Originally posted by: xhonzi
Is anyone else having a math problem with the prequel trilogy...?

This is something that has been bugging me in trying to understand the prequel/original trilogy timeline...

Excatly how old are Anakin and Obiwan in the 2 trilogies?

I'd say from the OT that Anakin is 50ish (Shaw was 77 during Jedi filming) and Obiwan is maybe 60ish (Sir Alec was 62 during the filming of ANH). Sine Luke is 18-20 at most, the PT can only be 21 years earlier than the OT... which would place Anakin at 29 and Obiwan at 39, obviously not the ages they were in the PT. Anakin is, again, 20 at most at the end of RotS so that makes him 41 at most in ANH...

Do you know what I mean? How old do you think they should have been in the PT?

xhonzi

As was pointed out, I attempted to actually track this in a book i wrote. Sometimes the guessing game can get a bit dodgy but a general sense, if not a specific pinpointing, can be achieved.

What I discovered is that there are three timelines.

The first is in Star Wars from 1977. Here Annikin and Vader are two seperate people--and hence very different in age. Obi Wan is about 75, and since Annikin was his childhood friend from Tatooine he would be very close to that as well; pegging Annikin's specific age here is a bit difficult but the 70-75 range is most accurate. For the purposes of illustration let's just say it was the same as Obi Wan. Vader on the other hand was "a young Jedi" as Obi Wan call him, his mere student, and would have been around 20 or so at the time he was Obi Wan's student, thus at the time of Star Wars he is about 40 years old.

TIMELINE ONE
Obi Wan: 75
Annikin: 75
Vader: 40

The second timeline was created with the combination of Annikin and Vader for ESB, though the story elements were not concretely desided until ROTJ. In this one the elderly Annikin had to be somehow reconciled with the young student Vader. For whatever reason, perhaps to better show that Vader was Luke's father by portraying him as an old man and not someone in middle age, Lucas decided to go with Annikin's age, but for some reason dropped it down a decade to 65. Thus at the time of Star Wars he would be 62.

TIMELINE TWO
Obi Wan: 75
Vader: 62

The third timeline was created for the prequels. Because Lucas now had to reconcile the older Annikin with the student Vader in concrete, literal terms, he could not have a 50-year-old student apprentice to Obi Wan, and hence had Anakin go with the original age of Vader, that is roughly twenty at the time of his turn to the darkside. But Lucas also decided to set his discovery up as being in his childhood, not adolescence as it originally was. The first draft of TPM had things sort of consistent age-wise with the first timeline, in that Anakin was 12 and Obi Wan was an older, full Jedi knight who discovers him, and with the film occuring thirty years before Star Wars and not twenty, that meant that Anakin/Vader would still be roughly 40 and Obi Wan in his seventies during Star Wars. Lucas' second draft completely changed this--Anakin was made 9, not a big change, but Obi Wan was made into a student and in fact it wasn't even he but his master who finds Anakin. Lucas kept Obi Wan as old as an apprentice could possibly be--I think it might actually have been 27 years old.

So with the third timeline created for Episode I Vader is once again 40-ish at the time of Star Wars but Obi Wan only 57 or so--not even a legal senior citizen. This made it even more bizarre when Vader is unmasked and portrayed by a 77-year-old man in ROTJ. Whatever.

TIMELINE THREE

Obi Wan: 57
Anakin: 42

The above ages I believe are what I ended up with but I am just going off memory. Its in the chapter "The Beginning...Again" in the book, near the end of the chapter.