yotsuya said:
Anchorhead said:
yotsuya said:
When you investigate where the name came from, it is almost impossible to ignore Dark Father and the implication that he was someone’s father from the very beginning.
No.
If you want to go from the very beginning, in the original outline Vader isn’t even part of the story. In the next writing (first script), he’s just a military officer.
- “He slaps DARTH VADER, a tall, grim-looking general, on the back…”
He’s not the Central tragic figure, Chosen One, destroyer of worlds Lucas morphed him into decades later. He isn’t related to any of the characters. He isn’t Annikin. In fact, the separate character of Annikin is considerably younger than Luke.
- “ANNIKIN STARKILLER, a tall, heavy-set boy of eighteen.”
Vader wasn’t Luke’s father in Brackett’s script for The Empire Strikes Back either. That change came along later when Lucas rewrote her work.
Leia being Luke’s sister would be another such item that Lucas would not tell anyone the real story until it was time.
No.
- “LUKE SKYWALKER, Commander of the Aquilaean Starforce. He is a large man, apparently in his early sixties…”
PRINCESS LEIA, about fourteen years old…"
Their being related was a late change while writing Return Of The Jedi as a way to tie up the “There is another” line from The Empire Strikes Back. When Lucas decided to scrap films 7, 8, 9 (or was that 10, 11, 12?), he had to scramble to come up with “another”.
Also, the saber duel on the lava planet was planned from the beginning. I knew about it very early on.
No.
For the film Star Wars, the original outline and the first four scripts have no mention what so ever of a lava duel. That wouldn’t come along until an early draft of Return Of The Jedi and even then it was Luke fighting Vader. The lava had nothing to do with Vader needing a suit.
I occasionally peruse a Saga forum to get a feel for the climate when a new trailer or bit of news is released. I understand there are lots of fans who want the saga to be a clean, contained, planned-from-day-one story. I understand they are under the impression that Lucas * genuflect * was some sort of profound creator of their world.
Unfortunately (for them) there are decades of evidence proving that just isn’t the case.
If you dig The Tragedy Of Darth Vader saga, cool, but don’t kid yourself that it was all planned from the very beginning as some sort of Original Vision ™. It wasn’t.
The problem with evidence is that it is only as good as the truth at the time. Lucas wanted the identity of Luke’s real father kept a secret. I am not surprised Leigh Brackett didn’t include it becuase it was probably something Lucas intended to drop in a later draft (which is what happened) and no draft of the script had the right lines until the script was published. That line was omitted from all circulated scripts during the entirety of production. I think only Lucas, Kasdan, Hammil, James Earl Jones and Ben Burt knew what the line was before the movie premiered so I don’t think that not seeing the line in early drafts of the script is any indication of when that particular piece of the story was added to what Lucas intended.
And since he played it so close to his chest during Empire’s production, there is nothing to say that Luke and Leia being siblings was not similarly hidden and she was the other all along. His comments since indicate that he was planning the family drama from the beginning and the earliest drafts of the script bear this out. He had fathers, sons, twins, from the beginning, but they vanish once he started seriously developing the installment we know as just Star Wars. Luke just has a dead father and an aunt and uncle. Lucas has repeatedly said what his intentions were and I think his secrecy (of which there is plenty of evidence) kept it out of the drafts of the script and kept there from being any evidence of his intentions. Such secrets were very closely guarded during production and were deliberately left out of the scripts.
And not everything is clean. Yoda originally didn’t exist. Leia’s memories and the story of her birth don’t really mesh up (unless she was really strong with the force at birth - possible but…). So there is plenty that is not clean, but I think Lucas has been very clear since Jedi came out that the story we got (at least as far as the Skywalker family goes) is the story he intended. I just pulled out the novel of A New Hope and just the opening section and the section in Ben’s hut - much about the Repubic, the Jedi, Palpatine (the public face, not the Sith Lord), and Ben’s untruth to Luke (Ben tells Luke a comfortable lie) are right there on the page. The volcano duel came from Lucas himself in multiple interviews back to late summer 1977. He even once hinted that one version of the story might have Vader be Luke’s father. A rare slip for him, but a nice tidbit the indicates that was his thinking all along.
