10 Lies About Star Wars You Probably Believe
1. The Wampa Scene Was Written In Specifically For Mark Hamill's Injuries
An awful lot was made out of the evident change of appearance Luke Skywalker and the star behind the lightsaber Mark Hamill underwent in the time between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.
With Hamill being involved in a car accident in 1977 and sustaining significant facial injuries that required doctors to take cartilage from his ear to mend his nose, a rumour would eventually snowball into a full-blown myth involving George Lucas writing in a specific scene to explain away his leading man's change of appearance.
And while Skywalker's mauling at the hands of a Wampa early in the Episode V day did partially help keep the real-life injuries from distracting away from the story being told, Lucas has since noted in Empire's Blu-Ray commentary:
"There's a scene in the film where Mark gets beat up by the monster (Wampa), which helps even more, but that wasn't really the meaning of why we wrote the monster in the beginning. We needed something to keep the film suspenseful at the beginning while the Empire is looking for them."
While admittedly giving the folks behind the feature a way of utilising a terrible and unfortunate situation for the Skywalker star, it's clear that there was much more to this particularly gnarly opening sequence than merely acting as a cover-job for Hamill's mishap.