019: Leia. She’s a bit rough
- Leia spits on Vader, and… exciting news just in: the English language has a new word: IMBICLE! And, check out the SPECIAL EDITION version, below!
Super-duper grown-up SWa9 SPECIAL EDITION of the old page
Art Notes
Blimey – she’s a bit rough!
Yet again, I can’t claim all the credit for this funny bit. Leia spits on Vader. Yeuk. It’s… in the blasted novelisation. Dammit!
Crap, crap, crap. It even sizzles when it lands on him.
“She succeeded in reaching him with her spit, which hissed against still-hot battle armour.”
– 1977 novelisation, by Alan Dean Foster
There I was thinking “George, George, George. Why couldn’t you push it just a bit further like this 9-10 year old did?” And then I read the novelisation:
“She succeeded in reaching him with her spit, which hissed against still-hot battle armour. He wiped the offensive matter away silently, watching her with interest as she was marched through the accessway into the cruiser”
[Sput!] “Nice…”
I could have done so much more with it though. Oh the missed opportunities! Did she do a big nose-honk first? If we look closely, is she wearing a chunky sovereign ring? Is the Pocahontas hairdo actually a council-estate-facelift gone wrong? Can you imagine if she’d consistently spat on people throughout the film.
- Vader enters the prison cell – SPIT!
- She meets Tarkin: SPIT! “I thought I recognised your foul stench!” SPIT!
- Tarkin orders the destruction of her planet: HONK! SPIT! Eurrckh… eurkh – SPIT!
- Solo: “Let’s get one thing straight, your worship…”SPIT!
There’d be spit and green phlegm all over that shiny grey Death Star.
- Luke: “So… what do you think of her Han?”
Solo: “I’m trying not to kid. Yeuk.”
Art Technique!
Loosen Up: Massive Markers!
Talk about a blunt graphical instrument! It was something like this
Check out that M A S S I V E black marker that was used – later – on the top panel. Cripes! It was one of those brilliant big half-inch thick tipped ones my dad borrowed from the work stationery cupboard. Pretty bold eh? As I get better at drawing, I’d eventually start to use fine, fibre-tipped pens form dad’s work – and worse: finest of the fine Rotring pens. Doing millions of little dots [all part of growing up I suppose].
But a few years later in art college the tutors would struggle to get us to put down the skinny paint-brushes and 2H pencils and loosen up by sloshing on the paint with wide house-painter’s brushes and even strips of corrugated cardboard! As a great artist once said:
“When I was a child, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child”
– Pablo Picasso
Next: Gaze upon the DEATH STAR!
PANEL 1
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(full-body/wide-shot of Leia. She's hit by a stun blast and falls to the deck)
'Back on ship--'
Leia is hit, "Oh... Aaaaaah!" she exclaims.
"You shouldn't have run--traitor!" says the stormtrooper.
PANEL 2
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(Wide Shot of Darth Vader (who's choking a rebel), Princess Leia, and a stromtrooper)
"We got her Lord Vader." the stormtrooper announces.
"Where are those data tapes--imbicile!" growls Darth Vader at Princess Leia. The Rebel captain chokes to death.
"Gluck--argh..." as the rebel spits blood and dies.
"Get lost!" sneers Leia as she spits a gob of phlegm on Vader's armour. It sizzles. "I don't know what you're talking about, I--"
“She succeeded in reaching him with her spit, which hissed against still-hot battle armour.”
Wow. I never realized the Star Wars novelization was so raunchy!
Another great page, John. Here’s hoping we’ll see more of your special editions.
You know what Rodders? If you tried ‘girls spitting’ in Google you’d probably get a list of all sorts of things that you wouldn’t want on a ‘workplace computer’. At least I’m guessing that’s the case. You know how odd some people are.
I’ll be curious to see how many visits this page gets. The previous ‘And in Space… there is no underwear’ one certainly did well!
‘You shouldn’t have run’… Being a foreign johnny himself the author would have been all too painfully aware of this parable of injustice and oppression by an evil empire, having had it recounted to him on nuUUUumerous occasions… dare-I-say-it “ad nauseam” by the local IRA recruiting sergeant…
Data ‘tapes’ indeed, was that C60 or C90?
Indeed N,
Johnny foreigner – that was me. And not trying in any way to fit in – unfortunately.
You refer to our teacher/headmaster?
Yes, tapes. Even in the old Rod Taylor ‘Time Machine’ film they had metal discs that one ‘spun’ like a coin on a table and they ‘played’ audio books. Was that in the original HG Wells story?
I’m wondering why it was hot, all he did was walk in the door.
Ha ha – I wondered about that too.
What a strange and bizarre parallel universe this is! My 9 -year-old is going through a big Yoda phase at the mo. He thinks Yoda is the funniest thing ever – especially with the alternative dialogue we’ve been ad libbing – e.g. stressing his senility, “Yoda forget name… oh wait, is Yoda!” and his inevitable bitterness about living in a muddy swamp while Luke goes gadabout. ” Why Yoda’s wife drive in car away? Shake fist at Yoda?” or “Luke so cool, with fancy haircut and Millenium Falcon, he think?. Not so hot, he is!”. etc., and stuff.
Thanks for the entertaining comment PJ!
Be careful now… don’t let your 9 year old watch it every night. My 4 year-old’s SW viewing is being rationed; so we don’t get a repeat of the Pixar’s CARS exprience. Last Christmas I was raving about CARS to other parents, and slightly mystified by their often blank – even traumatised – facial expressions. 4 months later I understood: I can barely look at CARS anymore having seen it at LEAST once a day for 4 months.
John – having read the Marvel adaptation and Del Rey novelization more times than I care to count, I can certainly identify with your youthful passion at age 9 (I was 10 at the time). I even recognized where Leia’s spitting on Vader came from without reading your background 🙂
I don’t know if this has been pointed out already, but the novelization was not, in fact, written by Lucas. It was ghost-written from the shooting script by Alan Dean Foster, who was allowed to write the unofficial sequel “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” as part of the deal (based off of some of Lucas’ notes).
Hi Rick,
Oh, my friends and I were obsessed! the novel is weird. In one paragraph it’s poetic, in the next it reads like a shooting script! So I wasn’t sure if it was written by more than one person – or just due to inconsistent writing!
Thanks for the info. You know, Alan Dean Foster was instructed to write ‘Splinter’ as a sequel set mostly in a jungle setting – narrow scope and cheap to shoot. I can’t imagine why George could possibly have wanted to make the sequel on the cheap. Was it because that was his plan before the first film was completed – a film he’d not expected to be a huge financial success?
Yes, that was exactly the reasoning. Nobody expected Star Wars to be a success, so Lucas was hoping that Splinter would be useable for a cheap sequel if Star Wars was mildly successful at the box office. Of course, that didn’t turn out to be a problem. It’s amazing how ravenous we were back then for any piece of new information, and how much that was driven by the inability to watch the movie whenever we wanted. Any new photograph would get pored over for the most minor details; the Topps cards were an endless source of new information – I prided myself on being able to identify the cards that were production stills, the shots where the negative had been flipped, and the cards with horrible retouching.
I like how your 9-year-old self tried so hard to lock in what he had seen on screen by integrating the comics and novelization with memories of the movie. My version of that was probably taking whatever series of Topps cards were available and rearranging them in movie order, mixing the colors together. Your method was much more creative!
Of course, there was also the time I snuck a tape recorder into one of the 1979 showings of Star Wars to get an audio version of the full movie (vs. the massively-edite d Story of Star Wars that was available on LP at the time). I actually had to do it twice, since the microphone I used the first time basically didn’t work for any sound that was too far away from it, no matter how loud. I almost wore that tape out over the following few years.
Hi Rick,
Loved reading of your tape recordings. Yes, we were absolutely desperate for any morsel. I held the tape recorder up to the telly during some programme – dunno what – and got a few seconds of Star Wars, To listen to that over and over was thrilling indeed. A few seconds! Believe me i know exactly how you felt.
You needn’t feel too nerdy though! It was the experience of God knows how many tens of thousands – millions? – of kids. Ever read Peter Jackson’s Introduction to the ‘Making of Star Wars’ book? It really struck a chord with me!
Great Special Edition, John. Vader in particular looks amazing! Can’t be easy working with the sketchy pen linework from the original. This page is one of my favorites.
As for the novelization, I think it felt like it was written by a 9 year old. Just saying.
Thanks Rod. Vader looks TOO amazing though. The original linework has disappeared.
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The novel’s writted better than I ever done word stuff. Good in patches – put together by committee.