When Pops (Gold Five) reports Gold Leader’s death to Red Leader, the latter refers to him as Gold Leader. Talk about an instant battlefield promotion.
Watch Biggs’ canopy as Red Leader orders Luke to hold his wingmen back while he makes his run. A black splotch streaks across the special effects background.
Poor Red Twelve. He gets blown up by Vader’s TIE while flying wingman to Red Leader’s torpedo run, and he doesn’t even have the benefit of an actor portraying his death. Just an exploding miniature. No respect.
Red Ten’s death isn’t Red Ten’s death! There’s another pilot seen in the shot where Red Ten bites it. Watch the preceding shots. Red Ten has a dark green helmet, with yellow circles and black dots (inset). When he dies, he is wearing a striped red helmet, which Janson will wear in The Empire Strikes Back. .
As Red Leader’s X-wing flies by the camera, being pursued by Vader’s TIE, some sort of support rod or clamp can be seen at the back of the Rebel ship. The X-wing’s rear fuselage is longer than usual. (Not the shot where Red Leader is hit, though.)
In the few bluescreen shots involving Artoo in the space battle, you’ll notice his blue details are suddenly black. Too bad they didn't fix this up in the Special Edition, like they did with Empire and Jedi.
During a couple of the TIE pursuit shots, (the one right before Luke has Artoo increase the power, for instance) strange black effects artifacts can be seen trailing from the TIE fighter closest to camera.
During some of the higher-angle TIE cockpit shots, you can see a window at the very rear of the compartment. This hexagonal window corresponds to the "engine port" on most TIE fighter schematics. This is, presumably, what prompted Shane Johnston to name it the ingress/egress hatch in his technical journals. Don’t know why nobody agrees with him, my guess is that everyone remembers the toy hatch much better. A design error has this window on Vader’s TIE even though his ship has no corresponding port due to its elongated hull design. Also, check out how transparent Vader's lenses are in this scene.
A cool continuity effect. As Luke’s torpedoes shoot into the Death Star, note the impact points from Red Leader’s near-miss.
This scene is filled with bad compositing effects. Most notably, look at the densities of the black shadows, and the outlines on the TIE fighter. The animated spark of collision is less-than-believable, and the TIE fighter's support rod can be seen jutting out of the lower right side of the cockpit ball.
.
Due to a compositing glitch, Vader's TIE advanced leaves a ghostly comet-trail blur as it soars into space.