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Post #597583

Author
ATMachine
Parent topic
Lucas' Inspirations for Star Wars
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/597583/action/topic#597583
Date created
22-Sep-2012, 9:20 PM

Here's a bit more....

Consider this quote from Lucas' late 1977 story conferences with Leigh Brackett.

Vader walks down the hall--these long, narrow steel corridors, very gray--and he goes into a gray room. It's all steel and there at the end of the room on a throne is a gray, macabre, cold steel box and it's the Emperor. The Emperor tells Vader to get Luke--he is the last of the Jedi and must be stopped.

The Emperor is hidden inside a "cold steel box"? Funnily enough, this also suggests a Dune connection.

By the end of Children of Dune, Leto II is the undisputed Emperor, but he is already beginning to mutate into something beyond human. Except for his face, his entire body is covered in the flat gray patches of sandworm larvae that have become a second skin to him. This melding of human and sandworm grants Leto extraordinary physical power: he can run far faster than any normal person, break open the strongest of steel doors, kill heavily-armed guards with the slightest of motions. But Leto's physical transformation is just beginning: he suspects that he will, in about four thousand years' time, become something utterly monstrous, at which point he must finally die.

Nor is this all. In Dune Messiah we meet Edric, a Spacing Guild navigator, whose job piloting ships through "fold-space" requires him to be immersed constantly in prescience-giving spice gas. As a result, Edric has mutated into a bizarre semi-fishlike creature, and lives his entire life floating inside a tank of gaseous spice:

Scytale looked at the Guild envoy. Edric swam in a container of orange gas only a few paces away. His container sat in the center of the transparent dome which the Bene Gesserit had built for this meeting. The Guildsman was an elongated figure, vaguely humanoid with finned feet and hugely fanned membranous hands—a fish in a strange sea. His tank's vents emitted a pale orange cloud rich with the smell of the geriatric spice, melange. [...]

The Guildsman stirred and his voice rolled from the glittering speaker globe which orbited a corner of his tank...

Young Paul had noted this possibility of spice-induced mutation in the original Dune:

"I'm going to watch our screens and try to see a Guildsman."

"You won't. Not even their agents ever see a Guildsman. The Guild's as jealous of its privacy as it is of its monopoly. Don't do anything to endanger our shipping privileges, Paul."

“Do you think they hide because they've mutated and don't look ... human anymore?”

“Who knows?” The Duke shrugged.

Combine the idea of a mutated Emperor with a mutated Guild Navigator, and you might get some monstrous creature hidden in a "cold steel box" as Lucas envisions here.

Also, the scene where Ambassador Edric is formally introduced to Emperor Paul Atreides jumped out at me:

Alia peered down from her spy window into the great reception hall to watch the advance of the Guild entourage. [...]

Guildsmen moved across the tile pattern like hunters stalking their prey in a strange jungle. They formed a moving design of gray robes, black robes, orange robes—all arrayed in a deceptively random way around the transparent tank where the Steersman-Ambassador swam in his orange gas. The tank slid on its supporting field, towed by two gray-robed attendants, like a rectangular ship being warped into its dock.

Directly beneath her, Paul sat on the Lion Throne on its raised dais. He wore the new formal crown with its fish and fist emblems. The jeweled golden robes of state covered his body. The shimmering of a personal shield surrounded him. Two wings of bodyguards fanned out on both sides along the dais and down the steps.

Besides the Edric/early-Emperor connection I noted above, we also see Paul Atreides wearing "jeweled golden robes of state." Likewise, in Leigh Brackett's script, the Emperor was "draped and hooded in cloth-of-gold" though his face was invisible.

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Something to further the Paul Atreides/Anakin Skywalker connection....

In Dune Messiah, Emperor Paul is presented with a ghola (clone) of Duncan Idaho, a trusted friend and mentor who died saving Paul's life in the first book. The Duncan ghola was produced from Idaho's corpse by the Tleilaxu, a culture of genetic manipulators whose tampering with nature is universally regarded across the Galaxy as dangerous and even (given the prohibitions of the Butlerian Jihad against computers) blasphemous. (The Tleilaxu have perfected the creation of Face Dancers, shapeshifters who can alter their bodies to any appearance, of either gender, but who are therefore sterile.) Late in the novel, a subliminal order from a Tleilaxu agent, telling the clone to assassinate Paul, produces a tension between the old flesh and the new mind, shocking Idaho into regaining his original memories.

The Tleilaxu attempt to use this knowledge to manipulate Paul. They anticipate that his beloved concubine Chani will die in childbirth. Therefore they ensure that not only does Paul know her flesh can be revived in ghola form, but also that her old memories can be unlocked and restored. So Paul can have his dead beloved restored to him--but only at a price: the Emperor must hand over the true control of his Empire to the Tleilaxu, becoming their willing puppet on the throne. Or, he can abdicate and give them direct control over the Empire. Either way, he must leave his realm in the grip of the nefarious Tleilaxu.

Paul kills one Tleilaxu envoy, the Face Dancer Scytale; though he is blind, he is guided by the prescient vision of his newborn son. But another envoy, Bijaz, remains alive, and Paul no longer has the strength to resist the thought of reunion with Chani. He is forced to have Duncan Idaho kill Bijaz: "As you love me, do me this favor: Kill him before I succumb!" Blind and heartbroken, Paul abandons his empire and his godhood, taking refuge in the emptiness of the deep desert.

Obviously this has huge parallels with the story of Anakin in ROTS (as ultimately completed). Paul is tempted to give up his entire Empire to the Tleilaxu, letting their evil schemes control the fate of the known universe, for the sake of his beloved Chani's life. In the end, he is not strong enough to resist this temptation himself, and must lean on the help of a trusted friend. Anakin faces a similar situation with Palpatine's offer, but he of course succumbs to the lure of the Dark Side.

This is also interesting when we consider that the "Anakin turns evil to save Padme" plotline was only added to ROTS in reshoots well after principal photography; the initial cut of the film featured an Anakin drunk on power, corrupted and crazed by his use of the dark side of the Force. In that version, the Dark Side invaded his mind like a drug, increasingly poisoning his thoughts. But Lucas decided when editing the film that this didn't work: he had to give Anakin a compelling reason to want to join forces with Palpatine... while still being a good person with noble intentions. It's quite possible Lucas once again turned to Dune for inspiration, since he'd already drawn somewhat on the character of Paul Atreides for shaping Anakin in the OT.

BTW, apparently in 1977 DC Comics published a short-lived comic book reviving Jack Kirby's 1971 series New Gods. Lucas seems to have been something of a Kirby fan (like Darth Vader, Doctor Doom from the Fantastic Four comics wears a mask to hide his hideously disfigured face, plus full armor and a cape). I have to wonder if this new series jogged Lucas' memory of Kirby's plot, which pitted the heroic New God Orion against his evil father Darkseid. Combine that with Children of Dune, which came out around the time of principal photography on ANH.... do we have the inspirations for Father Vader in these two sources?

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Postscript: I just finished reading God Emperor of Dune (released in May 1981).

The central character of the novel is Leto II, the titular God Emperor. By this point Leto has grown into a monstrous creature, a giant sandworm-human hybrid, resembling an oversized gray slug. His human face remains visible at its head, encapsulated within a gray cowl of sandworm-flesh, but his internal organs have vastly mutated (his brain, for instance, is now a series of linked nodes distributed throughout his segments).

Leto retains humanoid arms and hands, now covered over with the external gray sandworm-skin, but his feet and legs have atrophied into vestigial flippers. He travels by means of a special large cart with anti-gravity suspensors, and frequently receives others while sitting on a raised dais. However, he can move his worm-body with surprising speed, and more than once in the novel we see him using his bulk to crush humans beneath him. He retains all of his prescient abilities and knowledge of his ancestors' lives, and he is reckoned even by his enemies to be the most fearsome and intelligent creature in the universe.

Dare I say.... Jabba the Hutt?

(actually, Lucas wrote the very first rough draft of ROTJ in February 1981, before the release of God Emperor of Dune, and in that draft Jabba is described as "a repulsively fat sultan-like monster with a maniacal grin." Perhaps something of the original Sydney Greenstreet influence remains in that description. However, the revised rough draft was not finished until June, by which point Herbert's novel had come out. Presumably it suggested to Lucas the particular "look" for Jabba.)