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Wait a second, does Vader realize who he is speaking to at the beginning of ANH?

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Chichikov said:
I'll admit, I haven't dug super deep into the history of the making of Star Wars. I saw a documentary once, and was exposed to some other info through videos and articles over the years, but nothing really exhaustive.
But I've seen the film, and nothing on screen suggests that this story is anything but your standard standalone adventure with very obvious calls to serials like Flash Gordon (which is what he originally wanted to make, right?),
Maybe it was all studio execs meddling, I didn't get the sense that it happened to a large degree, but again, not an expert, but if it was, I think it was for the best. And I know it's not a really popular opinion, but I kinda wish Star Wars stayed like that.
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I think that's essentially it.

You could sum up the original idea for Star Wars as "what if we made a big budget, modern (for '77) realization of a random Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers serial episode?"

Did Lucas have ideas for what could happen before or after that random episode? Well, of course. Who wouldn't.
 
Supposedly the novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye was supposed to be a back-up sequel if A New Hope didn't do well, it was written right when the original movie came out (after Alan Dean Foster wrote the novelization of the movie)

In it, there is even more Luke-Leia romance, so I really don't think they were meant to be brother/sister at the time.
 
The original novelisation of Star Wars is interesting as well. My sister found a copy in a charity bookfair for me. Some of the minor names are switched around (e.g. Wedge Antilles is the captain of Leai's ship at the start) and the backstory for the Empire and the Emperor is completely different. The emperor is nothing more than a figurehead, a weak puppet used by the beaurceacy.
 
I thought this thread was gonna be about
how Leia lies to Vader's face about being on a diplomatic mission when he just saw her leave with the plans 5 minutes prior at the end of Rogue One
 
BocoDragon said:
Yes, they shared a past. Obi Wan trained a Jedi named Vader who went renegade. That's it.

Nothing about Vader being Luke's father or being Anakin Skywalker was planned when they filmed that movie.
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It's interesting how well that reveal works when you go back and watch ANH. Taken purely alone, they don't necessarily mean anything - 'now I am the master' etc are just illustrating a previous relationship between the two. But having seen ESB it is easy to project hidden meaning on some parts of ANH which clearly weren't there. Things like 'Vader killed your father' I read as Vader effectively taking over from anakin and consuming him so anakin is 'dead', things like that.

Leia feels much more like a bolted on plot change
 
Chichikov said:
George Lucas also said that American Graffiti is a remake of I Vitelloni.
George Lucas says a lot of things.

As a side note, I never understood why would he or some fans insist on this point, it's just a question of process, some writers plan everything in advance some don't, neither approach in inherently better.
There are some great writers who have no idea where the story will take them when they start writing. I guess maybe part of it comes from the desire of some people to think of these movies as a peek into this fully formed universe. I don't know, I think they're just, you know, movies.
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I have no problem with Lucas making stuff up as he went along, but Vader being called Vader is such a big giveaway/coincidence that it would be a larger leap of faith to think he actually never planned it, imo.



The Hamburglar said:
Better question would be why didn't Luke have a different name other than sky walker if he was supposed to be hidden lol.
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For all we know Skywalker and Kenobi are super common names on Tatooine.
 
Maledict said:
The original novelisation of Star Wars is interesting as well. My sister found a copy in a charity bookfair for me. Some of the minor names are switched around (e.g. Wedge Antilles is the captain of Leai's ship at the start) and the backstory for the Empire and the Emperor is completely different. The emperor is nothing more than a figurehead, a weak puppet used by the beaurceacy.
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Yeah, and if I recall correctly the current Emperor was just the latest in a long line of Emperors. When you say "original novelisation", did they actually release another one that fits the canon more?

spekkeh said:
For all we know Skywalker and Kenobi are super common names on Tatooine.
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Yet not a single one of these unrelated Skywalkers and Kenobis has ever appeared in the millions of EU novels and stories released...
 
I see this was already posted. Well never mind then.

xsONJFq.gif
 
RotJ Vader: "So you have a twin sister? Your feelings have now betrayed her, too. Obi-Wan was wise to hide her from me. Now his failure is complete."

RotJ Luke: "Fuck."
 
zeemumu said:
I thought this thread was gonna be about
how Leia lies to Vader's face about being on a diplomatic mission when he just saw her leave with the plans 5 minutes prior at the end of Rogue One
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Did he really? AFAIR he didn't see her and didn't know it either.
 
This doesn't add up. He was told the twins died. He knew Luke was his son, he didn't know Leia was his daughter, he then figured out Leia existed using the force. Wouldn't he have thought that the second he knew Luke existed?
 
Kettch said:
The other big one is that the ewoks should have been wookies. I don't have as big of a problem with ewoks as most people, but wookie slaves just would have worked so much better. You would have given both Chewie and Han much needed relevance in the film where they have to convince the beaten down slave laborers to rise up against their oppressors, and brought in Han's backstory of having saved Chewie at the expense of his Imperial career.
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Doesn't the story go that Lucas wanted Wookiees but an army of giants was functionally impossible in 1983?

VendettaRed07 said:
I'll just take this opportunity to say it for the 100,000th time that making Leia and Luke brother and sister was one of the most needlessly stupid dumb pointless decisions ever.

They just had to ride the "Luke I am your father" train didn't they. They just had to cash in on it again.

It's way way worse than any prequel retroactive midichlorian bullshit, because it completely changes the first two movies and just makes 10000 questions like this one pop up.
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Lucas backed himself into a corner. Leia wasn't supposed to be the other Skywalker, it was supposed to be a whole new character. There was at one point a plan for more movies after Jedi that would have included that character but Lucas dropped that pretty quickly and condensed whatever ideas he had down into Jedi (including having Palpatine as the end boss). That was also going to include the second Skywalker but bringing in a new major character last second wasn't going to work well to he shoehorned that whole thing into Leia's character to resolve that plotline without adding anyone else.

Kettch said:
What? Luke clearly had feelings for Leia in ANH. He's captivated by her in every scene. From her hologram to their cell meeting to his defensiveness when Han teases him on the Falcon to her kiss in the hangar. ESB is more ambiguous, but there are still plenty of signs there.

Maybe it's harder to notice when everyone knows that she's his sister.
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To be fair, long lost relatives of the opposite sex are actually extremely likely to be attracted to each other, as people tend to be more likely to be drawn to those with similar genetic/phenotypic traits and the familial bond hasn't been formed. Sooooo as creepy as it is, it's actually quite realistic lol.

Maledict said:
The original novelisation of Star Wars is interesting as well. My sister found a copy in a charity bookfair for me. Some of the minor names are switched around (e.g. Wedge Antilles is the captain of Leai's ship at the start) and the backstory for the Empire and the Emperor is completely different. The emperor is nothing more than a figurehead, a weak puppet used by the beaurceacy.
Click to expand...
That emperor stuff doesn't even make sense though. O.o Like, Tarkin said the Emperor disbanded the entire Galactic senate, and even the Imperial commanders on the Death Star were shocked. I'm not sure how him being a powerless figurehead works into that.

gaugebozo said:
This doesn't add up. He was told the twins died. He knew Luke was his son, he didn't know Leia was his daughter, he then figured out Leia existed using the force. Wouldn't he have thought that the second he knew Luke existed?
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Anakin didn't know it was twins. Hell, Padmé didn't even know she was having twins.
 
I'm not convinced that it was even finalized at that time that Vader fathered Luke and Leia, since I think those characters were mostly written to make sense in the standalone Star Wars. I could be wrong, though. And even in the context of all the movies he may not have known that she was his daughter, or even that he had a daughter, at that time.

Star Wars is such a goddamned good movie. I always watch it around Christmastime and should probably try and do that this weekend.
 
gaugebozo said:
This doesn't add up. He was told the twins died. He knew Luke was his son, he didn't know Leia was his daughter, he then figured out Leia existed using the force. Wouldn't he have thought that the second he knew Luke existed?
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He found out about Leia when Luke was thinking about her.

I think.
 
BocoDragon said:
That's not entirely true, and yet you are still half right.

Lucas did have a much larger story than in the original movie - he had a whole story bible notebook and multiple movies worth of story - but it certainly wasn't the plan that we actually saw realized in I-VI.

Lucas did know the original movie might be a one-off...And yet he did want "Episode IV - A New Hope" on the original movie, but Fox (or the common sense of the day) wouldn't let him.

Lucas didn't necessarily want the title "Episode IV" on the movie because he had concrete plans for a I-III and V-VI, but because he loved the feeling he had walking into saturday morning serials like Buck Rogers when they were already on Episode XII and he had no idea what what happening. Or the feeling of watching The Hidden Fortress and not knowing shit about Japanese history. He liked that feeling of wandering into the middle of the story knowing fuck-all about the world, and having to catch up anyway. A New Hope is definitely that kind of movie that starts in media res and doesn't quite conclude the overall story... If that's the only movie that were ever made, Lucas would have felt satisfaction that it worked on that level. And so "Episode IV" was kind of a clever nod that it was the middle part of some sprawling saga you'd never see the whole of. Very clever for 1977.

But you are right in that Lucas didn't exactly know where it was going. In the evidence we have of his original notebook "bible", it was a whole lot of random crap that didn't necessarily make it into the movies. It's a typical pie-in-the-sky notebook of random ideas. Sure, if given the chance, he'd fill in I-III and V+... but he'd essentially have to make it up as he went along....
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I've seen this mentioned first hand by Lucas. It went like "we went overboard on the script so I decided to just cut it up and start right in the middle".

How much of the original script/pitch is being known. Did we see Luke bullseyeing womprats?
 
Boney said:
I've seen this mentioned first hand by Lucas. It went like "we went overboard on the script so I decided to just cut it up and start right in the middle".

How much of the original script/pitch is being known. Did we see Luke bullseyeing womprats?
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The original script is online somewhere and it's vastly different. It's been years since I read it but Anakin was a main character from the get go, and Alderaan is a real setting instead of just something that got blown up
 
For years i had to me that Jedis just died like Obi Wan did. Disappear.

Yoda also disappears, right?

Yet i was watching all the movies in sequence and the end of episode III (i bet you all talked about this for years) yoda tells Obi Wan about Qui Gon being "alive" somehow

And then when vader strikes Obi Wan he disappear... and vader seems quite puzzled about it, stepping on Obi Wan robe

And the there´s the talk about
Obi Wan being alive for more new movies that made the rounds a few weeks back
 
As I recall, Lucas invented the whole "Leia as Vader's daughter" thing during RotJ because he needed some way to make Luke angry and it conveniently torpedoed the love triangle the series had going up until that point. But it's a rather clumsy retcon because it doesn't make much sense that Vader wouldn't have figured it out considering how much time he spent extracting information from Leia in the first film.
 
fna84 said:
another question..how does vader not know that luke SKYWALKER exists?
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This has been retconned now, but in the latest Darth Vader comics by Marvel, one of Vader's spies goes to find out who shot down the Death Star and the spy returns to tell him it was done by a boy named Luke Skywalker.
 
gaugebozo said:
This doesn't add up. He was told the twins died. He knew Luke was his son, he didn't know Leia was his daughter, he then figured out Leia existed using the force. Wouldn't he have thought that the second he knew Luke existed?
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He didn't know he was having twins, Padme didn't tell him or didn't know.
tuffy said:
But it's a rather clumsy retcon because it doesn't make much sense that Vader wouldn't have figured it out considering how much time he spent extracting information from Leia in the first film.
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1) You don't know how much time he spent extracting information from her, it's not even remotely implied. 2) He says her resistance to it is "considerable" so he wasn't able to get much information from her. 3) She doesn't know she's a Skywalker, what information about her being his daughter would he have been able to pull from her mind when neither of them knew? Her mind can't reveal something it has no knowledge of and Vader only cared about the Rebel's base location.
 
autumnleaf said:
1) You don't know how much time he spent extracting information from her, it's not even remotely implied. 2) He says her resistance to it is "considerable" so he wasn't able to get much information from her. 3) She doesn't know she's a Skywalker, what information about her being his daughter would he have been able to pull from her mind when neither of them knew? Her mind can't reveal something it has no knowledge of and Vader only cared about the Rebel's base location.
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Luke didn't know he was Vader's son - and the Emperor gave no hint that he was beforehand - but Vader seemingly figured it out for himself in the middle of their fight. Although the Force isn't good for revealing the location of rebel bases (which would've made for a very short movie), it doesn't make sense that Vader would've been able to sense his relation to Luke and yet not sense his relation to Leia until reading Luke's thoughts despite spending more time with her.
 
BocoDragon said:
Yup. And no one was concerned about any of Vader's children yet since he wasn't yet decided to be Anakin. Vader was just a random space baddie.

It'd be like wondering who Captain Phasma's daughter is right now.
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Vader isn't just a random space baddie though. He and Obi-wan clearly have a history based on their little chin wag on the death star.

Edit: I'm a bit slow.
 
BocoDragon said:
Yes, they shared a past. Obi Wan trained a Jedi named Vader who went renegade. That's it.

Nothing about Vader being Luke's father or being Anakin Skywalker was planned when they filmed that movie.
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I always took the scene of Obi wan smiling before dying as "Your son is here Vader" as well as Vader himself being an excellent pilot as hints of him being Lukes father.
 
UnemployedVillain said:
Well considering her last name isn't Skywalker and he didn't know he had twins...I'd say he definitely didn't know
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Which is such BS by the way. Let's assume for one second that this technologically advanced society doesn't have something similar to our ultrasound equipment to monitor a baby and notice that two were in the womb. But even if you ignore that, Anakin is a Jedi! He can feel the force, it flows through all living beings (i.e. the Skywalker twins in Padme's womb). That he can't sense two children inside Padme is nuts!

I've loved Star Wars since I was a kid, but sometimes it is the dumbest friggin' thing on the face of the Earth.
 
Randam said:
Did he really? AFAIR he didn't see her and didn't know it either.
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He watched the ship leave after carving through that hallway of rebel forces. He knows that ship is with the rebels and she's on the ship so he knew she was full of it.
 
tuffy said:
Luke didn't know he was Vader's son - and the Emperor gave no hint that he was beforehand - but Vader seemingly figured it out for himself in the middle of their fight. Although the Force isn't good for revealing the location of rebel bases (which would've made for a very short movie), it doesn't make sense that Vader would've been able to sense his relation to Luke and yet not sense his relation to Leia until reading Luke's thoughts despite spending more time with her.
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Personally, I can rationalize it enough for me. Luke and Vader were fighting and using the force. They're probably both 'probing' each other with the force a bit, or at least feel something in the other force user actively using the force. There's a huge trope in fiction about the 'intimacy' of personal combat, after all. That may be enough for Vader to feel something familiar about Luke, either to conclude his parentage directly or to put enough pieces together in the moment.

With Leia, he didn't even feel it was necessary to use the force at all. She was beneath him. And even if she's 'strong with the force' as Luke and Vader are, she's not actively using it. So there's nothing for him to sense, or at least no reason for him to try to sense it, in that regard.
 
TangoAlphaLima said:
Which is such BS by the way. Let's assume for one second that this technologically advanced society doesn't have something similar to our ultrasound equipment to monitor a baby and notice that two were in the womb. But even if you ignore that, Anakin is a Jedi! He can feel the force, it flows through all living beings (i.e. the Skywalker twins in Padme's womb). That he can't sense two children inside Padme is nuts!

I've loved Star Wars since I was a kid, but sometimes it is the dumbest friggin' thing on the face of the Earth.
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The force is a bunch of bullshit really. The plots in virtually all the movies simply isn't prepared to deal with all the implications of force powers. It also seems to have a bit of a "problem of evil" thing going on.
 
Riposte said:
The force is a bunch of bullshit really. The plots in virtually all the movies simply isn't prepared to deal with all the implications of force powers. It also seems to have a bit of a "problem of evil" thing going on.
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Isn't the "problem of evil" fixed by The Force essentially being neutral? Like the Bendu in Rebels.
 
I thought this was gonna be about stopping to catch her out about the ambassador.
After Rogue one he should have been like 'Bitch, I literally just saw you steal the plans, so let's just drop this pretence and I just force choke the truth out of you. Mkay?
"
 
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