Luke’s lightsaber is in The Force Awakens trailer

Last week’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer has now been viewed over 40 million times on YouTube – and it hasn’t even been out a week yet. The analysis has been endless. We only confirmed the other day who the voiceover was provided by. But although the trailer featured much of what we’re used to seeing in the Star Wars movies – the Tatooine desert; Stormtroopers; the Millennium Falcon – it held back one particular aspect: the original cast. While Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford are all returning for the film, which is set 30 years after the events of Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, they were nowhere to be seen in the new clip, which featured heavily on John Boyega’s and Daisy Ridley’s new characters. But a new tip from Disney, the production company behind The Force Awakens, has given information that in one small way, one of the original cast can actually be heard in the trailer.

Well, not their voice at least: Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber can be heard right at the end of the teaser, after the Star Wars logo has passed and the ‘December 2015’ cuts to black. The iconic sound of a lightsaber igniting was a nice touch to end the trailer, but how many of you actually considered it to be the weapon of any character in particular? According to a segment on American TV station ABC, the noise was confirmed as the same sound in 1977’s Star Wars, when Luke first switches on the lightsaber after it’s handed to him by Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Whether this is merely a nice little touch to the teaser trailer, or indicates something more meaningful, is entirely up to conjecture for now – at least until the next trailer hits…