ATMachine

In the fourth draft version of that scene, Vader doesn’t actually drink from the cup. Instead he crushes the cup in his hand as a demonstration of strength, right after Tarkin makes Vader release Admiral Motti from his Force choke. This slight gesture of defiance seems to have been lost in the revised fourth draft/shooting script (the version in Mayhew’s tweets).

Any other conundrums? 😃

I bet those announcers are really good at skiboxing.

Oh. Well, never mind then. I thought you were selling maps to the Legendary Lost Treasure of Melee Island ™. ;P

Er… what?

As the good book says, “And take back 11 cubits to honor the pagan god whose oak this is.”

TV’s Frink said:

ray_afraid said:

Density said:

I mean, yeah, they kissed and that’s kind of gross, but it was just to make Han jealous. Not because Leia was really attracted to her brother.

I’ve preached that message several times in my years here, but there are some who still think Luke and Leia were “making out” and that there was some kind of unresolved “love triangle” at the end of ESB.

Well, there is the deleted hardcore sex scene…

Is that before or after Leia arranges for Jabba the Hutt’s death on a bantha-hunting expedition?

Hmmm! Interesting. I guess the original plan was actually to have two live-action heads on a CGI body (which would undergo less scrutiny than the actors’ expressions). I suspect that in the event the live-action footage and the CGI meshed together too poorly to be convincing, resulting in the use of an all-CGI model instead.

AFAIK the main difference is that the later versions add in a postscript with notes on changes made for the 1997 SEs.

Oh! I almost forgot to answer where I got the pictures of John Mollo’s costume designs for Ben Kenobi from.

Mollo’s drawings of Ben of him in Tatooine farmer garb are from The Making of SW and the 1979 The Art of Star Wars (which also provided the McQuarrie drawings of Ben in Jedi robes). I think I found the Mollo picture of Ben’s Jedi gear while searching on the Internet, though.

Who knows? Maybe they always planned to open Ep8 in the very same point that TFA left off.

Oh, come on, you don’t need a special dispensation from the Pope to put a black guy in a movie.

I thought it was a comment on how Star Wars is now some sort of colossal franchise bestriding the world like a racist Oxford statue.

That drawing of Leia (presumably by Alex Tavoularis) is featured in the book The Cinema of George Lucas, where it’s (likely mis-) labeled as being by Ralph McQuarrie. I’d say it’s from around the time of the third draft, which is when Leia was reintroduced after being almost entirely cut out of Draft 2.

I agree that Alec Guinness’ gesture of removing his hood adds much to the feeling of Ben Kenobi as a wise old wizard. I wonder if that was improvised? It’s amazing how much GL could get out of his actors simply by letting them do their stuff.

Also, here’s another Mollo drawing of Ben Kenobi’s original Tatooine outfit.

And just for good measure, here are some drawings by Ralph McQuarrie for Ben’s Jedi robes. The rightmost drawing, showing a set of fancy blue robes, was apparently meant as a ceremonial outfit for Ben to wear during the medal ceremony at the end of the film (before GL decided to kill off Obi-wan on the Death Star).

Incidentally, blue and white seem to have been intended as the colors of the Rebellion during pre-production on the first SW film. Several John Mollo sketches of Rebel soldiers show them wearing blue jumpsuits and white armor plates.

Here’s a picture of John Mollo’s costume sketch for Obi-Wan’s Tatooine farmer outfit:

As you can see, it’s basically a variant on Luke’s outfit, along with a utility vest with lots of pockets.

Contrast this with Mollo’s design for Ben Kenobi’s Jedi robes. At this stage, the robes were to be fairly elaborate, with a silver tassel hanging from the end of the hood on his cloak – befitting the idea that Ben had kept his “Jedi uniform” stored away for a long time.

Presumably the extra costume for Obi-wan was a casualty of the budget cuts that impacted the production around the time the fourth draft was written at the start of 1976. And if that hadn’t happened, SW Internet forums wouldn’t have so many debates about why Ben is supposedly wearing “Tatooine farmer robes.”

I thought we were talking about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Or was that Georg Friedrich Händel?

Also, Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine as Richard III? I’d pay to see that.

Indeed. Contrast this with the ROTS duel, which – leaving aside the story largely informed by the OT – is nothing but effects.

The use of blue-on-blue lightsabers is cool though.

The swordplay in that fight isn’t good, but they were still figuring out how to do the lightsabers. GL tried using glowing rods (with wires running to wall sockets nearby) to create an in-camera effect that wouldn’t require post-production rotoscoping. It didn’t really work, so on later films they just used colored sticks which gave the actors much more freedom of movement.

I will say I’m amazed that aside from fixing rotoscoping errors, GL hasn’t put some sort of messy CGI in this bit of the film, since so many people (even on this very site!) complain about it.

That’s a good point! But it’s left ambiguous, probably intentionally so (rather like that Significant Look on Alec Guinness’ face in SW 1977 when Luke asks how his father died.)

I don’t have a problem with gay romance being in Star Wars. That said, I have yet to see gay romance in Star Wars.

(Outside of C-3PO and R2-D2, that is.)

The screenplay for ROTJ is a mess in parts, but it actually is quite clever at making the audience believe in stuff that GL came up with on the spur of the moment.

I’m talking, of course, about the idea that Darth Vader was the same person as Anakin Skywalker, which wasn’t suggested even by ESB (where Vader claims merely to be Luke’s father, not to be the same guy as Obi-Wan’s best friend).

Meanwhile, ROTJ somehow manages to make bits of storyline that had been planned since the first film – i.e, the whole Luke/Leia brother-sister incest plotline – look completely artless and spur-of the moment. It’s like a goddam magic act, I tells ya.

Dek Rollins said:

I believe that they were redone to remove an error in the model, where one piece of it intersected with another. CG problems that wouldn’t happen with a puppet.

Which makes it even more egregious that GL filmed this character with a puppet and then discarded that for a CGI character instead.

Back on costume topic! I do know that at one point Obi-Wan Kenobi was to have a “Tatooine farmer” outfit, separate from his Jedi robes. This was basically an outfit very much like Luke’s, with a white shirt and white pants with puttees. The main change was that Ben wore a pocketed utility vest.

I’ll see if my scans of John Mollo’s sketches for that are still around somewhere.

The CGI two-headed announcer for TPM is even worse because they actually filmed the two actors in live-action with makeup-- meaning that the use of CGI there was totally unnecessary.

Kind of like CGI Yoda in the TPM Blu-ray, to be honest. Puppet Yoda may have been creepy, but he wasn’t from the Uncanny Valley.

Indeed, that image is from Alex Tavoularis’ storyboards for the third draft (which is when the ideas I mentioned above were being mooted).

Leia being beaten up and bloody is mentioned in the same third-draft script – Carrie Fisher has remarked on how that detail was present in the script she got for her audition.

Both the McQuarrie thumbnail sketches above, and another unfinished Tavoularis sketch of a topless Leia, are included in The Making of SW. John Mollo’s words from the Costumes book also indicate the idea of THX 1138-style onscreen nudity was considered at one point, though it was never written down in script form.

Not that that’s surprising with GL, mind you – after all, Ralph McQuarrie also did a whole series of production paintings featuring a female Luke around the time of the second draft, an idea which similarly didn’t find its way onto the script pages.

I’d forgot Luke was called “Wormie” by the others at Tosche Station. Heh.

What’s 300 feet long and hides beneath sand dunes?