Darth Lucas said:
Mrebo said:
I very much agree, NeverarGreat. Still, just coming up with a great script - so great, people read it and WANT it to be the prequels - would be a triumph.
If someone offered a great overall concept and an outline, or a whole draft of a script that would provide some basis for people to offer changes and additions, perhaps quite major ones. But we'd need to be open to people poking at our 'art.'
I'm of the school that we keep all OT secrets. I want to work from a premise of what the PT would have looked like story-wise if made pre-77. I think there may be room for an Anakin/Obi-Wan centric story, but it is a challenge. Still, plenty of you need greater creative justification of that route. And without showing how it can work, it's hard to sign on to that sort of vision. Just as I'm intrigued about Neverar's unknown character vision, but need convincing.
I've liked CWBorne's work too. And the cross-polination is a good point. There are certain story elements of his I independently chose (Obi Wan crashing to Tatooine at the start) and other's I'm tempted to 'adopt.'
See. Here's where I disagree. While I do feel that the reveals of the OT should be preserved, there really isn't a way to make a decent, cohesive story arc that way. I'm in the school of thought that you should assume everybody watching already knows the reveals. I think that when thinking about story for the prequels, it should have reveals of it's own, so that whether you watch it 456123, or 123456, you still get some powerful reveals. I want to work from a premise of what the PT would have looked like if made late-eighties, early-nineties; as opposed to late-nineties, early two-thousands. Personally, I've always felt the story should be more about Obi-Wan's failure as a mentor, not Anakin's failure as a jedi. 1-3 should be about Obi-Wan, 4-6 should be about Luke, and the underlying story that ties them together should be about Anakin/Vader's redemption.
Neverar identifies one possibility, by making the events of the OT more peripheral to what happens in the PT. Or you can make Anakin a heroic figure fighting for justice and Obi Wan seemingly stuck in the past, reluctant, accepting of so many bad things that Anakin (and the viewer) thinks can be addressed. We never dislike Obi Wan, but recognize he is a flawed character. This leads to a duel in which Anakin suffers a not wholly intended "death" at the hand of his friend (falls into a volcano). The ultimate triumph of the Empire is a happy ending as it seeks to address all the problems in the universe. The point is that we never see Anakin really categorically go "bad." And there are so many ways it would be a transformational experience of the story in any viewing order.