"Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of Return of the Jedi, the third and (for awhile) final chapter in the Star Wars saga. It also was, arguably, the weakest of the chapters until the 1999 release of Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. We'll put aside that abomination and focus instead on Jedi, a more elegant film for a more civilized age.
Everyone knows the plot of Return and all the big set pieces it contains (Jabba's palace! A new Death Star! Ewoks Ewoks Ewoks! OK, forget that last one.), but in celebration of a movie that defined so many childhoods, here are 30 things that you might not know about Return of the Jedi.
1. Most Star Wars fans know that the movie was filmed under the title Blue Harvest: Horror Beyond Imagination to avoid publicity, but it's less-known that the bogus title was a play on Dashiell Hammet's 1929 novel Red Harvest, which was said to be an influence for Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which was cited as an influence for Star Wars. See how it all comes together?
2. Despite the credits, Richard Marquand may not have directed all of the movie; George Lucas directed some footage, and Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner once hinted that Marquand's assistant directed footage credited to Marquand, due to Marquand's poor relationship with the actors.
3. Speaking of connections to classic movies, Emperor Palpatine, making his first appearance in the flesh — he was just bits and bytes in that hologram in Empire, and was portrayed by a different actor — was at first named after a character in Taxi Driver, but his name was changed to avoid potential legal issues.
4. And speaking of Marquand, he wasn't the first choice for Jedi. Or the second, or even third. Stephen Spielberg, David Cronenberg and David Lynch were ahead of him in line. Just imagine, for a second, Cronenberg or, better, Lynch making a movie with Ewoks.
5. The Ewoks occasionally speak Tagalog, although most of their dialogue is loosely inspired by Kalmuck, a language spoken in Mongolia. One of the Ewok songs once was believed to be in Swedish — with the lyrics translating, wonderfully, as "It smells of cereal in here" — but that, sadly, was based upon people mishearing the gibberish the oversized rodents were singing.
6. The word "Ewok" is never actually said in Return of The Jedi, and neither were the names of individual Ewoks, although both appear in the end credits.
7. "Ewok" is derived from the Native American tribe the Miwok, indigenous to the Northern California redwood forests in which the Endor scenes were shot.
8. "Endor" comes from the Bible and is a village visited by King Saul before his final battle with the Philistines. Oddly enough, it also makes an appearance in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings, as the Elvish name for Middle-Earth.
9. Ewoks were a late addition to the Star Wars mythology. Their part in the story was to be played by the Wookiees, but by the time Lucas and partners sat down to write Return of The Jedi, they realized that, because Chewbacca could fly the Millennium Falcon, repair the ship and operate pretty much any weapon or machine in the known universe, they'd made the Wookiees too technologically advanced for the plot.
10. In what is either amazing planning or, more likely, complete coincidence, the one word C3PO says to the Ewoks is "Naboo," which was later revealed in The Phantom Menace to be the home world of Luke and Leia's mother — and Anakin Skywalker's wife — Queen Amidala.
11. The lyrics to the song the Ewoks perform at the end of the movie — the words everyone heard as "yub nub" — were written by none other than Joseph Williams, son of Star Wars composer John and lead singer with Toto. Someone, somewhere: Please make a mash-up of this song and Toto's "Africa" as soon as possible.
12. When scenes of post-victory celebrations around the galaxy were added to the 1997 Special Edition re-release, it was less a case of George Lucas tampering and more a case of fixing something that was missing from the original version of the movie. Lucas and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan had wanted to show Coruscant celebrating the end of the Empire originally but, unable to come up with a name for the city, dropped the idea entirely. It was only after Timothy Zahn came up with the name in his Heir to The Empire novel that the Imperial Capital had a name.
13. Both lightsabers used in the movie were re-purposed props from earlier movies. Darth Vader's lightsaber was a Luke Skywalker saber from The Empire Strikes Back because all of Vader's had mysteriously disappeared between movies. Luke's new saber was originally one of Obi-Wan Kenobi's from the original Star Wars movie.
14. Yoda was to sit this one out, but he was added after consultation with child psychologists made George Lucas decide he needed an independent character to confirm Darth Vader's claim that he is Luke Skywalker's father. Now you know why Yoda doesn't do much for the rest of the movie.."
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Amicalement
Armand
harvests scenario ideas from The Third World War.
