ATMachine

The scene of Vader using the Force to fetch a drinking cup was in the third & fourth script drafts. In the third draft it’s during Vader’s first meeting with Leia aboard her ship, and Vader drinks from the cup (!). In the fourth draft it’s during the conference with the admirals on the Death Star, and he uses the Force to crush it instead.

As for how Vader could drink from the cup… well, in the third draft Ben Kenobi has a prosthetic right arm, so apparently the idea of including a cyborg character hadn’t fully merged with Darth Vader’s character yet.

SilverWook said:

Everybody who’s not going to see it, speak up now, for the record. 😉

Me!

Some of the early Snowtrooper sketches, undoubtedly. I’ve seen early concept art of snowtrooper armor which has those little horns based on samurai kabuto helmets. (Costume designer John Mollo proposed something similar for Vader’s helmet on the first SW film as well.)

And one of the script writers was Gary Whitta, former EIC for PC Gamer. The Dark Forces homages were deliberate at some level.

A salutary reminder that actors are liars and secret-keepers by trade.

You know, it might actually make sense to make binoculars with extra scopes like that if you planned to sell them to beings with four eyes…

For the comparison to really work, you’d have to have a Neo-Nazi leader who assumes total power in Germany and then is suddenly assassinated when one of his deputies takes power in a coup. Then Zombie Hitler shows up.

The freeze-frame awakens.

TLJ Yoda’s eyes are also weirdly shiny with hard bright reflections, like they’re made from marbles, rather than the softer, more muted reflections of organic human eyes, which the ESB puppet captured better.

NeverarGreat said:

Lucas should have given Obi-wan a robot leg in the ANH Special Edition in 1997 so that people would have speculated endlessly over the next 8 years about when during the prequels he lost it, then never have him sustain this injury, making it clear that it just happened sometime later and had no bearing on the plot.

Ben Kenobi did have a robotic right hand in the 1975 third draft, so this is more plausible than it sounds on the face of it.

I LOL’d at the Praxis-wave explosion.

That may have been less Lucas “trying to convince” Spielberg to re-do Jaws and more of him idly musing about that being a possibility with the advances in CGI that were happening. That anecdote is third-hand, after all.

FreezingTNT2 said:

Can anyone tell me why Kylo suddenly changes from wanting to build a new order and let the past die to just deciding to be in charge of the First Order? It is not at all clear what prompts this change of heart.

Directorial musical chairs.

Indeed. Trying to imagine the 1974 draft as its own thing is a bit hard because it harks back to Golden Age pulp SF in ways we don’t normally expect from SW.

You’ve got rocket ships that take off vertically from underground hangars that resemble missile silos; Annikin has to don a spacesuit in order to use a spacecraft’s turret gun. There’s even a benign “Old Empire” that was replaced by a more tyrannical new regime, rather than a democratic Republic that was overthrown by tyranny.

That sort of fantastical space-opera imagery largely fell by the wayside, replaced by the more utilitarian, everyday aesthetic of Kubrick’s 2001. Visually, SW as we know it mostly hews closer to Alien’s vision of “space truckers” than it does to the gee-whiz factor of Frank Paul’s magazine covers and the Buck Rogers comic strip.

Another thing that comes to mind is that R2-D2’s original “tripod” design idea was probably a miniature version of the tripods from The War of the Worlds, meant to be realized with stop-motion. That idea probably lay behind the animated Fantasia-esque tripod candlesticks that appear during the finale of Willow, as well as the compact design of Iden Versio’s ID-10 droid in EA’s Battlefront 2 game.

Incredible art there. Who made it?

The Rinzler comic version of the 1974 draft made several arguable errors - for instance, George Lucas in 1974 almost certainly imagined Annikin Starkiller with dark hair (like Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers, vs. blond-haired romantic foil Clieg Whitsun) and Prince Valorum as black (a literal “black knight” & a precursor to James Earl Jones’ Vader).

captainsolo said:

The only thing I truly regret is him selling out to the very thing that represented what LFL was founded to rebel against.

This.

But I think a certain part of Lucas always admired Disney. Remember that kids across America in the 50s grew up watching “Uncle Walt” promote his movies and then his theme park every Sunday on ABC. Something of that showman’s magic must have left a lingering impression, and made it easier even decades later to ignore what the company has basically always stood for in corporate terms.

And Lucas evidently admired Disney’s total commitment to maintaining the illusion of reality for a child audience. So much so that he initially tried to emulate the old Disney practice of not revealing voice-actor credits with the droids in SW, pretending they were actual robots rather than performers in suits.

It seems like Lucas overdubbed basically anybody who was British (except Alec Guinness) in the first film. Though somehow General Tagge survived. Maybe because his working-class East End voice didn’t sound like a stereotypical upper-class Brit.

Probably it was Irvin Kershner on ESB who decided to let the Imperials use their natural British accents, for the American Revolution symbolism. Lucas, by contrast, thought of the Empire as more like modern-day America, so most likely he wasn’t the one who came up with that.

I think the idea was for the ST to get rather meta. Something of an exploration of the relationship between authors & their characters.

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

I suspect the wardrobe given to Carrie Fisher didn’t help. The way that dark dress billowed around her made for a disturbing resemblance to Mary Poppins.

I can totally see Dooku attending the opera on Coruscant. He probably would dig the brother/sister incest scene in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. 😉

I still have hope this might be better than TLJ, since it apparently deals with largely unexplored aspects of SW. I think Rian Johnson works better with relatively plastic characters who he can mold in his own fashion (Rey, Kylo, Rose) than when he has to color inside previously established lines (see: the Luke storyline).

I am still worried about the potential for glib, immersion-breaking “shuttle parkers” style humor though. Not to mention half-baked plotlines like the mutiny arising from Holdo’s bizarrely unexplained secretive decision-making.

Hmm, on second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be so hopeful after all.

The prequels showing how Anakin becomes Vader make for an interesting case of dramatic irony in the classical mold. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing at all.

I do think it would be cool if, instead of Anakin having literalistic visions of Padmé dying in childbirth, he had more symbolic ones of suited Darth Vader striking her down. That way, first-time viewers watching chronologically would get a reveal of their own, comparable to that of “I am your father” from watching in release order.

DrDre said:

ATMachine said:

This is foul sorcery.

There’s so much content, and it’s really fast.

Get thee behind me, I say

This is foul sorcery.

Yes. It provides an important thematic mirror to unmasked Anakin in ROTJ being digitally altered to remove Sebastian Shaw’s eyebrows and make his eye color look like Hayden Christensen’s.