See The Complete Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back Dutch TV Documentary From 1980
Back when J.J. Abrams and his team were getting ready to put together Star Wars: Episode VII, the franchise was looking to return to the big screen in a big way. It felt like a forever wait at the time, which is why at Giant Freakin Robot we were looking to get a Star Wars fix in any way possible. Even if that meant going back to the best of them all: The Empire Strikes Back.
Around that time, we posted a story about a documentary for Dutch TV about the making of The Empire Strikes Back from 1980.
The video quality wasn’t the greatest, and the TV documentary was incomplete, but thanks to the good people at StarWarsArchives.com, we had the opportunity to watch it in its entirety with better video quality.
French journalist Michel Parbot made the documentary while on set during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back.
It contains mostly behind-the-scenes footage with cast and crew interviews. The footage was then split into two documentaries, one for American TV and the other for the Dutch.
The American documentary can be found on the Star Wars Blu-ray set, and the Dutch version was considered lost somewhere in the Lucasfilm archive until recently unearthed.
It’s fascinating to watch Irvin Kershner, the director of The Empire Strikes Back, talk about the power of fairy tales and how they relate to the Star Wars movies and science fiction. It’s important to remember that these movies are fueled by imagination and ingenuity.
Plus, considering what we know now about the context of their relationship, it’s a bit creepy to consider that there was a love triangle between Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia.
I guess George Lucas didn’t clue in Mark Hamill that Luke and Leia were twin brothers and sisters. Why bother with that seemingly important little tidbit of information?
And sure, it’s an old recording from 1980, but it provides a pretty unique window into the filming process at the time, with the documentary beginning in Dutch before switching to English. It’s easy to why the Empire Strikes Back documentary and its rediscovery was met with excitement from Star Wars fans. It was like unlocking a time capsule of sorts.
