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Post #716410

Author
ATMachine
Parent topic
Dark Horse to adapt "The Star Wars."
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/716410/action/topic#716410
Date created
15-Jul-2014, 9:31 PM

Speaking of sex that was deleted from the comic adaptation...

Re-reading the rough-draft script, I noticed that Leia is described as being "half-naked" when she's abducted on Yavin. The sight of her partly undressed so enrages Annikin Starkiller that he immediately attacks the trappers who have kidnapped her, but he fails to prevent her being turned over to the Empire.

All the way through the various SW 1977 scripts, there's some serious goddess symbolism going on with Leia's character; she's the embodiment of the freedom our heroes are fighting for. Ralph McQuarrie noted that Leia's white robe in the final film was meant by Lucas to evoke the Virgin Mary.

With that in mind (and given that Lucas clearly had political ideas on the brain when he wrote the early script), I wonder if Lucas wasn't  trying to invoke some revolutionary symbolism in the rough draft. Namely, Delacroix's famous painting Liberty Leading the People, which presents Liberty as a barefoot, bare-breasted goddess storming the barricades of tyranny.

All that is to say, for most of the rough draft Leia would likely have worn the white dress that Carrie Fisher has in the final movie. But in the third act, when Annikin and Valorum are breaking her out of the Death Star, Leia might well have been reduced to wearing a ragged skirt and nothing else.

(Shades of pulp SF here--including such stories as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books, and Leigh Brackett's Lorelei of the Red Mist.)

But in the Dark Horse comic adaptation, Leia is wearing the outfit that Ralph McQuarrie designed for female Luke; she loses an arm and a leg of its fabric, but nothing else.

Likewise, although the arena scene in AOTC is clearly an updated variation of the Death Star escape from the SW rough draft, as both scenes feature a girl and two Jedi, Padme's white outfit there only loses one arm and its midriff. All of which suggests that SW is certainly a lot more family-friendly now than it started out being.

FWIW, the idea of the heroine in a white dress that gets torn up also reoccurs in Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Marion in the Well of Souls.