Originally posted by: Yoda Is Your Father
OK, I’m gonna try and talk real slow so maybe you finally understand. Stop me if I’m going too fast. Ok, here we go – The original idea for Star Wars was to make a space opera similar to the ones Lucas grew up with and loved as a kid. In order to give the viewer the feeling that they were watching a space opera and had been thrown right into the middle of a story of galcatic war, George decided it would be cool to call the film episode 4, of an imaginery serial. When George was a kid he would go to the cinema on a Saturday morning and watch whatever happened to be showing, and he wanted the viewer to feel like that when watching Star Wars. That is the one and only original reason for the ‘Episode 4’ subtitle. The problem is, when George told the studio he wanted to call it episode 4, they were like ‘episode 4? But this is the first movie!!’ They just didn’t get it, and they feared the viewer wouldn’t get it either, so they prevented him from doing it. A few years later George is rich and powerful, and still thinks it will be cool to add the episode 4 subtitle, so he does it. People then start asking questions about episodes 1-3, and George thinks it might be neat if one day he actually made these missing episodes. So basically, the episode 4 thing was just a novelty, a throwback to the old serials, but the idea gradually developed into the 6 part saga we have today. That IS how it happened, whatever bullshit we are getting fed these days about a grand vision. Adam, I would have thought that you of all people wpuld have come across this explanation at some point. You seem to love searching out facts and watching documentaries and makings of and stuff, and this explanation appears in so many places. In one documentary they even show a title crawl from an old black and white sci-fi serial that is pretty much exactly the same as the star wars crawl, complete with episode number, and shows what George was shooting for.
YIYF, that's my point. He wanted to make a story in the middle of a war. YET, in order to do this, he needed (as all good storytellers do) to write a backstory in order to know where exactly everyone came from, what the origins of the war were, etc. That's where the PT comes in. Now, I know very well that it wasn't completely planned out and that it was merely about seven written pages. As we all know, he wrote the main story as Eps 4-6, as that was the one he was primarily interested in telling. HOWEVER, later on he decided that he wanted to tell the backstory in the form of Eps 1-3 so that Vader's story would reasonate better. He explains in "The Chosen One" documentary on the Ep 3 DVD that originally he wanted to do one movie, Ep4, which would include the stories of what we now know as Eps 4-6. But he couldn't, as it would have been too large for one movie. So, he instead cut it into three parts, so he could tell the entire story. BUT, as a result, people didn't get to see the entire "movie" (Eps 4-6 as one), SO they saw Vader as pure evil until Ep 6, where they reallized he was once Anakin Skywalker, a good person who fell from greatness. But he explains that people still saw Vader as pure evil, despite ROPTJ. That's why he made the PT, he explains. He says he made it to HELP the story of Eps 4-6. Now, whether or not it actually helped is based solely on opinion. But that was his goal. And, of course, he had to stretch out his backstory into three Eps for the PT because, as he said at Celebration III "I could have made TPM and AOTC as Episode I and ROTS as Ep 2, but then I wouldn't have material for an Episode III, would I?" 
