You pictured Anakin as a young Alec Guinness? ;-P
This is kind of what I pictured. I figured Anakin was kind of a more powerful and slightly more reckless Obi-Wan, and someone who was smarter than Obi-Wan as well; the kind of person tempted to consider their own judgement superior to others because in fact in many cases it would have been (as opposed to Hayden’s portrayal, in which he is almost comically wrong-headed about everything, and isn’t very smart - to the point that Palpatine remote controls him from the moment they meet). The kind of person tempted toward failure of character through hubris. But also someone good-natured enough that they could have spent a lifetime in friendship with someone who was, in the final analysis, their moral superior (Ben).
I found a good fanart of what appears to be a young Sebastian Shaw playing as Anakin Skywalker:
^ This isn’t too bad, though the uniform wouldn’t be something I’d have imagined. Looks interesting though. This guy definitely looks like someone who could have shared adventures with Alec Guiness, almost a Lamont Cranston type.
Jude law with lighter hair might have been passable facial-structure-wise, but he has a kind of Fred Astaire body language that I think would have been wrong.
I always thought (a bulked-up) Russell Crowe would’ve made a good Anakin.
Yeah, this might work, if Crowe could put a little less Gladiator and bit more Guiness in the performance. He probably would have found that difficult, though, his testosterone levels are off the charts. I’m not sure any kind of deft, classic British cinematic aplomb is in his range. I’m also not sure I could see him and Guiness ever hanging out irl. Him and MacGregor, maybe.
One more thing, I never liked the reveal of Vader under the mask in ROTJ. I assumed his voice was affected somewhat by his respiratory machine but even so, a British accent would not disappear. I also thought his face was going to be way more scarred up as hinted in ESB, but here he’s just a pale bald older Brit, with or without eyebrows.
This.
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.
I always heard it was in the original novelization.
[Ryan McAvoy said:]
A younger Jake Lloyd, surely?
How about the older Jake Lloyd?
Holy Shit that freaked me out. Let’s stop destroying kids lives through childhood fame from acting roles, huh? Seriously, upsetting.
Arguably the pre-ROTJ Force was such a merit based power. The reason we don’t have Jedi is we don’t have Jedi masters to school us in the Force. Even a farm boy on a planet in the middle of nowhere can become a Jedi.
In ROTJ the power of inheritance is introduced and Luke’s sister is a Princess but she is an adopted Princess so she might be still ‘low born’.
In the PT Luke and Leia are the offspring of royalty and a demi-God.We have gone from the age of Aquarius back to the age of Dragons. Luke is no longer Uri Geller with Kung-Fu moves, now he’s a royal prince with magic blood.
This is a brilliant observation. I always thought of the Jedi as a monastic order of warrior sages, not as a society of supernaturally gifted mutants. I hated the way the prequels suggested that Jedis sought out “their own” to train them. Of course there would be some in this order who excelled more than others, and who would play greater roles in history.
The inherited gift thing sucks; it makes the extinction of the Jedi much easier to accomplish and far less heinous as an act; the extermination of an aristocratic or mutant bloodline would arguably involve fewer individuals than the erasure of whole culture, not to mention its millenia of history.