Ten Things I Bet You Didn't Know About The Empire Strikes Back

 Proves Everyone's First Drafts Are Usually Crap

10. Yoda’s name was originally going to be Buffy. No lie. Buffy or Bunden Debannen. Lucas said that Luke was going to meet a spiritual entity named Buffy and would become “the human Buffy” lol. In later drafts he thought of Yoda as a frog and picked out a full name. Minch Yoda.


9.Lucas considered having Luke’s face get injured. In 77 Luke’s actor Mark Hamill was injured in a car accident and had to have a facial reconstruction done. So up until filming he was going to have Luke’s face get damaged somehow and a droid was going to patch him up.


8.Luke’s journey to become a Jedi Knight was originally much bumpier.  One idea that got tossed around a lot in the early stages of planning ESB was the notion that Luke’s light saber had a crystal hidden in the hilt, with secret encrypted information on it — including the coordinates of Minch Yoda’s planet. And Luke would have been “humiliated” when he couldn’t use the Force to stop an attack by a bunch of ice monsters on the rebels Hoth base. (With Han telling Luke, “You’re not a Jedi knight, and you never will be.”) Meanwhile, Darth Vader senses that Luke used the force to destroy the Death Star and there’s a new wannabe Jedi in town — so Vader uses telepathy to choke Luke in his spacecraft, nearly killing him — except that R2D2 jumps the ship into hyperspace and takes it to Yoda’s planet.


7. We would’ve visited more planets. In the early days Lucas had plans to visit a water planet with a city built underneath. A city planet was going to be visited as well where the entire planet was built over. At one point Lucas considered visiting the Wookie Home world and seeing a young Chewbacca.


6. Vader had a castle. It was going to be a fortress of evil with lava surrounding it and gargoyles as Vader’s pets….I’m being 100% serious right now.


5.Vader wasn’t Luke’s father at first.  In Leigh Brackett’s first script draft, Luke meets his real dad, who says he sent away Luke and his secret sister for their own safety. (Luke’s sister has been training to be a Jedi knight in secret, just as Luke has.) And Papa Skywalker administers the oath of a Jedi Knight to Luke, in which Ben, Minch, Anakin and Luke cross lightsabers, and Luke swears to “dedicate my life to the cause of freedom and justice.”


4.The love triangle between Luke-Leia-Solo was a much bigger deal in the earlier scripts. It’s at the root of Luke’s struggles for self respect and his humiliations. When Darth Vader is trying to win Luke over to the Dark Side in the second draft, written by Lucas himself, Vader says, “You’re in love with Leia. You don’t want to lose her to Han Solo… But you will, if you lack the courage to use the strength that’s in you. A strength as great as mine, Luke.” And then at the end, Leia flat-out tells Luke that he’s not the one she loves, because she’s into Han. Also in this version, Han doesn’t get frozen in carbonite — instead, he just flies off to take care of business, leaving Luke and Leia watching the Millennium Falcon disappear.


3.They almost had a monkey in a mask to play Yoda. They thought of everything for certain creatures and beings. Yoda was a monkey in a mask, a midget, or even a child. For the Tauntauns they tried a human suit with what they called “hilarious if not film-worthy results.”


2.The Shining almost Axed The Empire. During the filming of Star Wars and The Shining there was a fire that burnt down Stage 3 where the Shining was being made. So Star Wars had to share their studio with them and it made space a real issue. Not to mention the fact that the Shining ran well over its schedule.


1. Miss Piggy had a cameo in the movie. When Mark Hamill first met Frank Oz, he asked him to do a brief Miss Piggy cameo during rehearsals on set, as a practical joke — but when the time came much later, it caught even Hamill off guard. During one scene, Yoda tells Luke to follow his feelings. Luke protests that he has followed his feelings — and suddenly, Frank Oz whips out a Miss Piggy puppet, saying “Feelings? You want feelings? Get behind the couch and I’ll show you feelings, punk. What is this hole? I’ve been booked into dumps before, but never like this. Get me my agent on the phone!”