That’s another thing. As a kid, I remember hearing about this third trilogy that takes place after the original films. These days, Lucas talks as if the third trilogy never existed in his mind or anywhere else. The saga is finished, and he’s moving on to other things.
Also not something that popped into his head in 1982. You can see from the early drafts of the script that Luke and Leia were connected – and the 1978 radio series foreshadowed Vader’s paternity of Leia.
(As an aside, one of the weird connections that Luke and Leia share is that plotting-wise they both have elements lifted from Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz. Luke stands in for Dorothy in the first half of the first movie, and Leia stands in for the second half.)
No. He does look like Tarkin’s little bitch, but we somehow know Vader is way ahead of him and it is actually Vader who is keeping an eye on everyone. “Do not underestimate the power of the force” says it all. We know Vader’s the big man. His “As you wish” response is to keep things cool with the apparent chain of command and with the rest of the officers. They make fun of the force, this means they don’t understand or believe in it, which also means they don’t know their emperor is a Sith Lord who shoots lightning bolts and has a serious problem with plastic surgery.
And I don’t think Vader was a simple flunkie. You usually remember the big villains of films. Jaws is not the big villain of the Bond films, you remember him as a cool dude, but not as a, borrowing from you-know-who, a bad mofo. Even “Vader lives!” T-Shirts came out after the movie. What does that tell you? I do think Lucas had Vader’s paternity in mind, but saved it for later. You don’t need to stick with a character forever to indicate his relevance in a story. You can have a break, a pause and introduce new ones. Sort of like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both Lucas and Tolkien thought at some point, “Wouldn’t it be cool to…?” and wrote that. Tolkien didn’t need to set up the entire history of the Ring and Sauron and the Nine in The Hobbit to write LotR. It’s a pause in the story, a necessary one, where Bilbo gets hold of this “weird, magic ring”. I think it’s good storytelling.
The core of the story may be about Anakin, because of his importance, in retrospect. That’s fine. Explicitly, the story follows the Skywalkers, the Republic, the Empire, and the Rebellion. Also fine. But what you can’t deny is Vader kicks ass, always has, and always will.
I remember reading somewhere soon after the first movie came out that Lucas wanted the third trilogy to focus on the rebuilding of the Republic. I think he dropped the idea when he finally realized how immensely dull that’d be. 
No, I’m very sure it was something he pimped in the beginning. He’s subsequently dropped it, but he definitely talked it up back when Episode IV was the only film in the franchise.
The Hook has Vader right: he may have not technically been in command in the original Star Wars movie (fuck this “A New Hope” shit :)), he was the baddest Bad Guy, not just in the movie, but in contemporary culture at the time. He may have been a subordinate, but he was nobody’s flunkie.
Three trilogies: Lucas came out with that story at the time of Empire’s release (if not before), to explain what the “Episode 5” deal was: that there would ultimately be three 3-movie cycles. (Al Yankovic riffs off this in “Yoda”: “The long-term contract I had to sign said I’ll be making these movies 'til the end of time with my Yoda.”)
But I still say that if there had been any justice in Lucas’ fictional universe, it wouldn’t have been Princess Leia who emerged as the other Jedi Knight besides Luke (and made the whole thing about genetics to boot), but rather R2D2, who kept his cool in every tight spot.
Rank life-ism, I tell ya.
Lucas is definitely a revisionist. I remember watching ROTJ when I was fourteen, and the “revelation” of Leia being Luke’s sister brought disbelief crashing down upon my head. I managed to re-suspend it with the help of a crane, a strong chain and an ex-Jedi friend who knew how to levitate metaphysical constructs, but it kind of killed the movie for me.
Also, it is pretty clear in ANH that Darth is Vader’s first name. Now, all of a sudden it’s a contraction of Dark Lord of the Sith (and shouldn’t it be spelled D’ar’th or something?) either that or the most common boy’s name in the Star Wars Universe.
I think Lucas is just pulling stuff out of his ass.
You’d think that with all the shit the little pile of scrap goes through and does for everyone, someone who’d been around for a while (like, say, Kenobi?) would look at a little blue droid some years later and and go, “Heeyyy…”
Lucas once stated that eh “Third Trilogy” would focus on a villan that survived Episode 3. Siince it is in continuity that the Emperor survives Episode 6 (thanks to a little cloning technology) we can probably assume that the big bad of the third trilogy is the Emperor.
Or maybe not. What the hell do I know?
That wouldn’t make any sense, seeing as he’s dead at the end of Return of the Jedi.
I haven’t the nerve to re-watch the first two prequels, but IIRC the only time Kenobi and R2 were within eye contact was on the Naboo starcruiser, where Kenobi praised “this little astro-droid” for fixing the shields or whatnot.
I think all the other folks who saw the stuff R2 has gone through are dead by the time Episode IV rolls around.
My choice of words wasn’t clear there. I can believe he plotted out three films in advance, but not nine. The last two movies are also pretty strong evidence that it was never anything but talk. By “later in the game,” I meant it was something he came up with after Star Wars was a big hit, not something I think he ever had real plans to do.
Cadabra was probably refering to the Dark Empire limited series that came out in the late-80s. Turns out Palpy had clones of himself so he could live forever. Tried to seduce Luke to the Dark Side but failed. It wasn’t a very good comic. The sequel was even worse. It had the exact same story as Dark Empire (Palpy’s clone comes back, seduces Luke, fails).
Well I wasn’t really old enough to know about Star Wars back when RotJ came out (I was 3), but later one, when I saw all of them, it seemed to me that the story (of the 3 films) was about Vader/Anakin, which we saw through the eyes of Luke. It was Vader who was redeemed at the end and the only reason that Luke survives. Going from a loyal servant of the Emperor to killing him was a massive turn. So watching the first trilogy, I saw it as the redemption of Vader within a story of the Fall of the Empire.
I remember hearing that Friday the 13th was supposed to stretch out to 13 films too. Just goes to show you those things you hear from friends at school are usually rumors.
I’ve always been of the belief that Lucas wrote Star Wars as a stand-alone film, with the underlying framework of a good old-fasioned serial (in fact he references this many times. Go rent a few old Flash Gordon serials if you’ve never seen one -it’s like watching audition tapes for Star Wars).
The idea behind these serials is that you can join the series at any point, and get caught up on what’s going on pretty quickly and start enjoying the part you’re watching (and hopefully come back next week for the “exciting conclusion” -which is never a conclusion, but a launching pad for the next one.)
There is really no start nor end to a good serial. They just keep going. If you were going to write the first episode of a serial, you’d start by writing (at the very least in your head) the story of the previous episodes. It’s pretty smart actually. If the first movie had done so-so (or poorly) at the box office, it had an ending and wrapped up pretty nicely. No need to go on. He could move on to create such memorable characters as Howard The Duck :rolleyes: If it caught on, he might just be on his way to fame and fortune.
I’ve always believed Lucas wrote Star Wars as ‘a random episode from a serial you’ve not yet seen any other episodes’. In order to make it more serial-esque, he laid out (however loosely only he knows) the backstory so the viewer had the feeling they were jumping into the middle of an ongoing series. Hell, the first movie starts smack in the middle of a chase sequence to recover stolen technical readouts. If that doesn’t imply a pre-conceived backstory I don’t know what does. And, as every good serial does, it ends with question mark (Vader gets away).
Did Lucas ever actually write out 9 scripts? Of course not. Did he ever fully intend to make the other chapters into movies? Maybe. Did he ever want to go on making “another exciting episode” in the Star Wars saga? I have no doubt it crossed his mind once or twice. And what’s wrong with that?
I always thought that it was in fact a title. Like “Don” Vader Bob Johnson “the Hut”. You don’t see too many folks call Vader by his first name:
“Hey Darth! Sally from accounting and that guy who runs the the super Turbo-laser are going to play racquetball later on level 250J later. Why don’t you swing by once you get that family stuff squared away.”
“I AM PLEASED YOU HAVE DECIDED TO FACE YOUR FEARS. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE SALLY…THE FORCE IS STRONG IN THAT ONE.”
Obi-Wan does. Most of the others call him Lord Vader, though.
Star Wars-- the whole damn thing-- is about dying in front of Luke (but not being killed by him, natch) so you get a nifty immortal shimmery body that can stand in the middle of a fire and not worry about getting hot.
And you can travel from planet to planet without a spaceship too!
Darth presumably is simply a short form of “DARk lord of the siTH”. So Obi-Wan was just calling him by a title he disrespected.
I don’t interpret it that way. He’s not subordinate; he’s just not in the local chain of command. Vader is the Emperor’s personal representative (and is specifically described as such) who happens to be operating in Tarkin’s command area at the time.
Consider that the only time he does anything Tarkin tells him to do is when he stops force-choking that dork in the wardroom. “Vader, release him” means “This is my command and you are killing one of my officers, and we don’t have time for this nonsense anyway.” Vader’s “As you wish” and the casual way he stops torturing the doofus are contemptuous. He’s made his point: he’s perfectly willing to kill someone for doing nothing more than being disrespectful, and he can get away with it. The way Tarkin immediately drops the subject indicates that he has no disciplinary authority over Vader.
For the rest of the movie, Vader goes anywhere and does anything he wants.
Actually that’s somewhat of a revision as well. In the first published stories Gollum actually congratulates Bilbo on outsmarting him and leads him out. It’s only in later version when Tolkien was working on Lord of the Rings that he went back and rewrote this part to heighten the seeming draw of the ring.
here’s a cite and here’s the text
The only difference here is Lucas isn’t as good of a story teller and he can’t go back and rewrite this movies (though I’m sure he’s dying to)