AN 'EMPIRE' AT 40: WAMPA IN THE BASE!

Wandering through the Rebel base, Artoo scoots past some Rebel technicians into a deserted cavern area, and straight into a Wampa that has broken through an ice wall. Soon enough, a game of cat and mouse begins. Thankfully, just as it looks like Artoo is cornered by the Wampa, several rebels with blasters, and one with a blaster/bazooka weapon of some kind, takes out the creature.

Kershner, on his first studio days filming at Elstree, would find the specific remote controlled Artoo Detoo needed for the Wampa filming to be difficult- with erratic moves and breakdowns. 

With the outdoor Wampa footage not proving successful in Norway, the majority of it hardly making the finished film, Stuart Freeborn and his team, already under pressure, have to re-work the creature, especially its face, for upcoming studio filming, and a later exterior scene filmed on the ELSTREE backlot (the creature goes through several permutations, the developed face masks eventually discarded, bar one brief partially hands covered scene in an ice-cave, in favour of a creature face insert later created by Phil Tippett and the ILM team in late Post-Production in California). With veteran stuntman Terry Richards inhabiting the massive costume for the action scenes instead of Des Webb, Freeborn's then protege Nick Dudman would go on to recall the Wampa re-working to STAR WARS INSIDER in 2008: “That was always a nightmare because it was made with sheepskins and weighed a ton. I do remember problems with that because they’d already shot it in Norway before I came on the picture. Then there were first pickup shots being done at ELSTREE, so they were putting the shoot back together. I remember that being an absolute pain.”

The early part of this deleted sequence was instead used to reflect the ground-pounding approach of the Imperial Walkers for a scene later in the film.

The 1980 released ART OF THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK book (page 24) shows a sketch of the corridors of Echo Base with wall and door details, including one sketch which has a note where a creature called the Yuzzem (later to be named a Wampa) was to break through a chunk of wall, whilst another sketch has the Yuzzem arm breaking through a removable section of the wall

The Wampa's search for Artoo begins!

The Wampa wrecks an overhead power cable.

Posed images from the filming of the Rebels' battle against the Wampa.

How much of the rebels bazooka attack and reaction shots with the creature that was ultimately filmed is unknown. The 1980 Marvel comic book has a moment in the battle where a rebel communicates to his superiors of the creature's attack- again, we have no idea if this shot was filmed or merely for the adaptation only. At this point during The Empire Strikes Back's principal photography already over schedule, and with the Wampa footage not proving a success with lots of production time and money wasted, this part may never have been completed.