The Empire Strikes Back, Super8 + audio cassette, Ken Films, USA 1980

A digest of the first half of The Empire Strikes Back was released on Super8 in 1980. The programme truncates the Hoth battle and the Falcon escape through the asteroid field into a compact 8 minute runtime. Compared to the best digests, here they failed to structure a self-contained narrative and it comes off as a "best of" highlight clip show of the action. (They didn't include the Luke Vs. AT-AT sequence.) With such a short running time to contend with they would naturally not emphasize any dialogue scenes, but the edit needs some more connective tissue. This issue includes an audio cassette with the associated soundtrack. The reel itself has a magnetic soundtrack, but reportedly the cassette was added for people with no sound capability on their projectors. Home video has come a very long way, I must say. The sound makes all the difference, but it is a very fiddly process to synch up the tape. As it also includes synchronised dialogue, getting the sound to line up precisely is imperative. The sound is duplicated on both sides of the tape. The tape ends immediately after the programme is over, so there's no need to rewind, just flip the cassette over and you're ready to go again. The cardboard box is twice the depth of the regular 8mm boxes to make room for the cassette behind the reel. The back of the box was just blank, black cardboard and is therefore not shown. I find the inclusion of a cassette really neat, so on that basis alone this has to be my favourite of the Super8 releases I own. Par for the course for these old reels, the colour on my copy has faded to red. I've corrected for the colour shift on the screenshots below, to give you an idea of what the reel looked like when new. As you can see there is still some semblance of natural colours left.

Assorted screenshots:

Opening logo	Company credit	Title card	Executor intro	Staff meeting
Letterboxed binoculars	Luke	General Veers	Bringing a giant to its knees	Matte painting
Fancy flying	Fancier flying	Chewie cropped out	Closing shot	End credit