The Asteroid Field
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
"The Asteroid Field" is a musical piece composed by John Williams for Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back. It achieved a minor popularity to music enthusiasts as a track.
Anatomy
It opens with a portion of The Imperial March. There's subtle brass with woodwinds for the melody in two distinctive segments from 0:50 through 2:15. Big brass catches the ear of the listener from 2:17 through 2:41, then reprising an earlier segment, before a crescendo to an altered segment of the preceding brass, and then goes off to a segment from Han Solo and the Princess. The piece ends with a quiet, eerie segment, before using woodwinds as a finale.
Appearances
- John Williams originally composed the piece for The Empire Strikes Back, during the first asteroid field scene. A few sources, however, like to use the segment played from 2:17 through 2:41 to represent the Millennium Falcon, as if that was the vessel's main theme. This was the case in a documentary by Hasbro regarding their action figure scale Millennium Falcon which played the piece over various scenes involving the starship.
- The theme is played prominently during the Star Tours attraction when the passengers' StarSpeeder 3000 has a dangerous encounter with a large group of comets.
- In the 1992 SNES game Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back the theme is used during the start-up screen and asteroid level.
- In many other Star Wars video games it is used in asteroid field levels, such as Star Wars: Starfighter, Star Wars: Battlefront and its sequel Star Wars: Battlefront II.
- It's one of the chapters on the 2005 Star Wars: A Musical Journey DVD as "Escape Theme".
- A variation of a part of the piece is played during the TIE fighter chase in the Star Wars Rebels episode "Out of Darkness," which was composed by Kevin Kiner.
- "The Asteroid Field" appears in the track "Reminiscence Therapy" of John Powell's Solo: A Star Wars Story, with minor modifications compared to the original piece.
- Parts of the piece can be heard in the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run attraction at Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge when the Falcon flies through an asteroid field.