If Shaw is used, this is the only version Luke would recognize:
He would recognise him more than some mop haired kid that just appears. Just a couple of scars and no hair doesn’t make him unrecognisable at all. Information is not easily available under the oppression of a regime like the Empire. He couldn’t just look up information about his father. The Emperor would have suppressed all of that. If it was so easy for Luke to look up info on his father, then it wouldn’t have been too hard for him to discover that he became Vader.
Anakin appearing as his younger self is ridiculous. So, one of the most evil men in the galaxy can suddenly return to his youth, while the other two jedi have to remain their older selves? And the fan theories about how he returns to his form when he was last a good man is also ridiculous. Not only is he NOT a good man on the light side of the force when he looked like that, ( He had already begun on the path to the dark side, He had, after all, slaughtered a whole village of Tuskens, including the women and children, out of anger long before he looked like that), but that also completely destroys the whole redemption arc of ROTJ. Anakin turns back to the light side prior to his death. Him becoming a force ghost originally symbolised that. Before the rubbish that they had to learn it, which Anakin had no knowledge of, so couldn’t have become a force ghost. God, the prequels screwed so much up in the OT
Spot on Ady.
The prevailing argument in this thread for having a Hayden ghost (or more accurately, a Hayden head 😉 ) seems to just be so that he is instantly recognisable from the PT for the sake of the audience and f**k any considerations of logic and consistency for the sake of the story and character in the actual movie being viewed at the time.
Yet it’s a significantly smaller leap of logic to accept the Shaw ghost as Anakin Skywalker and understand that Luke recognises him as Anakin since we both only just saw the very same actor / character not a few minutes earlier and seeing a new force ghost appear (Shaw’s) that we’ve never seen before, right after we know a master of the force just recently returned to the light side (we never see any dark side force ghosts) and died who is now standing beside Ben and Yoda, pretty much screams that it’s obviously Anakin and the fact he doesn’t look that close to Hayden is just something the audience has to swallow in the knowledge that these movies were made 28 YEARS apart.
The leap in logic to accept young Hayden as old Anakin in contrast to what is already established at this point as to how Jedi masters appear as force ghosts is just to big in comparison and no explanation is given to help bridge it, so it’s left to the audience to come up with their own explanations of which there are numerous that often clash with each other instead of everyone having the same common understanding from having previously already witnessed the lore that is actually established throughout the 3 movies.
It’s basically just a massive retcon that George throws in there to try and tie in the PT more with the OT but which fails from the outset, serving only instead to spit on the original movie, the original actor and the fans that already loved the movie and didn’t want to see such an intrusive and illogical change on their memories of it.
.Val