Star Wars was a great movie, but it was The Empire Strikes Back that turned the franchise into a religion. Think about it. The original Star Wars was cool, it told a story, and it had a nice, neat ending where the good guys won and the bad guys got their asses kicked. You can have a lot of fun with that, but you don’t make a bazillion dollars and create a nerd army ready to kill for you. No, to do that, you need a sequel. And not just any sequel. If the first Star Wars sequel had been less Godfather II and more Caddyshack 2, I would not be sitting here writing this and you would not be wearing your Ewok Underoos while reading it. So a sequel. A good sequel. And that’s what we got with The Empire Strikes Back.
Though not right away. The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t actually the first Star Wars sequel. Not really. Before we got that, we got this:
Okay, maybe not strictly a sequel, but it was the first time our characters appeared on film since the movie, so I think we have to count it. Even if George Lucas would probably trade all the money he made off of those boxes of C3PO cereal he sold in the 80s to get us to forget the sight of Bea Arthur singing in the cantina, this thing happened and so we’re counting it.
In fact, The Empire Strikes Back isn’t even the second sequel. That honor goes to this book:
I remember seeing this book in the library in 1978 or 1979, reading it dozens of times, and eventually buying my own copy, which I also read dozens of times. Still probably have it in storage somewhere. But this book was an honest to goodness continuation of the Star Wars story, with Luke and Leia and Darth Vader and a lightsaber duel. Couldn’t ask for much more than that if you were a prepubescent Star Wars geek whose only other contact with Star Wars at the time was the Marvel Comics series, which occasionally featured a 6′-tall green rabbit (see previous Star Wars post for more of the gory details).
No, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was a real sequel, and only recently did I find out how true that is. Apparently, when George Lucas was making Star Wars, he had no idea if it would be a hit or a flop so he commissioned 2 sequels in book form that, if necessary, could be turned into low-budget movies if there was no big money to make sequels. Obviously, the first movie was a hit, big budget sequels were a given, and so Splinter was released as a book that pretty much was contradicted by everything filmed afterwards (uh, yeah, Luke and Leia really seemed to have the hots for each other in this one and as we know, that would turn out to be really inappropriate). It was fun, but it was doomed to be a tiny footnote in the overall Star Wars saga. Which brings us to the first real, big deal, not a Golden Girl in sight Star Wars sequel, which I first saw in theaters some time in June, 1980, and which I then spent a whole summer reliving with this:
I think I may have bought the book before seeing the movie, but I’m not sure. I know for sure the book cover was the first time I ever saw the poster for the movie in color. And I know I didn’t read the book until seeing the movie and I doubt I had the self-control to own the book and not take a peek, so maybe I just missed the poster entirely while at the theater to see the movie. I know for sure I loved the book. I interacted with these movies so much more with the books back in these pre-VCR or -DVD years. And so after seeing the movie in the theaters twice, the book let me go back to the story whenever I wanted. The book, and this:
Yes, the movie in all its big glossy comic book glory. I read the hell out of this thing. Copied that picture of Darth Vader many times as it turned out to be the only thing I could do as a kid that could impress girls. Sad, but a Star Wars geek will take what he can get, and for me it was Darth Vader pictures. It’s facts like this that make me wonder how I ever got a girl to let me see her naked.
Odd little side note to that Marvel comics adaptation. It came out in 3 versions. The big magazine whose cover I copied, as monthly installments of the regular comics series, and a small paperback with the same cover as the magazine. Marvel did the adaptation while the movie was being made, so it worked with early drafts of the script and concept art, without being able to see the actual movie. So given how things change during a movie’s production, and how the paperback version of the adaptation went to press earlier than the other 2 versions, the paperback version has Luke being trained by a Yoda you might not recognize:
They managed to redraw Yoda in time for the magazine and comic books, to save our childhood heads from exploding. I didn’t own the paperback book, but I did own all 6 issues of the comic book in addition to the magazine, because even at that young age I needed to find as many ways as possible to throw my money at George Lucas. Another way I found was by getting this:
Star Wars music on cassette tape. That was the way to go back in 1980. I think I had to get it twice, because the first one was defective. Ever get a cassette tape that played to the end and the tape came loose so you could never play it again? This was one of those. I’ve owned a couple of versions of the music from all of these movies over the years, but I think The Empire Strikes Back had my favorite soundtrack of them all. Not sure why, but I think it’s the best one. Sounds way better on CD than it did on cassette tape, too. But crack open one of the comics, crank the cassette player, and you could pretty much guarantee someone bigger than you would want to kick your ass before the afternoon was over. Good thing I knew how to fight back.
There was one other way to keep up with a Star Wars movie back in the day, and it’s a way that’s pretty much disappeared by now. I’m talking about the official satire of the movie, as you might find here:
Mad Magazine still exists, barely, as a quarterly magazine, so if you really want to catch a spoof of a movie you liked, you might be able to even a decade deep into the 21st Century. But back in 1980, there was actually competition for such things, and if you really wanted to, you could drop a couple of bucks to compare and contrast:
Crazy Magazine was done by the same people who ran Marvel Comics, so not only were they first to the newsstand, but they had the wrong Yoda in their spoof. In the 30 years since I’ve forgotten if any of these were any good, but I’m sure I laughed my 12-year-old butt off at the time.
So, there it is, The Empire Strikes Back, named by some one of the better sequels in movie history, and often considered the best of the Star Wars movies. And I can understand why. It was bigger, faster, and louder than the first movie. It introduced a bunch of new stuff to the saga and threw in a twist and a downer ending that almost anyone knows even if they don’t care about these movies.
But what it also did was take the first step into a larger saga that, if you really look at it, doesn’t have a whole lot of room for the original movie. Five sequels later and the movies all more or less fit together into one neat story, except for the original Star Wars. There’s stuff in there that doesn’t quite match the layers of extra story George Lucas ladled onto it over the years. So while The Empire Strikes Back is easily the best Star Wars sequel, it loses many points because of what it did to the original. Though if I could dig out a copy of the comics adaptation tonight, I’d probably read it.
See you back here, or somewhere, in 3 years as we celebrate 30 years of The Return of the Jedi. Might take me that long to come up with enough positive things to write about it.
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