The second season of Star Wars: Andor is in full swing on Disney+, and it's been having a solid run so far. It's also returning focus to some locations we haven't seen much in the franchise in quite a while. Andor is set during the years before Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, when the Rebel Alliance is still finding its footing and the Empire is testing the bounds of its oppressive power. It'll be quite a while before the thrilling clashes of the original Star Wars trilogy, but the show has laid some fascinating groundwork by introducing one of the key locations from the first film: Yavin 4, the jungle moon where the Rebels make their last stand against the Death Star.
During the premiere block of episodes, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) was stranded on a jungle moon where he found himself in the middle of a Lord of the Flies situation as a splintering group of Rebel survivors went to war over food. He managed to give them the slip and escape in his stolen TIE Fighter. On his way back to space, the camera lingers over the jungle landscape, where we see several impressive ruins rising above the canopy. Yes, that's Yavin!
Yavin also featured in Rogue One, and we're all but certain to see more of it at some point in Andor season 2. It will have to become a main base for the Rebel Alliance in the show in order to properly tee up the films. "I mean, we have to end up in Yavin, right?" showrunner Tony Gilroy told Empire last year. "So, we'll tell the story of Yavin. No one has quite dealt with Yavin the way we will be doing it."
As excited as I was to see Yavin in Andor, I did have a weird pang of regret over how its pyramids looked. In Andor, they're clearly CGI pyramids meant to evoke a sense of awe. But in A New Hope, the pyramids of Yavin are actual real-life structures, filmed at a Mayan ruin in Guatemala.
The original Yavin 4 pyramids are the temples of Tikal in Guatemala
The very first shot we see of Yavin in A New Hope is of a Rebel monitoring the descent of the Millennium Falcon as it flies down over a jungle with several pyramids sticking out of it. This view is one of several scenes that were filmed at Tikal, the largest Mayan ruin in Guatemala.
"The iconic scene where the Rebel Alliance plans their attack on the Death Star was filmed in Tikal’s Great Plaza, with the massive pyramids and temples in the background," reads the official website for Tikal National Park. "George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, chose Tikal as a filming location because of its otherworldly aesthetic and the sense of history and mysticism it conveyed. The ancient ruins fit perfectly with the otherworldly appearance of the Star Wars universe. He chose to film A New Hope there after seeing a poster in the window of a travel agency in England advertising excursions to Tikal."
Tikal is a beautiful national park which spans around six square miles and has an estimated 3,000 structures on it. It was one of the pre-eminent cities of the Maya in Central America during the eighth century; archeologists believe that as many as 100,000 people called Tikal home at the height of its power.
I was lucky enough to visit Tikal in the years before the pandemic, and learned about its Star Wars connection directly from one of the guides. If you visit the park, you can even go to the exact spot where that iconic Yavin 4 vista was filmed. It's the view from the top of Temple 4, the tallest structure in Tikal.
At the end of the day, the CGI view of Yavin's temples in Andor is kind of an interesting conundrum. We live in an age of filmmaking where it's probably easier to create the pyramids of Yavin digitally than it is to fly a crew out to Guatemala, and by doing so Andor is able to create an internal continuity that is truly more alien. But there's something magical about the film history trivia that the view of Yavin in the original Star Wars was filmed at an actual place on Earth, and you can go there yourself.
That said, both Andor and Rogue One have clearly nodded to the real-world Mayan origin of Yavin's design. The fractured group of Rebels that Cassian encounters on Yavin in the first two episodes of the season are named the Maya Pei Brigade. And in both Andor and Rogue One, some of the temples in the background are designed to look a little bit like one of the famed temples of Tikal:
Andor season 2 airs new episodes Tuesday nights on Disney+. Here's hoping we'll see more of Yavin in the weeks ahead.
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