It is much less of a stretch for Vader to be a riff on “invader” rather than “father”. Unless Lucas was channelling Allan Sherman, I’d say he’s full of shit claiming it was the latter from the inception.
Vader means “father” in Dutch.
ETA: however, pronunciation is different.
Yeah, I think it’s a coincidence that Lucas (or more likely someone else) latched onto after the fact.
This is the guy who “created” the word “droid” by lopping of the first two letters of “android.”
Aha. So he has spoken out on the theory?
I feel like if you’ve set up this great reveal for a character and people don’t like the character as he is pre-reveal, then that just makes you move on to post-reveal as quickly as possible. True, you might scrap the character, but I’d probably run it by some people first before doing so, since it is (potentially) a cool twist.
But, outside of some random conspiracy theorists on the Internet, I don’t believe that there is any support for the idea from Lucas nor any of the several thousand people who worked on the film.
The argument requires that Lucas have a decent idea (questionable), drop the idea without ever talking about it (questionable), and then further never mention it after others have cottoned on to it and proclaimed it a great idea (unlikely).
Good counterarguments, everyone. But what about Lucas saying “Jar Jar is the key to all of this”?
I was talking about his maintaining that he always intended Vader to be Luke’s father.
A Google search of that phrase leads to a YouTube video where the very next thing Lucas says is, “He’s a funnier character than we’ve ever had in the movies before.”
It’s not a cryptic statement. It’s half of a sentence with the other half removed, so as to sound cryptic.
Ahhh.
Have you tried actually watching Phantom Menace with the theory in mind to see if it holds up?
It doesn’t.
Not long after I first saw the video online, I was at a friend’s house while her kids were watching Phantom Menace, so I paid close attention to the scene where Jar Jar supposedly does some kind of force jump. It’s edited differently in the internet video than in the movie. It looked pretty clear to me in the actual movie that he didn’t do anything impressive or outside the normal range of abilities for that character.
Just for posterity’s sake, I’ll mention that all of this hinges on a process known as “cherry picking”. It’s the most common technique used by conspiracy theorists to make their claims, and for the religious to justify their actions in Scripture. It’s nice to see the technique applied to something less meaningful. If I was a teacher of a class on reasoning, I might consider using this as a nice, low harm test case.
Oooh… [files away for future lesson planning]
Strange wording, as though you’re introducing the concept to the thread, and by extension to me as the OP. Yet the third sentence of my (short) OP begins: “But obviously it’s all cherrypicked…”.
It’s been several days since I read the OP. Fair point.
Ok 
Yes. Lucas has a habit of this, claiming that things were always a certain way, even though we can find him saying that about conflicting things.
I have an ebook called The Secret History of Star Wars that has extensive documentation of all of it, using interviews and actual copies of the script and stuff like that to set out a story of how it all happened.
I have the older free edition that the author put out before it was picked up to be published. But this stuff is so quintessential that I’m sure it wasn’t changed. I think he just got more stuff for Appendices and stuff.