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How you pictured Anakin pre-PT

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George Lucas admits going for the James Dean kind of look.  Apart from the acting, I think even just the look of Hayden Christiansen was wrong.  I always imagined a more masculine adult, someone in his late 20s, perhaps with a deeper voice and more charismatic--someone who didn't need a lot of voice modulation to achieve the JEJ voice, ya know?

How did you picture Anakin?  Who might you have cast in place of Hayden?

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I pictured young Shaw. I didn't think about who would be casted.

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I pictured Anakin as someone who was tall, broad-shouldered, with jet black hair.

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darklordoftech said:

I pictured young Shaw. I didn't think about who would be casted.

 I also go for Sebastian Shaw.

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Not at all a bad concept. Shaw as a young man, didn't look too far a stretch from playing Luke's father.

Unfortunately he was a good decade older than Alec Guinness, and looked it in Jedi.

"The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won’t last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you’ll be able to project it on a 20’ by 40’ screen with perfect quality. I think it’s the director’s prerogative, not the studio’s to go back and reinvent a movie." - George Lucas

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Young Seb Shaw with dark hair a beard and an English accent.

Leia's/Luke's mum I assumed would be the source of Luke's blonde hair.

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I think it's probably the most Fatal error to make three films about a bloke who should have remained mysterious and a folklore legend in war time.

We never needed to know who he was what he did or where he went only what he became from vague recollections about him previously.

It fails on so many levels how they handled this aspect.

The question should really be... How did you picture Darth Vader before the mask came off revealing Sebastian Shaw?

And within that question you have a definitive conclusive answer contained within a question.

We should never have known who he really was but only we got to finally see what he looked like eventually. And even then we really know very little about him.

Scooby Doo springs to mind... At least they got it right.


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Yeah, and we shouldn't assume that a man that lived as hard as Vader which resulted in him looking like Shaw, would've looked like that as a young man.

Who is to say that Anikan wouldn't have been more like Luke in appearance?

I don't think I ever put much thought into what he would've looked like when I watched Star Wars for the first time years ago.

"The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won’t last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you’ll be able to project it on a 20’ by 40’ screen with perfect quality. I think it’s the director’s prerogative, not the studio’s to go back and reinvent a movie." - George Lucas

<span> </span>

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I pictured him a lot friendlier looking.

But really, I agree that it was part of the larger failure of the PT trying to show the stuff that was mentioned in the OT.  As weak as it was, ROTJ did a much better job of showing someone trying to lure someone to the dark side - that surely was enough.  We didn't need to see the process again, drawn out over three films. And worse yet, "how will they keep control without the bureaucracy?" was more than sufficient in the OT for us to build a mental image... I couldn't believe it when the PT actually showed us the bureaucracy.

"Close the blast doors!"
Puggo’s website | Rescuing Star Wars

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So perhaps a better question might have been:

If a PT really were necessary to tell a complete Star Wars tale, what would have been the best tale to tell?  What should have been left out?

There probably are already threads addressing this.

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I don't think the trilogies need to really connect. No real need for a vast saga. Each trilogy should have been pretty much self-contained with characters from the last introducing the next.

Were it up to me, the PT wouldn't have been about the fall of Anakin. He and Obi-wan would have been in them but wouldn't necessarily be the stars. It also definitely would have ended before Vader.

I like the idea of a 30 year gap between each set of trilogies.

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Going by those mockups I'm getting a Kevin Spacey circa 1997 vibe off young Obi-Wan.

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This reminds me of something I was wondering about a couple weeks ago: I remember knowing that Obi-Wan and Anakin fought their duel on a lava planet well before The Phantom Menace came out. Even before the PT, that was just an accepted fact among everyone I knew. My question is, where did that come from? Was there an interview with Lucas or an EU novel or a comic book that had that in there? EVERYONE took it as gospel, but I haven't a clue where anyone got the idea.

Also, I think it was a huge mistake to try to make Anakin the protagonist in the prequels. I know Lucas is fond of saying that the whole saga is really Anakin Skywalker's story, but even if it is, using a more relatable main character (i.e. Luke) to give the audience a way in worked beautifully in the OT. The way he's portrayed in the films as they are, there's precious little relatable about Anakin, so no one really cares what happens to him. Obi-Wan should have been our main guy. We already know him from the OT, he's close enough to Anakin that we can still get that complete story if we're following him, and the nature of his character arc is something much more relatable. "Failing a loved one, resulting in a painful dissolution of the relationship" is something I'm willing to bet a lot more people have experience with than "being tempted to evil by the promise of occult techniques to achieve immortality". Even though if I had the choice I'd tear down everything about the prequels and start from scratch, I think just shifting the focus like that would massively improve the films that we actually got.

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I first heard about the Volcano before ESB came out.

If I remember correctly Mark Hamill was on a children's show in the UK (probably Blue Peter) and he explained why Vader had to wear the iron lung thing.

It was backed up by other sources.

That's how I knew about it.

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Ronster said:

I think it's probably the most Fatal error to make three films about a bloke who should have remained mysterious and a folklore legend in war time.

We never needed to know who he was what he did or where he went only what he became from vague recollections about him previously.

It fails on so many levels how they handled this aspect.

The question should really be... How did you picture Darth Vader before the mask came off revealing Sebastian Shaw?

And within that question you have a definitive conclusive answer contained within a question.

We should never have known who he really was but only we got to finally see what he looked like eventually. And even then we really know very little about him.


 

My thoughts exactly, for the past 30 years.  Vader was weakened as a character by the Father alteration to the story, damaged by the unmasking, and made laughable by the PT.  He should have remained a complete mystery.  

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I can't disagree more.

Between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back there was so much playground speculation about the world that has since been replaced by the PT.

Luke's dad was a great pilot a friend of the venerable knighted Ben.

Vader murdered him, was forced to breath via a machine and was so resentful he went around denying others breath.

It was a canvas that was quickly filled with imagined tales bolstered by Marvel's comic range dropping the odd hint here and there and then in 1980 the biggest WTF moment. Those two characters collided with the sound of hundreds of thousands of children's jaws hitting cinema floors around the world.

Was he lying, he must be and yet?????

Then there was the glimpse of the scars under the helmet. Vader was just too big to keep mysterious.

It was a master stroke of story telling albeit done on the fly.

The reveal in ROTJ is one of the few aspects of that film I approve of. Vader was never a monster or a robot, he was a fragile old man driven by hate, fear and resentment.

There is a morality tale for you.

Fett on the other hand.

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^This is darth_ender and I approve of this message.

But you'll never know....  :(

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Bingowings said:

I can't disagree more.

Between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back there was so much playground speculation about the world that has since been replaced by the PT.

Luke's dad was a great pilot a friend of the venerable knighted Ben....

If they had explored that tangent, the original story,  I agree that it could have been interesting. On filling in the blanks with my imagination, I was there 100%. 

However,  it was all handled so terribly by Lucas that he ended up ruining the mystery and the depth of the character. 

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Personally, I don't think Vader would have become as captivating a character had he and Anakin remained separate characters. Vader would have remained a badass villain, to be sure, but he probably also would have remained the same 2-dimensional "black hat" character he was in the first film -- scary and intimidating, but with no real depth given to his character.

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darth_ender said:

^This is darth_ender and I approve of this message.

But you'll never know....  :(

I'm with ya too (two).

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

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