Anchorhead said:
yotsuya said:
The problem with evidence is that it is only as good as the truth at the time.
That’s a laughable dodge of reality. Truth isn’t fluid. Uncle George wrote a story outline and several scripts. They weren’t sealed until a date decades later when the truth was to be revealed, they weren’t cryptic, nor were they a puzzle to decode as events unfolded through the years.
Your man isn’t anywhere near that deep. The story he always intended was filmed and released in 1977. What came out years later was also written years later.
There was no profound Original Vision ™ If he had everything planned from the very beginning, he wouldn’t have hired two people to write sequels to the film. The first sequel was a published novel, written in such a way as to make it something they could film. A published sequel, commissioned by and ok’d by Lucas.
he was planning the family drama from the beginning and the earliest drafts of the script bear this out.
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“ANNIKIN STARKILLER, a tall, heavy-set boy of eighteen.”
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*“LUKE SKYWALKER, Commander of the Aquilaean Starforce. He is a large man, apparently in his early sixties…”
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“PRINCESS LEIA, about fourteen years old…”
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“DARTH VADER, a tall, grim-looking general…” (age not given)
“the earliest drafts” show nothing of the sort. If you want to truly go back to the very beginning, Vader isn’t part of Star Wars. Two years later all four characters are in the story at the same time, at least two with different surnames. They are not and cannot be related in the the way you wish. No father\son, no twins. It simply isn’t possible.
Lucas has been lying about this for thirty-five years.
The only thing that seems certain about all of this is that Lucas understood that if he continually lied about something long enough some people would eventually believe it, even when the truth is easily discoverable.
Have you actually read all the drafts? I have. Like I said, lots of family linking. I didn’t say with what characters. In one draft she has brothers. In another she is Owen and Beru’s daugher and Luke’s cousin. He seemed to change his ideas about family relationships with each draft, but was pretty consistent in their existence. That coupled with the secrecy he used for TEST and ROTJ, and you cannot prove he hadn’t planned it the way we got it. And when I said beginning, I meant when the story of ANH we are familiar with came about - after he split the story.
You also have to remember that one if his inspiration were the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials. In those there is always something new in later episodes. There is even evidence in the earlier drafts that he was thinking about sequels. And Splintered was to be a potential inexpensive sequel. The real sequel was always TESB. Bespin and Cloud City was a carry over from an earlier draft (where he’d already hired McQuarrie to do some of the art) - the same draft where the final battle involved wookies.
And then you have the name, Darth Vader. It means Dark Father and there is plenty of evidence that Lucas knew what it meant when he picked it. There is meaning to many of the names. There is no evidence of offspring in the first draft to feature that name, but soon Luke is an orphan whose father was a Jedi. Coupled with what Foster wrote in the novelization (when Ben starts to tell Luke about the past it is called a convenient lie), Guinness’s acting (which seems to indicate he is hiding something), the similar sabers, that hint that Vader might be Luke’s father from that 1978 interview, the lack of the father line in any of the TESB scripts (later drafts have a note to insert a line, but not the line itself), and the pieces fit together to point to a plan in place, not one created on the fly after the fact.
