ATMachine said:
Tarkin's words to Vader convey the same basic idea: "The Jedi are extinct; their fire has gone out of the universe. You, my friend, are all that's left of their religion."
I can't hear (or read) lines like that without my mind immediately flooding with all the ideas and images that they conjured of the prequel era (before the actual prequels themselves were made). Damn it to hell, the PT could have been great, if only the younger, passionate Lucas who wrote those lines, and who actually gave a damn enough about his creation to have written multiple drafts until he'd brought forth the best possible story, had gotten around to making them, instead of handing them off to his fat, passionless, complacent older self, who could barely be bothered to crap out a single draft whilst sets were already being built.
Tarkin's line also evokes the singularly unique image of Vader we all once accepted as a given - that he, as far as the citizens of the Empire knew, was the last of the Jedi; the last practitioner of the Force (to whatever extent its existence was known or acknowledged); the last wielder of that mysterious and ancient "Jedi weapon" (as Palpatine called it) - the lightsaber. And his title - Dark Lord of the Sith - being some obscure honorific attached to his position in the Empire, and not an indication that he's merely a member of an ancient order of "anti-Jedi," all named Darth and all equipped with red lightsabers (even Palpatine himself - despite his clearly expressed disdain and relative unfamiliarity with that "Jedi weapon").
That's why my favorite EU work (getting back to the thread topic) is Rinzler's adaptation of Lucas' early draft, The Star Wars. It evokes all of that promise and mystery that the franchise had in its infancy, particularly when one looked at those amazing, strange, beautiful conceptual images gorgeously rendered by Ralph McQuarrie (who, for my money, deserves official credit as co-creator of Star Wars). I hold out some hope (slim though it might be) that TFA will restore some of that awe and wonder and mystery. The fact that they're using so much McQuarrie conceptual material in the design of the film only confirms me in that hope...
