Some new connections between Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the original trilogy have been revealed. The sequel trilogy has proven incredibly popular - The Force Awakens made $2 billion worldwide and The Last Jedi is 2017's most anticipated film - and a lot of that comes from its balance of the old and new.
Episode VII obviously featured several major returning characters as well as a galaxy heavily informed by the Rebel/Empire conflict (right down to another planet-destroying superweapon), but it also went to great lengths to show new characters and locations (even if they were twists on the classic archetypes and iconography). Episode VIII moves us further into the new era, although it will actually have evenmore tangible links to the past. On top of heavily influenced designs like the TIE Silencer, we just learned of some more impactful connections.
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The first comes care of the Sphero app used to control the impressive remote droid toys. This has already revealed Snoke's Mega Star Destroyer and and now shows us the Raddus (via Reddit). The good guys' own gigantic ship (it's twice the size of the Mon Calamari cruisers seen at the end of Return of the Jedi), it's obviously named after Admiral Raddus, the heroic white Mon Cal from the end of Rogue One.
Further, the StarWars.com Databank has some new details on Crait, the salt flat planet seen in the teaser trailer that appears to be the stage for a climactic battle between First Order gorilla walkers and Resistance ski-speeders. Updated postings on the series' website reveal that the base where the heroes hole themselves up is an old outpost once used by the Rebel Alliance - possibly one previously visited by General Leia - and that the crafts they eventually use actually pre-date the Rebellion.
The Raddus moment is a neat example of how the Star Wars Stories set over 35 years before the new trilogy can still have a slight presence in the Episodes, perhaps hinting at a cross-generation storytelling going forward; this would make it seem likely Han Solo will have some subtle link to Episode IX.
That said, the real interest comes from the Crait info. Pre-dating the Rebels essentially means prequel era, meaning where the Resistance choose to hide out after going on the run from the First Order (the evacuation of their base from The Force Awakens doesn't quite go to plan) has importance spanning the full saga in some form.
While all this is cool for fans, it's unlikely to factor into the story of The Last Jedi itself too much - Rian Johnson has said that all the newly rolled out merchandise doesn't contain any major spoilers, meaning everything we've seen across Force Friday is light on shocking info.
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Source: Sphero, StarWars.com
