"Your father wanted you to have this [lightsaber] when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it."
!? Now, Obi-Wan describes Anakin as a good man, though we saw precious little evidence of this in the PT. But let's take OWK at his word - maybe Anakin's goodness didn't take place during screen time. I think that the good man Anakin Skywalker used to be would definitely have wanted his kid to have his old lightsaber.
Yeah, but Obi Wan didn't say Anakin WOULD have wanted him to have the lightsaber. He said Anakin WANTED him to have it. And that's not the case. Anakin got chopped up and fried and Kenobi stole his lightsaber. No "Obi, give my lightsaber to my son." Until Anakin was messed up on Mustarfart he was using the lightsaber, not wanting it to be given to his son. And Kenobi took it, he wasn't given it for Luke. Anakin didn't even know he had a son. So this is a case of prequel revisionism, or of the Lucas just totally disregarding what was in the OT.
The description of Anakin as a good man could have been just Kenobi lying like he did about Vader killing Anakin (which only became a lie when Lucas changed Vader from Anakin's killer into the same guy), but looking at the OT, it gives you the impression that Anakin was a good man until he turned dark. Sure, the Vader-Anakin thing proves Kenobi can lie, but since that lie only came about because Lucas changed the story between ANH and ESB, I don't think we should go assume Kenobi was meant to be lying all over the place. I think we were supposed to get the impression that Kenobi was telling the truth about Anakin when he called him a good man. And then Lucas came along and revised the story and made Anakin a pain in the butt jerk. I think Lucas totally changed the personality he'd envisioned for Anakin.
TheBoost said:
Obi-Wan is also lying a great deal to Luke about Luke's past. This is probably partly because he's ashamed of his own role in what happened, and partly to protect Luke. it's one thing to learn your a Jedi, it's another the same afternoon to learn your dad is like, the worst person in the galaxy. Maybe Obi would have told the truth had he survived the Death Star.
He only lied about Anakin and Vader being two different people and Vader killing Anakin. And since that lie was not originally intended to be a lie and only became one when Lucas changed the story in the late 70s, I don't think we have reason to go assuming Kenobi is lying all over the place. And if the prequels are supposed to make us think Kenobi was lying all the time in the OT, then Lucas has turned Kenobi into a pathological liar, what a sad warping of a good character.
"[Uncle Owen] didn't hold your father's ideals - he thought he should have stayed behind and not gotten involved."
Obi lying. See above.
We're not given any reason in the OT to think it's a lie and I don't think it was intended to be a lie. It's not Obi lying, it's Lucas ignoring the OT.
Obi-Wan does say his loyallty is to the Senate... to Democracy! So it's also not totally unreasonable to say he served Bail Organa, especially given that the entirety of the war takes place off screen, who's to say he didn't serve him specifically at points.
Oh come on. It's pretty clear that that "you served my father thing" is evidence of things being envisioned differently when the OT was made. You can make excuses for it and try to explain it away, but really it sticks out as not sounding right when you compare it with the events of the OT. It sounds like Kenobi's regular position for the clone wars in general was as a general serving Bail Organa specifically. Not as a general serving the senate of which Bail Organa was a member, with possibly some period of direct service to Organa.
"There you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me."
"Mrs. Iglesias is the teacher who instructed me." That's true. I don't see why I need to add "...when I was in 3rd grade." Especially when I'm talking to someone dying in the snow.
The way Obi Wan puts it implies Yoda was his sole or primary teacher. Obi Wan also says he wrongly thought he could teach Anakin as well as Yoda could, as if Jedi were otherwise normally taught by Yoda and Kenobi trying to teach Anakin was arrogant and foolish. As if the other option to Kenobi training Anakin was Yoda training him and as if a Jedi other than Yoda training Jedi was not normally the done thing. Yes you can rationalize it as not being too at odds with the prequels, but what it implies (and what was undoubtably originally intended) is indeed at oddds with the prequels. Not to mention the whole scenario it suggests of Kenobi spontaneously getting it into his head to train Anakin and going off and doing so independently is at odds with the prequels.
R2-918 said:"[Uncle Owen] didn't hold your father's ideals - he thought he should have stayed behind and not gotten involved."
Theres some good info about Owen Lars at the Star Wars.com Databank:
http://www.starwars.com/databank/character/owenlars/index.html
Apparently Owen thought Anakin should have stayed with his mother on Tatooine and not gotten involved with the Republic or the Jedi because of the affect Owen seen on his step-mother Shimi of being without Anakin. An older Owen did not want to see Luke leave Tatooine and possibly become a Jedi like his father because Owen feared that Luke may suffer the same fate as Anakin did. Also the Databank entry confirms an EU incident between Owen and Obi-Wan over young Luke, So I guess this confirms why Luke (in Episode 4) knows a Ben Kenobi but not an Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Not all of that is in the databank entry as far as I can see. I think you're reading into it a bit. But of the part of that that IS in the databank entry, a significant part of it is in the expanded universe part of the entry, which probably means it was invented by some writer who wasn't involved in the films. Plus it was undoubtably written around the time AOTC and ROTS came out (or after) and long after the time the OT was made. I doubt much, if any, of what you list above was in Lucas's original backstory. At best it sounds like an attempt to fit the PT into the OT story after the fact. And let's remember that during the making of ROTJ Lucas decided to make Owen into Ben's brother (see the Annotated Screenplays), which made it into the novelization.