Luke’s ice cave on Hoth is another one of the Star Wars illustrations I made for Fantasy Flight Games.

As it happened many, many times, when I read the brief I thought “whoa, I get to draw that?!”

I mean, I think the scene where Luke chops the Wampa’s arm off is one of the most iconic in The Empire Strikes Back, together with the one where Han Solo stuffs him inside the Tauntaun’s belly.

Anyway, this was the only time I got to draw an environment for Star Wars, as literally all the other cards I painted were characters.

One of the reasons I always love doing anything related to Star Wars is that it forces me to do further research on the scenes they refer to, getting me to discover bits of movie trivia and Star Wars lore I probably wouldn’t have come across.

For example (all the following are from The Empire Strikes Back trivia on Imdb):

– it looks like there was some debate over the technicalities of showing Luke’s light saber flying to his hand when he was hanging upside down in the cave.
Eventually they went full old school, and had Mark Hamill simply throw the sabre away and reversed the shot.

– The scene where Luke gets out of the Hoth ice cave was supposed to have some fake snow blown around. Then a huge storm hit the hotel in Norway where the crew was staying at, so the director decided they were perfect conditions for the scene and sent Mark Hamill outside in a real snow storm.

– A part from the scene where he falls down the shaft in the City of Clouds, Mark Hamill did all his stunts in The Empire Strikes Back.

– a different character in each movie says the line “I have a bad feeling about this”. In this movie it’s Leia’s turn.

– During the filming of the Battle of Hoth, the Echo Base troops were actually Norwegian mountain-rescue skiers. In exchange for participation in this movie, Lucasfilm made a donation to the Norwegian Red Cross.

What I learned instead from Inside the World of Star Wars Trilogy is that the Wampa who attacked Luke in the snow wastes is not the same one who was about to eat him in the Hoth ice cave.

The cave was the den of a female Wampa, later nicknamed One-Arm, and contrarily to what one might think she was not a mindless brute.

She later became the leader of a band of other Wampas who preyed on hunters and explorers, and even went on occupying Echo Base after the Rebels had escaped it.

A few years later Luke Skywalker returned to the base with Callista Ming, where One-Arm recognized him and tried to kill him.

Unfortunately Luke was officially a bad ass at the time, and slew her for good with no effort.

by Paolo Puggioni