The story goes that although Star Wars was conceived of as a trilogy from the start, Lucas had to film the first movie as a stand-alone in case he never got the chance to produce the sequels. Supposedly the destruction of the Death Star would have been the finale of the trilogy, not done twice.
So if Lucas had won the lottery and known from the start he would be able to fund the full trilogy, what would the first movie have been about? Or does this go back too far into the conceptual stages that were heavily revised?
Maybe if he’d known from the start that he would be able to make all three movies, he would have incorporated his “those of the royal house (and their loyal retainers) are the only ones that count” brand of ideology from the start, and he would have made three repulsive movies, instead of two great movies (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back) and one repulsive movie (Return of the Jedi).
It would not have ended with the Death Star battle, and instead probably would have crept into part of what appears in Empire Strikes Back, i.e. something along the lines of the Hoth Battle - hidden in the Rebel base of Massassi, the Empire track them down and attack.
Actually, Darth apparently stands for Dark Lord of the Sith (at least retroactively; it’s not clear whether or not Lucas had already decided that or not), so it might be. Obi-Wan was calling him Dark Lord.
I don’t trust anyone that doesn’t give ROTJ a little credit. You can hate Ewoks and Threepio as golden God all you want… But if you think the Jabbas Palace rescue sequence wasn’t worth the price of admission… You have not a wondrous bone in your body.
It’s actually too bad, too. I mewan, in retrospect the Ewoks were pretty silly, but they could have been done much more… viciously.
Rather than have these fuzzy things flying gliders and tossing rocks, what would we have thought if suddenly these cute furry creatures crept close (unseen except for rustling grass), then suddenly jumped on the stormtroopers and ripped them apart? A vicious flood of cute little fuzzy barbaric monsters. And then, after ti was done, they’re all nice and friendly again, just covered in blood.
Is there any evidence that supports this? I know fans love to believe it, but I’ve always been sceptical. Was there any precedence for film trilogies in 1977?
To me it always looked like Star Wars was a surprise hit, so they made more of them.
You notice my fundamental problems with the movie have nothing to do with Ewoks or C3PO, as irritating as they both are. The ‘redemption’ of Vader says something fundamental about Lucas, and it’s not pretty.
Plenty. Two parts of The Godfather had come out in 1972 1974, not to mention Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly which came out 1964-1966. There’s also The Thin Man, After the Thin Man,Return of the Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home, and Song of the Thin Man from 1934-1947.
The real point was that Lucas was writing after the pattern of Hollywood serial films, like the Saturday matinee shorts that appeared before the main feature; those had been around for years before 1977 (Undersea Kingdom dates to about 1936).
Me, I do believe Lucas had a larger story to tell, but that he hadn’t had it all planned out very well. In the Super Secret Double-Dog Extra Special Quantum Revised Extra Special DVD edition commentary to The Empire Strikes Back he admits that he killed off Obi-Wan because he felt the old guy didn’t have any further purpose. After all, Obi-Wan would just have stood around for the rest of the film. So Lucas wrote him out and only when he came to write the TESB story outline did he realize he had painted himself into a corner, and so invented Yoda.
It doesn’t bode well for the “it was all part of the grand plan” meme. If it had all been planned out, I’m fairly sure that at least the notion of Yoda as an older, wiser version of Obi-Wan would have already been decided upon. But no, Yoda was an invention of necessity, as were (I feel) most of the plot twists from TESB on.
