RicOlie_2 said:
Yeah, it isn't perfect, but I'm pretty sure it would be possible to work around that.
Perhaps the Emperor could have several Dark Jedi, or something of the sort, under his command, all of them wearing masks that are somewhat like the OT Vader mask. Vader is just another one of them at first, but over time he surpasses them. The one remaining one (besides Vader) is told to kill Skywalker (since the Emperor either doesn't know that Vader and Skywalker are the same person, or he wants a way to eliminate Vader without people knowing that he did it). In the battle, Anakin falls over the edge of a cliff, into the lava pit (though he of course actually lands beside it, as we can deduce from his survival, which we learn about in Episode V).
In the third movie, we see Vader in the same mask that the masked warrior in ep. II, and the other masked Dark Jedi were wearing. He kills the man who had actually fought Skywalker--with an excuse besides revenge, perhaps. Maybe the two of them had not met for some time (or so they thought). The Dark Jedi taunts Vader about some new injuries he appears to have sustained, and mocks Vader's need to use a breathing apparatus like a dying old man. Vader says something about being injured on Mustafar (as I shall conveniently call the planet on which the volcano battle took place), then strikes the Dark Jedi down. He later dons a more customized mask that looks more like that of OT Vader. The rest proceeds as previously described.
I'm sure there are flaws in that too, but with minor tweaks, I think my proposed storyline would have worked without spoiling the OT for first-time viewers.
A prototype Darth Vader mask as an Imperial Sith uniform would have been a really cool concept. That would have given additional depth to the cave scene as well as the line in ANH about Vader being the last of that old religion.
How it should be written also depends on how much you want someone watching it 1-6 to feel when Obi-Wan recounts Anakin's death.
"A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father. Now the Jedi are all but extinct. Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force."
Do you want people to realize Obi-Wan's not telling the truth at that point & go "wait a minute, Obi-Wan never had a pupil named Darth Vader," or do you want people to be completely fooled up until the end of episode V?
If so, in the first scene of Episode I we see a young man named Darth Vader dueling a man in a proto-Vader mask and defeating him. Dialogue could reveal that both of them were former apprentices of Obi-Wan's. We see the victorious dark Jedi ask a lesser villain to now call him Darth Vader, the name of the first Jedi he struck down (which would then establish that as a Sith tradition)
Obi-Wan could elect to tell Anakin about the history of his former pupil Darth Vader &
You then presumably see Anakin killed by Vader at the end of Episode II & Obi-Wan sadly retrieves his lightsaber. Unbeknownst to the viewer, Vader takes Anakin to the emperor where he is trained in the dark side & finishes his training by killing Darth Vader.
At the end of Episode III, Obi-Wan defeats Vader & Obi-Wan pulls his mask off but the camera cuts so that the viewer can't see the face & then says something that regretfully acknowledges that the man he defeated in combat was is pupil. In a gritty wheeze he asks Obi-Wan to destroy him and take his name as the new Dark Lord but Obi-Wan refuses & asks that he instead remember his old name & he replies that name has no meaning to him, at which point Obi-Wan leaves.
Maybe that's a bit redundant with the three pupil thing, but it works insofar as it doesn't reveal to the audience who Vader is until he tells Luke he is his father.