Saga SW Saga In-Depth In-Depth Discussion Thread

So, maybe along the likes of Rokur Gepta, the "Sorcerer of Tund" from the Lando Calrissian Adventures?

 

I wonder if Lucas told Zahn to give Palpatine the cloning tech in the Thrawn books because Palpatine was behind the Clone Wars.

 

An explanation of the labels:

The X-axis represents Luke's relationship with Vader; namely, is Darth Vader his father (ie, his real father, not Annikin Skywalker) or his elder brother?

The Y-axis represents the nature of Luke's relationship with Leia: Incestuous, Not Incestuous, or she's Dead by the end of ROTJ.

As for the various cultural allusions: they're notes to John Mollo for the middle section of Star Wars, circa 1975.

 

To segue into something not quite movie-related (although still "G-canon" as the old label went)... I've been playing The Force Unleashed lately. And I think I've realized just why this particular video game was given such a high canon level by GL.

So you play in TFU (not to be confused with TFA!) as "Starkiller," Darth Vader's secret Sith Apprentice. Real name of Galen Marek, because allusions to Roman history (specifically, the guy who came up with the "four humours" theory of medicine) are always fun. Doubly so when it gets you a protagonist whose name sounds vaguely like "Elim Garak."

But that's not why the game is interesting to me.

Here's why:

Galen has a training/information droid, PROXY, provided by Darth Vader. This droid has a skeletal endostructure, around which he projects holographic "skin" so as to mimic the appearance of any human he might choose.



Also, Galen's love interest in the game is his pilot: blond, blue-eyed Juno Eclipse. Another Roman first name, though her face looks like she could be a model for Miss Rhinemaiden 1933. So what does PROXY do when Galen asks him about Juno? Why, use his skin to project a hologram of her... while she's standing right next to him.



"Say... you wouldn't happen to work nights at the Yoshiwara nightclub, by any chance?"

I'm pretty sure you guys can figure out where this is going. ;P



In case you were in any doubt that this was a deliberate Metropolis reference, in the very next cutscene Galen informs Juno that she's actually the eighth pilot to have worked for him -- the previous seven all having died.

Recall that Brigitte Helm didn't just play the two Marias (flesh and robot) in Fritz Lang's Metropolis... she also played Death during Freder's nightmare, in which statues of Death and the Seven Deadly Sins come to life in a cathedral.



TFU also has a couple of homages to Johnny Weissmuller's 1930s Tarzan films -- not only in Galen being an orphan born on Kashyyyk (one idea GL mooted for Han Solo's backstory), but also in the locale of Raxus Prime, AKA the Secret Elephant Droid Graveyard.

Also, according to Wookieepedia the bulk of the game takes place in 3 BBY, and Princess Leia has a pretty significant cameo during the later levels. Going off of Leia's canon age of 19 during SW 1977 (one year older than Carrie Fisher was in real life), that means Leia is around 16 during the events of TFU... the same age as Brigitte Helm when she filmed Metropolis.



Ulp.

 

Obi-Wan is my personal favourite, that said, i have a couple of views that go against how you see him - and the PT Jedi for that matter.

the PT Jedi have overseen thousand/s of years of peace, they do not believe that any Sith are left, but they are in an awkward position where they're being dragged into politics and a looming war, started and later orchestrated by Palpatine. the reason i bring up Palpatine so early on, is because Palpatine (obviously) figured into the fall of the Jedi (ROTS) extremely early on, playing the long game. i doubt Anakin was even a part of his plan in the early stages (before Qui-Gonn found him). The jedi are suddenly involved in a war. this part is what many see as the Jedi's biggest mistake, some say because it goes against all facets of the Code/Council (when the same people say that the Jedi are supposed the be guardians of peace/justice........ how do you accomplish this by overseeing a war against the Republic (good guys/peaceful) that would threaten destroy, regardless if being involved or not, the Republic?). my explanation on the Code/beliefs is that the Sith and Jedi all have conflicting beliefs/views, as does the Light Side of the Force and Dark Side of the Force, respectively. so like your example on Obi-Wan being a hypocrite - i dont really think thats fair on the character, or the lore/justifications surrounding the actions of Obi/PT Jedi. like my earlier question regarding "what do you do when you're the Guardians of peace/justice, but end up having to decide to be involved in a war or not (the people threatening war, are the ones threatening peace/justice - at the same time, conflicting the way the Light Side has been presented, defensive, fluid, etc)?"
so to begin with, i guess my point is, these codes/light/dark are presented in a way that were always going to be contradicted. this started as far back as the OT, with Luke needing to go after Vader, to save the galaxy (yet is in contradiction to the way the Jedi had been presented to that point too...)

my argument in Obi-Wan's defense is along the lines of the way Luke was shown to HAVE to take on Vader, to save the galaxy. Obi-Wan was simply doing the greater good, he knew there was no going back for Anakin, when Anakin harmed his lover, Padme (the yellow eyes also may have been a big hint ) and this way, Obi-Wan is actually properly following the code, stopping further harm (defending the innocent) to Padme (and the unborn children), while also defending the galaxy/Republic.
this is also how i view the Jedi in regard to how they were pushed into a war. Palpatine manipulated it, he is the most cunning player in the Saga and his exploits, i think, speak for themselves. while i dont think the Jedi were perfect, they were at least made fallible, both in relation the 'code' and the way they see the Force (light/dark sides). They were obviously not prepared for Palpatine's manipulations - or even his Sith presence.

Qui-Gonn fascinates me as character - but more so for his inclusion within the story. it wasnt accidental that he openly questions why/how the council is run, and chooses to not participate in the every-day proceedings. yet, he's still a part of the Order (not the Council). so this opens up the possibility of seeing the Jedi in different ways, no, it actively ensures you do question how the Jedi were ran. so while i believe theres a few ways to see the PT Jedi, i certainly believe that they were purposely made out to be fallible. the same with how we are supposed to view the Force, on both sides, and the more complex intricacies on either side (or even a middle point).

the Prophecy was obviously a huge introduction into the Saga, and again, i think this is also there to be seen by different view points. its clear it was a major focus - and a conflicting one withing the Order/Council. the fact that the Force created Anakin and Anakin does what he does (his entire character, from good to bad to redeemed) goes to show how mysterious the force is and how it works/figures into the GFFA.

Obi-Wan was made in TCW to be even more of a hypocrite when he does his thing with Satine (when only a short few years later, hes harking on to Anakin about Padme).

so overall, i blame Palpatine for the Jedi's fall, while attributing some minor things to the Jedi, more so how they reacted in certain situations !once they were actually in the war! with Dooku being the subject of some questionable decisions from the Jedi (hunting him down, using Ventress and Vos to do so), Mace and how he handled going after Palpatine, etc.

i dont believe that Obi-Wan acted against the Jedi, or ever did anything that could be seen as acting against the Jedi - just like Qui-Gonn, he able to get away with certain things, or, was in control of what he was doing (lets not get started on how we can perceive "attachments" lol). he was always a based, loyal, compassionate, caring Jedi - who believed in the Republic, Democracy and Justice. he's literally the best mentor that Luke could have asked for and doesnt do anything hypocritical that isnt already inherently hypocritical by nature - which is how the Light and Dark side, i have to reiterate, has always been. since i havent said how the Dark side is hypocritical, how about this - they always want to prolong their life, yet they have to take life/energy to do so. they want ultimate power, but they can't reach this power because they destroy themselves ( introduction of rule of two). they have the rule of two, yet its a continuous cycle of master, apprentice, whoever can outlast the other. fear, hate, love, caring - various emotions (some fans see these as good things - however the principles have been based off things like Stoicism, monks, etc, where emotions are often seen as negatives) are fuel for the dark side, yet the dark side is always taking, destroying and deforming everything in its path.

 

I've now finished playing through The Force Unleashed (both endings.) I'll post more in-depth thoughts later, but for now I'll say: I thought the retcon backstory for the Alliance logo was hokey back when DC Comics used it for Superman.

 

OK, here's some more of my post-playthrough thoughts on The Force Unleashed:

The boss fight of the game's first level pits Galen Marek/Starkiller against fugitive Jedi Rahm Kota. The fight ends with Starkiller defeating Kota by blinding him with his lightsaber -- an idea that was later reused with Kanan during Season 2 of Rebels.

Later, though, Starkiller needs Kota's help to organize a rebellion against the Empire, a movement which Darth Vader plans to use to distract the Emperor in order to overthrow him. (Fomenting sedition in order to distract your enemy? Vader's plan here has interesting overtones of Lenin's sealed train to Moscow, provided courtesy of German Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, during World War I.)

But the Emperor has discovered Starkiller's existence, and confronts Vader about it, so Vader kills Starkiller by blasting him out into space... only to have a droid recover Galen's body and bring him on board the ISS Empirical to be revived. This particular plot point is a crib from Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, in which astronaut Frank Poole (killed by HAL 9000 during a spacewalk back in 2001) is discovered floating in space after a millennium and resurrected thanks to futuristic medical technology.

Also? Vader's secret medical-research space station is called the Empirical. That's no Imperial Lab... it's an Empirical Lab!

During his escape from the medical station, Starkiller rescues his pilot, Juno Eclipse, whom Vader has sentenced to death for associating with him. And then it's off to Cloud City to find General Kota. These two levels (the Empirical station and Cloud City) are the shortest in the game, and they occur one right after the other.

However, the two settings are evidently placed together to form a deliberate contrast, by way of another literary allusion.

I mentioned earlier that Starkiller's first name comes from the Roman physician Galen, and that "Galen Marek" sounds like Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Well, at one point during the early writing for the original Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry considered naming his space show "Gulliver's Travels," after Jonathan Swift's novel, and having the dashing Starfleet captain be Captain Gulliver. Of course, Swift's hero, Lemuel Gulliver, was himself a ship's physician.

At one point in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver comes upon a floating cloud city of his own: a haven for scientists whose theoretical flights of fancy are unencumbered by practical experimentation. The city's name is Laputa... which is Spanish for "the whore."

Follow me closely here, there's a deliberate analogy at work: Theoretical is to Empirical as Whore is to... Madonna?



In case you aren't up on your 18th century literature, TFU doesn't stop there: in the cutscene before the Cloud City level, we see 16-year-old Princess Leia arriving on Kashyyyk as a hostage of the Empire. She's been sent there to make sure her father Bail keeps his mouth shut about his grievances with Palpatine's regime. Otherwise, as Governor Ozzik Sturn warns her, Leia could become the "unfortunate victim of a Wookiee uprising."

Of course, Sturn doesn't actually say that Leia would be killed. A theme which is continued once Starkiller has located General Kota, who warns him about the futility of defying the Empire by saying, "You'll eventually be killed... or worse."

This game really wants us to know about the "fate worse than death" that 16-year-old Leia suffers in the 1974 The Star Wars rough draft.

 

Also very interesting are the two AU missions which take place after the Dark Side ending of TFU -- in which Starkiller kills Vader only to take his place as the Emperor's right-hand man.

Each mission starts with a modified version of the opening crawl from a SW film, respectively A New Hope/Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. However, the AU means that the stories get different titles: ANH becomes "A Fragile Hope", and ESB is "Wrath of the Empire". Which would bring the subtitle into line with all the other SW movies since ROTJ by not including a verb. (Contrast The Force Awakens, which is the first full-sentence SW film title since 1980. That's got to be deliberate.)

In TFU's Dark Side ending, the leaders of the Rebel Alliance are killed -- except for Princess Leia, who avoided capture by the Emperor's minions. So Mon Mothma, Garm Bel Iblis, Bail Organa, and Rahm Kota all die.

But interestingly, none of these characters was featured in the first two SW films, except Bail Organa, and (in the old canon, at least) he died offscreen when Alderaan was blown up. Which means that SW canon is much less affected by this AU than it would seem at first glance.

As the Alan Dean Foster interview for Splinter of the Mind's Eye shows, Vader dying and being replaced as the saga's principal Sith Lord is an idea that GL considered during the making of the OT - probably for use if he extended the saga beyond three films. In fact, Vader died during the Death Star trench run in the 1975 second draft script, so it was definitely an option on the table.

Likewise, in TFU's AU missions, Starkiller catches up with Obi-Wan Kenobi as the Millennium Falcon is about to leave Mos Eisley. They duel and Starkiller slays Obi-Wan... only for the Jedi's spirit to take ghostly form and continue the lightsaber duel. As silly as this sounds, it's actually cribbed from the Leigh Brackett draft of ESB, in which a ghostly Ben Kenobi fights Minch (Yoda) in a lightsaber duel to prove Minch's identity to a disbelieving Luke.

Starkiller busts Obi-Wan's ghost, but the Falcon escapes in the meantime. This brings in another implicit parallel with the SW 1975 second draft, since in that version Luke and Han traveled to the Imperial prison planet without a Jedi mentor accompanying them.

Plus, I will say that TFU has a very marked interest in the "injury to the eye motif" as Frederic Wertham put it once.

During the Dark Side ending, when Starkiller is rebuilt as the Emperor's slave, the final shot is a first-person view of a needle poking through the visor of Starkiller's helmet. And the theme continues in the intro to the ESB AU mission, where we see a first-person shot of snowspeeders fighting AT-ATs on Hoth... only to have the cockpit window cracked by a flying lightsaber, thrown by Lord Starkiller.

The ESB mission climaxes in a duel whose goal is to "enthrall Luke Skywalker" as Starkiller's Sith apprentice. This is an allusion to John Donne, and his poem "Batter my heart, three-person'd God":

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

I'll leave the interpretation of this up to the readers.

 

Speaking of The Force Unleashed and the "injury to the eye motif": one alternate costume in the game is a set of "Sith training gear", which is described as what Starkiller wore "before being commanded to eliminate General Kota." But take a close look at the costume, and it becomes obvious that for some reason, it shows Starkiller with blind eyes - like Kota's own after being defeated in the first level.

Some light on this may be shed by the phrase in the description of the training gear: Starkiller was "commanded to eliminate General Kota". In Timothy Zahn's The Last Command, Mara Jade has the Emperor's final orders to her still running through her mind: "You will kill Luke Skywalker."

Mara fulfills this order by fighting against a clone of Luke in the novel's finale. However, she does so while temporarily blind - Leia, who is pinned down nearby, uses the Force to guide Mara's attacks, in a scene shamelessly borrowed from Dune Messiah.

Of course, the duel in The Last Command has its own antecedent -- namely in Splinter of the Mind's Eye, where Princess Leia has to face Darth Vader in lightsaber combat while Luke is pinned down by fallen debris.

So we have a set of reoccurring elements: a Dune-inspired lightsaber duel by proxy featuring a female protagonist, and a Jedi being blinded by an opponent's lightsaber (Kota in TFU, and Kanan in Rebels). Both of which are linked by the linchpin of TFU and its extraordinarily allusive storyline.

Very likely, what we're seeing here are the scattered shards of an early idea GL had for the climactic duel in a SW sequel (perhaps what would become ROTJ). Said duel would have featured a blinded Leia fighting against Darth Vader while Luke, pinned helplessly nearby, guided her via the Force.

It would seem Splinter of the Mind's Eye was GL's first stab at getting this idea into narrative form. But since he thought he might get a TV movie out of it, he probably saved certain ideas (such as Leia being blinded) for the telefilm.

 

It seems the idea at the time of http://therealcharleslippincott.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-alan-dean-foster-interviews.html?m=1 was that everyone in the Empire had their own agenda and that no one character was the big bad. When brainstorming for ESB, GL decided to make the Emperor the big bad and everyone else a pawn.

 

Or rather, everyone in the Empire was backstabbing everyone else. Which kind of makes the Sith mentality and the ensuing Rule of Two a return to a 1970s idea.

 

This is often the case in dictatorships. One of the reasons the Night of the Long Knives happened is that Himmler saw Rohm as a rival.

Excellent observation and connection, although I think the Sith mentality and the Rule of Two came from the Luke-Vader-Emperor dynamic.

 

The unstable three-legged stool, as Reverend Mother Mohiam puts it.

 

I'm currently playing the second Force Unleashed game. It amused me greatly to see that on Cato Neimoidia - a planet where the buildings are literally made of solid gold - the major bad guy was the spitting image of US president John Quincy Adams.



Why? Because JQ Adams' likeness - bald head and wispy white mutton chops - was used by George RR Martin for the novel version of Tywin Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire.



In fact, GRRM probably chose that particular political allusion on purpose, because George Lucas used passages from the diary of John Adams (father to John Quincy) as a basis for the Emperor's speeches in the 1974 SW rough draft. This was just a reciprocal homage of sorts, if you will.



And as I've said before: twincest has been a major component of the SW saga since the 1970s.

 

I should note that I probably mixed up the arrangement somewhat in the initial version of this chart. Here's a revised version:

 

Speaking of The Force Unleashed: I think I've figured out why Juno Eclipse and Galen Marek are given names from Roman history and mythology.

Juno is the Roman version of the Greek goddess Hera... who was famously resentful of th demigod Heracles, child of her husband Zeus by another woman.

So resentful, in fact, that she sent two serpents to Heracles' crib at his birth to devour him -- only for Heracles to strangle the serpents in turn. The twin-serpent imagery is also commonly used for the medical profession (ie, doctors, like the Roman physician Galen) since it derives ultimately from the caduceus staff of Mercury.

Remarkably, the same allusions recur in Rebels, with the name of Hera the Twi'lek. And then there's Ezra Scarlet, whose first name is probably a reference to poet Ezra Pound (he of the famous dictum "Make it new.")

As for the import of these hints? Well, if you've seen The Matrix Revolutions, you know that a lightsaber isn't the only way to blind someone with electricity.

(For further clarification, see my earlier post about TFU and early ideas for ROTJ. ...Poor Leia.)

 

There's one further story scenario which I've hitherto overlooked: an evolution of the plot in which Leia falls in love with Han Solo, rather than Luke, and the pair survive through the end of the OT. (Like in ROTJ ... only not exactly.)

This new data is designated under the Y-axis label LH in the revised version of the chart below.



Additionally, here's a costume/makeup reference chart in the same vein (as best as I can reconstruct it), for the planned ending c. 1975 of the third SW film, which would later on become ROTJ.

 

Lucas: Anakin Skywalker starting hanging out with the Emperor, who at this point nobody knew was that bad, because he was an elected official.
Kasdan: Was he a Jedi?
Lucas: No, he was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the senate and finally took over and became an imperial guy and he was really evil. But he pretended to be a really nice guy. He sucked Luke’s father into the dark side.
Kasdan: The Force was available to anyone who could hook into it?
Lucas: Yes, everybody can do it.
Kasdan: Not just the Jedi?
Lucas: It’s just the Jedi who take the time to do it.

I wonder what, if anything, Lucas had in mind for how Palpatine learned to use The Force. Self-taught? Ancient fallen Jedi?

 

From Charles Lippincott's blog: Failed Star Wars advertising concepts from 1976.

 

I also wonder when Palpatine stopped being "Nixon" in GL's mind. Had that idea been abandoned by 1983 or it did it hang around until GL got to work on the prequels?

 

A bit of trivia: the Rancor in ROTJ was in all likelihood named for Ranko, a King Kong-like ape that inhabits a Scottish castle in Hergé's Tintin album The Black Island.

(A haunted Scottish castle? Sounds like the opening to Indiana Jones and the Monkey King.)

The Tintin parallels become even more apparent in the version of Leia's meeting with Wicket in GL's June 1981 revised rough draft:

Here Leia's speeder bike crash is caused not by damage from a blaster bolt, but by running into a trap set by Ewoks to catch prey. Also contrast the description of Leia's post-accident state here with the shooting script, which says instead that "Her clothes are torn, she's bruised and disheveled."

Obviously the original idea was that Leia's Alliance outfit would be damaged enough that she'd wear the "animal-skin dress" later given to her by the Ewoks for the remainder of the film.

This exact scenario plays out in The Black Island: during a visit to Scotland, Tintin is thrown from the cockpit of a low-flying biplane when it hits a fence during a thick fog. He lands in a patch of brambles, tearing his tweed suit to shreds. Fortunately a local Scotsman takes him to his house, where Tintin receives a kilt and sweater that he wears for the remainder of the story.

And yes, Leia's dress was probably meant as a Tarzan-style affair, since in the early drafts the Ewok village is hidden in a cave reached by swinging on a vine from the wooden tree-bridges.

Also, the scene where Leia makes friends with the Ewoks in the revised rough draft is disturbing in a very 1960s sort of way:

Speaking of King Kong and Tarzan: some of Willis O'Brien's early concept art for the original 1933 King Kong featured a female Amazon in a decidedly Tarzanesque animal-hide costume. I'm not going to show it here directly because it's NSFW.

PS, a funny thing about The Black Island: it's the only Tintin album for which Hergé produced two entirely different color versions, one in the mid-1940s and the other in the mid-60s. The latter "Special Edition" version with all-new artwork was initially done for the English translation, and later became the standard French version. However, reproductions of the first color version of L'Ile Noire are far easier to come by these days than good-quality prints of the theatrical cuts of the original SW trilogy.

 

A small correction.. you are right about "The Black Island" being the only album with two "entirely" different color versions, but there are several other albums which have had changes made to the original color version (which are now impossible to find), and "The Land of the Black Gold" was partially redrawn in the 1970s (and again, the first color version is impossible to find).
Tintin is a very good example of an author making alterations to his previous works and making the originals unavailable!

 

I know that, actually -- I just omitted to mention it for simplicity's sake.

These days, though, Hergé's French publishers sell reproductions of the original color versions of most of these albums, including Au Pays de l'or noir. (I should know, I own one myself.) So they're still far easier to come by than a decent copy of the SW OOT.

 

I didn't know you could buy that version! Still, the first album version is of course different from the actual original version which was published weekly, as happens with all the rest of the albums. Some originals can be found, but not all of them.
And even then, there are other small changes (for example, I bet you can't find the original color version of Tintin in America (with a black woman holding a baby) or Golden Crab (again with more prominent black villains and more drinking from Haddock).

I don't want to start an argument about Tintin here, but it is a REALLY good example of an author changing earlier works (for a variety of reasons) and making the originals (mostly) unavailable for the public (and a great amount of confussion about different versions with small changes -similar to the different audio versions of SW for example).
I'm not saying that to defend that Lucas shouldn't release the OOT, mind you! But just a good example of the very same thing happening in another medium (and let's not talk about classical music! )

 

So I was thinking about the various sources for SW names and one thing jumped out at me.

There are several works which probably had an influence on Princess Leia's name: the story of Jacob and Leah (and Rachel) in the Bible; Frank Herbert's Dune series with its Princess Alia; Poul Anderson's 1954 fantasy novel The Broken Sword (revised 1971), which features a female elf named Leea as a supporting character; and the libretto for Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle (in particular Götterdämmerung: to quote the Rhinemaidens, Weialala leia, wallala leialala!).

But all of these particular works involve or suggest a certain amount of sexual impropriety on the part of the heroes. The Israelite patriarch Jacob, of course, is married to two wives, the sisters Rachel and Leah. And Emperor Paul Atreides has a similar degree of bigamy going on: he's officially married to Princess Irulan, but never sleeps with her, favoring his Fremen concubine Chani.

Another running theme, though, is brother-sister incest.

Dune Messiah features a plot by the Bene Gesserit to rescue Paul's genetic line from from the "taint" of Chani's blood by engineering a relationship between him and his sister Alia. The central relationship in The Broken Sword is between the human Skafloc, raised by elves, and his sister Freda, who begin their romance before they learn they're siblings... and continue it afterwards. And in Wagner's Die Walküre, Siegfried is born to the half-siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde, children of the god Wotan, who consummate their love despite being fully aware of their blood ties.

So what bearing does this have on SW, where a love triangle involving royalty suddenly has one of its sides turn into a sibling relationship?

Heck if I know. (And if GL does, he isn't telling.) But as Mel Brooks said, "It's good to be the king."