You know the one. Fight fight “I am your father” handectomy “Nooooooo!” plunge to near death Classic. Set the ground for dozens if not hundreds of sf movies featuring climactic battles in places with a long fall below.
But where, exactly, are they fighting? I can tell that at least part of it takes place in some sort of maintenance area, or something. But where/what exactly is the chute that Luke then falls through? I recently rewatched the movie, and realized that it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have a setup like that. Rather dangerous, as we see.
And yes, I understand the folly in critiquing one tiny point like that in the Star Wars saga.
I don’t know what the whole area was, but the chute, I believe, is some sort of garbage chute which sucks out random flying debris (e.g. severed extremities) that falls into the bottomless pit and gets cast out into the clouds.
There is quite a bit of waste management depicted in the Star Wars saga: the Death Star garbage masher, the Millennium Falcon floating away “with the rest of the garbage,” the cloud city garbage-sucker, as well as the Ugnaut droid-parts disposal incinerator.
Cloud City is a Tibanna Gas Mine, that is it mines tibanna gas. The vane that the fight-and-fall is on is a gas processor. It’s suspended in a chute that extends into the clouds of Bespin, where it extracts the raw gas and processes it into something useable, whatever that may be.
It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be cool and dramatic and interesting to shoot. Lucas loves a fight that takes place in a location that has different height levels, as all subsequent movies show.
Which is actually kind of interesting. In most sci fi the garbage just sort of magically disappears.
Lucas does seem to love his bottomless pits - a point made comically clear in the Robot Chicken Star Wars Special (“what the heck are they doing up there all the time!?”)
I remember watching Jedi where Vader is telling who I presume is the lead contractor that the Emporer is coming to oversee the final construction personally and thinking to myself - does that include the RAILINGS? (This was pointed out in the Family Guy Star Wars Special - “you know what they said?! we’d be LEANING all the time!”)
The Star Wars playset called the final location of the fight “The Gantry” (see here). The “pole” that Luke crawls out onto and holds onto after the handectomy was called a rocket. The playset pictured on that webpage is missing the removable “rocket” piece.
I simply have to take this moment to recap what Chuck Klosterman said about this battle, because it’s priceless. He comments that Vader beats Luke, but not in a generic evil-defeats-good way, no: “Vader beat Luke the way Ike used to beat Tina.”
Aha, I knew that there had to be some explanation given for it, and that there’d be some Star Wars geek (said with all respect) who’d know it here.
My memory is a bit more rusty on this one so I’m almost afraid to ask, but is any similar attempt at a plausible explanation given for the endless pit that Darth Maul gets knocked into in Phantom Menace?
And am I the only one who thinks that Freud or similar would have a field day with Lucas’s movies - all those swordfights above big gaping holes?
That one still makes more sense than the Giant Pit of Death that is in the middle of the Emporer’s fricking THRONE ROOM!
[Death Star Architect] We need a place to put a big open shaft to the fusion generator…HEY! how about right through the middle of the throne room! Uncle Palpy never comes here anyway![/DSA]
The sensible, not-consumed-by-anger-and-hate guy says, “That’s stupid. I’ll just ride my little floating thing 20 feet away, hop off, and I’m standing on the same height as you.”
The Dark-Side-Psychotic-I-Think-I-Am-The-Most-Powerful-Guy-In-The-Universe says, “Oh yeah? Watch this, motherfucker!!!”.
Little known fact. Tibanna has a nasty side effect of causing minor optical hallucinations and Long term exposure has been known to create lens distortion in the eye.
Now if you have a hand crafted properly sealed blaster and cartridge you have nothing to worry about.
If it is a mass produced weapon from the company that won the contract with the lowest bid… Well let’s just say that the average time for an Imperial Marksman to be demoted to grunt is now measured in weeks.