I've read, in many places, and heard in interviews, that while filming the Battle of Endor sequence in Return of the Jedi that in the "It's a trap!" scene, when an overwhelming number of Imperial ships are flying at the Rebel Fleet, that there are at least two interesting things in the shot:
1) There are two ghost TIE fighters that show up over the Millenium Falcon due to a compositing/matte issue.
2) That there is a tennis shoe or sneaker that shows up for one frame.
The story is that the FX people were having a very tough time with all the matting and compositing work for that shot (which, supposedly, is the most complex matte shot ever done in film) and at one point one of the guys took off his shoe and shot it as a space ship and this ended up in the shot for one frame.
I've seen forum discussions claiming this is true, but I have never seen a screen shot or been able to find either of these events on my own.
I have the new blu-ray edition of SW as well as the DVD edition. I don't know if these two shots were fixed along the way.
Are there screenshots of them anywhere on the web (I've been Googling, but haven't found screenshots)?
Where are they on the DVD edition or on the blu-ray edition?
(Is asking to see a screen shot encouraging a violation of copyright law? I would think 2 or 3 frames of a 2 hour movie would be fair use.)
Since asking this question, I've found a screenshot that includes a tennis shoe and a potato in the asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back. Does anyone know if this is the only "shoe in space" and that the shoe in Return of the Jedi was a misplaced reference to the one in Empire?
Answer
From a 2003 Star Wars insider interview with Ken Ralston (Visual Effects artist on ROTJ):
Which brings us back to Ralston’s tennis shoe – among other things – and the fact that it’s an amazing accomplishment just to see how many ships there are buzzing around the moon of Endor, or how many ships there seems to be.
"I was always trying to stick stuff into shots,” Ralston laughs. “JEDI has my tennis shoes and also a yogurt container as part of the ships in the background! Who would know? It’s like there’s all this stuff going on – and I thought, ‘Hey, it’d be fun.’ It was my way of just saying, ‘See what you can get away with?’ Some people noodle this stuff so much, fretting about it, but it’s like, you know, you can’t tell what this stuff is – just stick it out there!”
And from “Making of Return of the Jedi” by J.W. Rinzler
Ralston describes showing the scene to George complete with the shoe, wads of gum, and a yogurt container in it.
Lucas vetoed the yogurt container because he said it looked “odd”, but even he wasn’t able to spot the shoe and gum.
So there was a shoe (and gum) in the scene but you cannot see it, and neither could George Lucas, you'll just have to take Ken Ralston's word for it. Providing a screenshot as evidence might prove difficult as anything that looked too out of place and obvious (like the yoghurt pot) were removed.
With regards to the "Ghost TIE fighters" these are visible in the original but have been corrected in the later releases.
Original Film: 
Special Edition: 
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