The summer of 1980 is remembered — without much fondness — for a brutal heat wave that subjected just about everyone to unseasonably severe temperatures.
No place — or person — was spared. I remember being here in Dallas, where it is ordinarily hot seven or eight months every year, and being aware of how many consecutive 100–plus–degree days the city endured (something like seven or eight weeks, as I recall) — and Dallas wasn't barely passing the century mark, either. It got well over 100 much of the time — which wasn't too surprising since it really didn't cool off at night.
The most unsettling memory from that summer that has remained with me is of riding in a car on the streets of Dallas — and actually hearing the asphalt squish beneath the tires.
But I don't think the heat wave was under way on May 21 of that year. Things were heating up, all right, but more in a metaphorical than physical sense — although the physical did play a role. Mount St. Helens had just erupted. President Carter and Ted Kennedy were battling for the Democratic nomination. CNN was about to launch the era of the all–news, all–the–time TV networks.
While all this was going on, the sequel to the surprise hit of 1977, "Star Wars," made its debut at the theaters 30 years ago today. It received a tremendous buildup at a time when such heavy–duty promotion was not unheard of but still relatively rare.
And, in all honesty, I wondered how any movie could live up to such hype. I'm sure there were others who wondered the same thing.
But I have often thought that "The Empire Strikes Back" was an effective rebuttal to those who insist that movie sequels are always disappointments. I knew that wasn't true — because I had seen the first two "Godfather" movies, and I always felt that the sequel was better than the original. (I can't say, though, that I thought much of the third movies that served as the finales for either the "Godfather" or "Star Wars" trilogies.)
And, in the years since, I have seen the "Spider–Man" movies, the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and other movies that have proven they weren't simply cheap attempts to cash in on the originals.
"The Empire Strikes Back" may have set the bar unbelievably high for me when it comes to standards for sequels. It really lived up to the publicity — perhaps because everyone understood that this wasn't the end of the story. A third movie was already in the works.
Viewers didn't seem to mind the many loose strings that were left dangling at the end of a movie that never pretended to contain the resolution to all the story lines and managed to ratchet up interest in a third film that was still three years away.
When Darth Vader told Luke he was really his father, the audience understood it was true — and that the conflict would be resolved in the third movie. The audience never seemed to notice that, only minutes before earnestly appealing to Luke to join him, Darth Vader seemed pretty intent upon killing him and even succeeded in slicing off Luke's right hand — not very fatherly things to do and not exactly the kind of tactic most people use to win other people's allegiance.
The audience forgave that sort of thing and accepted the cliffhanger of an ending — it even accepted the dark and at times depressing story — presumably because the public loved the swashbuckling, futuristic characters in a conflict between good and evil that was as big as, well, the universe.
It was the highest–grossing film of 1980. In fact, it has earned more than $530 million, which, when adjusted for inflation, makes it #12 all time.
Not bad for a film that was made with an $18 million budget.
