Let's take Obi-Wan's words at face value
 

Forget for a moment all the other films, books, video games, whatnot. There is only Star Wars. The way Obi-Wan tells it, I could get the impression that Obi-Wan, "Anakin" for lack of any other reference, and Darth were a trio during the Clone Wars. It seems logical to assume Obi-Wan and Anakin would be around the same age. Darth would have been younger, probably Luke's age back then - "a young Jedi named Darth Vader".

The mystery component in all this is Owen. The name Lars never actually shows up in the movie - not even the credits. For all I know his name really is Owen Skywalker. If I am to conclude that Obi-Wan and Anakin would be around the same age, then I can logically conclude that Owen is the younger brother - "that wizard is just a crazy old man".

Now, I did consider whether Owen could have been a Jedi as well. But there is a line that pretty well crushes that - "he felt your father should have stayed here and not gotten involved". You could stretch it and say something like maybe he trained but gave it up for a simpler life. But even then, the wizard line seems to indicate a general disdain for Jedi. Although it's entirely possible that disdain came out of the death of his brother - of which he clearly blames Obi-Wan for. I guess because he trained Darth and couldn't keep him from killing Anakin?

One other note I want to bring up is the Clone Wars. Having absolutely no other reference, it occurred to me the word Clone could have just as well been the name of system or a family or a gang or some strange class of starship. Starship technology that could project a fleet of ship clones? Why not?

Meh. If you read through all this nonsense, congrats. It was just something I was thinking about after watching Star Wars(the unmolested version thank you very much).

I'm just going to go ahead and say there's a 15 a year difference between Obi-Wan and Anakin. And Anakin and Owen are actually the same age. By the time the Battle of Yavin happened Obi-Wan was 57 when he died, Vader was 42, and Owen was also 42 when he died.

There was a fan theory that "Obi Wan" was really OB-1 and was a clone designation.
That meaning the Jedi cloned the real Ben Kenobi Jedi to look after Luke- and possibly there was one foe Leia that maybe died on Alderann. It would also explain why vader thought Kenobi was dead and was not looking for him- 'cause he was dead!

I always thought this a cool idea.

For me the one thing that Obi wan says that is telling is when he says (paraphrasing) : "A young Jedi named Darth vader, betrayed and killed your father..."

If there was an established knowledge of the Jedi, even a cloudy "mythological" knowledge would they not also have at least the same minimal knowledge of the Sith?

And having said that would Luke not know that Darth is not a name but a Sith title? How would Obi Wan be training a Young Jedi who is a titled Sith?

If the "A New Hope" trilogy is viewed as a standalone, I can buy that "Darth Vader" would be the name of a person, not a titled Sith. Why Aniken chose that name (in the context of the first trilogy only) would be anyone's guess though.

Doesn't palpatine name him in Ep 3?

True, true. I was speaking with trilogy one as a standalone context for my point.

As a kid in '77 we were led to believe there was three distinct people in the story about Anakin Skywalker (1) getting killed by Darth Vader (2), as told by Obi Wan Kenobi (3).

This was proven ultimately false in Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi, but the point is during that whole trilogy Darth was never hinted at being a title, simply a name.


I am not sure in which fiction or timeline it was revealed that Darth was a title.

Obi calling Anakin's murderer Darth may have been a slip in so much as he would be telling Luke "The guy who killed your Dad was a pupil of mine who happened to be a Sith Lord..."

Am I making my point? I'm not sure I'm explaining it the as well as I can.

Let me just point out that George Lucas did a miserable job writing/producing Episodes 1-3, and he clearly didn't think things through as far as consistency and plot holes. The man got old, rich, and untalented. Any inconsistencies that you find with the movies can be attributed to this.

Oh for sure, Lucas totally phoned in Ep 1-3.

To this day I have not seen any of those three films in their entirety. They are literally unwatchable. Even actors I appreciate suck total ass in it.

I am SO confused. 1-3 add up to 4-6 well enough to make a story work. I'll do a power point.

1. Obi Wan and all the surviving Jedi went off the grid, to Vader, Obi Wan is dead because his presence isn't felt in the force. Kenobi learned to do this over time, so did Yoda, ect.

2. Owen isn't blood related to Anakin expect by his dad being married to Anakins mom. So the chanes of Owen being a Jedi is slim to none.

3. Obi Wan is clearly lying about how Lukes father died, obviously to protect Luke from the Dark Side.

As for the title, anyones guess, but rumors had it is that Lucas had the scripts 1-3 written long before 4 was a thought. Would Episode one have been any better if it was made in '77?

Do not talk ill of Ewan McGreggor, Samuel L Jackson and Liam Neeson! </3

Actually I was thinking of Natalie Portman.......:p

But as much as I adore Portman, and the three Musketeers you mentioned they all sucked ass in the movie. Not their fault, as we say down here in the South, you can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit........

I bet you could if you tried... :P

I would rather try than watch EP 1-3 back to back......

Bwahahahahaha. It's a shame that 1-3 where so bad :(.

That is so true. When I was a little dude I asked my dad if I could watch Star Wars, and an old friend of his hooked me up with some ancient VHS tapes (awesome artwork by the way). I loved them so much that I probably watched those tapes a hundred times each (I wish I still had them). When Phantom Menace (episode 1) came out my dad took me to see it, and we both hated it. I still love the originals, but the newer ones reflect the mentality behind their creation - who cares if they're any good? They'll make a fortune.

That is so sad.

i thought that obi gave the vader killed aniken stoory as a partial lie to cover the truth of vaders identity. near as i could tell that was always my impression of things.

You really need to read a book called Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays.
Amazon.com: Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays (9780345409812): Laurent Bouzereau: Books

(Buy a used copy!) This is officially sanctioned by Lucas. In it you discover the first draft of Star Wars that is NOTHING like the movie we got, nor were the first drafts of ESB or RoJ anything like we was made. The original plots were completely different - and Lucas took a while to decide on the family relationship between Luke and Vader, much less Leia.

Now, there was an interview with one of the cast (either Mark or Harrison) in which THEY mention as they are pushing ESB that there was talk about a prequel to tell the story of the fall of Vader and in that interview they spell out Episodes 1-3 a little bit: Mark Hamill & Harrison Ford on Today 1980 part 1 - YouTube

So, to be clear, Lucas hadn't written anything about these movies except what you might infer from episode 4. From that, no one would have envisioned the Clone Wars we got (and are still getting! - when will Obi-Wan fight with Bel Organa?), Pod Racing, the two Sith only rule (which Lucas has already broken in the cartoon!), or the Separatist robot army.

I think at the time, "Darth Vader" was simply a name Lucas had chosen because Darth sounds similar to "Dark" and "Vader" means father in Dutch. That's not to say he always intended Vader to be Luke's father, but certainly someone's evil dad.

I think it was either the original novelizations or one of the Expanded Universe books that turned "Darth" into a title, rather than a first name.

Also, the Sith are (or were) a very secretive group and worked from the shadows. They view power as a coveted commodity and do not willingly want share it with anyone. Even Palpatine didn't use his Sith title when he became emperor.

So it does make sense that the general public wouldn't know anything about the Sith, but would know or have a vague idea of Jedi. They were well known and publically visable for centuries before the rise of the Sith. They had a temple/training center and actively worked with the Galactic Republic.

A notable exception would be Tatooine, but it is also one of the furthest systems from the Galactic core. Basically, Tatooine is to a hick town in the midwest US as Coruscant is to Mumbai, India. Ironic that it ends up appearing in 5 of the 6 films (the only planet to do so).

When I first saw ANH as a kid, I also thought that Ben was lying, but not necessarily about Vader's identity, just the circumstances of Anakin's death and his own part in it.

He sounded very vague and evasive during that scene. On the other hand, Luke didn't exactly press him for details either.

Kirschner also had a large hand in changing the script for ESB. It's one of the reasons that movie resonates more with audiences than any of the other five. He requested that the chararcters be more humanized to better elicit emotion.

True. The scripts for the prequels weren't written until much later. But Lucas did write an outline that contained basic plot elements and backgrounds for several characters (not all of which carried over into the actual movies). This was back when Luke was still known as Starkiller and Jabba was a human in a fur coat.

From that outline, which was far too ambitious for one film (I think he said it was some 200 pages), he broke it into three parts and decided that he'd do a movie based on the middle third. After further thought, he decided that even that portion was too big for one film, so he broke it up into three parts and decided to do a movie based on the first third of that middle section, which became the original Star Wars.

That's also the reason people reference Star Wars as a 9-part epic, and why ESB suddenly had "Episode V" in the opening crawl sequences when Star Wars originally didn't have any subtitles. "Episode IV: A New Hope" was added to Star Wars after ESB came out.

I distinctly remember being really confused in the theater when I saw that and asked my dad "What happened to Episodes II, III and IV?"

I'm just saying, if you read the Starkiller treatment, there is virtually nothing connecting it with the movies we have today. They are after the Kaibur crystal (or something like that), it is a big war, not a rebellion, no empire ... it is just a different movie. As he worked on making it something real, the ideas got distilled, and as he received a budget, even more refined. In reality, the prequels were the movies Lucas hoped to make originally but didn't have the technology or resources to make happen. Adversity made him a better writer and director. But the outline he created had little to do with Jedi as we know them, the force as was explained later, or a rebellion against the empire.

Kirschner and Lucas butted heads heavily on ESB - one reason he didn't return for Jedi; Lucas actually had to do a last minute rewrite for Jedi which may have ended up helping the movie as he didn't have more time to insert anything crazy in it.

I'm serious - read the annotated screenplays. It makes clear that most of the venerated ideas that Lucas says he had "way back when" weren't in any of the early treatments, sometimes didn't show up until very late drafts, and certainly don't fit with the original ideas he had.

I;ve said it before and I'l say it again- the Clone Wars series is, by far, the best Star Wars anything ever made.
Best acting too!


And the ships....!

Don't get me wrong. I am in no way defending Lucas about the prequels. And I'm certainly not saying he had all the details of the entire saga nailed down by 1977. And I agree the movies as they are today are radically different from what he originally wrote.

I'm just saying he did have something of an outline in the beginning, but it was way too ambitious to do during that era of filmmaking. So he broke the story down to a point where he felt it could actually be made into a film. And that's when the details started changing and being refined to the point where it was nothing like what he started with.

Which is also probably why the orginal outline was scrapped when he went to write the prequel trilogy. The problem is, he relied on half-assed retcons, outright BS and "Special Editions" of the OT to force all six to work together. What he should have done was hire a continuity consultant to help him write the prequels so everything would fit together seamlessly.

In fact, my biggest critique of Lucas is that he tinkers too much and doesn't know when to leave something alone. He says he's a perfectionist, but I think he just needs someone else with an equally strong personality to act as a counterbalance.

But I definitely agree that adversity only helped Lucas and ILM creatively, and that it was the biggest contributor to the success of the franchise. Hell, Lucas only decided that Vader would be Luke's father in the second draft of the script (written after his first screenwriter passed away). And IIRC, it wasn't until Jedi's script-writing that he had the idea to have Leia be revealed as Luke's sister. It's now the reason their kiss in ESB is so creepy in retrospect and also makes the scene with Yoda and Obi-Wan after Luke rushed off to save his friends very interesting:

Obi-Wan: "That boy was our only hope."
Yoda: "No. There is another."

I'm quite sure if Lucas had those ideas about the Skywalker family from the beginning, he wouldn't have had Luke and Leia kiss, or at least would have had them react differently. He probably would have had Vader react a lot differently towards Leia during ANH and ESB, especially since she's also Force-sensitive and Vader was able to figure out that Luke was his son.

He had a rough idea of Ep. I-III but far from full scripts. The reality of it is that about 80% or what he had written down about the prequels took place in the Ep. III time frame. Basically, for the first two prequels he had very little thought up and had fill it in with a lot of boring stuff he thought up. That's why Ep. I & II sucked as much as they did. That, and terrible writing/directing that turned out wooden performances from otherwise good actors.


Basically, as seen in Empire and other movies Lucas has been a part of, the less his ideas get implemented and more he gives control away the better the movies become.

i shudder to think how he could have pulled off 1-3 back in the seventies. Im pretty sure the droids would look like something from battlestar galactica or...stop motion miniatures. But at least the ships wouldnt be CGI.