Vaderisnothayden said:
Yeah. I feel for you. You bought the paperback. I wanted to buy the paperback but then I heard about the bonus material and I decided I'd better get the ten-ton hardback. I think it's a dirty trick sticking valuable stuff in the hardback only. That section about expanding the universe has a whole lot of 1977 monologue pieces from Lucas in which he gives bits of 1977 Star Wars backstory for use by expanded universe writers. Han, 3PO, Leia, rebellion, rise of the empire, etc.
I'm still in shock that in 77 Lucas had threepio rebuilt by a boy working for a junk dealer and eventuallly given new coverings, later to join Alderaanian service. The thing to be careful about when judging the prequels is that some stuff that looks like it's recent bullshit can turn out to go way back. Still there's a lot of stuff that looks very clearly like it's a 90s development. And if the prequels really were all that faithful to Lucas's backstory then maybe the backstory was crap that was best kept off the screen. But I think no matter how faithful the story elements in the prequels might be to the original backstory, the spirit of how they were done out in the prequels must be seriously at odds with how Lucas envisioned the backstory back in the old days. And no way was Anakin originally envisioned as being like the Hayden Christensen version.
Vaderisnothayden:
In that '77 scenario, it wasn't Anakin that built 3PO. The text-interview doesn't explicitly say that it is, but frankly, the context of the whole "Lucas expands his universe" section makes it highly unlikely that the boy in question was actually Anakin or 'Annikin' (as it was spelled then) back in '77. If you read the other parts of that chapter of SW 'history', it's made clear that Vader and Annikin were two separate people (Annikin being the last Jedi to die in the purge only tends to reinforce this). With that, there's no reason for a 'memory wipe' or for 3PO to NOT know that it was Anakin who built him, if it indeed was supposed to have been Anakin . So you can forget 'Anakin built 3PO' as being "old"....just that 3PO was built buy a boy working for a junk dealer. When it came to the prequels, Lucas merely grafted that 'boy' onto Anakin's history (among other...ahem....'tweaks').
Ditto for the midichlorians, where it (the '77 text) says that "certain alien species have a higher count than other beings." Could that be the 'genesis' of Yoda, or a 'proto-Yoda'? Dunno. But it certainly doesn't speak of a human 'Chosen One' , on account of midis.