Yep, Georgie boy was definitely making things up as he went along. He never should’ve fired Gary Kurtz. Return of the Jedi was originally going to be about as dark as The Empire Strikes Back but George scrapped that idea much to my chagrin. Instead they went with the version of episode 6 that follows a lot of the same beats as episode 4 does. It’s also quite similar to episode 7. Too much repetition in this saga if ya ask me.
“Return of the Jedi was originally going to be about as dark as The Empire Strikes Back”
The way Lucas described “book three” back in Dec 1975 says otherwise:
“In the third book I want the story to be just about the soap opera of the Skywalker family, which ends with the destruction of the Empire.”
The third “book” they talks about was NOT ROTJ. This was to be the later episodes. Right up until ROTJ was in pre-production, ROTJ was not to be the final episode. The confrontation with the Emperor and defeat of the empire was to have been in those later episodes. Episode 6 WAS originally going to be darker. With Luke being separated from his friends at the end, going off to search for his sister (who was not Leia). When Lucas decided he didn’t want to make any more SW films, he brought those plans forward, dropped the search for the “other” Skywalker and made Leia the sister.