Life on Earth is too depressing right now, so Sean and Cody blast over to the ice planet of Hoth (which looks suspiciously like Finse, Norway) to figure out how the Star Wars gang handles a cryonic environment. In The Empire Strikes Back, resistance heartthrob Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) gets his face effed up by the Bumble creature from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer while testy Han Solo (Harrison Ford) sells Wookie kisses and the rebellion prepares for an epic space battle with military tactics straight out of 1916. Analysis of The Empire Strikes Back touches not just on icy environments and how to live there, but how science fiction often depicts the environment, the cultural memory of Vietnam, Art Deco design and its socioeconomic assumptions, and how this film in particular evokes the classic “Golden Age” science fiction of yesteryear’s pulp magazines.
The idea for this episode started with a single inexplicable question: what do tauntauns eat? In addition to that burning inquiry, numerous others come up. Is the “wampa” monster the astral equivalent of a baby alligator flushed into the New York City sewers? Wouldn’t Cloud City be way too cold to just walk around outside? Why do people who work in Antarctica dread touching doorknobs? What can a train ride across Norway teach you about Star Wars? What’s the ideology of the Empire? Why are sci-fi planets so often depicted as having only one climate? Is the lining of Lando’s cape made of Corinthian leather? Is the “I am your father” thing just a cop-out? We’re ready to target all these questions and more on this episode of Green Screen. The shield will be down in moments!
The Empire Strikes Back at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/
The Empire Strikes Back at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-empire-strikes-back/
Next Movie: The French Connection (1971)
