I’ve been putting some deep thought into my own fan-edit project lately, and I believe that I have figured out all of the necessary changes required to preserve almost every twist and reveal in the OT, this is very important to me because I really love the idea of watching the whole series through in chronological order and still having information withheld from the audience (even though all of us know the truth and know the plot twists inside and out) I think it would be really cool to watch complete films that still tell the whole story but leave out little bits for storytelling reasons. So here’s a list of things that need to be cut in order for the PT to line up with Obi-Wan’s lines in ANH and ROTJ.
-Cut any mention of Anakin’s last name being “skywalker.” This one is pretty straightforward, just make sure nobody says “skywalker” in the PT, and nobody could put 1+1 together
-Remove yoda from the movies, this is crucial and actually serves the OT more because you can leave in all of the lines mentioning master Yoda, setting him up as a great Jedi Master. This is also no problem to me because Yoda is boooring in the PT, save for a few good lines.
-Remove Luke and Leia being born, this fixes a great many things, with this edit you know that Padme is pregnant at the end of the film but you don’t see her die (another continuity fix), you don’t know there are twins, you don’t know the kids’ names, and you don’t know when they’re born. “I have not gone by the name Obi-Wan since long before you were born” would imply that Padme had the kids a while after the fall of the Jedi, blurring the timeline a bit.
I feel like I’m missing a couple of things, but these edits would really help to watch the series in order. The thing I’ve realized about making changes like this is that you realize how shoehorning in a bunch of OT-era stuff in the prequels makes no difference to the story being told, when stripped down, the story of the PT is about Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padme, and Palpatine. Nothing is added to the films by throwing in unimportant OT characters. Yes, Yoda is important, and yes Luke and Leia are important, but not YET. This is why we didn’t see Han and Leia having a kid at the end of ROTJ, it’s not only that Kylo Ren (or the solo twins for that matter) hadn’t been conceptualized, it’s that each trilogy should be complete in their own right, each trilogy should stand on their own as films rather than simply exist to serve films that were already made. This is why Rogue One wouldn’t make sense on its own, and why the Hobbit trilogy was so bad.