From another thread:
So, the question: Did George Lucas actually start the cliche of dropping a bad guy off the side of a cliff or building for the sake of keeping the hero clean/not showing blood on the screen?
I would personally have guessed that Disney started it at some point, but I can’t recall any of their films doing it off the top of my head except The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
I wonder who did start it. I know it took off like a rocket in TV movies with women/sensitive dads as the heroes, because it’s a clean kill.
Well, it’s in Disney’s Snow White (1937), but I think it’s older than that.
EDIT
Also Gaston dies in Beauty in the Beast after stabbing the Beast in the back by falling off a roof, and Scar falls badly in The Lion King when he attacks Simba after a deal is made - the fall doesn’t kill him, but hurts him so that the hyenas can kill him.
Never mind.
Production Code, perhaps? (1934.) It stated that heroes/heroines, very summarily, couldn’t do bad-guy stuff.
There was some understood subtext, ie, a man could make someone dead, but not a woman. So how else is a man menacing a woman to be killed? How about falling? Aha…
Isn’t the entire concept of the “cliffhanger” the result of this situation having become cliche back in the dawning days of motion pictures?
How will our heroes get out of this one? Tune in tomorrow, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!
The cliffhanger involved the hero(ine) hanging off a cliff, not the villain.
Fair enough.
Yep, he also invented the Wilhelm Scream, special effects and the concept of a “sidekick.” 
I don’t know if this counts, but when Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, he had them both plunge over a waterfall. Holmes, of course, eventually came back.
I would say no, it’s not an example, because Holmes was locked in combat with Moriarty and so didn’t have “clean hands.”
The villain in Kit Carson (1928) falls off a cliff, but I’m sure he wasn’t the first. It’s a neat way of dispatching a bad guy without a lot of special effects. And if you can get the bad guy to conveniently hurl himself off while trying to kill the good guy, it comes with a nice and tidy moral message.
I don’t get the Star Wars reference. In the Empire fight referenced in your quote, its the hero that falls off the cliff (or down the shoot, whatever). There’s a couple other places in the trilogy where a villain takes a dive off a cliff, but I can’t think of anywhere where it was done “for the sake of keeping the hero clean/not showing blood on the screen?” Basically all the heros in Star Wars kill several dozen people over the course of the films with out any worry over “keeping their hands clean”, and all the deaths are pretty bloodless even when there aren’t any cliffs invovled.
So I guess the answer to your question would be: no, Lucas didn’t start that cliche, and in fact didn’t even use it in the original Star Wars movies.
Don’t know when it started, but one of my favorites that meets the posted criteria was in an episode of The Adventures of Superman . The bad guy (a young Jack Weston) and his moll discover Superman’s secret identity, so he deposits them on a mountaintop until he can decide what to do with them. They attempt to climb down, slip, and plunge to their deaths with a bloodcurdling scream that still rings in my ears to this day. Supe’s SI is safe, and he didn’t kill them.
Sorry, I didn’t buy that when I first saw that episode at the age of 7, and I don’t buy it now. Superman knew full well those baddies wouldn’t stay where he put them, and chose that spot to act as his executioner-by-proxy. I mean, just think of the enormous number of un-climb-out-of-able pits and mine shafts from which he had previously saved Lois and/or Jimmy he could have used instead.
Ahah, you’re right. I was thinking that we were talking about the final film not the second (fifth.)
What…you never saw a Road Runner cartoon?
Just how many times did that Coyote fall off a cliff??
Whenever my wife our I do something stupid and self-inflict pain, the other days ‘See, that’s God punishing you.’
I hope he never wants to ‘punish me’ off a cliff.
Hitchcock did it a number of times.