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The Emperor & line change in ESB SE 1997

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I don't know if anyone's talked about this on this site before, so apologies if I'm covering old ground - please point me to the apropriate thread if I am.

The scene in the original cut of ESB where Mr Vader has a chat with Mr Palpatine - did Lucas change the performance to one from Ian McDiarmid for the current incarnation of his "artistic" "vision"?

This is one change that I actually would have welcomed in the 1997 SE.

Personally, I feel that ESB survived the best in 1997, with largely cosmetic changes made. The one thing that grated was an apparently insignificant change - Mr Vader, in the original cut, just after Luke has thrown himself into the void rather than join him, is walking through a corridor in Cloud City and James Earl Jones growls: "Bring my shuttle" - expressing very well Mr Vader's emotional state at that point in proceedings.

In the SE release of 1997 the line was changed, although the same shot was still in place. The rather flabbier and less expressive phrase: "Alert my Star Destroyer to prepare for my arrival" (or something equally as crap) is used. Where, before, we had a terse, explosive line, which JEJ uses to full potential, we instead have to suffer through a line which is twice as long and says exactly the same thing but with less expression of Mr Vader's feelings.

This one change annoys me like no other, because, as I say, ESB otherwise was relatively unchanged.

Quite how this gets ESB anywhere closer to the fabled "artistic" "vision" I have no idea...

I should point out that I have not purchased any DVDs of any version of any of episodes 1-6 as yet, so I have not taken into account any further revisions subsequent to the 1997 release.
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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This was to fit Lucas' original creative intention of having Vader's Shuttle miraculously land on the Death Star where Moff Jerjerrod was awaiting to take him to the bridge of the Executor.

Confused yet? I have been for nine years.

Apparently Lucas thought we were all confused when Vader "magically" arrived at the executor. Apparently we couldn't understand why he said "Bring My Shuttle."
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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What?!

So, they dragged the new Death Star through the asteroid field?
Or they were building it near Bespin?

And the 'difficult' concept of using a shuttle to get from Cloud City to the Executor... right...
Did he think everybody would imagine a Star Trek style transporter, or, perhaps, some kind of rope ladder?

Lucas has some weird ideas, doesn't he?

He reminds me of Michael Jackson, in a way. Both had their biggest successes in the late seventies / early eighties, both became super-rich, both became recluses in their huge estates and both now seem a little disconnected from their original strengths. And they're both slightly loopy...
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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Heh, ADM is making something of a joke, but not entirely. You see, the footage they used of Vader arriving in his shuttle is actually an unused take/angle from Return of the Jedi of Vader arriving at the Death Star at the beginning of the movie. If you look closely, you can see Moff Jerjerrod standing there waiting for him.

EDIT: Too many 3PO heads in this thread. I had to break up the monotony!

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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- Oh! Nice to see a familiar face!

- Echuta!

- How rude!!
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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Has there been any further revision of either scene since 1997 SE?
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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Well, by either, I'm assuming you mean the Emperor scene and the shuttle scene? The Emperor scene wasn't changed until 2004. And there doesn't appear to be any more reversioning of the shuttle scene since its inception in 1997.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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So did they change the emperor to Ian McDiarmid?
I haven't seen the latest versions of episodes 4-6.
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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Yeah, it was changed to Ian McDiarmid, and the scene is much worse for it. The performance is bad, and the dialogue was changed as well.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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I think Ian has rather descended into the pork and dairy trade of late. This is a shame, as his performance in ROTJ was so goddamn evil...
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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It's just another example of how GL has over-explained something that didn't need explaining, at the expense of the movie's pace.

I was never confused about how DV got from cloud city to the executor- I never even thought about it. He just got there- that's all.

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But now you know exactly how he got from Could City to Executor. Too bad we still don't know how the Millennium Falcon got from Hoth to Anoat to Bespin....
"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.
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Yeah, I know. That's always stumped me too. I mean, in one shot, they're flying near Star Destroyers. In the next shot, they're flying in Bespin. I mean, it's just too confusing! How are we supposed to know how they got there?! I demand answers!

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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Actually, how the Millennium Falcon could get from Hoth to Anoat and Bespin (or indeed, anywhere) without a functioning hyperdrive has baffled me for years.

Getting from one solar system to another at slower-than-light speeds takes a long friggin' time . . .

Maybe Luke could have finished his Jedi training by then, at least. lol
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Well, yeah, that's what I love about it. There are a lot of people who complain that all the events in ESB take place over too small an amount of time... far too little for Luke to get any type of training done. But then I remembered that Han and the others had to travel to Bespin without the aid of a hyperdrive, so quite a lot of time had to pass. I love it.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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Originally posted by: hairy_hen

Getting from one solar system to another at slower-than-light speeds takes a long friggin' time . . .

Maybe Luke could have finished his Jedi training by then, at least. lol


Sure, it's possible that Luke experienced a couple of years on Dagobah while Han took the Relativity Express to Bespin. But that raises a few questions...

a) How come Luke's hair didn't grow? Or get cut?
b) Why did Luke never change clothes? Did Yoda teach him some sort of textile purification Force power?
c) What were Boba Fett and Vader doing during those years when the Falcon was in transit to Bespin?
d) Why didn't the Empire intercept the Falcon while it was in transit? (It is, after all, moving millions of times slower than the fastest Imperial ships!)
e) Why didn't Han just call someone for a tow? Surely the risk of Imperial eavesdroppers isn't as bad as the living in a tiny space with See Threepio for such a long time.

I think the WEG solution is still the best. The Falcon had a backup/spare hyperdrive motivator with just enough juice to crawl to a nearby star system.
"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.
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Yeah, I content myself with the thought of a clunky but just barely usable backup hyperdrive to get them to Bespin. Nothing else makes sense at all, though I suppose if they had one you'd wonder why they weren't trying to put that together in the asteroid cave instead of the main one. Oh well.
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Well, here's a little counter-argument. Up until this point, the Empire had no conclusive idea that the Falcon's hyperdrive was busted. I'm sure they might have figured it out, but there was nothing to prove it. Yet they'd still spent the first half of the movie causing destruction for the Empire's fleet. They caused several TIEs to be lost in the asteroid field. They'd caused a few Star Destroyers to sustain significant damage in said asteroid field. And they almost caused three Star Destroyers to crash into each other! For all they knew, the Falcon's crew could be suicidally insane or at least have some kind of plan as to why they were screwing around with the Empire instead of escaping. So maybe they were just being cautious, and that's why they decided to force Lando to trap them instead of continuing to attempt (and failing miserably) at trying to capture them themselves. It makes perfect sense to me.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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But it was Boba Fett who alerted the Empire that they had gone to Bespin! The fleet had jumped into hyperspace and gone off to "every possible destination along their last known trajectory", as ordered by Mr Vader.

I like to think that Bespin lay in another direction and that it was only due to Boba Fett's presence of mind that the Empire had even a chance of catching them. Fett probably contacted the fleet once he was fairly sure of where they were making for - Fett has a history with Han Solo and perhaps, therefore, knew about Lando. He put 2 & 2 together, called the fleet, they arrived ahead (due to their greater speed) and prepared the trap.

BTW, who was it that decided how far away Bespin is from the asteroid field? Maybe they overestimated?
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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According to Han Solo, Anoat and Bespin are two different systems, and they are "pretty far" for whatever drive systems the Falcon had available. Which, by this point, probably included some form of hyperdrive. They had had several hours or days to fix things.
"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.
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Well, if you can assume that where they were in the Anoat system at departure was the edge of its system, and Bespin was at the edge of its own system, it might not have been impossible to make that journey without light speed.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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The distance from our solar system to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, is 4 light-years. Without a hyperdrive, 5 years would probably be the absolute minimum travel time to get there. The distance from the sun to the edge of the system is only about 1/1000 of a light-year, so it wouldn't have much effect on inter-system travel where in the system they were . . .

Dang it. Why does Empire have this ginormously gaping plot hole? They never mention backup hyperdrives; it's only because I've read Zahn's books that the idea of a ship having one even occurred to me at all. Oh well.

Actually, now that I think of it, I'm fairly certain Zahn's having Talon Karrde reference a backup hyperdrive in Dark Force Rising was a subtle suggestion (in part) about how the Falcon could have managed to trip to Bespin. Karrde says his damaged ship had to "limp back to civilisation on the backup hyperdrive" and I suppose the Falcon could have done the same.

Wasn't this thread supposed to be about the Emperor scene? lol
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I haven't seen it in a while, but I'm pretty sure a strict interpretation of ESB allows Han to fix the hyperdrive before arriving at Bespin. IIRC, some kind of power coupler was busted, and they started to replace it while in the space slug. Then they got chased out, and latched onto Avenger. After Avenger dumped her garbage and went to lightspeed, the Falcon cleared the debris field at sublight. The next time we see the Falcon, she's at Bespin.

Emergency repairs to the hyperdrive could've been made after we see the Falcon "floating away with the rest of the garbage." On Cloud City, Lando asks what's wrong with the Falcon, and Han just says, "Hyperdrive." He doesn't say the drive is completely broken, just that there's something wrong with it.

The interstellar sublight hypothesis might work if the stars were in the Core or the Deep Core*, but most EU material suggests the Core is heavily populated and the Deep Core is devoid of human life except for some military outposts and Palpatine's Berchtesgaden.

But the trip from Hoth to Anoat is still problematic.

* According to This source, there are 100 stars per cubic parsec in the core of the Milky Way. That means the mean distance between stars is 0.7 light years.** But the galactic core is not the friendly kind of place where Tauntauns and Wampas can evolve ... it's got radiation, and occasional bursts of energy that make the Death Star's superlaser look like a trickle.

** My math is probably wrong.
"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.
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Originally posted by: Scruffy

* According to This source, there are 100 stars per cubic parsec in the core of the Milky Way. That means the mean distance between stars is 0.7 light years.** But the galactic core is not the friendly kind of place where Tauntauns and Wampas can evolve ... it's got radiation, and occasional bursts of energy that make the Death Star's superlaser look like a trickle.

** My math is probably wrong.


But it's a good try.
Each star in this cubic evenly distributed space is adjacent to six stars at a range of 0.7 light years, but it's also adjacent to six stars at (0.7^2+0.7^2)^1/2 ly (the diagonals on the faces of the cube) and a further EIGHT stars at [(0.7^2)x3]^1/2 ly (the "internal diagonals" of the cube). This gives a mean average of 0.994 light years between stars, which I find to be an unintuitive and surprising result given the size of a parsec (3.26 light years).

Steve
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Thank you for the correction. It now appears even less likely that the Falcon made an interstellar trip at less than light speed.
"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.