ - 22nd November, 1982
Reconstructing the end of ROTJ with Storyboards
Like Juno, I thought we’d one day see more added footage with the Ewoks, Rebels and troopers in one of the Special Editions too.
An amazing amount of information in those two threads. timdiggerm’s https://macrobinoculars.wordpress.com/ is a beautiful project.
I know there’s deleted footage of Han, Leia and Chewie infiltrating the base on Endor, with some of the other Rebel soldiers in the background. This footage would require some work if it were to be incorporated into a fan edit, because it’s very raw (proper sound effects would need to be added). But at least it shows the other Rebel soldiers actually existing and doing things, if only very briefly.
https://youtu.be/gJqRPV19vKM?t=303
But this is inside the base, not in the forest. It’s also one of the few scenes on Endor that actually has a “military commando special-ops” vibe befitting an operation to take out an enemy shield generator. Hilariously, it also highlights the absurdity of Han Solo not wearing military camouflage gear like everyone else, because you know he’s way too cool for that.
I really enjoyed watching those scenes, the “military commando special-ops” vibe is great to see, a pity it wasn’t finished and didn’t make the final cut. Yarso ago there was a project on here (I think) to add certain scenes from the 2 Ewok movies, and from some high quality fan films to insert into a more adult-feeling “ROTJ: Longer Edition” edit. I hope it got finished and released.
Lol on Solo and the camouflage gear. I can easily picture him telling George: “I don’t care, I’m Han Solo and I am not wearing that!”