Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Revealing mistake: When Luke is talking to Han over the comlink, there's a shot of Han riding a tauntaun. The animal leaves no tracks in the snow. (00:03:35)

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When Luke is hanging upside down from the roof of the ice creature's cave, his legs are apart. But in the close-up of his feet, his legs are together. (00:08:40)

Continuity mistake: When the Millennium Falcon is being chased by the Empire after leaving Hoth, C-3PO's position in the cockpit keeps changing slightly between shots. At one point he falls towards Chewbacca (with both arms in that direction) but during the in-between cut to Leia, he is also still there (with his left arm extended her way).

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Suggested correction: And in the Star Wars corrections page, you will find that mistake with the explanation that Lawson has used both Denis and Dennis in his career.

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back mistake picture

Visible crew/equipment: When the Snow Speeders are looking for Luke and Han, you can see the blue screen reflected on the angled side of the pilots' goggles. (00:16:00)

Matty W

Revealing mistake: After C-3PO gets shot, as Chewbacca walks over to the door, his right foot crushes one of the steps on a small set of stairs. (01:19:25)

Continuity mistake: The Wampa changes when we see it again in the ice cave. Its fur is less fluffy and its horns are bigger. (00:04:00 - 00:08:45)

Dr Wilson

Continuity mistake: When they are escaping from the Hoth base, Chewbacca enters the Millennium Falcon but when Han and Leia enter some seconds later, Chewbacca is still going inside the spaceship.

Dr Wilson

Continuity mistake: At the fight between Luke and Darth Vader, after Luke pushes Vader to fall down from the top of the hibernating cabin, he looks down with the lighting light sabre in the hand. He goes back and we hear the switch-off sound of the light sabre, he comes back three meters left of the point he looked down and in his hand is the switched-off sabre. But as he goes back before this, we can see the end of the prop-light sabre taken out of Luke's hand and obviously the off-prop sabre is given in his hand.

Continuity mistake: When Han and Leia are bickering in the corridor on Hoth, Han says, " Well, the bounty hunter we ran into on Ord Mantell changed my mind." In the next shot, behind them, there's a man walking past them that wasn't there in the previous shot. (00:05:55)

Continuity mistake: When Yoda is teaching Luke, he is strapped to Luke's back in a rucksack. When Luke puts Yoda down, the little Jedi master is still inside the bag. Luke then reaches for his jacket, and in the next shot of Yoda, he has in a few seconds managed to get out the bag and is now sitting next to it. He is not even sitting in the same place as in the previous shot, and is also holding a walking stick he didn't have when Luke put him down.

Revealing mistake: In the shot where the Falcon is underneath the Star Destroyer, it is transparent and you can see the part of the Star Destroyer through it.

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When the stormtroopers push Leia into the cell in Cloud City, she is wearing a completely different outfit from when she was taken captive. (01:25:20 - 01:28:35)

Continuity mistake: In the shot before Luke's hand is cut off, his left arm is bent and his elbow is positioned next to a pole. In the next shot, his arm is straight and his elbow is next to a different pole. Also, his lightsaber is held in a different angle. This is best seen in the widescreen version. (01:45:55)

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back mistake picture

Continuity mistake: As already noted in another mistake, when Han is about to be frozen in carbonite, his jacket appears and disappears between shots. This jacket can also be seen when Lando says, "You're being put into carbon freeze." This shot was not fixed in the DVD. (01:35:05)

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Suggested correction: That is a shadow, giving the illusion it's a jacket.

That is incorrect. You can see the contrast between the jacket and the shirt, with the white collar of his shirt sticking out of the brown jacket.

Catwalk

The shadow isn't touching all of the shoulders, which gives the illusion that there is a jacket on him, but there's not.

Revealing mistake: During the battle on Hoth, after Luke says: "Hobbie, you're still with me?", there's a shot of an AT-ST shooting at the rebel and after that, there a shot of an explosion behind them. You can see that the rebels are actually dummies in that shot.

Dr Wilson

Continuity mistake: After Luke places the thermal detonator inside an AT-AT, he falls to the ground. The AT-AT takes only one step before the charge goes off, but when the AT-AT explodes, it is much further away from Luke than one step.

Continuity mistake: In an exterior shot in Cloud City, Leia can be seen through the window of a building, with one hand on her hip and the other arm at her side. In the following interior shot, her hands are clasped together.

Other mistake: When the Millennium Falcon escapes Hoth and is pursued by the Star Destroyers, frantic movements cause them to collide. Watch the interior shot of the Star Destroyer as everybody is thrown around. Near the bottom of the screen one of the computer consoles comes away from the wall and is hurridly pushed back into place by a controller! (00:35:55)

Visible crew/equipment: When Luke's X-Wing crashes into the swamp, the set lighting is visible along the edges of the swamp (most noticeable in the the first shot of him getting out of his ship in the original 1980 version of the film).

Yoda: Told you, I did. Reckless is he. Now, matters are worse.
Obi-Wan: That boy is our last hope.
Yoda: No. There is another.

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Trivia: This was the only movie in the Star Wars series until Episode VII in 2015 without a scene on the planet Tattooine.

Xofer

More trivia for Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Answer: The short, short answer to this is "Yes... from a certain point of view." The long answer is complicated and depends completely on what timeframe you mean by "always." If you're going back all the way to the early rough drafts of the early-mid 70s (which actually resemble Episode I more than they do the Star Wars of 1977), you'll find there's a cyborg father figure protagonist that makes a heroic sacrifice, and then another character that is a "black knight" villain that eventually turns to the side of good near the end. Just to make things more complicated, there is yet another character, a villain by the name of "Darth Vader" that is a human Imperial officer like Grand Moff Tarkin. It may be a stretch to count all that as "Darth Vader was always the father" but the pieces were all there, at least.

TonyPH

(1) Now the earliest explicit mention on any documented material that Darth Vader is Luke's father comes from notes Lucas made outlining the general story of the trilogy and its place in the larger Star Wars saga. These were found in the archives for The Empire Strikes Back, but they are undated and we don't know if they were written before Star Wars (1977) and carried forward, or if they were written afterward. These were found fairly recently (made public in 2010) and as far as I know Lucas has never commented publicly about them.

TonyPH

(3) One thing we know, at least, is that Lucas had come up with the idea of Darth Vader the father before starting work on The Empire Strikes Back. Something incredibly odd, though, is that the first draft written by Leigh Brackett does not feature the twist (and in fact introduces Anakin himself as a ghost); for a long time many fans took this as proof that Lucas hadn't thought of the idea at all by then, but after the series outline was discovered it was made apparent that Lucas simply hadn't told Brackett for some reason. Perhaps he wasn't sure yet that he wanted to go through with it, or maybe at that point he was thinking of revealing it in the third film. Either way, Lucas would write the second draft himself, and that's where the twist first appears in script form.

TonyPH

(2) Something that must be understood about Star Wars (1977) is that it was an ALTERNATIVE to his original plans of a saga. By then he didn't think it was realistic that he would be able to make a long series of many movies, so he came up with a "Plan B": he crammed the general story of the trilogy into one movie. So we know that when Star Wars (1977) was filming, Darth Vader was NOT Luke's father, because this one movie was IT, that was the whole story. But what we DON'T know, is whether that means Lucas had abandoned the idea of Vader being the father in order to simplify the story, or if Lucas simply hadn't thought of that at all just yet.

TonyPH

(2, cont.) On a side note, you can tell by watching Star Wars (1977) how it has condensed the story of the trilogy. The middle portion has the characters trying to escape capture from the Empire while one of them loses a duel with Darth Vader (like The Empire Strikes Back) and the third act is a final battle against the Death Star above a forest moon (like Return of the Jedi). The first act features a member of royalty on the run while a couple of protagonists find the main hero on a desert planet, resembling the original drafts and by extension Star Wars: Episode I. Because of this we've arguably never actually had a "pure" first chapter to the original trilogy, even though Lucas eventually had the film serve this purpose anyway.

TonyPH

Answer: Yes, however, he didn't want anyone to KNOW about it. In fact, the original script said "'Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father.' 'He told me enough... he told me YOU killed him!' 'No, Obi-Wan killed your father'" Even Hamill was only told the real line just before shooting, so his reaction is somewhat natural.

SexyIrishLeprechaun

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