PT Lightsaber as a God weapon.

In the prequels lightsabers were treated like god weapons. they could slice through anything. however in return of the jedi you all remember luke with his saber in the sail barge battle. he was just kinda knocking people around with his saber not actually killing them. when i was i kid i always thought you needed to exert a certain amount of force to actually cut through something with a a saber. i guess lucas decided to intentionally tone it down during the sail barge battle just to avoid the R rating since pg13 didnt exist yet. i still prefer the idea of having to put a certain amount of force into a saber swing to determine if it cuts through something or just glances off. it tones the weapon down a little and makes it more dramatic.

 

Depends on the density. Denser materials will be harder to get through. A few of the sail barge folks had on some kind of armor so there may have been some momentum gained from getting hit. I prefer the idea that Luke put a little of The Force into it, and sent them flying out of the way.

 

Put quite simply -

Real world reasons:
It wasn't exactly easy in 1983 to show people's limbs being severed all over the place

In universe:
Luke was probably not going for a direct kill, rather using his saber to defend himself while taking them out in a more... humane manner, I suppose. Not that killing is at all humane lol

 

There are moments in the OT where the lightsabre has the same effect as in the PT, Obi Wan slicing through the two thugs in the cantina comes to mind. It also sliced through all sorts of material during those movies, so I don't really see a difference. If anything, the sail barge scene is the exception.

 

More like in 1982-83, Lucas and Marquand were using extras whereas in the PT, there were CGI robots being sliced up under Lucas's direction. Lucas was even debating showing Maul being sliced in two almost all the way up to the last minute. The idea is that Lightsabers could always cleave people in two, but Lucas and Marquand opted not to depict that in ROTJ.

 

he was killing them.

 

Not going with this explanation I'm afraid. A quick clean saber kill is a good deal more humane than knocking the opponent into the Sarlaac pit where they will find a new definition of pain and suffering as they are slowly digested over 1000 years.

 

They probably died when he slashed them, it was just that they were knocked away at the same time. As I recall, the only time someone is actually shown struggling from the sarlacc is when it was someone Luke kicked off. The ones he slashed were never shown afterwards; I just assumed they'd died, I guess. In the PT the enemies were, up until the last half of ROTS, always droids, so they were just cleaved right through. We didn't see all that many clones even killed by lightsabers, now that I think about it–but if you look at the ones that were (specifically, the scene with Zett Jukassa, the kid who dies in front of Bail Organa) they fall away from him in a similar manner when he slashes them, just not as far.

 

I always assumed it was the lack of CGI available in the early 80's.

 

Yeah, I think it's a limit in tech and...discretion on the matter of graphic violence.

It sorta reminds me of those old westerns. When the cowboy fires his six shooter, and the bad guy suddenly grabs his abdomen, winces, and falls dead...but you don't see a thing. There's no hole, no blood, nothing.

The bad guys in ROTJ sorta do the same thing. Mark waves his flashlight and they sorta clutch at their wound, let out a scream, and fall. I assume that they probably died pretty quickly, I don't think they survived what was obviously supposed to be a lightsaber slash through the torso....even though we don't really see the lightsaber slash deep, I think we can assume it. It's a lightsaber, not a wiffle bat.

 

That is the difference between this...



And this...

 

That has always been my interpretation as well. They couldn't exactly have severed limbs flying all over the place though.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's been said that the relative tameness of the scene was a direct response to the bloody slasher films at the time; Lucas didn't want to be lumped in with that.

It never bothered me because everything moves so fast in the scene. Luke's just trying to incapacitate the countless bad guys charging at him as quickly as possible. Some seem to only be disarmed, but others suffer mortal wounds (we can assume that all end up dead anyways after a pretty definitive explosion). It seems in the court of Jabba the Hutt, Luke clearly isn't too fond going easy on his henchmen.

On the original topic, there doesn't seem to be a difference between the abilities of a lightsabers in the PT and OT; we just see more of it used and get a better idea of its capabilities. One time that a clear limitation is shown is when Qui-Gon is attempting to cut through the door of the Trade Federation battleship. Not quite as easy as flimsy Battle Droids. I'm also glad the deflection ability was seen again as well; I believe it was only exclusively seen in the Sail Barge scene. Now, if there was to ever be a clear difference in the usage of lightsabers, it's between ANH and ESB. Lucas described them as being relatively massive at the time, and only practical as a two-handed weapon. People criticize the Obi-Wan/Vader duel in retrospect, but it wasn't at the fault of Guinness or Prowse; they just had a different idea for how lightsabers worked at the time.

 

conan rules!

 

Yep. Pretty sure those guys were dead at Luke's hand.

I'm not a proponent of overdoing the "make the OT better" thing, but you know those glowing, golden-yellow cut marks used in the PT (like when Vader cut down the Separatist Council on Mustafar)?

Yeah, I actually wouldn't mind if some of those were put in the OT (and I kind of expect them to return for the ST, anyway, so why not?). Luke's wrist. Sail Barge. Maybe Vader's wrist.

Particularly aboard the Khetanna, though. Make it a little less "hit by a baseball bat-y."

 

Well, for ROTS, the film was PG-13 which Lucas insisted the MPAA give it. So the bits that we actually saw were due to the rating which didn't exist in 83 and "Conan The Destroyer" came out on June 29th, 1984 with "Red Dawn" being the first official PG-13 film coming out on August 10th.

 

Actually, there is at least one known survivor from the sail barge's explosion.

 

It was the same way that the sepratists leaders were being killed in ROTS. It was very similar to the way the guards on Jabba's barge were getting killed.

 

Ruthlessly cut down one by one as they tried desperately to escape? Luke was killing the guards because they were trying to kill the him and the Rebels, he had slightly better motivation than Anakin. I think the context in which they are killed should play into the rating system as well.

 

In the sail barge rescue in ROTJ, you can hear the sound effect of the light saber strikes. He was making contact with the bad guys, however, he wasn't running them through like we saw Maul do to Qui Gon.

I was fine with how the light sabers were used in the PT. It would stand to reason that in the Jedi's Golden Age, they would use their sabers a lot more and in different ways than we saw Luke using his because they had a better understanding of their weapons.

 

"I set my lightsaber from kill...to stun"

"oh yeah, great, great, if anyone attacks us we can singe them to death"

 

No. I was referring to the manner in which Luke and Anakin were killing the guards on Jabba's barge and the Separatist leaders. That they were being just sliced and not having cut off limbs everywhere. Not that I was comparing the circumstances they were in. Just the way the enemies were being killed. That both those scenes were in similar fashion to each other.