Saga SW Saga In-Depth In-Depth Discussion Thread

I haven't seen the interview, but it sounds like GL being a little bit flippant, just for the sake of provoking discussion. Leia's almost a second McGuffin in the first film. It could also be his own roundabout way of criticising the way his own films turned out, and how certain plotlines and characters got away from him.

 

I think I've seen similar quotes about Leia being the main character and the others "tagging along" elsewhere - possibly in Star Wars on Trial, when people are defending and attacking the way women in general are portrayed in Star Wars.

 

One other thing GL said in the featurette: his absolute favorite science-fiction movie is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Meanwhile, Lucas freely admits that SW is not science fiction at all, but rather a fantasy set in space.

A lot of the detractors of SW over the years have belittled the series using that very argument as a criticism, usually claiming at the same time that SW's box office success killed serious SF films. But it's clear that Lucas sees the fantasy nature of SW as nothing to be ashamed of--and also that he thinks that "hard" SF movies like 2001 have an equally important place in cinema.

 

I wouldn't say that 2001 space odyssey is hard SF. The last 30 minutes + the beginning are pretty fantasy-like, which is not meant to be a critique of it. Blade Runner seems closer to hard SF than 2001.

 

I think he's always said that the Saga was a bit more fantasy than sci-fi, but it's usually lumped in as sci-fi.

 

Cinetropolis isn't working for me.

 

The 2015 Special Edition D&D insider issue has the whole thing.

 

Still, I wonder if amybody else is having issues with cinetropolis.

 

It doesn't work for me either. It used to.

 

I wonder if Vader was still supposed to be a mercenary at this point. The third, fourth, revised fourth, and final drafts of SW/ANH don't use the word "mercenary" but don't use anything in its place either.

 

The first SW posters featured Vader very prominently. And of course after the movie aired the cat was out of the bag. They then knew how massively popular he is.

It's not uncommon for a character to outgrow humble origins. Sometimes a character who only features in a side role becomes so popular he will from then on be featured as part of the main cast.

Darth_Nub

You say thug as if it is a bad thing.

 

Well, it is a bad thing (being defined as "a tough and violent man, esp a criminal" or "a cruel or vicious ruffian, robber, or murderer"), although that wasn't the point I was making. The point was that Vader as originally written by GL wasn't meant to be much more than a one-dimensional bad guy to act as a foil for the heroes, rather than a complex character with deeper motivations for his own behaviour, and perhaps the grand intentions suggested by Foster's novelisation.


Like you said, a character can outgrow humble origins - I was simply interested to find out when this growth began, or if Vader's origins weren't intended to be humble to begin with.

 

What I meant is that there is nothing wrong about a thuggish villain, it is just a flavor like any other. It doesn't make the villain "lesser", some really good villains were thugs.

I agree however that GL probably didn't expect Vader to become so big.

 

Small side note of Eaglelandia: as an American, I get a really weird feeling of cognitive dissonance reading a discussion on an international forum where Vader is referred to as a "thug," because that word is extremely racially charged here in the US. Not that I'd presume to dictate proper vocabulary to non-USians, but I'd never use it myself.

Back to the more important stuff--I tracked down the SW Insider issues with the Lucas/Foster conversations about Splinter of the Mind's Eye from 1976. As Iron_lord mentioned, there are bits in the print version that weren't included in the transcript posted on Cinetropolis.

In the introductory header, Rinzler notes that, at this stage of post-production on SW 1977, Lucas hadn't hired James Earl Jones to re-dub Darth Vader's voice, nor had Ben Burtt created his signature sinister breathing. That explains a lot of why Lucas initially had a hard time picturing Vader as a really scary villain. He was clearly still thinking of Vader's lines as spoken on set by David Prowse--whose rural West Country accent was so un-intimidating that the English crewmembers on the film dubbed him "Darth Farmer."

(In fact, traditionally in Hollywood movies, the West Country accent is used for pirates, a tradition that dates back to Robert Newton as Long John Silver in the 1950 Treasure Island.)

In the print conversation, Lucas mentions to Foster that he wasn't satisfied with the droids on SW 1977, and wants in future films to use "a real robot," "a totally mechanical little robot." He then lays out something of his ideas for this new character:

Obviously here is an anticipation of the questionable comic relief scenes with Artoo in the prequels. More interestingly, the robot design Lucas proposes here may owe something to the diminutive bipedal worker robots from Silent Running--the original model for R2-D2 himself. Of course, Silent Running used the same solution as SW to realize its robots, namely putting people inside them.

At one point Lucas refers to the story's action as being land-bound, like the film Seven Voyages of Sinbad (sic). The film in question (one of Ray Harryhausen's most famous) is actually titled The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. In fact, Lucas made the same mistake in the featurette aired on TCM just a few days ago.

Lucas also uses a term for what later became "the light side of the Force" which I don't recall seeing before: "We know now that Luke is one of the few white knights, working for the light Force and trying to learn the white Force." I guess "the white Force" is analogous to "white magic."

Lucas and Foster have an extended discussion about monsters, where GL sheds light on the ethereal nature of the Dia Noga in early drafts of SW 1977. When Foster tentatively compares it to the invisible-but-deadly Id Monster from Forbidden Planet, Lucas instead explains that it was "much more like a translucent thing, like a big jellyfish." (These particular lines were included in the Cinetropolis text, but shorn of the proper context, following on from a mention of the Dia Noga from early SW drafts.)

GL discusses the scenes in the Sith chapel from the SW third draft of 1975:

Lucas is misremembering slightly: in the 1975 third draft, Vader actually possesses the crystal in the beginning, and it's placed in a position of honor in the Sith chamber of worship, from which Ben Kenobi steals it.

Nonetheless, the slip of GL's memory indicates where his ideas were heading. A "shadow" of the dark Force, on "the verge of personification," has the authority to boss Vader around--it tells him to go get the Kiber Crystal. This "devil" is clearly an early version of the Sith sorcerer who ultimately became Emperor Palpatine.

At this point, this proto-Palpatine figure was apparently some sort of evil Force being, not quite corporeal. Perhaps he might've been some ancient sorcerer who'd long ago ascended to a higher plane of existence--like the super-evolved, impossibly old, and irredeemably evil Eddorians, the ultimate villains of Doc Smith's Lensman series.

(Smith's Eddorians are countered by the similarly evolved but benevolent Arisians, reclusive beings who endow the best warriors of the galactic Civilization with supreme mental powers comparable to the Force. The corps of Lensmen thus created is a clear forerunner of the Jedi Order.)

The persistence of early SW drafts in Lucas's memory is evident when he forgets that in the finished film he killed Ben Kenobi:

The Lucas/Foster conversation was reprinted nearly in full in the SW Insider 2015 Special Edition issue. However, the second part of the article was re-typeset, and the following lines were (apparently inadvertently) truncated:

Foster's interjection and the first clause in Lucas's reply have disappeared in the reprinted version. (The text in question is on page 25 of Insider issue #146, and page 45 of the 2015 Special Edition issue.)

Also, Foster notes that when Luke heals the injured Leia with the Kiber Crystal, it's not "too strong" of an ending (as GL worried) because "He's not bringing her back from the dead." Which is essentially what Luke does in the published novel.

 

While I was busy working out the apparent trend of GL's thoughts about possible Willow sequels, a really alarming thought occurred to me.

GL has always been enamored with the Norse legend of Sigurd: that's where he got the idea to leave Luke a sword from his dead father, after all.

Of course, in Richard Wagner's adaptation of the Sigurd legend in the Ring Cycle operas, Sigurd/Siegfried is conceived as the incestuous union of the brother and sister couple, Siegmund and Sieglinde, who have sex despite knowing about their relationship. Moreover, typically Siegfried's parents, and he himself, are depicted with the blond hair and blue eyes that would later become a fetish among the Wagner-mad Nazis.

This has some extraordinary implications for the subtext of the SW saga. After all, as far back as 1975, Lucas (who already knew quite a lot about the Sigurd legend) instructed Ralph McQuarrie to draw Luke and Leia as physically identical, giving both of them blond hair and blue eyes.

Lucas has, many years after the fact, stated that even then, he wanted the two to be siblings. But what if that isn't just hyperbole? What if, inspired by Wagner's Ring operas, he actually considered the idea of Luke and Leia being brother and sister as far back as 1975--and decided they should hook up anyway?

 

That's an interesting possibility - maybe he changed his mind after concluding audiences wouldn't stand for it?

 

Yes, that was what I was thinking. I had images of cinemas full of wide-eyed viewers - jaws agape, straw-bales blowing through the shocked/horrified silence.

 

It wouldn't play in Peoria, that's for sure.

 

In the original script for SW 1977, Luke and Leia are not twins, as they aren't the same age. Luke's age ranges from 18-22, and Leia is 16.

But considering the Wagnerian source material, this isn't an objection to the theory. Quite the opposite. In the opera Die Walküre, Siegmund and Sieglinde aren't twins either... only half-siblings, sired by Odin on different mothers.

Not only that... in the 1975 third draft of The Star Wars, Luke's father survived for several years into his boyhood, since Luke can say that he "told me many stories" about his old friend, the great Jedi Ben Kenobi. So he was clearly alive long enough to father an illegitimate daughter somewhere.

Luke also knows exactly when and where his father died: the Battle of Condawn (though evidently he's not aware of the fact that Darth Vader, a traitor to the Jedi Order who also fought there, was the man personally responsible). Note the name: Condawn. This is a play on the Battle of Camlann, the final battle in Arthurian legend where Mordred killed King Arthur.

So Luke's father is a King Arthur figure, which would make Ben Kenobi a Merlin of sorts.... and of course Arthur, despite being married to Queen Guinevere, fathered Mordred out of wedlock.

And, meanwhile, the SW second draft from earlier in 1975 was the point where Lucas considered turning Luke into a girl... and in that draft, the Princess Leia figure in need of rescue was Luke's older brother.

I don't think I like where this is going.

New thought: since Darth Vader is clearly taking some inspiration from Mordred, who is King Arthur's son... and Luke is also the son of a symbolic Arthur figure...

According to The Making of SW, Lucas told Alan Dean Foster in 1975 that the third SW film would be the "saga of the Skywalker family," and that in the climax of the second film, we would "learn who Darth Vader is."

Father Vader was of course not yet even an idea in Lucas's head, so that's clearly not what he meant. But just perhaps, was there once another idea in its place, in fact, a precursor: Brother Vader?

(Old-school adventure game fans, you may now proceed to quote Monkey Island 2.)

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Lucas has always referred to Luke's conflict with Vader as being intentionally Oedipal in nature. In the classic form of the Oedipus complex, as formulated by Sigmund Freud, the hero wants to murder his father--and marry his mother.

So combine that with Wagnerian influence, which brings the incest down a generation... was Luke really going to kill his evil brother, a dark reflection of himself, and end up marrying his sister?

Plus, during the writing of ESB, Lucas ended up deciding both that Vader should be Luke's dad, and that Leia would end up with Han Solo... both of which are decisions that quite evidently contradicted his original ideas from SW 1977.

 

The name of the Battle of Condawn, where Vader killed Luke's father in the 1975 third draft of SW, is also apparently is a pun on the adjective condign, the dictionary definition of which is: "suitable as a proper punishment for a crime."

Yikes.

 

OK, here's one more for the disturbing thoughts pile.

In Willow, the two-headed dragon is evidently a symbol of sorts for the eventual romantic union of Madmartigan and Sorsha. And in the early version of Willow illustrated by Moebius, Sorsha was evidently a half-Elf, the daughter of the Elf king of Tir Asleen.

But the diminutive, bearded Elf King of Moebius's drawings is clearly modeled on Arthur Rackham's illustrations of the dwarf-king Alberich in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle. Wagner's Alberich impregnates a mortal woman, the wife of the King of Burgundy, and she gives birth to the sinister black-haired knight Hagen of Tronje.

This latter role--the half-Elf foster son of a mortal King--was evidently meant for the raven-haired Madmartigan, who (according to the Willow novelization) was the foster son of the mortal King in whose realm he grew up. This would make him and Sorsha incestuous half-siblings, Wagner style.

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So is there a symbol in SW that equates to the two-headed dragon of Willow, the apparent symbol of incestuous romance?

Yes--and it's been in front of our eyes for 37 years now: the twin yellow suns of Tatooine, whose color corresponds to Luke and Leia's shared blonde hair in Ralph McQuarrie's 1975 concept art.

The twin suns go all the way back to the 1974 rough draft, where they are seemingly little more than an incidental detail of the setting. In the opening text of the 1975 second draft, though, the twin suns are equated with Luke himself, as he is the prophesied "son of the suns" who will save the galaxy:

This quote recurs at the beginning of the third draft, from later that same year. It was after completing the 1975 second draft, of course, that Lucas briefly thought about making Luke into a girl. And the third draft is the point at which he reintroduced Princess Leia... now with blond hair, cut in exactly the same style as Luke's.

Come to think of it: although we meet both of Leia Aquilae's parents--King Kayos and Queen Breha--in the 1974 rough draft, we never hear or see anything about Annikin Starkiller's mother.

Except once, in this exchange, when General Luke Skywalker first greets his old Jedi comrade, Kane Starkiller:

So in other words, it seems that Annikin's mother, whoever she was, had a wandering eye for romantic liaisons.

So... could Annikin really be the son of Queen Breha, born out of wedlock? And was her relationship with Kane Starkiller like the family dynamic in The Searchers--where John Wayne's character is clearly in love with his brother's wife, and may even be the father of her daughter? That is an extraordinary question, but I think the answer is a tentative "yes." If so, it would mean that incest has been implicit at the heart of SW from its very beginning.

 

W.....T......F