May 2007 marked thirty years since the original theatrical release of Star Wars. In May 2008, Return of the Jedi reaches the quarter-century mark. John Booth, who at age six converted his thumbs and index fingers from cowboy shooters to Han Solo-inspired blasters, is raking together his memories of the saga in a series of essays for Field's Edge.The series begins here.
The Empire Strikes Back is a special movie.
From a strictly cinematic standpoint, it's the best Star Wars flick in the bunch: It's a visual stunner, the script’s genius, and the plot and its cliffhangers rock.
Of course, it runs deeper than that, because looking back, the Empire era was kind of my Golden Age of Star Wars.
For starters, Empire marked the first time I'd ever really paid real attention to the idea of a sequel. That’s right – I’m eight or nine years old probably, I’m obsessed with Star Wars, cut-out action-figure proofs-of-purchase are the coin of my realm, and what’s that you say? They’re making another one?!?! Oh, dear God.
Despite my rabid fandom, I didn’t see Empire on opening day. Maybe not even opening weekend. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why not, given that I’d been waiting for this movie for, at that point, a little less than a third of my whole freaking life.
Pre-internet, back when we lived in caves and watched our sitcoms on papyrus flip-animation books, there wasn’t much in the way of pre-film speculation available to your average elementary-school kid. The closest thing I can think of was an issue of National Geographic's World magazine which had a whole story on some of the special effects in the as-yet-unreleased Empire. Came with this great poster of the Millennium Falcon being chased by a Star Destroyer – the familiar publicity shot with the green laser bolts ricocheting near her hull – and just a few photos in the article, but enough to get us really excited about what we were in for. Asteroids! Big metal animal-looking things! Luke and Vader going at it with lightsabers! (I kid you not – in one photo, there’s a background light or something that looks, if you’ve got a little imagination and some hyperactivity, like a ghostly figure. My friends and I wondered if old dead Obi-Wan was making a spiritual comeback of sorts. He did, of course, but not in the way we’d been thinking.) There was also a picture of the Falcon sitting on that Cloud City landing platform just after her arrival. I think it may have actually been in the background of a photo showing one of the matte-painting artists at work or something, because the picture was small enough that I couldn’t actually tell it was the Falcon. I actually thought it was a shot of some kind of alien from the torso up, and only later realized what I’d thought was this thing’s oddly-shaped head was actually Han and Chewie’s starship. You know how once you find the hidden picture inside another one, or see a drawing or photo the way it’s meant to be seen instead of the way you saw it originally, it’s hard to “lose” that second vision and sort of re-discover your first viewpoint? Believe it or not, even when I’m watching Empire for the umpteenth time, it’s still easy to dredge up just enough of that eight-year-old me to see that landing platform as an alien with a Millennium Falcon-shaped head.
I remember seeing the previews, the lasting image being that shot of the Falcon careening sideways through a canyon, explosions in her wake. I remember being enthralled by the new movie logo, with The Empire Strikes Back framed by a wraparound version of the old Star Wars and thinking it was incredibly cool. Even now, my favorite old-school toys and things are the pieces with that logo, because it still stirs those long-ago nerves of excitement and anticipation.
And then of course, there was the mystery of Boba Fett, tantalizingly offered in glorious full-color Kenner plastic well before we’d have any idea of just how ridiculously small a part he’d play onscreen.
Empire was also the first time we got to see a full-out Star Wars marketing and merchandising blitz leading up to a movie release. I don’t think I ever did manage to collect all the stickers that went with that Burger King folder, or get all the fast-food chain’s ESB glasses.
When the movie itself finally came out, I had to put up with hearing stuff from people who’d seen it – and man, oh man, the things I was hearing…
For starters, there was the glimpse of Vader’s head. “All you can see is veins and stuff,” was what I remember someone telling me, and I imagined it looking like a flesh-colored brain spidered with pulsing purplish-blue tendrils.
One of the older kids across the street was the first one to hit me with the “Darth Vader is Luke’s dad” news. This rocked me, of course, but I wasn’t mad about hearing it ahead of time. I was eight years old – all it did was make me want to see the movie more. I remember telling my Dad about it and him kind of shaking his head and saying something like, “Well, you never know. Maybe Darth Vader’s just trying to trick Luke, so he won’t kill him or something.” Thinking back to the expression on his face, I wonder if Dad wasn’t maybe a little sad that some older kid had felt the need to spoil the surprise for me.
A kid on my baseball team saw the movie before me, too. (Yes, I played baseball. No, not well. I was one of those outfielders who could probably count on one hand the number of times I actually touched the ball during a game because hardly anybody could hit that far.)
We were sitting in the cinder block dugout along the first base line at one of our late-afternoon games, and this kid was talking about Empire, which I seem to think I was going to go see that weekend. He had a nasal, smart-ass voice and was chewing gum open-mouthed, and I remember his nod when someone asked him, “Do they really show Han ripping the organs out of that monster?” The image that formed in my head was one of Solo in Cloud City, standing in front of a vague, hulking mass, tearing through its innards bare-handed and tossing pieces back over his shoulder like he was looking for a lost set of car keys in a pile of dirty laundry.
I’ll never forget the day I finally got around to seeing the movie for myself.
The night before, my pal Jacob had come over to my house and my mom was going to drive us to Mellett Mall the next day and drop us off for a noon-ish showing. Probably a Saturday, since we didn’t have church in the morning. As it happened, some friends of our family were in town, and their son, a kid named Craig who was the same age as me and Jake, wound up coming over to spend the night, too.
So the three of us stayed up late goofing around and getting psyched about the movie and everything, but when time came to fall asleep, Craig said he wanted to go home. (“Home” being his grandparents house, where he and his family were staying.) Said he couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t even try. Didn’t care that going home meant missing out, for the love o’Pete, on seeing The Empire Strikes Back the next day. He actually guilt-tripped me into going down into my parents’ room at one-thirty in the morning and waking my mom up to ask her to take him back to his grandma’s. Naturally – and I’m paraphrasing here – she said, “No way. Go to bed. Good night.”
Next morning (yes, we’d finally fallen asleep, even Craig), we had breakfast, gathered up my friends’ stuff and waited for mom to take us to the mall. (HolycrapI’mactuallygoingtoseeANOTHERStarWarsmovie!!!!) Mom double-checked the showtimes in the newspaper and we headed out for a 12:15 matinee.
Got to the mall a few minutes before showtime. Went up to the ticket window to find that the movie had started at 12 o’clock. Son.Of.A.Bitch. Yep, that’s right – the big reason I’ll never forget the first time I saw Empire is because I missed the beginning. IT was so disorienting walking into that theater late, trying to find a seat and at the same time not wanting to take my eyes off the screen for more than a millisecond.
Thanks to previews, I figure we missed less than ten minutes. It’s easier to recall what I didn’t see the first time than to remember where exactly we came in: Missed the opening theme music and the yellow-lettered crawl; missed the Star Destroyer and the probe droid deployment; missed the Probot’s impact on Hoth. I think we were there to see Luke get whacked by the Wampa. I know we were there for the belly-slitting scene, though, because I thought, “Well, that’s hardly 'ripping the organs out.'”
A few other things that stick with me from that first time:
Confusing the curved-wing TIE Bomber with Vader’s fighter and thinking he was pursuing the Falcon through the asteroids himself.
Afterward, Jake and I had to explain to Craig the meaning of Yoda’s line “That is why you fail.”
I utterly failed to realize that it was Luke’s face inside the Vader vision on Dagobah.
When they knock over the block of carbonite containing Han, I remember thinking that he was “popping out” due to the impact of the block landing so hard. (It makes no sense, I know. I was eight.)
During a pause in the lightsaber duel, while Luke’s stalking Vader, I leaned over to Craig and whispered, “I hear somebody breeeaaa-thing –” and right then is when Vader jumped out of hiding with a huge downward slash of his saber. It was awesome.
When we walked out of the theater after the movie, I hardly remembered that we’d missed those first few minutes. It was still a couple weeks, at least, before I finally saw the movie in its entirety, and I actually remember being slightly disappointed that the super-cool Empire movie logo wasn't in the opening titles. In the meantime, Jake had gone to see it with his parents and I dragged every possible detail about the movie’s opening moments out of him.
Not that there’s a lot there to tell. Still, it was a few moments of Star Wars movie-time that I hadn’t seen, and that was like knowing a week after Halloween that you still had a Butterfinger left over but not remembering where you hid it.
Here are the links to the rest of Remembering Star Wars:
Part I: Summer, 1977
Part II: The Droids We Were Looking For
Part III: Perfect Hibernation
Part IV: Into A Larger World
Part V: Collect All 21!
Part VI: A Certain Point of View
Part VII: A Pack-A-Day Habit
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