I sense snark here, but it could make sense. Maybe Skywalker is as common on Tattooine as Lee is on Earth.
In the military people call generals “General” and majors “Major” and captains “Captain.” I know nothing of these earlier prequels of which everyone speaks*, but is “Darth” that far off from a military rank sorta thing?
In an earlier thread where this was brought up, someone mentioned that it was Obi-Wan being dismissive and cutting, and I made the comparison of this to Law and Order former DA Ben Stone’s predilection for calling defendents a withering “sir,” as in, “Yes, sir, and then you chopped her head off.”
- No I’m not being snarky as to the quality – I’ve only seen a little of “Phantom
Menace” so I’m not really up 'em.
In the course of the movie, he’s addressed as “Darth Vader”, “Vader”, “Lord Vader”, & “Darth” - obviously Lucas just didn’t think his name would turn out to be a big deal.
I haven’t seen the original trilogy in a while – is the idea of Tattooine being Anakin’s home a prequels-only thing? Because the whole thing is easily explained by the idea that Tattooine is utterly remote. “If there’s a bright center of the universe, this is the planet it’s furthest from.”
Vader was unlikely to return to Tatoonie, so it was a pretty good hiding place.
I guess you could argue that they never clearly state in the original trilogy whether Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are maternal or paternal side of the family. If you look at just 4-6, it’s conceivable they are not Own and Beru Skywalker.
Further, if you wanted to get really anal, the dialog between the parents “He’s just got too much of his father in him” sounds like they ARE a degree removed from Anakin. Because if it’s a relative, you might say something like “he’s got too much of my/your brother in him.”
Course, the prequels blow all that to crap too 
It sounded a lot classier than, “Only a master of evil, asshole!”
Well, you would refer to him as President Obama, but only a hick would say “Hello, president” instead of “Hello, Mr. President.”
On the planet where his mother was raped and murdered… That he never visited even when she was alive because he hated it so much…
Yeah, it makes no sense at all.
The novelization of Jedi even claimed that Owen Lars was actually Ben Kenobi’s brother, no relation to Vader/Skywalker at all.
Obviously, a lot of that is decanonized by the prequels, but until then, that was all anyone had to go on.
I doubt she was raped. This is Lucas, after all.
But yeah, the way you put it, it actually makes sense. Tattooine is probably the last place in creation Vader would ever go.
There are plenty of titles without a prefix like “Mr.,” though: governor, senator, congressman, prime minister, chancellor, etc. I have no problem believing that Kenobi was referring to his former pupil by his hateful but voluntarily-assumed title as a Sith Lord, and thereby reminding him that he’d fallen away from the One True Path of the Jedi.
You’d think that if he really wanted to piss Vader off, Obi wan would have called him “Annie.”
Calling the biggest badass in the galaxy by a girly nickname wouldn’t do much for Vader’s ego.
See, but in the SW universe, Annie is as common a boy’s name as “John” is in ours…
This point is one of the items I point to in explaining why the prequels were so bad.
All they had to do was put in a line where Kenobi clearly mocked Anakin’s new Sith name to set up the “Darth” use in episode IV, but it clearly never even occurred to them.
Example of how hard it would have been:
How about “Breathy”?
Well, I think it WAS a title back then. I remember reading WAY back that Vader was a “Dark Lord of the Sith”. Seeing as how “Darth” is obviously a contraction of “DARk lord of the siTH”, it is possible that Lucas had that in mind way back before he became Darth Flannel.
-Joe
…in a galaxy with thousands or millions of inhabited planets. Darth Vader was no longer Anakin Skywalker - this is a huge part of everything through four of the six movies.
Why is Darth Vader going to swing by Owen’s farmstead? To discuss the moisture crop? He’s the number two ruler of the First Galactic Empire and has no reason to think he has any relatives (Mom, wife, and unborn children are dead, remember?) so why bother? Besides, even if Anakin Skywalker had some relatives, who cares? Darth Vader didn’t.
-Joe
Think of it as being like the Emperor saying to Luke, “So be it, Jedi.”
As for Shmi being raped, it is sort of implied that that’s what happened to her.
Oh, and Owen is Anakin’s step-brother, remember? Owen’s father Clieg, married Shmi Skywalker.
And a lot of Tatooine natives had names like Skywalker, Darklighter, Fardreamer, Whitesun, Blyskipper, Goldenfield, Sandskimmer, Starkiller (which was supposed to be Luke’s last name, originally), Windtide, etc. So it’s not like “Skywalker” would have been such an unusual name, or have stood out on Tatooine.
Calling him what his beloved and very dead wife called him would be rather stupid, only piss him off.