I, Am Not Left Handed
If I were to try and name the most formative pieces of entertainment from my youth, that list would invariably contain three titles:
The Prince of Persia
Star Wars
And The Princess Bride
I can still hear this music. The soundtrack was AMAZING.
Prince of Persia was the first real video game I played as a child.
Or toddler, really.
I was three.
Created by the incredibly talented and very humble Jordan Mechner, (who just released his journals from the game’s development as a book, if you are curious) this game defined what I would spend my life chasing in good video games. The way he approached design was as a platform title. In other words, running, jumping, avoiding pits and spikes etc, but no violence. You wouldn’t fight. He remained adamant about this design choice until the final hour when he realized that a sword mechanic added a whole new level of urgency to the gameplay. It elevated what was already a good game, into something more.
And it worked. It worked really well. The combat involved some rudimentary blocking and swinging and each encounter felt tense in the way all great fantasy should. My younger self was fascinated by the blood and the potions and the variety of levels. It also fulfilled a dream that every young boy carries from the womb: I got to use a sword.
Star Wars was a profoundly impactful trilogy, not just for me but for the whole damn planet, with particular emphasis on my favorite, The Empire Strikes Back. A New Hope has arguably the most disappointing lightsaber battle in history, even including that kid from YouTube that just kind of fought himself in an empty room with a blanket backdrop.
In fact, someone came in and redid that scene between Obi-Wan and Vader (Here) with special effects and it works really really well. But you know what worked even better? Let’s look at Luke v. Vader in Cloud City.
The Empire Strikes Back is not an unpopular film. Most of the angrier nerds you run across sipping craft IPAs in your local bar near an uncomfortable looking woman, are talking about the fifth Star Wars film and how it fits canonically within the Star Wars Universe (true story). They’re not necessarily wrong (they’re just an asshole). It’s a rare film that feels timeless. It did a lot of things right, but discussing them is beyond the scope of my tiny blog. All those aside, it also did one big thing that resonated with everyone.
It fixed the lightsaber battle.
Luke vs. Vader felt huge. The hits were hard, the finesse was there. The movement and the use of the force were all so engaging and tactile.
Yea, yea, Luke finds out that Vader is his dad.
Whatever.
Five year-old Derek couldn’t have cared less.
Vader cut off Luke’s freaking arm.
Sliced it right off.
His lightsaber hand.
THAT. Was. Crushing.
I too, as a kindergartener, would have leapt from a high tower into the abyss if someone had destroyed my blade hand. It stuck with me for a long time.
I felt that. We all felt that
And finally, the Princess Bride, the greatest movie of all time and probably the first love story I enjoyed as a kid who still thought girls had cooties.
I joke around alot, but feel the need to clarify: I do not jest about The Princess Bride. The love story between Wesley and Buttercup told against a backdrop political intrigue and fanciful locales full of torture, pirates, fighting and even FREAKING ROUS’s, has EVERYTHING.
Observe, the reason I believe in love
I remember countless viewings as a child staying home sick from school and watching with wide-eyed fascination as the man in black outsmarted and out-maneuvered everyone. The dialogue is clever and the story gleefully leans into the fairy tale tropes it satirizes. It’s a joy and I feel lucky to have shared it with my daughter in it’s recent re-release to theaters. She loved it. I cried happy tears.
I maintain that “As you wish” is one of the greatest “I love you”’s in cinema.
So, I was considering these seemingly disparate stories and trying to find a link between them that may have intrigued my younger self in ways that Back to the Future and Dr. Who never did. What was different? What was the same?
Sword fighting.
I’m not gonna say that this was the thread onto which my toddler fingers clung, but...maybe it was? Each of these has a very similar approach to combat. In fact, it’s an approach we no longer see in modern movies and games. They featured realistic swordplay with a heavy focus on the art of the duel.
I know, sounds boring, but hear me out.
With the release of the Phantom Menace in 1999, the whole world of Star Wars and on-screen battles was changed. I won’t lie and act as though I hated this movie when it was released. I was 12 and it had Natalie Portman, Kiera Knightly, roughly 12 minutes of podracing action, cool droids, and a DOUBLE SIDED LIGHTSABER. Insofar as I roughly grasped human biology, that movie was puberty.
If my first love was Buttercup, Padme was second.
But it hasn’t aged well and though the reasons for that are legion, I want to focus on the part that has arguably aged the best: The lightsaber fight.
Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon face off against one the coolest villains in Star Wars history, Darth Maul. The dude has horns coming out of his head that’s covered in tribal face tattoos while rocking a double bladed lightsaber like a ninja warrior.
I believed, in my 12 year old heart, that I would be a good Jedi if the occassion should arise, but I left the theater seriously considering the Dark Side.
I mean, seriously. Dude is a badass.
The scene is cut up, action interspersed with other battles happening elsewhere, but we watch these three characters flipping and clashing their sabers together in the most spectacular fashion with a fantastic choir adding tension to the whole scene. It was remarkably different and more intricately choreographed than anything else I had seen to that point in my life. And there lay the problem.
See, Empire Strikes Back had a fantastical battle, but when my friends and I finished watching, we could re-enact almost all of it on the playground. Right down to the tragic missing limb. It further blurred the lines between reality and fantasy that already exist in so fleeting a fashion to younger souls.
But here, the flips and the back and forth action of Maul versus the good guys was more like…dance. It showed a bunch of cool skills but separated some of the brutality by feeling so planned out. While the action was incredible...it was unfortunately...not credible. Ha! God I’m clever.
When you wanted to play lightsabers in the yard with sticks or that rusty rebar your parents didn’t realize you had stashed in the alley, you couldn’t flip around. Sure, you tried. You rolled on the grass, you said “Wait!” and spun in artful circles whilst your friends admired your Jedi speed, but in the end, it was impossible to match the spectacle. So there existed a divide. The slightest fissure between the film and the playground, and it grew, at least for me, as I returned to the movies, further distorting reality.
If those were sticks and one of them was crying this would be my youth. I would be the crying one.
What Empire did, that I so very much enjoy to this day, was incorporate a real fighting style into the battle. It’s mixed in with Vader throwing things with the Force but the larger pieces of fight were things that you might actually see happen. You know, when you’re watching two dudes fight with fencing foils in the streets of your suburb.
Bob Anderson was the fight choreographer and even served as the stunt double for Vader in both Empire and Return of the Jedi.
The guy was an Olympic fencer. To say that he understood swordfighting is to say Walter White can do chemistry...it’s a vast understatement. He had a career that spanned 50 years and he is responsible for some incredible work with Highlander, The Mask of Zorro and even… you guessed it, THE PRINCESS BRIDE.
Yes, this man was responsible for the commonality between two of my favorite films. He was the silent hand behind the swinging sword and created combat that was believable and true and beautiful on screen.
Look at the fight between Inigo Montoya and Wesley at the top of the cliffs of insanity in The Princess Bride. This, in my never humble opinion, is the best fight scene in all of movie history. Yes, all of it. The swordplay intermixes perfectly with the music and the clever quips and cock-sure banter just serve to add to the gleeful tension.
I fought with my left hand for months after I watched this movie just to whisper that line somewhere between the monkey bars and the yellow slide at whoever I was fighting that week, “I know something you don’t know…” then I’d toss the sword(stick) to my right hand with a flourish, “I am not left handed”.
It was exhilarating.
Again, this was replicable in a way that modern combat scenes simply aren’t. I’ll admit that the newer Star Wars films added a brutality to the lightsaber battles that I really dig and it’s definitely a cool step forward in the franchise, but whether for nostalgia or actual conviction, I find myself drawn to the showdowns orchestrated by ol’ Bob Anderson. And that style of fencing combat is exactly what Jordan Mechner incorporated into The Prince of Persia. In fact, he pulled his fight animations from the 1938 movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood. (I checked, Bob didn’t choreograph this one but damn, that would be cool)The blocking, the striking, the parries, it all matched across the fantasy field, and in their similarity, they were able to reinforce their own worlds.
Familiarity of concept reinforces a piece that otherwise might be harder to grasp. When you watch someone swinging a laser sword, your brain registers that it’s fake and that risks pulling you away. But when they use that fake weapon in a fashion you’ve seen somewhere else, set in a different time period or in the case of Prince of Persia, in a different medium, you can begin to connect the disparate threads of the realities and each piece of art becomes stronger from their shared pieces of truth in a field of fiction.
This isn’t a callout of modern fight choreography in the least. I think it’s wonderful and fun to watch and the people doing it are so talented it hurts my brain. Instead, I hope this comes across as I meant it: a deep appreciation for the sword fighting that defined my childhood. Bob Anderson died in January of 2012 but I like to think that as long as we continue to celebrate the incredible contribution he had to these classic films, he lives on, in the heart of any kid with a tree branch sword on a playground in a suburb somewhere, tucking their arm into a sleeve and screaming, “NOOOOOOO, that’s impossible”, before jumping down the slide and into the abyss.
Thanks Bob.
Supplemental stuff for those interested:
Jordan Mechner talking about Prince of Persia
Thanks for reading :)