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Also, I think I've mentioned it before, but in the SW third draft Leia is described as "bloody and mutilated" from Imperial torture when Luke and Han find her.

Given Lucas's love of Kurosawa films, this was probably imagined as a reference to the nasty black eye that we see on Toshiro Mifune when he's beaten up in Yojimbo (as well as on Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's remake, A Fistful of Dollars).

Which basically means Leia would be walking around with an eye swollen shut for the whole second half of the movie. Gruesome, but on both a literal and symbolic level it would instantly establish Leia as the toughest of the film's three heroes.

Here's a little addendum concerning the later drafts:

I think I figured out why Ralph McQuarrie drew Luke and Leia as looking so identical in his SW 1977 concept art from the third draft onward. And it's not because Lucas already imagined Luke and Leia as brother and sister.

First, go back to this famous McQuarrie painting from the SW second draft, from the point in time where Luke was a girl:

Look how McQuarrie has painted both girl-Luke and Han Solo. Specifically, they're both blond. The only difference is that Han has a red beard.

Now we know that Han is definitely not Luke's brother in this version; that role belongs to Deak Starkiller. So what's going on?

I suspect Lucas instructed McQuarrie to draw the two principal leads of the film as looking almost exactly alike, to show that they were soul mates. Like, and yet unlike (as indicated by Han's beard). Girl-Luke is the young innocent, the naive farm girl heading out into the wider world for the first time. Her love interest, Han Solo, is an experienced smuggler, a confident and self-assured man who knows the galaxy. Yet each of them has something of the other inside as well; yin and yang. Luke will become a bold Jedi warrior, whereas Han runs away from the Imperial might of the Death Star. Thus they are perfectly matched, and a natural romantic pair.

Ralph McQuarrie presumably transferred this symbolism intact to his later concept art based on the third draft. There the two lovers assumed the form of the naive farmboy, Luke Starkiller, and the confident leader of soldiers, Princess Leia. But they were still intended to end up together romantically, so they were drawn to look very much alike--like two halves of one whole being.

McQuarrie seems to have imagined both Luke and Leia as blonde by default, and both with short hair. However, when he drew the two of them together, he would usually alter the hair color of one of them slightly, making it light brown instead. This has the effect of making the two characters look not quite alike--just like Han Solo's red beard did in his character design from the second draft. (Alternatively, in his painting of the medal ceremony at the end of the film, McQuarrie gave Leia long blonde hair to contrast with Luke's shorter bowl cut.)

I wonder if, somewhere in the Lucasfilm Archives, there still exists the hairpiece Alec Guinness wore as Obi-Wan.

The way the rough draft is presented, the Jedi and Sith are both fearsome warriors. What makes the Sith dishonorable is that they serve the totalitarian Empire. A Sith who switches his allegiance to the cause of liberty is functionally equivalent to a Jedi.

Mind you, this is because telekinetic Force powers hadn't been invented yet by Lucas. Jedi and Sith are fierce fighters and cunning tacticians, but not superhumans. So there's no element of corrupting black magic attached to the Sith yet--that came later.

Once the Force became akin to a superpower, with light and dark sides akin to white and black magic, the Sith became irredeemably evil. This is reflected in their grotesque appearance: from the second draft onward, Lucas wanted the Sith knights to "look like Linda Blair in The Exorcist."

Also, the Sith in the rough draft are not stated to be an ancient organization like the Jedi. In fact, they may very well be a relatively new sect, created by the Empire in order to hunt down the Jedi.

In the backstory of the rough draft, the Jedi Order rebelled against the corrupt Empire, only for the Sith to crush the rebellion and hunt down the survivors. It's quite possible that the ranks of the Sith were filled by Jedi who remained loyal to the Empire.

I've done something like this before, but since my knowledge of the SW rough draft has since increased greatly, I thought I'd have another go.

George Lucas's 1974 rough draft for The Star Wars is full of interesting visual images. Sadly, since the draft is on paper and was never illustrated, many of these images have gone unremarked. I hope in this post (really rather an essay) to illuminate some of those visuals--which is best done, in many cases, by probing into the origins of various elements of the script.

The best way to approach this, I think, is to provide a detailed summary of the script, illustrated throughout by pictures that show just what Lucas had in mind for the look of the film. Accordingly, this will be a long and image-heavy post.

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The rough draft's principal protagonist is the eighteen-year-old Annikin Starkiller. The script tells us that Annikin and his father, Kane, wear their hair long, in "an odd bun" on top of their heads. This hairstyle is said to be picked up from the inhabitants of the Kessil System, where the Starkillers lived as fugitives for a time.

This "bun" is, in fact, a samurai topknot, and Annikin is meant to resemble Toshiro Mifune in his various samurai roles. This means that Lucas probably imagined Annikin as having black hair.

As the pupil of a venerable elder Jedi, Annikin also recalls Katsushiro, the young apprentice samurai in Akira Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai.

The image of the black-haired warrior figure recurs in Lucas's later work, both in Willow and in early concept art for TPM.

Given Lucas's apparent preference for blue-eyed heroes, Annikin likely has black hair and blue eyes, which would make him resemble the literary version of Conan the Cimmerian. Robert E. Howard's Conan stories appear to have been a notable influence on Lucas's early drafts of SW.

Early in the script, Annikin ends up engaged in a lightsaber duel with a Sith on an arid, desolate planet. The equivalent scene in the second draft (now set aboard a spaceship) would be immortalized in art by Ralph McQuarrie.

Both Annikin and his Sith opponent are wearing breathing masks, as the air of the planet shown in the film's first scenes is unsuited to humans. These masks are meant to be reminiscent of samurai battle masks.

In this draft, Jedi and Sith do not have telekinetic superpowers. That came later--in the second draft, to be precise. At this stage, the Jedi are ferocious warriors because they have trained hard to achieve intense discipline of mind and body. But they are not superhuman, or genetically distinguished in any way from the general population.

(Once Lucas did give the Jedi telekinetic abilities, he began immediately to think of Jedi powers as a heritable genetic trait. In fact, the second draft portrays the Jedi as a set of families whose powers descend from father to son, much in the vein of the Bene Gesserit matrilineal bloodlines from Dune. And, just as Paul Atreides was the opposite-gender culmination of the Bene Gesserit matriarchs' breeding program, Lucas gave serious thought to revising the second draft to make Luke Starkiller a girl.)

Oh, and in the rough draft, everyone's lightsabers are red in color. Which was faithfully reproduced by (most of) the sabers in the recent Dark Horse comic adaptation.

Annikin's younger brother Bink, only ten years old, is killed by the Sith warrior. Bink is described as having "dusty blond hair," so presumably he is the very earliest prototype of Jake Lloyd's nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker.

After they bury Deak, Annikin and his father Kane return after long voyaging to their home planet of Aquilae.

The script now shifts focus to Alderaan, a cloud city on the capital planet of the Galactic Empire. The image of the floating city in the clouds is obviously inspired by the Sky City of the Hawkmen from Flash Gordon.

We are introduced to the city of Alderaan by a squad of two-man "stardestroyer" fighters flying overhead, as the evil Emperor makes a speech announcing the imminent invasion of Aquilae, in front of a massed army of troops in black uniforms.

The two-man craft would recur as the twin-pod cloud cars seen in Bespin in ESB. Presumably the early concept art for that craft, which made it triangular in shape like a full-size Star Destroyer, was influenced by the SW rough draft.

In fact, this scene on Alderaan is meant to recall the opening of Leni Riefenstahl's infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, in which Hitler descends from the clouds down to Nuremberg via airplane. The Emperor here is even described as having a Hitler-style mustache.

However, the Emperor's speech contains lines taken from the diary of John Adams. This serves to indicate how Lucas conceived the Empire: a vision of an America that has been corrupted and fallen from its once-noble ideals.

We also first encounter here another heroic character, observing the scene: Clieg Whitsun, "a tall, blond young man about twenty years old." Whitsun is something of a prototype of the final film's Han Solo. He fights alongside Annikin Starkiller in several battles, wielding a lasersword and laser pistol, but is distinguished from Annikin by not being a Jedi warrior.

Given Clieg Whitsun's blond hair, and the syllabic sound-similarity of his name to that of Flash Gordon, it's safe to say that Lucas intended Whitsun to physically resemble the Flash of Alex Raymond's comic strip.

In later drafts, this property would be transferred to chief protagonist Luke Starkiller/Skywalker, who would no longer be black-haired. Han Solo, on the other hand, would have brown hair like Buck Rogers.

Over the course of the script, Clieg Whitsun accompanies the party of fleeing rebels until they are forced to abandon their damaged spaceship in orbit over Yavin; there he sacrifices his life to save Princess Leia.

Following the speech there is a scene where we see Imperial bureaucrats plotting the upcoming invasion of Aquilae. Chief among them is the newly appointed governor of the soon-to-be-conquered territory, Crispin Hoedaack, a Grand Moff Tarkin figure. Hoedaack is "a young, treacherous man with stone-cut angular features and piercing grey eyes." His henchman is Darth Vader, at this stage conceived only a "a tall, grim-looking general."

The Imperials' quarters are described as "white-on-white," an image of sterility and lifelessness that recurs from THX 1138.

On Aquilae, we are introduced to the commander of the Aquilaean King's armies, General Luke Skywalker. Skywalker is "a large man, apparently in his early sixties, but actually much older. Everyone senses the aura of power that radiates from this great warrior. Here is a leader: a JEDI general. He looks weary, but is still a magnificent looking warrior. His face, cracked and weathered by exotic climates, is set off by a close silver beard, and dark, penetrating eyes."

Unlike Kane and Annikin Starkiller, the Jedi warrior Luke Skywalker does not wear a samurai-esque topknot. Along with the color of his white hair, this connects him visually with Kambei Shimada, the gray-haired lead samurai in Seven Samurai, who shaves off his topknot at the beginning of the film as part of a disguise used to rescue a small child from a bandit.

The short hair and beard of Luke Skywalker also visually connects him with Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name from Sergio Leone's films. Lucas stated that he envisioned the General character as "a seventy-year-old Clint Eastwood."

However, despite the Clint Eastwood connection, General Skywalker is presumably meant to be Japanese, as proclaimed by his dark eyes.

We also meet the King's fourteen-year-old daughter, Leia Aquilae. She is described as having "long auburn hair tied in braids" (i.e., red hair) and blue eyes.

The braids may already have been conceived as being like those of the final film's Leia, whose hairstyle recalls the Nordic braids of Queen Fria from Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon.

Leia's red hair comes from several sources: most notable are probably Princess Alia in Dune Messiah and Princess Aura (and Queen Desira, shown below) from Flash Gordon.

Leia's stated age (14) is taken from that of Princess Yuki, the heroine of Kurosawa's film The Hidden Fortress, who like Leia becomes a fugitive on the run from enemy troops.

Lucas likely already imagined Leia as wearing the white dress she has in the final film.

As Ralph McQuarrie noted, this dress is in fact deliberately designed in order to resemble the robes of the Virgin Mary. Goddess symbolism permeates Leia's character throughout the various drafts of the film; she is the divinity whose cause the heroes fight for.

When the Starkillers arrive on Aquilae, Kane confesses to his old friend General Skywalker that he is dying and needs someone else to complete his son's Jedi training. This is because he is now almost entirely mechanical, as he dramatically reveals when he swings his left arm down on a table and android parts spill out.

This imagery is very probably borrowed from Star Trek. In the TOS episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Kirk gets into a fight with Dr. Roger Korby, the long-lost and presumed-dead fiancé of Nurse Chapel. Kirk tears the skin off of Korby's left hand, revealing android circuitry beneath. Korby then explains that he preserved his consciousness in an android body when his original body died.

Later in the script, in the scene where Kane Starkiller dies, he opens his chest and reveals a panel of circuitry. Here Kane says of himself that there is "nothing left but my head and right arm." He is literally "more machine than man," just like Luke's father in the finished SW trilogy.

Annikin Starkiller is inducted into the service of the King of Aquilae. This entails him donning "the white uniform of the Aquilaean starforce." However, he still keeps the "Kessilian hair knot" (i.e., the samurai topknot).

Obviously the main protagonist of the film was already conceived by Lucas as wearing white, just like Luke Skywalker as ultimately portrayed on screen.

(This goes back to my point earlier about Leia likely already wearing a white hooded dress.)

Incidentally, in the revised rough draft (though not the initial version) the sky on Aquilae is described as green, a detail deriving from the desert planet of Altair IV seen in Forbidden Planet.

At one point, just before the Imperial invasion begins, Annikin has a sexual dalliance in a closet with a female aide of the King's military staff. This is obviously derived from a scene in Seven Samurai where Katsushiro has sex in a barn with Shino, a peasant girl with whom he has fallen in love, the night before the final battle to save the peasants' village.

Clieg Whitsun arrives on Aquilae with proof that the Empire is planning to invade. General Skywalker dispatches Annikin Starkiller to bring Princess Leia back safely from the Academy where she is attending school. Annikin notices that Leia has a handmaiden, Mina, who has dark hair but otherwise resembles the princess.

As you can probably guess, Mina is passed off as a decoy Princess, when Annikin puts Leia's royal medallion around her neck. This idea, which would recur in a more fleshed-out form in TPM, originates in The Hidden Fortress. In that film Toshiro Mifune's character (General Rokurota Makabe) sacrifices his own sister as a substitute for the outlawed Princess Yuki.

When the Imperials invade, Princess Leia's father, King Kayos, returning from a meeting with his legislature, is killed by a nuclear weapon. The use of atomic bombs, which would disappear from the SW universe after this draft, recalls their presence in Frank Herbert's Dune series.

Meanwhile, General Skywalker assembles the squadrons of Aquilae's starfighters for an attack on the planet-sized Imperial space fortress orbiting overhead.

The starfighters are described as "sleek" two-man starships. I would guess they resemble the silver Naboo spaceships of the prequels, whose aesthetic was borrowed from the 1930s Flash Gordon serials.

In fact, in the first draft of TPM, Lucas described the Naboo fighters as two-man craft, with Anakin and Padme piloting one together in the final battle.

The pilots themselves wear white jumpsuits, keeping with Lucas's use of white clothes for the heroes and black for the villains, like in a Western. On their suits is the symbol of Aquilae, said to be the "distinctive circle-and-cross medallion."

This probably refers to the alchemical symbol for Venus, which represents femininity, fertility, and love (as opposed to war, the domain of Mars--represented by the Imperials). The Venus symbol also bears a strong resemblance to the ancient Egyptian ankh, the symbol of life and rebirth.

During the space battle, two worker robots on the Imperial space station, frightened by the damage occurring, eject in a lifepod to the surface of Aquilae below, where they are picked up by Annikin Starkiller. These are the rough draft's versions of R2-D2 and C-3PO.

Threepio is described as a "chrome android." The chrome color refers to the appearance of the robot Maria in Metropolis, as it looks on black-and-white film. In later drafts Lucas would describe Threepio as "bronze" instead, this time referencing the color the Maria robot was actually painted on the set of Metropolis.

R2-D2, on the other hand is a "short (three feet) claw-armed tri-pod" with a "radar eye."

Now, Ralph McQuarrie basically designed the final film's Artoo from the ground up. McQuarrie's idea was that, since the obvious inspiration for the later Artoo was the diminutive, non-speaking worker robots in Silent Running--which were rectangular, like a Gonk droid--he'd design something cylindrical instead, just to be different.

However, unlike the Silent Running-inspired Artoo of later drafts, the rough draft's Artwo-Detwo speaks perfect English. And Ralph McQuarrie of course hadn't come along yet.

I actually believe the inspiration for the original appearance of Artwo in the rough draft was the Martian tripods (or "fighting machines") from H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds.

Like Artwo, Wells' tripods have three legs, as well as numerous flexible arms with which to grab objects. Their "heads" also usually are depicted with a single giant "eye," actually a lens from which they project a lethal Martian heat ray.

If Lucas indeed scaled down the Martian tripods of Wells' book to create a believable non-anthropomorphic construction robot, it would be of a piece with what he did with C-3PO. After all, the robot in Metropolis was presented as a villain. In both cases, we glimpse a recurring theme of the rough draft: the monsters of older SF are recast by Lucas as heroes.

With the King dead, the nobles of Aquilae decide to capitulate to the Empire. Still defiant, General Skywalker begins making plans for the escape of the royal family from the invading Imperial army.

In order to secure the support of "the chrome companies" for Leia's restoration to the throne of Aquilae, Skywalker is entrusted with capsules containing the DNA and recorded memories of 33 prominent Aquilaean scientists. These samples, suitable for creating clones, will be turned over to the chrome companies as the price of buying an army to restore the planet's freedom.

This plot element virtually disappears after this point in the script, as the eventual destruction of the Imperial army is brought about not by the chrome companies' hired forces, but by an army of Wookees. However, the prominence of cloning and corporate guilds as elements in this early script shows clear echoes of Dune.

The party of fleeing rebels consists of General Skywalker, Annikin Starkiller, Princess Leia, Clieg Whitsun, the droids, and Leia's two younger brothers. Kane Starkiller is not present, as he is already in the spaceport of Gordon, arranging for transport off-planet.

The rebels leave behind the underground command chamber from which Skywalker had run the war, and the complex (in which Leia's mother the Queen has remained) is then blown up by an atomic bomb. This is done deliberately, so as to prevent it falling into Imperial hands.

This is modeled once again on The Hidden Fortress, where, after the party escorting the fleeing princess leaves behind their hidden mountain refuge, the enemy surrounds it. At that point the fortress's remaining defenders set it ablaze and perish rather than fall into unfriendly hands.

The "black knight of the Sith" assigned by the Empire to hunt down the Aquilaean royal family is Prince Valorum, who is "dressed in the fascist black and chrome uniform of the legendary Sith One Hundred."

Valorum's uniform--black against the white walls of Imperial architecture--is once again borrowed from the imagery of THX 1138.

As for what Valorum himself looks like, I suspect Lucas wanted the Jedi and Sith knights to be a racially diverse group. As such, Valorum would quite possibly be cast as an African-American, after the fashion of Mace Windu in the prequels.

Both Valorum and Mace Windu are honorable warriors who are nonetheless strict in temperament, overly bound by reverence for rules. Valorum mends his ways and becomes a hero, but Mace Windu fails to realize his errors, which leads to his death.

This also would lead to a racially diverse group of heroes being presented in the film's celebratory final scene. Along with the various non-human creatures, there would be Annikin and Leia, General Skywalker, and the reformed Prince Valorum--human heroes from three distinct racial backgrounds who have come together in harmony to defeat the Empire.

The idea of portraying Valorum as black would also explain the casting of James Earl Jones as the voice of Valorum's successor character in the finished film of 1977: Darth Vader (who of course was not yet Luke Skywalker's father).

Once the heroes reach the city of Gordon (named for Flash), we get an early version of the cantina scene, in which General Skywalker is bothered while having a drink, and proceeds to cut an alien's arm off. The dialogue in this version is even more nakedly borrowed from Kurosawa's Yojimbo than in the final film.

When we re-encounter Kane Starkiller, he introduces us to his contact with the anti-Imperial underground, Han Solo. Han is "a huge, green skinned monster with no nose and large gills." In other words, he is a swamp creature, modeled on the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Here, too, Lucas has recast an earlier film's monster as one of his heroes.

Han Solo's physiology also recalls the gigantic Green Martians from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series, several of whom the hero John Carter befriends over the course of the books.

As the monstrous sidekick of the human heroes, the rough draft's Han Solo is the forerunner of the final film's Chewbacca. However, unlike Chewbacca, here Han Solo speaks perfect English.

The swamp-creature Han Solo of the rough draft would later provide inspiration for Yoda (who is shrunk down to diminutive size, just as the Ewoks of ROTJ are smaller versions of the SW rough draft's Wookees); as well as Jar Jar Binks, who was originally imagined as green.

The heroes need to transport Leia's two younger brothers in small cryogenic chambers, so they can be moved easily and without fuss. However, there are not enough power units available in the Imperial-controlled city to power both of their cryo-packs.

Kane Starkiller solves this issue by opening a panel in his chest and ripping the power pack out of his mechanical innards. He dies shortly afterward, making the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good.

The image of Kane opening his chest to reveal a panel of circuitry likely has roots in another Star Trek TOS episode, "Mudd's Women," where we see an android who does the same thing.

Prince Valorum lays a trap for the heroes at the spaceport, but they escape and take off in a military spaceship. Valorum's failure recalls the humiliation of his model from The Hidden Fortress, General Hyoe Tadokoro, who fails to capture Princess Yuki and General Makabe.

The spaceport is imagined as an underground facility, and the spaceships are protected by silo covers, like Cold War missiles. The heroes' ship blasts through this outer cover, sustaining light damage in the process.

As the stolen spaceship travels onward, tracked by Imperial fighters, Leia confesses that she loves Annikin. Annikin realizes that he, too, is in love with her.

When Imperial fighters catch up with their spaceship, Annikin and Whitsun (the equivalents of the final film's Luke and Han) put on spacesuits and man the laser turrets to destroy the approaching craft.

The spacesuits prove useful when Annikin's turret is blasted open by laser fire, and he is thrown into space, kept from floating away only by a single thin tether. Artwo-Detwo goes out into space and helps Annikin back into the craft.

This scene is borrowed from a similar one in Destination Moon, a 1950 film about a fictional Moon expedition, where one character is nearly lost during a spacewalk outside the rocketship and another must come to his rescue.

To evade Imperial pursuit, the general turns the starship into an asteroid field. However, the ship is so severely damaged by the asteroids that the heroes are forced to use the lifepods to bail out, heading for the surface of the nearby planet Yavin.

It is at this point that Clieg Whitsun sacrifices his life. When Princess Leia's lifepod fails to eject, Whitsun reconnects the damaged cables that control it, staying behind in the dying spaceship as the others bail out.

The lifepods come down at various points on the surface of the jungle planet Yavin; Annikin and Leia are each separated from the others.

Thrown out of his crashed lifepod, Annikin lies senseless in a tree when a disgusting insect creature begins crawling over him. His eyes open, but he lies still and silent for several long moments, until suddenly he grabs the creature in one swift motion and smashes it dead.

This scene appears to be borrowed from how James Bond deals with a deadly spider in Dr. No. The same scene would also provide the inspiration for the moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy deals calmly with a pack of large spiders.

Having killed the deadly insect creature, Annikin reunites with Artwo-Detwo and begins looking for Princess Leia. Meanwhile, the others revive Leia's two brothers from cryosleep, and begin searching for the rest of their party.

Finding Leia's lifepod empty, Annikin continues on until he finds a group of "scruffy alien trappers" sitting around a stove. The trappers have captured several Wookees, described as "huge grey and furry beasts," who are suspended by their ankles from tree branches.

The imagery of the Wookees--enormous furry ape-like creatures--appears to lean heavily on King Kong. However, the detail of their fur being gray seems to derive from the monstrous giant gray apes that appear as threats in several of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, such as The Servants of Bit-Yakin and The Hour of the Dragon. In either case, the effect is that once again Lucas has turned a villainous monster into a heroic figure.

As Starkiller watches, one of the trappers enters his vehicle, then returns with Princess Leia, held "unconscious and half naked" over his head. Clearly he intends to rape her. Starkiller is so enraged by the sight of the partially nude Leia that he immediately leaps among the trappers and begins cutting them down.

Given that Lucas infamously told Carrie Fisher that "there's no underwear in space," I suspect that having Leia show off her underclothes wasn't what he had in mind here. Instead Lucas probably imagined Leia Aquilae as having had her top ripped off, leaving her bare-breasted like the heroine in a Conan story.

Presumably from this point forward in the film, Leia would be wearing only a tattered white skirt, held up by a belt. Along with her missing top, her braids would likely be undone, and the lower few inches of her skirt would be gone too--as well as her boots, leaving her barefoot.

We can be fairly certain that Lucas intended some sort of clothing damage here, because as with other images from the rough draft, the idea of a heroine in a white outfit suffering a wardrobe malfunction reappears in his later work.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Marion Ravenwood loses her shoes and the lower portion of her white dress when she is trapped in the Well of Souls, and in AOTC, Padme loses the midriff and one arm of her white outfit during the arena sequence. Apparently both of these instances are milder reflections of the original, more extreme clothing damage suffered by the Leia Aquilae of the SW 1974 rough draft.

It's also worth noting in this regard that, unlike Lucas's later, more family-friendly films, THX 1138 featured onscreen nudity.

Starkiller manages to cut down several of the trappers, but one of them escapes in his vehicle with Princess Leia, and Annikin is knocked unconscious. However, in the chaos, several of the Wookees escape, and they take Annikin back to their village.

In the Wookee village, Annikin finds himself thrust into ritual combat with a Wookee warrior, Jommillia. Annikin holds his own in the fight until Auzituck, chief of the Sawa tribe of the Wookees, calls a halt to the affair. A great celebration with bonfires is put on to celebrate Starkiller's bravery, much like that seen in the ending of ROTJ.

Annikin takes his leave of the Wookees, but one of the Wookees whose life he saved--Prince Chewbacca, son of Chief Auzituck--follows him in order to discharge his debt.

Meanwhile, the other heroes have met Owen Lars, a human settler, and his wife Beru. Han Solo and General Skywalker leave Leia's brothers in their care while they search for Annikin.

Annikin, Artwo, and Chewbacca at last meet up with General Skywalker and Han Solo. Realizing that Leia has been taken to a nearby Imperial outpost, they make a plan to use the Wookees--who hate the Empire and its trappers--to lead an assault on the base.

As an Imperial "air tank" makes a patrol through the jungle, it is ambushed by a squadron of Wookees, holding reflective metal shields that jam its radar. Starkiller and Skywalker overpower the occupants of the hover-tank and get in. Leading a column of Wookee soldiers, they use the captured tank to attack the feeble defenses of the Imperial base.

This scene would provide the inspiration for both the forest battle with AT-ST walkers seen in ROTJ, and the floating Trade Federation tanks seen in TPM.

The attack is successful, leaving the rebels and Wookees in command of the outpost. However, they discover that Leia has been taken by ship back to Aquilae.

Meanwhile, a squadron of stormtroopers has raided Owen Lars' house, capturing Leia's brothers. Fortunately, the stormtroopers are intercepted by a patrol of Wookees. The boys and the Lars family are safely rescued.

While Han Solo arranges for an uprising on Aquilae via the rebel underground, General Skywalker begins to train the Wookees in spaceflight, using the captured Imperial starfighters of the outpost. The fighters themselves are four-man craft, described thus: "Bizarre and colorful Wookee designs have been painted across the large deflector fins of the spacecraft. Some designs transform the ships into huge and grotesque animals, while others create unique mosaic patterns."

The description of the patterns painted on the fighters by the Wookees is highly reminiscent of the dazzle-camouflage color schemes used on spaceships in the SF paintings of Chris Foss.

Meanwhile, Annikin Starkiller disguises himself as an Imperial pilot and sets out, accompanied only by Artwo, to infiltrate the space fortress over Aquilae and rescue Princess Leia.

Aboard the space station, Darth Vader interrogates Leia, using electric shocks in an attempt to break her will. Ultimately, however, Vader places his hopes in "doctors from Alderaan" who will operate on Leia to destroy her mind and render her pliant.

Starkiller arrives aboard the space station and steals a stormtrooper's uniform. However, he is detected and captured. Prince Valorum, now reduced to the rank of a stormtrooper after his earlier failure to capture the heroes, laments to Starkiller that he has come to a place where a warrior's honor is meaningless.

The ship bearing the doctors from Alderaan finally arrives, and Annikin is escorted to the airlock to meet it. Suddenly, however, Valorum cuts down his guards and frees Annikin. Valorum has realized the error of his ways; the Empire has no honor, and he must help the Jedi instead.

Valorum and Annikin free Leia as she is being led to the ship. The trio begin battling their way out of the Imperial space fortress.

Since Leia is apparently barefoot, bare-breasted, and carrying a gun in this scene, her costume here invokes more goddess symbolism: that of Liberty in Eugene Delacroix's famous French revolutionary painting Liberty Leading the People. Leia as the goddess Liberty suggests the necessity of revolution against the evil Empire; her companions, Valorum and Starkiller, represent those who fight for Liberty's cause.

As a bare-breasted woman in the middle of a labyrinth of white Imperial corridors, Leia also represents everything life-affirming that is lacking in the sterility of the Imperial ideology.

Outside the space fortress, the Wookees in their fighter squadrons arrive and begin their attack.

Needing an escape route from the fortress, the trio of heroes plunge down a garbage chute into a trash compactor. General Vader, seeing them on the security monitors, activates the garbage compactor. However, the Wookee fighters knock out the power to the compactor, and the heroes are saved.

As the space station reels under the Wookee assault, the trio run for the lifepods. At one point they have to hold on for their lives when a hole is blasted in the corridor, leading into open space. Finally they reach the lifepods. Valorum and Artwo take one pod, Starkiller and the princess the other.

The pods eject. The Wookees' assault on the space station's power conduits has begun a chain reaction. General Vader advises Governor Hoedaack to evacuate, but Hoedaack refuses to do so. The space station explodes. In their lifepod, Annikin and Leia kiss passionately.

In the film's final scene, we see all the heroes gathered in Leia's throne room on Aquilae: Annikin Starkiller, General Skywalker, Prince Valorum, the green-skinned Han Solo, and the Wookees. Leia is in the center of it all, seated on a throne, resplendent as Queen of Aquilae.

The equivalent scene in The Hidden Fortress has Princess Yuki wearing white geisha makeup, symbolically representing her as a goddess figure. Quite possibly the idea to do the same with Leia was already present in Lucas's mind. That impulse would finally be realized on screen with Queen Amidala in TPM.

Leia rewards the two droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO, announcing that they will serve Annikin Starkiller, the new "Lord Protector of Aquilae" (i.e., Leia's consort on the throne).

With that scene, the rough draft ends.

---

As we can see, a LOT of the images from this rough draft would recur elsewhere in Lucas' later work. It's actually quite surprising how visually fleshed-out this draft was in Lucas's head.

Thoughts?

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

Well, now I know where a whole bunch of King's Quest V came from.

The roc and the dragon were clearly both inspirations for the two-headed dragon of Willow. Harryhausen creatures are so great.

4 out of 4 cyclops eyes.

Speaking of sex that was deleted from the comic adaptation...

Re-reading the rough-draft script, I noticed that Leia is described as being "half-naked" when she's abducted on Yavin. The sight of her partly undressed so enrages Annikin Starkiller that he immediately attacks the trappers who have kidnapped her, but he fails to prevent her being turned over to the Empire.

All the way through the various SW 1977 scripts, there's some serious goddess symbolism going on with Leia's character; she's the embodiment of the freedom our heroes are fighting for. Ralph McQuarrie noted that Leia's white robe in the final film was meant by Lucas to evoke the Virgin Mary.

With that in mind (and given that Lucas clearly had political ideas on the brain when he wrote the early script), I wonder if Lucas wasn't  trying to invoke some revolutionary symbolism in the rough draft. Namely, Delacroix's famous painting Liberty Leading the People, which presents Liberty as a barefoot, bare-breasted goddess storming the barricades of tyranny.

All that is to say, for most of the rough draft Leia would likely have worn the white dress that Carrie Fisher has in the final movie. But in the third act, when Annikin and Valorum are breaking her out of the Death Star, Leia might well have been reduced to wearing a ragged skirt and nothing else.

(Shades of pulp SF here--including such stories as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books, and Leigh Brackett's Lorelei of the Red Mist.)

But in the Dark Horse comic adaptation, Leia is wearing the outfit that Ralph McQuarrie designed for female Luke; she loses an arm and a leg of its fabric, but nothing else.

Likewise, although the arena scene in AOTC is clearly an updated variation of the Death Star escape from the SW rough draft, as both scenes feature a girl and two Jedi, Padme's white outfit there only loses one arm and its midriff. All of which suggests that SW is certainly a lot more family-friendly now than it started out being.

FWIW, the idea of the heroine in a white dress that gets torn up also reoccurs in Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Marion in the Well of Souls.

I think the most interesting part of this comic is that the writer thought Leia should end up with Luke instead of Han.

The Hopi women's hairstyle thing seems to be an afterthought on Lucas's part; he never mentions it in interviews from the time of the original 1977 SW.

Hopi hairstyles were definitely considered for Padme in TPM, and the idea that Lucas "always wanted them" (where have I heard that before?) probably comes from that point in time. But as far as Leia goes, it was pretty clearly Flash Gordon all the way as the principal (if perhaps not only) influence.

I'm pretty sure Carrie Fisher actually wore hair extensions for her look in ANH. At least that's what I recall reading in the Making Of.

The style was actually meant to mimic the hairstyle of a character in the old Flash Gordon Sunday comics (check out my avatar).

When Jedi Knight first came out, I didn't like that Kyle ended up (in the Light Side ending) with a yellow lightsaber instead of something more conventional like a blue blade.

Now I love it and wish they'd kept that in Jedi Outcast, instead of giving Kyle a brand-new blue saber from out of nowhere.

SilverWook said:

CatBus said:

Wasn't there a thread about Vader's floating glass of water in the original drafts for Star Wars, which made it into a comic adaptation?  Basically the guy can't even be bothered to hold his own cup--it's the very definition of frivolous use of the Force.

We'll never know exactly why that wasn't filmed, but I like to think part of it was that in the early days, Lucas accepted criticism and when people told him something was idiotic and unnecessary, he didn't do it.  Now we have three complete idiotic and unnecessary films, so yeah, frivolous use of the Force comes right along with that.

 IIRC, it's in the novel, and merely illustrates his mastery of The Force, before choking Admiral Motti of course. He summons the cup into his hand. I never thought it frivolous.

I think when it came time to shoot, they probably decided there was just was no way to make a guy in a scary mask drink from a cup, and not look silly...

In the third-draft script, Vader floats the cup over to him when he's interrogating Princess Leia aboard the Tantive IV. And yes, we're told that "He casually drinks from the flask."

But it's worth keeping in mind that as recently as the previous draft, Vader's helmet had been intended largely as a spacesuit, used when the stormtroopers breached the hull of Leia's ship. It was a one-scene wonder that would be discarded during the rest of the film.

Except, of course, that Ralph McQuarrie made it look so goddamned awesome that Lucas decided Vader should have his spacesuit on all the time.

(Elsewhere in the third draft, the idea of a cyborg character is actually grafted onto Ben Kenobi--who has a cybernetic left arm.)

By the fourth draft, Vader's cup-floating trick is moved to the familiar scene with Admiral Motti. But in that version Vader crushes the cup with his mind, rather than drinking from it.

Presumably by that point the "all-spacesuit-all-the-time" idea for Vader's costume had occurred to Lucas, with the result that Vader could no longer be seen drinking, so he had to do something else with the cup.

Actually, the bits of dialogue with Saavik's Romulan heritage aren't actually put back into the longer TV version of Wrath of Khan. They did appear in some extremely low-quality footage shown at various Star Trek conventions over the years, though.

For my money, by far the most intriguing deleted subplot in that movie involves the lost scenes where it's revealed that Khan has an infant son of his own, whom he quite willingly blows up along with the Genesis Device in his last attempt at revenge on Kirk.

Didn't Ben Burtt et al. move to a different sound-mixing suite during post-production on ROTJ? I seem to recall reading in the Making Of book that this move was actually accelerated due to a massive flood in the old building. So that might have something to do with it.

I will say that if we do see flashbacks in the new film, it would likely be dragging the franchise into a more modern style of filmmaking.

Remember the LOTR trilogy? That had quite a few flashbacks. For instance, when Elrond says that he watched in horror, three thousand years ago, as Isildur took the One Ring for his own, we don't just hear him tell it, we see it happen before our eyes even as he's speaking. We leap backward three thousand years and forward again, seamlessly, all in the matter of a few seconds.

The emphasis in modern blockbuster films is on showing the audience what happened in the past or "off-screen," as opposed to just telling them. The problem with this is that it's a very arty technique. As such, it conflicts with the previous SW "house style" of fly-on-the-wall documentary-style filmmaking, whose whole goal is to make you forget there's a director behind the camera.

Ordinarily I'd discount the flashback idea as a rumor, but wasn't there a set photo showing that Abrams and company have actually recreated the burning Lars homestead from ANH?

We might actually be in for multiple flashbacks here. Which is kind of weird, because it's so unlike Lucas's signature cinema verité style. It puts me more in mind of the Leigh Brackett draft of ESB, which uses stuff like text captions introducing new planets, and trippy Force-visions when Luke and Vader duel.

Theoden is definitely Old English for "king," but it's also very similar-sounding to the name of the hero in a novel that Tolkien fell in love with as a boy. Not everything has to be based on one source of inspiration and one source only.

But clearly you are unwilling to listen to me or anything I say, so I don't know why I bothered posting this. In fact, I'm thoroughly sick of this entire thread now. Congratulations.

TheBoost said:

None of these are "clear examples." The logic seems downright tortured.

Picts were a real people. Lucas used Picts. Therefore he took a pre-existing literary name, which as you say is NOT literary, from Howard?

willow Ufgood and Frodo Baggins are both names made of two troches, and that's a "reworking?" So is my name, Morgan Sowell. Were my parents inspired by Frodo, or Bilbo, or Lotho? Or by Millard Fillmorr, who also has the same meter?

 

 

My point was that Lucas apparently felt he could not use the name Picts--it was too close to something pre-existing. And given the similarity of "King Kael" to "King Kull," another Howard connection seems quite logical.

If you still don't believe that Lucas frequently took pre-existing names and lightly altered or combined them, all I can do is point you to the word "Jedi" itself.

The Jedi were originally called "Jedi Bendu" in the early scripts of SW 1977. But in fact, this name is really a combination of the first part of jidai-geki, the Japanese name for period-piece samurai films, and the second half of "prana-bindu," a set of meditative exercises mentioned in Frank Herbert's Dune.

And if that doesn't convince you, then it's obviously fruitless for me to spend any more time arguing with you.

And as far as that last point goes: even Tolkien wasn't above renaming somebody else's character and reusing him. For instance, he got the name "Grima Wormtongue" from the hero of an Icelandic saga who was named "Gunnlaug Worm-tongue" (for his skill at poetry, not his evil cunning).

Éomer was the name of a guy mentioned in Beowulf whose name isn't actually in the surviving manuscript, but was re-inserted through correction of scribal errors.

And King Théoden himself was named after the protagonist of a late 19th century William Morris novel: a Germanic chieftain named Thiodolf, who dies valiantly repelling an assault by a Roman legion.

Of course a design feature can be based on multiple sources of inspiration at once. Virtually all of Star Wars is a mish-mash of various pre-existing stories. But that film appeals to us because the old stories are combined in a way that makes them fresh and interesting.

Lucas may indeed have been drawing on Celtic legend; in fact, I'm sure he was. But he definitely drew directly on Tolkien as well. I mean, come on, he plagiarized the opening of The Hobbit verbatim in his third draft script for SW 1977.

Most of the names in Willow, not just Madmartigan's, are actually reworkings of other character names from pre-existing sources. Sorsha is named for Shasta from CS Lewis's The Horse and His Boy, "Willow Ufgood" has the same meter as "Frodo Baggins," and the last name of Airk Thaughbaer is a garbling of "Théoden."

In fact, in the third-revision script of the film, some wild tribesmen show up who are called Picts. In the novelization and comic adaptation they also appear, but are renamed Pohas. This is an extremely clear example of Lucas taking a pre-existing literary name--the Celtic tribe was famously fictionalized by Robert E. Howard--and slightly altering it to obscure its origins in another work.

Here is a rather long summary of how I believe the plot of Willow stood at the point when Moebius did his concept art:

Willow Ufgood, a diminutive Nelwyn, finds a human baby, Elora Danan, who is being pursued by the armies of the sorceress Bavmorda. To keep his village safe, Willow knows he must return the baby to the world of the humans. He sets out accompanied by his best friend Meegosh. The duo do not get far before they meet Mad Martigan (then so spelled), a great human swordsman who is currently in a position of dishonor. The idea of having Madmartigan imprisoned in a cage at a crossroads may already have existed.

At this point we are also introduced to Airk Thaughbaer, Mad Martigan’s old comrade-in-arms. Airk is riding with an army to confront the sorceress Bavmorda, who has just destroyed the great castle of Galladoorn, which belonged to Airk’s king.

After much debate, Willow and Meegosh free Mad Martigan, entrusting him with the baby, and begin to return home. However, they are kidnapped by trolls and imprisoned in their underground lair. The Nelwyns also see that the trolls have kidnapped Elora Danan.

Fortunately, the Nelwyns and Elora are rescued by two brownies, small water sprites who lead them to a waiting boat. The trolls pursue them in their own boats, and a dramatic river chase ensues.

At last the trolls lose the chase—possibly by being killed by sunlight when dawn breaks, or maybe via a flood of water summoned by the Brownie Elder, like that called up by Elrond to defeat the Black Riders in The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Nelwyns travel on to Brownie Island, where they are reunited with Mad Martigan. Here the Brownie Elder tells them that they must take Elora Danan to the benevolent sorceress Fin Raziel, who lives in a wasteland. She can lead them to the hidden Elf city of Tir Asleen, where Elora Danan will be safe.

The Brownie Elder gives three magic acorns to Willow, which will turn to stone whatever they are thrown at. In the third-revision script the fairy queen Cherlindrea, who replaced the Brownie Elder, gives them to Willow, but in the final film they are given to him by the Nelwyn village’s elder, the High Aldwin.

Mad Martigan and the Nelwyns set out on their journey with the child. Because the Brownies are water sprites, and they will be traveling overland, presumably they leave the Brownies behind. In the final film Meegosh would depart at this point, being replaced by two Brownies (who are no longer associated with water).

They stop briefly at an inn, where they are discovered by Bavmorda’s troops, led by Sorsha. Mad Martigan is struck by Sorsha’s beauty, but she demands he hand over the child. As in the finished film, a chase through the woods on horse-drawn carts and chariots ensues.

The heroes elude their pursuers, and finally reach the wasteland of Fin Raziel. Here there is nothing but barren sand and rock, except for one lone tree in the middle.

Mad Martigan recounts the legend that the tree in Fin Raziel’s dwelling place is made of solid gold. When they approach, Meegosh starts breaking off the branches of the tree, and discovers that while the exterior is covered in bark, the inner core is indeed golden. (I suspect that in this early version of the film, Meegosh was principally a comic-relief character. In the third-revision script, where the tree is still present but Meegosh is gone, Madmartigan takes over the role of the greedy branch-picker.)

Meanwhile, Willow notices a tree-dwelling creature nestled among the branches. It’s Fin Raziel! She explains that she was cursed by Bavmorda, and that they themselves are in dire danger. Meegosh continues to pile up branches… but then a monstrous two-headed dragon emerges from a cave beneath the roots of the tree!

The dragon incinerates the golden branches with its flaming breath. A battle ensues, and Mad Martigan kills it. Relieved, the heroes turn around… and find Sorsha and King Kael, Bavmorda’s lieutenant, at the head of an army there. Sorsha captures them and takes them with her.

If you’ve seen the final film, you may have noticed that I made no mention of Willow’s magic wand. That’s because early on there wasn’t one. In the early version, Fin Raziel told Willow that he needed to create a philosopher’s stone before he could do magic. This took the place of the magic wand; in fact, it actually survived as long as the third-revision script.

While Sorsha’s army is encamped, Willow manages to gather the ingredients and create the philosopher’s stone, which he uses to set himself and Mad Martigan free. He also transforms Fin Raziel into a bird, like in the final movie. Also as in the final film, Mad Martigan goes into Sorsha’s tent to rescue Elora Danan, but finds himself sidetracked by the sleeping Sorsha.

Apparently the concept artists—and not just Moebius, judging by other art on the film’s Blu-ray—imagined Sorsha as sleeping naked beneath fur sheets. She was given a nightgown in the final film, though.

Willow, Mad Martigan, and Meegosh manage to escape with the baby. I believe that at this early stage, their escape was on horseback, as opposed to the impromptu sled scene of the final film.

The heroes take refuge in an ominous-looking ruined castle—it’s Galladoorn! Bavmorda’s troops ride behind them in pursuit. However, our protagonists are sheltered by the remnants of Airk’s army, who are hiding in the ruins. King Kael’s army does a cursory search, but fails to find them.

Mad Martigan asks Airk and his soldiers to accompany them on the way to Tir Asleen. Airk refuses, believing that the Elven kingdom is a myth. Meanwhile, Willow has used his magic to restore twelve of the kingdom’s greatest knights, who were petrified by Bavmorda when the castle fell.

The knights, hearing Mad Martigan’s plea, agree to make the perilous journey with him. Not only that: they are so impressed by his courage that they decide to make him the new King. Wearing a shining suit of royal armor, Mad Martigan leads the party to the seashore, where they take ship in hopes of finding Tir Asleen. Meegosh, however, fearing for his life, would likely stay behind with Airk.

Fin Raziel flies overhead as a bird, guiding them on the right path. The way to Tir Asleen is guarded, however. A huge sea monster attacks the boat! Five of the knights are killed, but Willow turns the monster to stone with a magic acorn.

The boat arrives at Tir Asleen, and the heroes are taken to meet with the Elf King, Sorsha’s father. Mad Martigan pleads with him to send his army into the mortal realm and defeat Bavmorda, but the King refuses to get involved in human affairs.

Suddenly there is a commotion at the castle walls: Bavmorda’s army has followed the heroes to Tir Asleen, and is besieging the city!

During the chaos of the fight, Sorsha sees her father for the first time, and realizes the depth of Bavmorda’s evil. She switches sides, saving Mad Martigan’s life.

Willow uses his second magic acorn during the battle, but fails to affect the outcome. All seems lost—until Airk shows up with the remainder of his army—and Meegosh! Airk was shamed by Mad Martigan’s example, and followed Bavmorda’s soldiers to Tir Asleen.

Unfortunately, King Kael has managed to steal Elora Danan during the fighting. He rides back to Bavmorda’s fortress of Nockmaar with it. Willow and Meegosh, Mad Martigan and his men, Sorsha, Airk and his army, and the king of Tir Asleen with his knights, all follow.

As in the final film, Bavmorda turns the entire army (save Willow, who has protected himself using the magic of the philosopher’s stone) into pigs. At this point Willow performs his greatest act of sorcery yet, restoring Fin Raziel’s human shape so that she can undo Bavmorda’s curse.

I suspect that, with the character of Cherlindrea not existing yet, Fin Raziel would have been restored to the form of a young, beautiful woman, as she only supposes she is meant to be in the final film. When Cherlindrea was added, Fin Raziel may have been rewritten as more of a female-Gandalf character.

As in the final movie, Willow hatches a plan to deceive Bavmorda into opening the gates for the heroes’ army. They all charge in. King Kael attacks and kills Airk, but his death is avenged by Mad Martigan, who kills Kael immediately afterward. (Airk is an obvious stand-in for Tolkien's Theoden, who leads an army to relieve the siege of Gondor, but dies when the Witch-King attacks.)

Fin Raziel and Bavmorda have a magical battle, but it is Willow who defeats her using his sleight of hand. Elora Danan is saved and goodness restored.

In the ending scene we see Mad Martigan as the king of a beautifully restored Galladoorn, with Sorsha as his queen, and Fin Raziel and the Elf King at their sides. Willow is presented with a Book of Magic, and he and Meegosh return home to their village as heroes. The ending here would likely have referenced the rough draft of SW 1977, which in turn referenced that of The Hidden Fortress.

I don't know if Lucas ever formally tried to get the rights. He was probably canny enough not to even attempt it by that point. Besides, Saul Zaentz had already picked up the rights to LOTR; while the Silmarillion rights have never been sold, and likely won't be until after Christopher Tolkien is dead.

Having said that, there are a LOT of things even in the earliest versions of Willow that were directly inspired by Tolkien's work. In fact, some scenes were originally more similar to prototypes in The Silmarillion than they ultimately turned out to be.

For instance, the journey to the Elven Otherworld of Tir Asleen (as it originally was) was done via water, like the journey to Valinor. And as with Valinor, it is normally impossible for mortals to reach Tir Asleen--in this case because a fearsome sea monster guards the way.

There was also a scene immediately before that, where Willow and Madmartigan find a ruined human castle. Willow uses magic to resurrect twelve knights inside who have been petrified by Bavmorda, and Madmartigan asks them to set out with him on the impossible journey to Tir Asleen.

Impressed by his courage, the knights decide to make him their new King, and join his quest. However, other humans hiding out in the castle from Bavmorda's troops decline to go, only to show up and save the day heroically, Han Solo-style, later in the film.

This scene has obvious parallels in the stories of the mortal heroes Tuor and Beren in The Silmarillion. Tuor finds a suit of armor in the abandoned Elven castle of Nevrast, which ends up leading him on a quest to find the hidden Elf city of Gondolin. And Beren pleads with the King of Nargothrond, Finrod Felagund, for help in stealing a priceless Silmaril from Morgoth's crown. Finrod and ten Elf warriors join Beren (for a total of twelve), but the other Elves refuse to go out of fear.

Plus Sorsha originally being a half-Elf is a clear reference to Arwen.

On the other hand, there are also some clear Narnia references. Sorsha is pretty clearly a female version of Shasta, the hero of The Horse and His Boy, who was kidnapped at birth and raised as a poor peasant in a foreign country. The plot of the novel concerns Shasta's journey home and his discovery that he is really a prince.

Bavmorda's petrification of the twelve knights also has echoes of the White Witch Jadis in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

There's even a bit of Robert E. Howard thrown in. A couple of ferocious blue-painted warriors, originally known as Picts and later renamed Pohas in typical Lucas fashion, make a cameo appearance in early scripts. And General (originally King) Kael was obviously named after Howard's King Kull, literary precursor to Conan.

So I'm working on putting together an essay that captures my thoughts on Willow and its relationship to SW, as well as Lucas's various influences while writing it. By no means all of it is relevant to a SW forum, but I'll excerpt some interesting bits.

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Willow's species, the Nelwyns, were obviously modeled on the Hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. It appears that, early on in the writing of the film, Willow's best friend Meegosh was going to be a more important character. His role was probably reduced because he proved to be too obviously similar to Tolkien’s Sam Gamgee.

At one point during the writing of the original 1977 SW, Lucas considered having all the natives of Tatooine—including Luke Skywalker, Owen and Beru, and Ben Kenobi—be played by little people, with everyone else cast as an average-size human. The idea was to make Tatooine into a space-fantasy equivalent of the Shire in LOTR, but it never got very far.

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As well, I mentioned in another thread that the idea of a "magic tree" guarding the entrance to the Force cave on Dagobah in ESB was almost reused in Willow.

Apparently in early outlines for Willow, there was a scene with a tree growing above the mouth of a cave where a fierce dragon lived. The tree itself would have been ordinary-looking on the outside, but with an inner core of solid gold (a reference to Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, where Princess Yuki's golden treasure is hidden inside sticks of firewood).

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Also, as far as the prequels go, you can see a LOT of influence on their art direction stemming from the French artist Moebius's concept art for Willow. Those designs, in turn, were influenced by Lucas wanting to reuse ideas from the early drafts of the OT that never made it to the screen.

Observe:

This is Moebius's concept drawing of Madmartigan. Although he clearly resembles Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian, the hairstyle incorporates Lucas’s love of Asian costume. It’s long in the back, but with a shaved portion just above the forehead. This style blends the shaved pate of a Japanese samurai chonmage with the shaved fore-crown of Manchu-era Chinese men’s hairstyles.

The dark hair also boosts Madmartigan's resemblance to Toshiro Mifune, who was one of the two major influences (the other being Flash Gordon) on the appearance of protagonist Annikin Starkiller in the very first rough draft of The Star Wars.

Except for the shaved forehead, this hairstyle survived intact for the final film’s Madmartigan…

…and was actually recycled in early TPM concept art of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Madmartigan's name is a combination of Tolkien's "Aragorn" and "Mad Max" from the eponymous film.

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Here's Moebius's take on Sorsha.

Note her blonde hair. At this early point in production, Sorsha was envisioned not as a human like in the final film, but rather as a half-Elf. The final film's fully human Sorsha has red hair, much like Princess Leia Aquilae in the rough draft of SW 1977.

The white mask Moebius gives Sorsha here, which combines geisha makeup with the horns of an oni, invites comparisons with another character from the rough draft of The Star Wars: Prince Valorum, a Sith knight who switches sides near the end of the script and joins the good guys. At the end of the story Valorum is one of the heroes seen sitting in honor by Queen Leia’s throne.

The character arc of Prince Valorum would later evolve into the redemption of Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader’s helmet, in turn, would find a descendant in Sorsha’s oni mask. However, like Valorum, Sorsha survives the film.

Even as late as the “third revision” script, Sorsha is described as having a face-concealing helmet. This idea would later be transferred to General Kael, a villain who is not redeemed.

I also suspect, given the origin of Madmartigan's name, that the white mask in this portrayal of Sorsha is inspired by the villain of Mad Max 2...

...who is known as "The Humongous." The half-Elf version of Sorsha would indeed be "humongous" standing next to her full-Elf kindred.

But that’s not all. The end of the rough draft of The Star Wars was clearly inspired by the ending of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, where Princess Yuki is revealed as the beautiful ruler of the Akizuki clan in exile. In this scene Yuki is shown wearing white geisha makeup, clearly visible despite the black-and-white cinematography.

So that idea passed down to Sorsha’s hybrid geisha/oni mask, and then finally…

…to Queen Amidala in The Phantom Menace.

As well, Sorsha’s shaved-head-with-topknot hairstyle in the above concept drawing was reused in TPM…

…for the briefly seen Aurra Sing, an extra in the Podrace scene.

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King (later General) Kael, the monstrous second-in-command of Bavmorda’s army. In Moebius’s drawings Kael is an inhuman creature, and he is still described as such in the third-revision script. However, in the final film he is merely human, though he wears a face-concealing helmet like that originally planned for Sorsha.

Note the forehead tattoo and horns that Moebius has given Kael here. These motifs would later recur...

…in the character of Darth Maul, who like Kael is merely the henchman of a greater villain.

Don't be silly. Sebastian Shaw wasn't ginger. ;)

Actually it might have been cool in the prequels if they'd gone for a Shaw-style dark-haired Anakin and a blonde Padme. But no, I guess Lucas just had to make them identical forebears of Luke and Leia.

I could probably write one myself if you really wanted. ;)

But seriously, I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept art Moebius did for Willow, which really shows a significantly different film than the one we ended up getting. In any case the film would still have owed a lot to Tolkien and CS Lewis, but we might have had something much more visually interesting.

Heck, I could start a whole thread about Willow and SW and how they interrelate, if anyone's interested. It would probably need to be rather image-heavy to illustrate the early Moebius ideas, though.