Most of the “ROTJ was a disappointment” dissertations I’ve read leave me wondering why some thought it would have been a good idea for the third Star Wars film to have basically been “TESB Redux”
Thank you. You probably right, either way.
No prob! It looks like we were both kinda right. Lucas did indeed “split the story” and “stole the ending from the second half” …but he did both of these in the space of a single draft (the second full draft), so all the full drafts indeed end with a battle with the empire’s new battle station!
Honestly just leaving it to “Lucas made Vader Luke’s father because he wanted to go back and depict the cyborg father’s heroic sacrifice and the black knight’s turn to goodness from the original scripts” is actually a lot simpler to digest than having to explain the whole “expanded-then-recondensed-story” rigamarole, but that’s the process that got me to figure it out myself.
From “THE DEVELOPMENT OF STAR WARS AS SEEN THROUGH THE SCRIPTS BY GEORGE LUCAS” as archived at https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/the-development-of-star-wars-as-seen-through-the-scripts-by-george-lucas/
Lucas had realized that his first screenplay would not fit into one movie, so he put a large part of the rough draft aside when writing the second. Since he now had material for three films, he decided that he would use the deleted parts if he ever got the opportunity to do any sequels.
This second draft took Lucas eight months to write. He had pared the previous screenplay, basically cutting it in half, but it still contained two movies; the rescue mission, and the battle of the Death Star: “I sort of tacked the air battle on, because it was the original impetus of the whole project.”
That’s very insightful. Interestingly, with the Second draft, a ‘sequel’ of sorts was hinted at, but it involved something other than Vader - since Vader is killed in the final (Death Star) battle at the end of this version, and Luke’s father is very much alive in this story (there is no Ben/Obi-Wan Kenobi character at this point). It seems that the Third draft is when things changed towards sort of a ‘proto’ Original Trilogy as we know it. This would of course continue through to the fourth draft (and beyond). In the Story Synopsis circa April or May of 1975, which came some time after the second draft but preceded the third, Luke has a lightsaber duel with Vader during the final space-station battle, and kills him (or maybe just ‘defeats’ him?). So that version of the story could possibly be said to be an even more ‘stand-alone’ story than even the final film (where Luke doesn’t doesn’t do any of the above, and those elements were largely saved for the sequel films).
I’ve got a thread going over at TheForce.net, where with a couple of exceptions, most of the posters there seem to only accept the ‘standard/orthodox/fan-view’ of the origins of the Father Vader plotline.
I think the origins of “Father Vader” are probably even simpler than Kiminski’s theory once you take what we know of Star Wars’ development into account.
The Star Wars that hit theaters functions mostly as a standalone story, Lucas having “stolen the ending” of the two-parter he’d had in mind and ending up with a movie that in the broadest strokes resembles what’d become the overall trilogy in condensed form, and there’s really only a few major plot points it didn’t cover, two of the biggest ones being:
- The hero’s cyborg father makes a heroic sacrifice
- The “black knight” villain turns against the empire and saves the heroes
Hi Barfolomew,
The thing with the “stolen the ending” part is that, looking at Rinzler’s ‘Making of Star Wars’, I can’t seem to find a draft or synopsis of the first film where there WAS NOT going to be a final space battle involving the Imperial battle station. I know that supposedly FOX wanted Lucas to consider cutting that from the ending…
Hi, I appreciate your response, especially your taking the time to look into this! It’s been a while since I reviewed all the info of the drafts, I recall that there are at least one or two that end with the escape from the floating prison complex in the skies of Alderaan, climaxing in a battle, though not with the Death Star (or equivalent).
I’ll see what I can find. It’d certainly be something if none of the drafts actually conform to this, because it really seems “split the movie in two” and “stole the ending from the second half” are near-axiomatic in Star Wars behind the scenes lore (also the way Empire + Jedi together look very conspicuously like an elongated two-part retelling of Star Wars would seem to support it, but hey maybe he just decided to repeat the whole darn thing regardless, lol).
Thank you. You probably right, either way.
I think the origins of “Father Vader” are probably even simpler than Kiminski’s theory once you take what we know of Star Wars’ development into account.
The Star Wars that hit theaters functions mostly as a standalone story, Lucas having “stolen the ending” of the two-parter he’d had in mind and ending up with a movie that in the broadest strokes resembles what’d become the overall trilogy in condensed form, and there’s really only a few major plot points it didn’t cover, two of the biggest ones being:
- The hero’s cyborg father makes a heroic sacrifice
- The “black knight” villain turns against the empire and saves the heroes
Hi Barfolomew,
The thing with the “stolen the ending” part is that, looking at Rinzler’s ‘Making of Star Wars’, I can’t seem to find a draft or synopsis of the first film where there WAS NOT going to be a final space battle involving the Imperial battle station. I know that supposedly FOX wanted Lucas to consider cutting that from the ending…