Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Trivia: There are two additional scenes that are not included in the special edition. The first one is near the beginning when Han is asking if Luke has made it back, you will notice that there is a slaughtered Taun-Taun on the ground. In the scene they discuss that something has killed it. Later, the Ice Creatures attack the Hoth base and get locked in a storeroom. A sticker is placed on the door saying do not open. In some of the promotional materials there is a shot of C3PO peeling off the sticker. Stormtroopers open the door and get killed. When Vader enters the base, he asks 'What killed these men?' After all, they had to blast into the room, and it's already full of dead Stormtroopers.

Trivia: Acting is a collaboration, which made the Dagobah scenes difficult for Mark Hamill. For the most part he was alone, R2-D2 was remote-controlled, and Frank Oz was beneath the sets. Furthermore, he could not hear most of Yoda's lines.

Trivia: Sir Alec Guinness agreed to appear in this movie late in filming, and performed his scenes in a single day.

Trivia: When Billy Dee Williams (Lando) picked up his daughter from elementary school after the film's release, kids would run up to Williams and say "You betrayed Han Solo!"

Trivia: This was the only movie in the Star Wars series until Episode VII in 2015 without a scene on the planet Tattooine.

Xofer

Trivia: The Special Edition covers of Return of the Jedi and Empire Strikes Back are wrong. The picture of the Emperor on ESB cover is from 'ROTJ', and the lightsaber duel between Luke and Vader on the cover of ROTJ is taken from 'ESB' (notice Luke is in his fighter pilot suit, and Vader is fighting him one-handed)

Trivia: Although credited to Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, most of the script was actually written by George Lucas himself. He felt Brackett's draft got the tone and feel of the movie all wrong, and he rewrote the second draft from scratch. Kasdan's main contribution was to redo all the dialogue (admittedly a crucial element especially since Lucas is famously bad with dialogue), but otherwise nearly the entire screenplay was Lucas' work.

TonyPH

Trivia: The sound of an AT-AT Walker's footstep is a shearing machine used to cut sheet metal.

Trivia: Mark Hamill did all his own stunts in this film, except in the scene in Cloud City where he is sucked out of a window.

Trivia: The role of Lando Calrissian was originally offered to Yaphet Kotto, but he turned it down because he feared the character would be killed off and he would be typecast as a result.

Trivia: Frank Oz's performance as Yoda impressed George Lucas so much, Lucas spent thousands of dollars on a campaign to nominate Oz for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. However, the Academy shot this down, feeling that puppeteers are not "actors."

Cubs Fan

Trivia: The scene in which Luke uses the Force to get his lightsaber back in the Wampa cave was filmed by having Mark Hamill throw the saber prop into the snow, and then running the film backwards.

Trivia: There was a false page in the original script in order to fool all of the people working on the film. This was to keep it secret that Darth Vader was Luke's father. Only George Lucas, the producers and James Earl Jones knew the truth. Mark Hamill was told just moments before filming this scene so his reaction would be right, while David Prowse read the lines from the original script "Obi-Wan killed your father."

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Suggested correction: Mark Hamill stated multiple times that he knew for over a year about the twist. It was a secret for the remaining cast though.

oldbaldyone

Trivia: When Lando orders the evacuation of Cloud City, a bunch of civilians run past the camera as our heroes go down the corridor. The very last guy in this group can be clearly seen carrying an ice cream maker.

Trivia: Originally, Boba Fett was supposed to be sort of an Imperial Super-Stormtrooper (in their trademark white armor). This idea was - in a way - reused in 'Attack of the Clones', with his father Jango Fett being the genetic father of the Stormtrooper clones.

Trivia: C-3PO's interruption of the kiss between Han and Leia was an ad-lib during filming.

Trivia: In the first take of Darth Vader and his troops entering the Rebel base, the lead troopers tripped, a stuntman stepped on the cape of David Prowse (Darth Vader), the cape tore free and Prowse fell on the troopers.

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Suggested correction: How is something from the blooper reel considered trivia?

ctown28

Well I for one didn't know about it, so it's interesting to know it happened. Behind the scenes stuff is generally valid trivia.

Jon Sandys

Trivia: During the chase in the asteroid field, a TIE fighter is hit by a little one. If you watch in slow-motion, you can see the pilot ejected from the explosion.

Dr Wilson

Audio problem: When Luke says, "Now all we gotta do is find this Yoda, if he even exists," if you look closely, his mouth never moves.

More mistakes in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Yoda: Told you, I did. Reckless is he. Now, matters are worse.
Obi-Wan: That boy is our last hope.
Yoda: No. There is another.

More quotes from Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Answer: The short, short answer to this is "Yes... from a certain point of view." The long answer is complicated and depends completely on what timeframe you mean by "always." If you're going back all the way to the early rough drafts of the early-mid 70s (which actually resemble Episode I more than they do the Star Wars of 1977), you'll find there's a cyborg father figure protagonist that makes a heroic sacrifice, and then another character that is a "black knight" villain that eventually turns to the side of good near the end. Just to make things more complicated, there is yet another character, a villain by the name of "Darth Vader" that is a human Imperial officer like Grand Moff Tarkin. It may be a stretch to count all that as "Darth Vader was always the father" but the pieces were all there, at least.

TonyPH

(1) Now the earliest explicit mention on any documented material that Darth Vader is Luke's father comes from notes Lucas made outlining the general story of the trilogy and its place in the larger Star Wars saga. These were found in the archives for The Empire Strikes Back, but they are undated and we don't know if they were written before Star Wars (1977) and carried forward, or if they were written afterward. These were found fairly recently (made public in 2010) and as far as I know Lucas has never commented publicly about them.

TonyPH

(3) One thing we know, at least, is that Lucas had come up with the idea of Darth Vader the father before starting work on The Empire Strikes Back. Something incredibly odd, though, is that the first draft written by Leigh Brackett does not feature the twist (and in fact introduces Anakin himself as a ghost); for a long time many fans took this as proof that Lucas hadn't thought of the idea at all by then, but after the series outline was discovered it was made apparent that Lucas simply hadn't told Brackett for some reason. Perhaps he wasn't sure yet that he wanted to go through with it, or maybe at that point he was thinking of revealing it in the third film. Either way, Lucas would write the second draft himself, and that's where the twist first appears in script form.

TonyPH

(2) Something that must be understood about Star Wars (1977) is that it was an ALTERNATIVE to his original plans of a saga. By then he didn't think it was realistic that he would be able to make a long series of many movies, so he came up with a "Plan B": he crammed the general story of the trilogy into one movie. So we know that when Star Wars (1977) was filming, Darth Vader was NOT Luke's father, because this one movie was IT, that was the whole story. But what we DON'T know, is whether that means Lucas had abandoned the idea of Vader being the father in order to simplify the story, or if Lucas simply hadn't thought of that at all just yet.

TonyPH

(2, cont.) On a side note, you can tell by watching Star Wars (1977) how it has condensed the story of the trilogy. The middle portion has the characters trying to escape capture from the Empire while one of them loses a duel with Darth Vader (like The Empire Strikes Back) and the third act is a final battle against the Death Star above a forest moon (like Return of the Jedi). The first act features a member of royalty on the run while a couple of protagonists find the main hero on a desert planet, resembling the original drafts and by extension Star Wars: Episode I. Because of this we've arguably never actually had a "pure" first chapter to the original trilogy, even though Lucas eventually had the film serve this purpose anyway.

TonyPH

Answer: Yes, however, he didn't want anyone to KNOW about it. In fact, the original script said "'Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father.' 'He told me enough... he told me YOU killed him!' 'No, Obi-Wan killed your father'" Even Hamill was only told the real line just before shooting, so his reaction is somewhat natural.

SexyIrishLeprechaun

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