Age 13/14/15? | 1981/82/83? Poor Dack gets killed as Cliff from Cheers and Threepio look on…

That looks like John Ratzenberger (Cliff) from Cheers standing by Threepio in that silly Alphabet sticker thingy. There’s also a stuck in photo clipping and—I’m guessing—a latterly added pencil drawing of Leia, a stuck-on text box and a stuck-on speech balloon. I wonder why drew her in pencil? Surely I had access to pens. Was I too impatient to draw and just used whatever was closest to hand? Or did I consciously want to try a bit of fancy tonal pencil shading?

Leia’s sounding pretty fatalistic. I hope she didn’t say that on an open channel to the pilots!

Action!

luke skywalker piloting a snowspeeder

I remember when I saw the ‘making of’ documentary for ESB as a kid—which I think was called Movie Magic and presented by Mark Hamill—it blew my young mind. (corny and cheesy as it was) One bit that really stuck in my memory ever since was where they showed the creation of the exploding snowspeeder shot. I was amazed that they’d carefully build a model and then blow it up! What a waste. But how else could you do it without modern CGI? In the 1970s TV series SPACE 1999, there was a solution but it wasn’t the best. They created photographic cut-outs of the spaceships and blew those up. To be fair, most of the time it looked pretty good. But the diving, flaming and exploding snowspeeder looked amazing in Empire.

Luke's dead snowspeeder co-pilot dack in the Emire Strikes Back

You can tell that I enjoyed dong the red bits—as always!

I like the laser beam hitting the back of Luke’s snowspeeder and the resulting explosion blasting off Dack’s rear gun.

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