10 things you didn't know about The Empire Strikes Back
Yoda was originally named Buffy. No, really. In George Lucas' earliest outlines for the sequel, Luke meets a supernatural entity named Buffy, or Bunden Debannen. Here's how Lucas described it:
Buffy very old — three or four thousand years. Kiber crystal in sword? Buffy shows Luke? Buffy the guardian. 'Feel not think.'"
And Lucas concludes by saying Luke will become the chosen one, "the human Buffy." In later drafts, he thought of Yoda as a kind of small frog, and Yoda had a full name: Minch Yoda. In the earliest script draft, Minch has the immortal line: "Skywalker. Skywalker. And why do you come to walk my sky, with the sword of a Jedi knight? ... I remember another Skywalker."
If they'd gone with "Buffy", does that mean we'd have had Yoda the Vampire Slayer ?
Luke's journey to becoming a Jedi Knight would have had a lot more bumps. 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 rebel's 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.
...
Darth Vader would have had a castle. And it would have been an evil fortress — in some versions, it's surrounded by lava, and full of gargoyles who are Vader's pets.
Awesome!
The Luke-Leia-Han love triangle is a much bigger deal in earlier drafts of the script. 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.