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There’s a secret stormtrooper storyline in the Star Wars saga, and it dates all the way back to 1977.

Do you remember the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi disables the Death Star tractor beam in A New Hope? The next time you watch that scene, listen closely to the two stormtroopers. The troopers, unaware of Kenobi’s presence, discuss a piece of technology called T-16.

What you might not know is that the conversation continues across multiple Star Wars projects across multiple eras of the timeline.

“There’s a funny thing that’s kind of a blooper that [Sam Witwer’s] involved in and our colleague David Collins,” Star Wars sound editor Matthew Wood says at Dragon Con. “We do this thing, I don’t know if this is going to go into a little bit of a deep dive, but in Episode IV when Ben Kenobi is skulking around the Death Star and you see those two stormtroopers talking and they’re like, ‘Hey, did you see those new [T-15s]? Yeah, some of the other guys are telling me about it.’ That whole scene, we got it into our head, because we go and perform these kind of voices for everything starting with The Force Awakens all the way through to now, every single show that’s happened. And Dave and Sam take that thread of those two guys talking about that [T-15] and we’ve put it in every single [project].”

“It’s one of those things where we’ve been doing this for years now, and it’s like, is anyone going to stop us?,” Witwer says.

“Every project there’s two stormtroopers and they’re talking about some iteration of that equipment. So, because Force Awakens takes place after A New Hope, and in A New Hope it’s T-16s, so in Force Awakens it’s, ‘Hey, did you hear about the new T-17s?’ ‘Yeah, I did. I hear they’re great.’ ‘They’re not.’ And then in Solo it was, ‘If the T-15s are down, we walk from here.’ Because we’re going beforehand.”

“In Rogue One they’re on the beach and they’re like, ‘Hey, did you hear the T=15s have been rendered obsolete?’ ‘Oh boy, it’s about time for that.’ And so literally depending on where you are in the Star Wars timeline determines which pieces of equipment they’re talking about. Much like the Star Trek movies, the even numbers are incredible. They nail it. And the odd numbers suck. And we have literally put this in I believe every Star Wars project,” Witwer continues.

According to Witwer, he even snuck it into some episodes of The Mandalorian.  Keep your ears open the next time you watch a Star Wars project.

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