George was telling the truth about the Father Vader twist going back to ANH, but so was Kurtz:

I think the original back-story circa the Third draft of Star Wars was that Annikin (Luke’s father) had actually killed the Sith knight Darth Vader and took his identity - possibly to usurp/infiltrate both the Empire and the Sith organization, and either Ben Kenobi knew or didn’t know this*. With the Revised Fourth draft via Kenobi’s dialogue Lucas reverses this, and this reversal was set-up imho to function in two different ways: a ‘literal’ sense (especially had Star Wars not done so well at the box-office) and a ‘metaphorical sense’, keeping his options open either way. Also, Kenobi become implicitly aware of what happened to Luke’s father and Vader. With Empire (ESB), Lucas either went with the ‘metaphorical’ sense of Vader having ‘killed’ or ‘destroyed’ Luke’s father, or…he decided (at least for the time being) to go back to his ‘original’ idea from the Third draft ('Annikin killed Vader, then ‘became’ Vader). Kurtz at least may have thought Lucas intended to stick with this; see his later remarks on what he thought the original ‘redemption angle’ for Vader vis-a-vis Luke was going to be about. We can only be certain that by ROTJ, Lucas decided on Anakin turning to the dark side and becoming Vader. At least with my theory, Luke’s father and Vader indeed were originally two separate people. The father twist came before Lucas had actually ‘merged’ the two characters. Edit to add: Luke’s father Annikin doesn’t seem to have had the ‘pilot’ aspect added to his character until the Fourth draft, which may indicate he’d already merged them together.

*also keep in mind that in this draft, Ben didn’t seem to be hiding in exile on Utapau (Tatooine), and the Rebel Alliance didn’t seem to know or care that he was there (they don’t seek out his help in this draft)

edit to add:

There’s also the not so small matter of Lucas telling Alan Dean Foster when the latter was beginning to write ‘Splinter of the Mind’s Eye’ to not delve into Vader’s back-story at all. Keep in mind this was in 1976.

Superweapon VII said:

JF_Sanderson said:

I wonder if at any point developing Rotj, George considered making Luke into “Luke Vader” and keeping Anakin a separate character than Darth.

He should’ve.

I used to think so as well. Or rather, that it was possible that that’s what he did (actually, I thought maybe George considered it for ANH and for TESB, but changed it for ROTJ).

In the scenario I’m proposing, they would be two separate characters as well. The difference being that the one who died in the back-story was Vader, rather than Anakin. And Anakin took on the former’s identity. I’m mainly extrapolating and triangulating between Lucas and Kurtz’s statements to get a clearer picture of what I think the original plans were for the OT. And I think ROTJ is when Lucas changed it. I’m aware that the ‘consensus’ view is that Anakin wasn’t Vader/Vader wasn’t Luke’s father until the second draft of TESB, but I think this view has been accepted too uncritically.

JF_Sanderson said:

I wonder if at any point developing Rotj, George considered making Luke into “Luke Vader” and keeping Anakin a separate character than Darth.

You may be on to something there. After all, in both of the drafts of the scripts that George wrote prior to Kasdan coming aboard, Luke’s father is never called Anakin; actually, he’s not named at all (though the name already had existed for quite some time). Also, there’s no “certain point of view” stuff from Kenobi in these drafts either. 😉