There was a fair amount of hype surrounding the release of The Empire Strikes Back. I was in Grade 6 at the time, and more into Marvel comics and Micronauts, but it was hard to escape the growing pop culture phenomenon that was Star Wars.
I remember the buzz about Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian (I distinctly recall seeing this issue of People magazine while shopping for groceries with my mother at Miracle Mart in Westdale Mall, in Mississauga).
There were plenty of schoolyard spoilers - soon, everybody knew that Darth Vader was revealed to be Luke's father - which, like rumors of the glimpse of Vader's unhelmeted head, only served to generate publicity, not disincentives to see the movie.
My mother took my siblings and me to see the film at the Westwood Theatre in Etobicoke, where we were pleasantly surprised to see two of my cousins, on our way out of the theatre. We were all a bit perplexed about the ending (the bad guys won?)
When I saw the re-release in 1997, while living in Montreal, the campy dialogue struck me as a little stilted (one of the more notable exceptions being Harrison Ford's improvised "I know" in response to Leia's declaration of love).
A cool thing I've learned in recent years is that an early draft of the screenplay was written by Leigh Brackett, who also wrote "The Sword of Rhiannon" (1953), a planetary romance in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars.
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