My Top 100: #28 – Super Return of the Jedi

 

For most of us hardcore Star Wars fanatics, it’s quite easy to remember just what it was that made us fall in love with that galaxy far, far away.  For me, it was Super Return of the Jedi.

Whenever people ask the question of “what’s your favourite Star Wars movie”, I’m always quick to answer Episode VI.  For some reason, that never goes over very well!  I’m not sure why, either.  I mean, sure, the Empire’s ground forces were taken out by a bunch of teddy bears…  keep in mind, however, that the kind of music played in A New Hope‘s Cantina scene is called “jizz”.

For serious.

Try not to take your Star Wars too seriously, folks.  I love it too, but they’re just movies, meant to entertain.

Anyway, Return of the Jedi just wraps all the storylines up into a nice little package, and ends it in a way that always gives me goosebumps whenever I watch it.  The Emperor is creepy as hell and played to perfection by Ian McDiarmid.  The emotionally charged duel between Luke and Darth Vader is more interesting than the one in Empire, just because Vader’s not just “some bad guy” throughout most of the fight – Luke KNOWS he’s his father this time around, and comes dangerously close to falling to the dark side.

John Williams’ score for Jedi is easily the best of all six movies.  From the Battle of Endor music (“Into the Trap” is possibly my favourite music of the entire saga) to the low, haunting Emperor theme, I friggin’ love it.  Even the Special Edition’s ending music gives me chills, just listening to it!

In the end, though, the reason I like RotJ the most is simply because Super Return of the Jedi was the game that made me say “I’m over my paranoia about space and Jupiter now, so I should probably watch those movies!”

 

 

1996 was a pretty eventful year, when I think about it!

I experienced my first ever NASCAR race, which was obviously a big deal, and stuck with me.  At the end of grade 7, I was in a school play as an important character with actual lines, and stuff.  That was fun, since we went on a road trip and played at different schools around the province.  That September, the Nintendo 64 was released…  I was *slightly* pumped about that.

On the flip side, there was talk about having my grandmother move into an apartment\nursing home just down the street from the family house in Baie-Sainte-Anne.  Not only that, but they were thinking of selling the house, which had been in our family since the early 1900’s.  None of that really sat well with me, but it was just a sign of the times.  It seems that everyone has to go through that sort of thing, eventually.

On one summer trip to the Baie, I had brought my Super NES as usual.  I had also borrowed my friend Abba’s copy of Super Return of the Jedi, even though I knew next to nothing about Star Wars.  I had played a bit of it at his place, however, and knew that it was a solid action platformer with cool “3D’ flying levels.

It was an abnormally quiet day in the house, since my mom and grandmother had walked down the little path over to my great aunt’s mini-home, located on the same piece of land.  They would talk about this and that, have lobster, do whatever old people liked to do.  They were probably playing crib and joking around, like they did so often!

I was playing Super RotJ for the better part of the afternoon when I decided that I really wanted to see what those Star Wars movies were all about.  I thought it was just a bunch of unknown actors in there, but was that Harrison Ford that I could choose to play as?  I couldn’t be sure, just because he was all 16-bittey, and stuff.

On the drive home the night after, I remember asking my mom a ton of questions about it.  Who else was in it?  What years were they released?  Was Star Wars the one with the “I am your father” quote?  Because that’s all I pretty much knew.  She told me what she could, of course, but her knowledge was pretty much limited to who the main actors were, and how Mark Hamill’s face got somewhat mangled in a car accident between movies.

Now THAT I had to see for myself.

We got back into Fredericton, stopped at Blockbuster Video, and rented A New Hope on VHS.  After I watched that, I couldn’t wait to see how the rest of them panned out.

“Dude, didn’t Obi-Wan just lie to Luke about his father???  Or…  was that famous Vader line just a lie???”

Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long to find out.  Our neighbor got wind that I had discovered the awesomeness that was Star Wars, and lent me Episodes V and VI to watch that weekend.

The rest, as they say, is history!