Anticipating Empire

I've been listening to Galactica Watercooler's podcasts about the Star Wars movies lately. They've reminisced a bit about going to see the Star Wars movies for the first time in the theater. I have numerous memories, of course, but I was thinking about waiting for Empire Strikes Back to come out.

It was released in May of 1980 a month before my 8th birthday. I remember my mother showing me an article in Time or Newsweek magazine a couple of months before it came out. The article was one page long and had one picture: Yoda standing on the jungle floor of Degoba. I remember reading the article very closely, but it told you virtually nothing about the movie.

I stared at the picture intently, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. At first, I thought that Yoda was emerging out of the ground because it looked like his cloak went all the way down and he was so short. I think I eventually figured out that he was very small, but I couldn't figure out what he had to do with anything from the first movie. Incidentally, I didn't even have a clue what the title of the movie meant, nor did I care.

Second, my mom bought me a copy of Fangoria that had an article in it. The magazine in general was filled with oddities and bizarre pictures that left me uneasy about the world. Furthermore, there were only a couple of pictures from Empire, but they were of the stormtroopers on Hoth wearing their snow gear, carrying a mounted laser gun. I was absolutely ecstatic, which only made the anticipation worse.

The only other way to catch a glimpse of the upcoming features were of course trailers. So I, like everybody else, would go to movies wanting to see particular previews more than the actual movie. This appears to be the actual trailer that was shown in theaters. Watching it, I can't imagine wanting to see a movie any more desperately than I did then. Furthermore, what other movie actually delivered the way Empire did?

Lastly and perhaps most importantly. When the movie came out -- that was it. That was your chance to see it, then it was done. So I remember trying to absolutely soak in every moment for recall later. And when it was gone, it was gone. No videotapes. No movie channels. All I had from Star Wars was a little wind it yourself movie thing that you looked into, and it played about ten seconds from the movie with no audio obviously. I can't remember what that thing was called.

Actually Empire was the turning point. My friend John's father ended up getting a bootleg copy of Empire on Betamax, no less. That was the first time I thought, hey, there might be hope of seeing things when they aren't in the theater. Now we're a bunch of spoiled nancy boys.