Best Regarding the Best

I'm late to the party, but probably you heard that last Friday was the 30th Anniversary of the release of The Empire Strikes Back? And while I love all the Original Trilogy (and like all of the Prequel Trilogy), let me get in line with everyone else: As much as I hate to pick a favorite, you kind of have to go with this one.

And I was there! I remember my parents taking me to see Empire when I was three. I guess that makes it one of my earliest vivid memories (even though I have a small handful from when I lived in Baltimore a year earlier)? I most that the theater where we saw it had window displays of Star Wars action figures, dioramas I suppose, and I Wanted Them. If anything, this was the cracking of the seal of my imagination and it left an unshakable imprint. It would be a year or two still before I saw A New Hope (as a theatrical re-release [they used to do that, back in the day], taken by my Dad to a theater down the street from our Alhambra home as a reward for giving my first talk in Primary) but I heard to the radio adaptation of it before that and couldn't help but imagine the swamps of Dagobah while Luke and Obi-Wan traveled across Tatooine.

Anyway, IGN has this list of 100 Things You Didn't Know about The Empire Strikes Back, it's fairly interesting. It's got some good geek stuff in there, I hadn't read any of that stuff about the early drafts of the script before.

100 Things You Didn't Know About the Empire Strikes Back