Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Hey, Do You Remember...?

Christopher Schrader

Tv & Film, Comedy

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2017

⏱️ 151 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The HDYR gang returns to a galaxy far, far away for a deep dive on the crown jewel of the Star Wars franchise. It's a follow-up that's so unbelievably strong that other filmmakers have turned it into some sort of Rosetta Stone for how to craft an effective sequel. The superficial elements they grasp onto though (the darker tone, the twist ending, etc.) actually have very little to do with why this all works so well.

With The Last Jedi hitting theaters this weekend, it felt like the right time to take another look at the middle chapter of the original trilogy and highlight all the ways in which this expertly expands on Star Wars lore. From the early story conferences that shaped the film to its lasting impact on this series and the industry at large, join us we revisit The Empire Strikes Back...

Topics include: why George Lucas decided not to direct this film and where his attention was focused instead, the original script and its completely different big revelation, how the scope of this begins on an epic scale and gradually gets more and more intimate, a deleted subplot that wound up getting recycled in an N64 game, the pros and cons of separating our core group of characters, the real reason Han got frozen in carbonite, changes made for the Special Edition, what sets this apart from the other entries in this series, and much much more!

iTunes / Stitcher / RSS / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

About The Show

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, do you remember the Empire Strikes Back?
0:07.0	Hello and welcome to Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose tinted glasses to see how it holds up.
0:31.7	I'm Chris.
0:32.4	I'm Donna.
0:33.1	And I'm Carlos.
0:34.0	And today we're revisiting The Empire Strikes Back.
0:53.0	Thank you. I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting the Empire Strikes Back. After the meteoric and unexpected success of the original Star Wars, George Lucas was certain of two things.
0:59.8	One, there was going to be a sequel. And two, he had no interest in directing it.
1:05.4	At this point, Lucas was thinking about the bigger picture. Not of the Star Wars saga, but of the Lucas film brand.
1:11.5	The title of this film actually works two ways. In front of the camera, it's about the rebels,
1:16.2	realizing just how hopeless their situation might be. But behind the camera, it was about Lucas
1:21.3	establishing his independence from the studio system, especially now that he was sitting on top
1:26.2	of a gold mine that none of them had believed in. Financing this film himself meant that he was sitting on top of a gold mine that none of them had
1:27.7	believed in. Financing this film himself meant that he was now fully in control of the exponentially
1:33.0	expanding Star Wars Empire. So the empire strikes back, indeed. Early on, Lucas hired sci-fi author
1:40.3	and screenwriter Lee Brackett to help him write what at the time was just called Star Wars 2.
1:45.6	After months of story conferences, they had a treatment that Brackett then turned into a script.
1:50.4	The story beats of this first draft were fairly similar to the finished film with one major
1:54.6	exception. Darth Vader was not Anakin Skywalker. In fact, the big twist in this version is delivered by the
2:01.9	Force Ghost of Anakin himself, who tells Luke that he has a long-lost twin sister named
2:07.1	Nelleth, a previously unmentioned character who's also training to be a Jedi in another
2:12.9	part of the galaxy. The moment didn't quite land, and like a lot of first drafts, it was riddled with other
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Christopher Schrader, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Christopher Schrader and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.