Mace Windu Stand-In Blunder Discovered In Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

Everyone's talking about the takeaway coffee cup that inadvertently made it into a scene in the fourth episode of the final series of Game Of Thrones. The offending cup was spotted on a table in front of Daenerys - played by Emilia Clarke - in a time and land where disposable cups simply don't exist.

It's no surprise, then, that the fuck up went viral, with screenshots of the blunder being shared thousands upon thousands of times on social media. The makers of the programme shouldn't feel too bad, though - that kind of thing happens all the time and has been happening ever since people first started making films.

As if to prove that very point, one Reddit user noticed an even bigger, more glaring error when rewatching Star Wars: The Phantom Menace recently.

In a scene towards the end of the film, Mace Windu, who is played by Samuel L Jackson, walks alongside fellow members of the Jedi Council. Except that it wasn't Jackson who was filmed doing so at all, but actually a stand-in. Whoops!

Disney

It's maybe not quite as obvious as the Game Of Thrones SNAFU, because in the scene where the stand-in, erm, stands in, the focus is on Sheev Palpatine, the Dark Lord Of The Sith. But if you zoom in on the background where Windu is meant to be, it's pretty obvious that the actor wearing his clothes isn't Jackson.

Disney

To be fair to George Lucas, Star Wars - and Game Of Thrones, for that matter - is a huge production, so it's inevitable that a few things will slip through the cracks here and there. And the fact that it took 20 years for someone to notice is surely of comfort, too.

The 20th anniversary of the film is just days away now, so it's probably a bit too late to change it for then, but when Lucas decides it's time to release the film again, perhaps he can just digitally edit the gaffe out, in much the same way he added all the unnecessary CGI parts to the original trilogy when those we reissued.

Or we can just pretend that none of the films after the original trilogy ever happened. That might be preferable, actually.

Topics: Star Wars, TV and Film, US Entertainment

Mischa Pearlmen

Mischa is a freelance journalist usually based in either New York or London. He has written for Kerrang!, Record Collector, NME, the New York Observer and FLOOD magazine, among others. Contact him at [email protected]