I do think Anakin in the TPM is a bit overly cutesy, but I only see that as a minor thing in that movie. For most of his scenes I think he’s generally more serious, sad or excited, rather than overly cutesy to me.
It’s not just Anakin who is cutesy, it’s his whole world that’s cutesy. For me it’s difficult to see his slavery as a serious consideration when it basically mirrors suburban living. He lives with his Mom, she entertains guests, he gets to work in a fix-it shop and race go-carts…it just doesn’t feel fully realised. The ‘baby Conan’ scenario at leasts gives a full-blown reason for a good, decent guy to have a very reasonable chip on his shoulder.
I also prefer, personally, Owen being Anakin’s step brother, rather than brother, as I feel that a character driven so much by his personal connections, I feel it doesn’t really connect much for Vader to have had a brother that he was raised with, and then that brother dies and it never comes up in the OT. I already feel like it’s an issue in the OT that they’re never mentioned again after they die.
I agree in a sense - I mean I wish Owen had come up in RoTJ (imagine if Luke, having beaten Vader to a standstill, rubbed the death of Owen and Beru in Vader’s face)!
The Owen connection I posited would work (IMO) because it would illustrate a definite (and poignant) crossroads between Anakin and Owen. Anakin would meet Obi Wan and be filled with zeal at the idea of tracking down evildoers and (eventually) getting his revenge. Owen would be like “it’s not worth it, let’s be farmers and leave all that behind us”. This to me is much more emotionally potent than the movies as they stand, especially given that there’s no real ‘idealistic crusade’ issue expressed or even demonstrated in the movies.
In terms of a Luke/Anakin parallel let me just say this - Conan '82 and Star Wars share many commonalities, something that admittedly only really occurred to me over time. Lucas and Milius were essentially going for similar things - the sense of myth, the Kurosawa inspiration, the aged mentor, the ‘used universe’, the ‘father’ tropes including the handing down of the sword/sabre and the villain becoming the dark mirror image of the noble father etc etc (even the poster art is the same BTW!). Both Luke and Conan end up in much the same place…basically standing over a defeated James Earl Jones with a sword and wondering where to go from there.
Luke chooses mercy and redeems his ‘dark father’. Conan does the opposite and kills his ‘dark father’ (of course Vader was actually Luke’s father while Conan’s villain was claiming ‘fatherhood’ in a spiritual sense, but anyhow…). This to me is an example of what Anakin could be - less a Luke figure and more a Conan figure.
Now Conan gets to just wander off and keep doing Conan things, but had he been bound by something like an allegiance to a Jedi Order (with his best friends and wife bound by the ethical constraints of that order as well) then you have an interesting state of affairs and a great springboard for the kind of character who could embody all the noble traits of ‘a good friend’ and ‘a cunning warrior’ but also be driven to rage by orthodoxy in a way that wouldn’t allow him to ‘let go of his hate’. This way we, the audience, could empathise with him whilst also seeing how such a great dude could become a bad guy. As it is now we kind of have to flex our credulity somewhat to go from ‘whiny teenager Anakin’ to ‘killing younglings and joining the bad guys’ Anakin. I just think the ‘baby Conan’ idea gives a more straightforward, and believable, path from child-slave to Dark Lord that easily smooths out the discrepancies between Obi Wan’s fond recollections on Tatooine and the homicidal psychopath that Vader actually was. But his central struggle wouldn’t be the ‘saving Padme’ stuff or anything to do with being a Chosen One. It would be about his slavery and his obsession with personal autonomy growing through adversity into an obsession with personal power - which would lead to his descent into darkness when that obsession is challenged by those he loves.