Darth Vader's suit — Page 2

SilverWook said:

Prowse did know, (or guessed) and was quoted in a small local newspaper article during a publicity event in 1978. That a larger publication didn’t pick up on it is a mystery.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5684916/in-1978-darth-vaders-actor-spoiled-the-empire-strikes-backs-ending-to-a-local-newspaper/

The version of Vader’s injuries that made the rounds when I was a kid was that Vader fell into a volcanic vent during a duel with Obi Wan. I think that comes from a tidbit Lucas dropped in an early print interview.

Pretty impressive that it went viral in the analog pre-internet era. Usually, it was just lurid urban myths like the one about the kid from the Life Cereal commercial exploding from mixing Pop Rocks and soda pop. 😉

Oh, many things went viral in those days. I just took months to propagate instead of hours.

I think Prowse either guessed correctly or had a hint from his character’s name.

Density said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

Density said:

Darth Vader1 said:

I know it’s just a movie, but is it believable to think that Anakin could survive those burns even with the suit?

You’re seriously asking this question in a movie universe with faster than light space travel, prosthetic limbs that are indistinguishable from real limbs, laser blasters and swords, and literal midi-chlorians?

FTFY

I’ve found George Lucas’s account, turns out it’s not Negative1 after all

Curses! Foiled again!

It’s never mentioned if Darth Vader eats or uses the bathroom. I kind of assumed that he doesn’t eat or use the bathroom, but how does he sleep? I was wondering if he takes the mask off and the suit and lays down on a bed at night. I was thinking that maybe the suit supplies him with energy in a way that renders the need for sleep or his digestive system unnecessary. He’s able to be awake and feel comfortable 24/7 with no sleep or food because he gets a constant supply of energy pumped into him through the energy cells built into his suit. The cells just need changing every so often. I was always hoping to see more behind the scenes footage of Darth Vader’s suit. I was hoping to see maintenance done to his suit. You’d think with how fragile his body is being dependent on that suit that somebody that doesn’t like him at some point would just pull the plug on his suit (metaphorically speaking) when he’s not noticing and kill him.

Yeah, but wouldn’t that only allow him to sleep sitting up? Don’t you think that would be uncomfortable?

Maybe he goes into a medically induced hibernation type sleep that makes it ok for him to be sitting up. Or perhaps he just retreats into a bacta tank every night.

I quite like the theory that the suit gives him the energy to never sleep. That’s kind of badass.

I was hoping to see a scene in ROTS of Anakin in a bacta tank. It’s like they just put the suit on over burned flesh without even removing the remainders of his clothing or cleaning the burned skin. I know those burns would have hurt, but a good bath with some scrubbing would have probably helped alleviate the pain of the burns overtime. I think it is also wrong that once the suit is done it is like he is just ready to go. You’d think a guy like that would need to rest in the hospital for quite some time with constant care to get over that. I could barely get out of bed for 2 weeks just after falling off my bike & scraping my hands bad.

Anchorhead said:

yotsuya said:
When you investigate where the name came from, it is almost impossible to ignore Dark Father and the implication that he was someone’s father from the very beginning.

No.
If you want to go from the very beginning, in the original outline Vader isn’t even part of the story. In the next writing (first script), he’s just a military officer.

• “He slaps DARTH VADER, a tall, grim-looking general, on the back…”

He’s not the Central tragic figure, Chosen One, destroyer of worlds Lucas morphed him into decades later. He isn’t related to any of the characters. He isn’t Annikin. In fact, the separate character of Annikin is considerably younger than Luke.

• “ANNIKIN STARKILLER, a tall, heavy-set boy of eighteen.”

Vader wasn’t Luke’s father in Brackett’s script for The Empire Strikes Back either. That change came along later when Lucas rewrote her work.

Leia being Luke’s sister would be another such item that Lucas would not tell anyone the real story until it was time.

No.

• “LUKE SKYWALKER, Commander of the Aquilaean Starforce. He is a large man, apparently in his early sixties…”
  PRINCESS LEIA, about fourteen years old…"

Their being related was a late change while writing Return Of The Jedi as a way to tie up the “There is another” line from The Empire Strikes Back. When Lucas decided to scrap films 7, 8, 9 (or was that 10, 11, 12?), he had to scramble to come up with “another”.

Also, the saber duel on the lava planet was planned from the beginning. I knew about it very early on.

No.
For the film Star Wars, the original outline and the first four scripts have no mention what so ever of a lava duel. That wouldn’t come along until an early draft of Return Of The Jedi and even then it was Luke fighting Vader. The lava had nothing to do with Vader needing a suit.

I occasionally peruse a Saga forum to get a feel for the climate when a new trailer or bit of news is released. I understand there are lots of fans who want the saga to be a clean, contained, planned-from-day-one story. I understand they are under the impression that Lucas * genuflect * was some sort of profound creator of their world.

Unfortunately (for them) there are decades of evidence proving that just isn’t the case.
If you dig The Tragedy Of Darth Vader saga, cool, but don’t kid yourself that it was all planned from the very beginning as some sort of Original Vision ™. It wasn’t.

The problem with evidence is that it is only as good as the truth at the time. Lucas wanted the identity of Luke’s real father kept a secret. I am not surprised Leigh Brackett didn’t include it becuase it was probably something Lucas intended to drop in a later draft (which is what happened) and no draft of the script had the right lines until the script was published. That line was omitted from all circulated scripts during the entirety of production. I think only Lucas, Kasdan, Hammil, James Earl Jones and Ben Burt knew what the line was before the movie premiered so I don’t think that not seeing the line in early drafts of the script is any indication of when that particular piece of the story was added to what Lucas intended.

And since he played it so close to his chest during Empire’s production, there is nothing to say that Luke and Leia being siblings was not similarly hidden and she was the other all along. His comments since indicate that he was planning the family drama from the beginning and the earliest drafts of the script bear this out. He had fathers, sons, twins, from the beginning, but they vanish once he started seriously developing the installment we know as just Star Wars. Luke just has a dead father and an aunt and uncle. Lucas has repeatedly said what his intentions were and I think his secrecy (of which there is plenty of evidence) kept it out of the drafts of the script and kept there from being any evidence of his intentions. Such secrets were very closely guarded during production and were deliberately left out of the scripts.

And not everything is clean. Yoda originally didn’t exist. Leia’s memories and the story of her birth don’t really mesh up (unless she was really strong with the force at birth - possible but…). So there is plenty that is not clean, but I think Lucas has been very clear since Jedi came out that the story we got (at least as far as the Skywalker family goes) is the story he intended. I just pulled out the novel of A New Hope and just the opening section and the section in Ben’s hut - much about the Repubic, the Jedi, Palpatine (the public face, not the Sith Lord), and Ben’s untruth to Luke (Ben tells Luke a comfortable lie) are right there on the page. The volcano duel came from Lucas himself in multiple interviews back to late summer 1977. He even once hinted that one version of the story might have Vader be Luke’s father. A rare slip for him, but a nice tidbit the indicates that was his thinking all along.

yotsuya said:

Anchorhead said:

yotsuya said:
When you investigate where the name came from, it is almost impossible to ignore Dark Father and the implication that he was someone’s father from the very beginning.

No.
If you want to go from the very beginning, in the original outline Vader isn’t even part of the story. In the next writing (first script), he’s just a military officer.

• “He slaps DARTH VADER, a tall, grim-looking general, on the back…”

He’s not the Central tragic figure, Chosen One, destroyer of worlds Lucas morphed him into decades later. He isn’t related to any of the characters. He isn’t Annikin. In fact, the separate character of Annikin is considerably younger than Luke.

• “ANNIKIN STARKILLER, a tall, heavy-set boy of eighteen.”

Vader wasn’t Luke’s father in Brackett’s script for The Empire Strikes Back either. That change came along later when Lucas rewrote her work.

Leia being Luke’s sister would be another such item that Lucas would not tell anyone the real story until it was time.

No.

• “LUKE SKYWALKER, Commander of the Aquilaean Starforce. He is a large man, apparently in his early sixties…”
  PRINCESS LEIA, about fourteen years old…"

Their being related was a late change while writing Return Of The Jedi as a way to tie up the “There is another” line from The Empire Strikes Back. When Lucas decided to scrap films 7, 8, 9 (or was that 10, 11, 12?), he had to scramble to come up with “another”.

Also, the saber duel on the lava planet was planned from the beginning. I knew about it very early on.

No.
For the film Star Wars, the original outline and the first four scripts have no mention what so ever of a lava duel. That wouldn’t come along until an early draft of Return Of The Jedi and even then it was Luke fighting Vader. The lava had nothing to do with Vader needing a suit.

I occasionally peruse a Saga forum to get a feel for the climate when a new trailer or bit of news is released. I understand there are lots of fans who want the saga to be a clean, contained, planned-from-day-one story. I understand they are under the impression that Lucas * genuflect * was some sort of profound creator of their world.

Unfortunately (for them) there are decades of evidence proving that just isn’t the case.
If you dig The Tragedy Of Darth Vader saga, cool, but don’t kid yourself that it was all planned from the very beginning as some sort of Original Vision ™. It wasn’t.

The problem with evidence is that it is only as good as the truth at the time. Lucas wanted the identity of Luke’s real father kept a secret. I am not surprised Leigh Brackett didn’t include it becuase it was probably something Lucas intended to drop in a later draft (which is what happened) and no draft of the script had the right lines until the script was published. That line was omitted from all circulated scripts during the entirety of production. I think only Lucas, Kasdan, Hammil, James Earl Jones and Ben Burt knew what the line was before the movie premiered so I don’t think that not seeing the line in early drafts of the script is any indication of when that particular piece of the story was added to what Lucas intended.

And since he played it so close to his chest during Empire’s production, there is nothing to say that Luke and Leia being siblings was not similarly hidden and she was the other all along. His comments since indicate that he was planning the family drama from the beginning and the earliest drafts of the script bear this out. He had fathers, sons, twins, from the beginning, but they vanish once he started seriously developing the installment we know as just Star Wars. Luke just has a dead father and an aunt and uncle. Lucas has repeatedly said what his intentions were and I think his secrecy (of which there is plenty of evidence) kept it out of the drafts of the script and kept there from being any evidence of his intentions. Such secrets were very closely guarded during production and were deliberately left out of the scripts.

And not everything is clean. Yoda originally didn’t exist. Leia’s memories and the story of her birth don’t really mesh up (unless she was really strong with the force at birth - possible but…). So there is plenty that is not clean, but I think Lucas has been very clear since Jedi came out that the story we got (at least as far as the Skywalker family goes) is the story he intended. I just pulled out the novel of A New Hope and just the opening section and the section in Ben’s hut - much about the Repubic, the Jedi, Palpatine (the public face, not the Sith Lord), and Ben’s untruth to Luke (Ben tells Luke a comfortable lie) are right there on the page. The volcano duel came from Lucas himself in multiple interviews back to late summer 1977. He even once hinted that one version of the story might have Vader be Luke’s father. A rare slip for him, but a nice tidbit the indicates that was his thinking all along.

Sources?

Darth Lucas said:

yotsuya said:

Anchorhead said:

yotsuya said:
When you investigate where the name came from, it is almost impossible to ignore Dark Father and the implication that he was someone’s father from the very beginning.

No.
If you want to go from the very beginning, in the original outline Vader isn’t even part of the story. In the next writing (first script), he’s just a military officer.

• “He slaps DARTH VADER, a tall, grim-looking general, on the back…”

He’s not the Central tragic figure, Chosen One, destroyer of worlds Lucas morphed him into decades later. He isn’t related to any of the characters. He isn’t Annikin. In fact, the separate character of Annikin is considerably younger than Luke.

• “ANNIKIN STARKILLER, a tall, heavy-set boy of eighteen.”

Vader wasn’t Luke’s father in Brackett’s script for The Empire Strikes Back either. That change came along later when Lucas rewrote her work.

Leia being Luke’s sister would be another such item that Lucas would not tell anyone the real story until it was time.

No.

• “LUKE SKYWALKER, Commander of the Aquilaean Starforce. He is a large man, apparently in his early sixties…”
  PRINCESS LEIA, about fourteen years old…"

Their being related was a late change while writing Return Of The Jedi as a way to tie up the “There is another” line from The Empire Strikes Back. When Lucas decided to scrap films 7, 8, 9 (or was that 10, 11, 12?), he had to scramble to come up with “another”.

Also, the saber duel on the lava planet was planned from the beginning. I knew about it very early on.

No.
For the film Star Wars, the original outline and the first four scripts have no mention what so ever of a lava duel. That wouldn’t come along until an early draft of Return Of The Jedi and even then it was Luke fighting Vader. The lava had nothing to do with Vader needing a suit.

I occasionally peruse a Saga forum to get a feel for the climate when a new trailer or bit of news is released. I understand there are lots of fans who want the saga to be a clean, contained, planned-from-day-one story. I understand they are under the impression that Lucas * genuflect * was some sort of profound creator of their world.

Unfortunately (for them) there are decades of evidence proving that just isn’t the case.
If you dig The Tragedy Of Darth Vader saga, cool, but don’t kid yourself that it was all planned from the very beginning as some sort of Original Vision ™. It wasn’t.

The problem with evidence is that it is only as good as the truth at the time. Lucas wanted the identity of Luke’s real father kept a secret. I am not surprised Leigh Brackett didn’t include it becuase it was probably something Lucas intended to drop in a later draft (which is what happened) and no draft of the script had the right lines until the script was published. That line was omitted from all circulated scripts during the entirety of production. I think only Lucas, Kasdan, Hammil, James Earl Jones and Ben Burt knew what the line was before the movie premiered so I don’t think that not seeing the line in early drafts of the script is any indication of when that particular piece of the story was added to what Lucas intended.

And since he played it so close to his chest during Empire’s production, there is nothing to say that Luke and Leia being siblings was not similarly hidden and she was the other all along. His comments since indicate that he was planning the family drama from the beginning and the earliest drafts of the script bear this out. He had fathers, sons, twins, from the beginning, but they vanish once he started seriously developing the installment we know as just Star Wars. Luke just has a dead father and an aunt and uncle. Lucas has repeatedly said what his intentions were and I think his secrecy (of which there is plenty of evidence) kept it out of the drafts of the script and kept there from being any evidence of his intentions. Such secrets were very closely guarded during production and were deliberately left out of the scripts.

And not everything is clean. Yoda originally didn’t exist. Leia’s memories and the story of her birth don’t really mesh up (unless she was really strong with the force at birth - possible but…). So there is plenty that is not clean, but I think Lucas has been very clear since Jedi came out that the story we got (at least as far as the Skywalker family goes) is the story he intended. I just pulled out the novel of A New Hope and just the opening section and the section in Ben’s hut - much about the Repubic, the Jedi, Palpatine (the public face, not the Sith Lord), and Ben’s untruth to Luke (Ben tells Luke a comfortable lie) are right there on the page. The volcano duel came from Lucas himself in multiple interviews back to late summer 1977. He even once hinted that one version of the story might have Vader be Luke’s father. A rare slip for him, but a nice tidbit the indicates that was his thinking all along.

Sources?

Good luck with that.

I think Darth Vader was cooler not being a central character to the story. He just happens to take center stage in ESB & Jedi. I don’t think that the prequels should have been abut him. His story should have played in the backdrop of a bigger story about Obi Wan Kenobi, The Emperor & the rise of the Empire. I agreed with RedLetterMedia that the prophecy idea & Anakin being Space Jesus was absurd.

Also, that first treatment from 1973 is just Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress retold as a space opera. It wasn’t until the first draft of the script that Lucas started making his own story and Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader appear. It isn’t until the second draft the droids appear and characters start to take on familiar names and the story starts to resemble the final version. Luke and Leia were cousins in that draft and Luke had brothers. So lots of family connections in the early drafts and then nothing in ANH with revelations in TESB and ROTJ. As Lucas always intended the ST be made this decade (per a quote from Mark Hammil about episode 7 coming out in 2011), that means a long gap between trilogies so holding the revelation of “the other” until the ST makes no sense. He got the fans buzzing after Empire so it makes sense his plan was always to reveal the other in Jedi. Why make them wait for 30 years. No, when you put the fact together - the early drafts, the secrecy about the family revelations during production, the meaning of names, the stories of fake scripts to catch anyone leaking the plot - it all adds up to the story as we got it was planned from the get go. They weren’t last minute additions - they were secret plot points that weren’t included to keep them secret.

That’s not to say that the story didn’t evolve. Han in Carbon Freeze, Lando, Boba Fett, the second Death Star, the location of the final duel, Ewoks, and a host of other things came about during the evolution of the scripts. But the basic story, the one that evolved from the early drafts and that he had to break up to make it filmable, that remained intact. I am positive that in that final draft of A New Hope, Lucas intended that Vader was Luke’s father and that Leia was Luke’s sister. Ben’s story about what happened to Luke’s father being labeled a lie in the novelization coupled with Alec Guinness’s acting in that scene in the movie make that story of Vader betraying and murdering Anakin a lie, just as Ben admitted in ROTJ.

Darth Vader1 said:

I think Darth Vader was cooler not being a central character to the story. He just happens to take center stage in ESB & Jedi. I don’t think that the prequels should have been abut him. His story should have played in the backdrop of a bigger story about Obi Wan Kenobi, The Emperor & the rise of the Empire. I agreed with RedLetterMedia that the prophecy idea & Anakin being Space Jesus was absurd.

Yeah, I could have done without the virgin birth thing. Although there are other explanations. I think the prophesy on the surface is dumb. I think Lucas failed to make a couple of things abundantly clear in the PT. You have to catch that Palpatine and Sidious are one and the same and you have to guess at his goals. He should have made it more obvious to the viewer without making it more obvious to the characters. And typically the prophesy is correctly interpreted by the good guys in the Campbell style mythological story telling. I like how Lucas turned it on its ear, but he didn’t do it very well. The Jedi assume that the Choses One is there to destroy the Sith. Yet there is evidence that the Jedi have become corrupt as well. Not evil, just wrapped up in protocol and tradition to the exclusion of their mission. Bringing balance to the force could very well have meant from the start, the destruction of both Jedi and Sith. That is how I take it and it does add to my enjoyment of the PT. I also find that taken in that light, it makes the character arc through all 6 films very powerful. Vader ceases to be Tarkin and Palpatine’s lackey and becomes a pivotal figure. I’m kind of hoping that the ST will create a similar arc for Luke. Father destroys the old, son builds the new.

But even with the PT, I find Vader’s bad ass ness to be undiminished. I really love how he is being used in Rebels. Totally the awesome warrior I always pictured. I love how they have gone with the ANH costume as their inspiration.

Tyrphanax said:

TV’s Frink said:

Darth Lucas said:

yotsuya said:

Anchorhead said:

yotsuya said:
When you investigate where the name came from, it is almost impossible to ignore Dark Father and the implication that he was someone’s father from the very beginning.

Truth

Denial

Sources?

Good luck with that.

His Writer Friends™.

His Professional Writer Friends™.

Darth Lucas said:

Sources?

What part?

The volcano duel comes from several interviews including one in August 1977 Rolling Stone.

Most everything else comes from too many sources to enumerate. I have the treatment and the different drafts of the original Star Wars script. I have the Brackett draft of TESB and the 3th, 4th, and published drafts. I have the published draft of ROTJ. Then there are all the interviews with Lucas in all the special features gathered in the various special collections. My list of sources is extensive and you would need to specify what you question if you want me to tell you where I found it. If I can remember or if I can Google it, I’d be glad to share.

Here is one for you. This lists the 1977 Rolling Stone interview and a 1978 interview where he hints that Vader might be Luke’s father - http://videoeta.com/news/1359/rumors-about-darth-vaders-beginning-have-root-in-the-past/
The volcano duel has been part of my Star Wars narrative for as long as I can remember. My mother relayed it to me. What her source was I can’t say and I doubt she remembers. She probably read it in one of the early interviews.

And yea, Frink, I have professional writer friends. All that means is that I know how stories are written and evolve. I’ve dabbled in it myself. I prefer to let other people do the work and study how they did it. I love hearing about the evolution of movie scripts, especially good book adaptions. I’m also good at investigating. Comes with my job. So I’m good at seeing patterns and possibilities. Seemingly small clues and add up to a definitive picture. I can’t say I am 100% right, but I am 100% convinced that Lucas had the basic story before 1977. Lucas was too good and too careful about keeping the secrets during the production of Empire and Jedi for the lack of these story points in the scripts to be considered evidence of anything.

The only source anyone needs: George Luca$h a/k/a G-Money a/k/a The Prophet™.

yotsuya said:

The volcano duel has been part of my Star Wars narrative for as long as I can remember. My mother relayed it to me.

…and it was that way: the folk wisdom was passed down from Mother to son, down through the generations, until the mightly tale of the tragic SITH LORD™ DARTH VADER™ had spread to every planet throughout the Galaxy far, far away, and even beyond----to our very own Milky Way, when, a long, long time after the fateful events, an Angel™ did tell th’ Tale, full and true, to the one and only True Prophet™, the TEACHER™, GEORGIE-POO LUCA$H, and did tell unto him to spread the Tale far and wide, using picture-screens, so that the people of Earth might learn from DARTH VADER’S downfall, and not be doomed to repeat His Folly!

Also: LOL