Star Trek: First Contact

Special effects designers and animators are known for sneaking little Easter eggs into the material they work on—like the Pizza Planet truck that makes cameos in nearly every Pixar movie. In the case of Star Trek: First Contact, a fun sci-fi universe cross-over makes an appearance.

John Knoll, a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, worked on both the special effects for the Star Wars special edition releases and for Star Trek: First Contact. When it came time to work on Star Trek: First Contact, he subtly slipped a newly rendered Millennium Falcon digital model into the space battle between the Borg Cube and Starfleet. If you watch the scene in slow motion, the Millennium Falcon can be seen zooming about above and behind the Borg cube.

That wasn’t the only Easter egg tucked away inside First Contact. In addition to the appearance of the Millennium Falcon, the Borg’s blinking eyepieces are actually spelling out the cast and crew members’ names in Morse Code, and when Captain Picard enters commands into a satellite dish control unit, the unit is revealed to be an AE-35, the same model as the Discovery’s satellite dish control system in 2001: A Space Odyssey.