It was either do that or continue with the inch-thick makeup from the Holiday Special.
EVERYTHING up to then had Anakin Skywalker as a different person than Darth Vader. In the Star Wars novelization by Alan Dean Foster released in 1977, he describes the fight between Anakin and Darth on Mustafar. It wasn’t until Leigh Brackett died while writing The Empire Strikes Back and George Lucas thought, “I can do better.” that the idea that Anakin = Darth even existed.
I still have a copy of that book, and both it and I were shocked by the reveal too.
Before I saw it, a friend told me they reveal Vader’s real identity and I blurted out “Is he Luke’s father?”. I’m not sure why I jumped to that (correct) conclusion. I went into the theater knowing the twist, but it didn’t diminish my enjoyment of ESB.
Was it even that obvious (to kids) that Vader was not a robot? After all there are plenty of anthropomorphic droids.
Which would have made it as surprising as learning C3PO was his brother.
Or am I forgetting a line?
Maybe not to really little kids, but I was 12 when the original movie came out, and I always believed that Vader was a guy in a mask and suit, not a droid.
Ben told Luke that Vader left humanity behind and that he was more machine than man now. So we knew he was (at least, originally) a human.
Vader moves differently than droids, then there’s the whole breathing thing.
Yeah it might just be me. As a kid in the late 80s, I had the toys (which were really cheap as star wars mania ended abruptly in the UK) long before I saw the movie.
And from the toys it wasn’t that obvious that characters like Vader or Boba Fett or heck, even the stormtroopers, were meant to be humans in a suit. I don’t recall now, how much into the movie I figured that he was a guy.
ETA: The “breathing” of course sounds more like venting or something, I don’t know if it’s that clear he’s human. But of course it’s hard to remember how Vader first came across, as it’s so long ago and how iconic a figure he’s been through my whole life.
I was an adult when I saw it (in its original run). I remember my reaction was, “Great plot twist.”
When I saw the movie and we met Yoda somewhere in the theater I heard a child’s voice pipe up, quite clearly, “He sounds like Grover”
Never even crossed my mind that he was a robot when I was a kid. Aside from the breathing, he’s in charge of shit, and people are scared of him. All the other droids (at least in the first movie) are treated like fancy appliances. Nobody is scared of them, and nobody takes orders from them, any more than you’d take orders and cower in front of your microwave.
There’s no one line that specifically calls Vader a human, but there’s tons of dialogue where people talk about Vader in terms that only make sense if he’s human. Probably the most significant was Obi-Wan telling Luke what happened to his dad: “A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father.”
There’s a Jedi at the end of this Book
Is there a face palm emoji?
The failure was when Luke ignored his mentor’s instructions, and took his weapons into the cave, which we can take as emblematic that he entered the cave with fear and aggression - he was worried it was dangerous, and wanted to be able to fight whatever that danger was. The vision he had was what would happen to him if he continued to “fail” in that way - he would eventually turn to the Dark Side, and become just like his father. If he’d heeded Yoda, and left fear and aggression behind when he entered the cave, he wouldn’t have needed that specific vision, and would have received a different one, more suited to where he was on his journey to being a Jedi - perhaps something that showed him an easier path to redeeming Vader, or hinting at his real relationship with Leia, or warning him off from the trap in Cloud City.
As a kid, I remember totally not getting that scene at all. The big problem for me was I didn’t recognize Luke’s face when the face mask on the helmet exploded. I think I was thrown by the fact that Luke was already in the scene, so that had to be a different person in the mask. Instead, I somehow mistook him for one of the Star Destroyer’s officers from earlier in the movie.
I didn’t, either. When I finally figured it out, I was pissed at the filmmakers for not making that clearer.
The other thing that makes Vader an obvious non-robot is his use of magical powers (like choking that guy with the disturbing lack of faith in the Force.) How many robots in cinema have mastered telekinesis?
Me, too.
Funny. I didn’t have any problem recognizing the face as Luke’s. That’s what led to the feeling that he would be fighting himself in using the Force. Ready, he was not. Fail, he did.
Agreed. Now, offline I should get and dinner I should have.