Ryan McAvoy said:
Although it's interesting to note that the "Seduction of power" plot element...
"(Papatine) was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the senate and finally took over and became an imperial guy and he was really evil. But he pretended to be a really nice guy. He sucked Luke’s father into the dark side."
...was fully filmed during principle photograhy on ROTS. But Lucas went back in during post-production and rewrote much of the dialogue and called his main cast back for pickups, to change Anakin's fall to be about losing Padme. All of this material is sitting on a tape somewhere in the Lucas archive but I doubt it will ever see the light of day.
Ugh, I haven't seen that movie in so many years, I was starting to forget about it. No I am remembering how ridiculous the turn was.
Somewhere in the depth of this forum we have a thread discussing good characters turning bad, and whether or not it is possible for it to be done convincingly. That was a fun thread, I thought of it sometime back while watching Breaking Bad.
You start off with Walt, an easy to sympathize with character and you grow attached to him. They put him in a dire situation and make him do bad things for a noble reason. So you still sympathize. As the show progresses, his dire situation turns around, and his bad actions slowly cause him to lose the noble reason for doing them. Eventually, when you take the time to think about it, you realize Walt is just a bad guy. But you still can't shake that sympathy for him that was built at the beginning. He continues to do these bad things, but is now driven by greed and pride, rather than the intended selfless sacrifice for his family that started him off on that path. It is the best story of a fall into evil that I have ever encountered.
I don't think it is impossible, or even necessarily that hard, to make a beloved character sink into becoming the villain. We all loved Darth Vader before, but imagine how we'd feel about him now if George had managed to make Anakin a character we loved and sympathized with as much as Luke. Instead he was just a bitch from the beginning that you couldn't wait to see Obi-Wan smack around a bit before he finally grew a pair and donned his leather suit.
It should have been the story of a good man led astray, instead it was a character who was marketed heavily as being a hero for a very young audience (who ran around with his action figures and dressed up like him) ultimately doing some very stupid, sick, and sadistic things, all the while seemingly having never made up his mind about what kind of a person he really was or wanted to be. Anakin as portrayed to us had no character to be put to question, he had no ethics or moral code. He was an immature kid in one film, an annoying jerk of a teenager in the next (where he is already committing mass murder), and a creepy conflicted psycho in the last one (who isn't sure if his mentor admitting to being evil is a big deal or not, and is easily convinced that slaughtering a classroom full of small children is necessary). Gah, that movie isn't only awful, but it is actually kind of disgusting when you think about it.