[trebleshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BigHanksCustoms

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.

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).

Quote:

Originally Posted by redx24

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.

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by perrych

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.

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.

Quote:

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.

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?"