Full Series Early Star Wars (1974 - 1979) Influence in Rebels

I still need to get the last two issues, but I have read the first six as well. I also see A New Hope as an improvement for sure, but it's been an unbelievable thrill to get to experience this incarnation of this early draft. And I would say all the crucial elements are there.

There's honestly probably no level at which I would think Rebels is too much like the first The Star Wars draft, but it's already looking like it a lot to me so I am a lot more psyched for it than I otherwise would be.

 

Ooh this thread is cool, thanks for bumping. Great images and I've been loving the McQuarrie concept art influence on the Rebels sneak peeks.

 

KeithyT you're welcome, I'm glad you're interested in discussion about this.

The Star Wars comic books Dark Horse just finished up are really great resources for the first draft. I also need to take a look at the second, third, and fourth drafts again so that I can spot possibly borrowed plot devices in Rebels. They're all available here: http://starwarz.com/starkiller/category/star-wars-scripts/star-wars-star-wars-scripts/

 

Hijacked from http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...ilers-allowed.50011239/page-435#post-51679399 :

Obviously I'm very psyched to see them going back to species from Ep. IV that we have hardly seen, if at all, since!

Hijacked from http://boards.theforce.net/threads/agent-kallus.50018460/page-3#post-51669837 :

There's a few nods to 1974 - 1979 era Star Wars in this video I'll point out later if others don't first.

 

Hey, isn't that Prince Valorum?!

More seriously, the detention cell is clearly modeled on the one in ANH--although its occupant is male. Shades of Deak Starkiller from the second draft.

 

Great to see you around and in this thread ATMachine, thanks for giving me a specific reason to check out the second draft again when I can get around to it.

 

It's official. Kanan = Kane Starkiller.

On page two of this thread I have some rather detailed posts about how much Kanan from Star Wars Rebels is clearly a decades-late incarnation of Kane Starkiller from the very first full The Star Wars draft from 1974 (which Dark Horse recently completed an excellent comic book adaptation of). There's Kanan being pronounced as Kane-in, them both being males with long hair (of which I am one but it is rare) tied back in a style seemingly borrowed from The Hidden Fortress (a film that was a major inspiration of the original SW drafts), them both having metallic right arms, and them both being put in the role of Jedi/Jedi-Bendu mentor to a Jedi/Jedi-Bendu student in an era in which the Jedi/Jedi-Bendu are "all but extinct."

So all of that was making it quite clear when all we had were images of the character and the sparsest of descriptions about him. Now thanks to this video I hijacked from http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...ilers-allowed.50011239/page-438#post-51681785 :

... there are a couple other similarities between Kanan and Kane Starkiller regarding their roles in their respective stories I have previously speculated about that I am now super-psyched to be able to confirm!!!

At 8:21 you can barely make it out if you pause at the exact right fraction of a second but I am pretty sure I can make all this out:

Anyone who has been keeping up with my posts on this or is familiar with the first The Star Wars draft is probably already having their mind leap to this excerpt I posted on the previous page of this thread:

http://starwarz.com/starkiller/category/star-wars-scripts/star-wars-star-wars-scripts/

So Kane Starkiller doesn't feel qualified to be a mentor because of how beaten down he is after decades of war while Kanan feels the same way but because he never finished his training before his order was wiped out. Different motivation, but they're still put in basically the same situation and have basically the same reaction. I am very curious as to whether Kanan puts any effort into actually finding another Jedi Master for Ezra in which case my head will probably just explode and you'll never hear from me again because Kanan really will = Kane Starkiller in basically every sense possible at that point, or if it just becomes a personal thing for Kanan to overcome and regain his old confidence. Of course, even then I would say that they merely combined the characters of Kane Starkiller and General Luke Skywalker from this draft to create Kanan as I described on page two of this thread, similarly to how Luke's father and Darth Vader were conceptually combined into one character in Ep. V. There are other things in this video to post about in this thread later as well but I'm really psyched to have confirmation of this character dynamic in Star Wars Rebels with Kanan in the role of Kane Starkiller.

I'm gonna have to make myself a bad-ass Kane Starkiller/Kanan icon for when the show starts similar to my current one.

 

Also, it's interesting to see that they cast David Oyelowo as the voice of Prince Valorum. I suspect George had an idea knocking about his head back in 1974 that the most feared Black Knight of the Sith, Valorum, might be played by a black actor. Which presumably led to the casting of James Earl Jones as the voice of the most feared Black Knight of the Sith, Darth Vader (who was of course originally unrelated to Luke Skywalker), and much later to Samuel L. Jackson taking on the role of high-ranking Jedi Master Mace Windu in the prequels.

 

Hijacked from The Inquisitor's thread (page 24):

I searched all references to "Sith" in the rough draft and the closest thing to a relevant reference would be the part of the opening crawl that says "One by one [the JEDI BENDU] have been hunted down and destroyed as enemies of the NEW EMPIRE by a ferocious and sinister rival warrior sect, THE KNIGHTS OF SITH." That being the only piece of evidence available to us on the subject, I think your speculation that Knights of Sith were relatively new is probably the best guess one could make about it.

On the larger topic, I also see similarities between the Knights of Sith and the Inquisitorius. Both groups are seemingly founded for the purpose of hunting down the Jedi/Jedi-Bendu, driving them to extinction for the first time in over a thousand generations, and replacing them as the prominent order in a new galactic empire.

 

Huh, that's never how I interpreted it. My assumption was always that the Jedi and Sith were long-time rival orders, with the latter having allied itself to the (New) Empire during its rise in order to destroy the Jedi.

 

It's probably been noted before, but the ability of the monstrous Zeb to speak perfect English is highly reminiscent of the "green swamp creature" version of Han Solo from the 1974 rough draft. His appearance, however, is borrowed from the original Ralph McQuarrie design for Chewbacca, based on a bushbaby.

Also, Ezra has dark hair and blue eyes. It may be just coincidence, but I'm pretty sure that was exactly how Lucas envisioned Annikin Starkiller as looking in the '74 rough draft. All he needs is a samurai topknot.

 

Hijacked from pages 464 and 465 of the Rebels general discussion thread respectively:

I cannot thank you enough for catching this, I completely missed it!! On the earlier pages of this thread there is information from earlier videos I highlight that talks about how Chopper was influenced by the early McQuarrie concept art like that classic example you gave. I'm so psyched to see they actually made a character model for the other droid in that picture to put the two together!!

It's worth noting that concept design for C-3PO which we now finally see fleshed out in Star Wars a few decades later looks remarkably similar to the robot from the classic 1927 German science-fiction silent film Metropolis:

Even though the last couple years I've been digging up everything I possibly can from that era OU, I still have not delved into the radio drama and did not realize that it branched out into original stories after the adaptation of the film. Can you please extrapolate? This really piques my interest.

 

If you ever look at the original version of that Ralph McQuarrie painting (as photographed before he reworked it at GL's request) the resemblance to the Robot Maria from Metropolis is even stronger.

In the early version Threepio has the exact same sculpted "human" eyes as the Maria robot, as well as a stylized panel of chest muscles in place of Robot Maria's "breasts." GL apparently found this too creepy-looking, so McQuarrie went back and redrew Threepio's face with simpler eyes that were just small holes, and replaced the original chest with something plainer and sleeker.



There were actually even more Metropolis visual references in the 1974 rough draft than just C-3PO. I'm pretty sure that during the third act, Lucas intended to have Princess Leia running around wearing something resembling the False Maria's Whore of Babylon costume, bare breasts and all. You won't see that on the Disney Channel anytime soon.

As for the SW 1977 radio drama, the scenes described above aren't actually continuations of the film storyline. Instead it's additional material added at the beginning, which explains just how Leia ended up on the run with the Death Star plans in the first place.

 

Very interesting ATMachine thanks a lot for sharing that. I have to confess I have only seen the beginning of the film because so far I have only tried to watch it really late at night and always pass out within a half hour. It looks freaking amazing though. It was on Netflix last time I watched it if anyone else is interested.

 

This shot of Kanan's lightsaber from one of the videos in the new wave of trailers is the closest-up so far and I noticed that the top of it above where his grip hand would be when it is turned on has a section that comes out wider than I think any part relative to any lightsaber hilt of all lightsabers in the films or TCW:



It immediately made me think of this iconic Star Wars poster from 1977 I must have had up in my room in one size or another for I'd say at least 80% of my life including now:



... because it always stuck out to me that Darth Vader's lightsaber hilt has a hand-guard like a normal sword would typically have in the poster that is obviously not there in the film(s), and that part of Kanan's lightsaber similarly sticking out farther than any part relative to the hilt of any lightsaber in the films or TCW looks like it could have been inspired by this poster even though the hand-guard part of his lightsaber does not come out quite as far as Darth Vader's in this poster and still looks like a part of a conventional lightsaber as they were eventually developed unlike Vader in this poster .

I can't help but notice that this design shared by Darth Vader in this poster and Kanan looks just like how the hand-guards look on a samurai sword, as opposed to, say, the swords from the classic The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn which I believe GL has also stated was an early influence on the action scenes in Star Wars (perhaps ATMachine can confirm that) - and incidentally also an all-time favorite movie of mine since childhood.





On a very closely related note, in videos from the last few days there is all kinds of stuff Dave Filoni says about being inspired by this era of SW for this show and Freddie Prinze Jr. (voice of Kanan) talking about how he was influenced by samurai movies as a kid and connected samurai to Jedi - just as ATMachine already pointed out on this page of this thread GL took his earliest inspiration for the idea of the Jedi (and Sith) from samurai warriors (and I would add, the samurai in the film The Hidden Fortress, which I have already mentioned in this thread was a major influence on GL in the early days of SW and is the apparent origin of Kane Starkiller and Kanan's hairstyles) - so that is coming soon along with a lot of other great material for this thread that has come out in the last two waves of trailers and interviews. If no one else gets to it first, as always.

 

Re: the saber hilt handguard thing--the original idea on SW 1977 for the lightsaber hilts was actually something in that vein, where the hilts were made out of modified flashlights/electric torches. Of course, as flashlights usually do, they flared outward near the top, creating a sort of handguard in the manner of a samurai sword.

If you look at some of the footage of the early lightsaber tests, though, you can see mock-up versions with cross-guards on the hilt, like on a Western sword (as seen in Robin Hood).

I might also point out that The Hidden Fortress wasn't the only Kurosawa samurai film to be a major influence on the early drafts of SW--so were Seven Samurai and Yojimbo.

 

Two more points in my ongoing project to demonstrate how Kanan is really just a few-decades-later incarnation of Kane Starkiller:



In this video preview of the Star Wars Rebels visual guide I also used as a source above, we get confirmation that Kanan's right arm is simply covered by a layer of armor, it is not a robotic arm with synthflesh like Luke's hand at the end of Ep. V. At 3:12 in this video you can see that it says "protective arm guard" with an arrow pointing to the right arm. So rather than completely copying the character of Kane Starkiller in this respect, they copied the most unique parts of the visual design and just explained it differently. (Similar to how they have the same hairstyle, but unlike Kanan, for Starkiller it is supposed to be a traditional Jedi-Bendu hairstyle.)

Now, to counterbalance that, we've also gotten some news that further reinforces the character similarities between the two. As described in great detail on this and the previous page in this thread, I've been waiting to see if, like Kane Starkiller, Kanan's feelings of inadequacy about training someone else lead him to try to find another master for his student as Kane Starkiller sought out General Luke Skywalker.

In this new Rebels trailer:



... we learned that Kanan thinks it's really important to try to reach the imprisoned former Jedi Master Luminara Unduli. So of course the first thing my mind leaped to was whether Luminara could in some way be this story's variation of the General Luke Skywalker role. She probably wouldn't take over the training like General Skywalker, but if there are any lines at all about Kanan even wanting her to, we're still working with the same plot device and Kanan is still copying the role of Kane Starkiller, down to an even more detailed level than could have been previously confirmed.

 

I don't know, it could still be a protective arm guard over a robot arm and they just don't want to reveal it in the guide.

 

Haha, technically true, but unless they happen to talk about it on the show I guess we'll technically never know!

 

Todd the Jedi those are my thoughts exactly. I never want to fully count on anything till it actually happens, but I can't imagine that with the set-up we know for sure of Kanan being unsure of his own ability to train Ezra and them seemingly trying to find any real Jedi they can that there wouldn't be some dialogue connecting these dots. Also, that's the first idea for a use of contemporary Obi-Wan in Rebels I actually like!

 

Part of Dave Filoni's response to a question on how he feels about doing a show with the same henchmen and spaceships from the OT; audio of the SDCC 2014 Rebels panel courtesy of TFN http://www.theforce.net/story/telev..._Audio_From_Star_Wars_Rebels_Panel_159085.asp (starting at about 21:00) :

This is probably the broadest statement we've gotten from any of the show's creators or official materials about the huge influence of Ralph McQuarrie on the show's visual designs. In Chopper's video they mentioned the McQuarrie influence on his visual design and I believe another video did the same for the planet Lothal that will be in the pilot arc. Now we have Filoni himself saying that "all of" the vehicles in the show are meant to be "the Ralph McQuarrie version of everything." I'm definitely gonna be watching everything again with a new eye and trying to keep this in mind when watching the show. This one quote can cover so much in the show and in this thread.

 

The Rebels Visual Guide certainly supports this. And not just McQuarrie - other artists as well. "Early-version art" seems to be a common factor.

 

Cool! Would you mind posting any text you feel is relevant as long as it's not long or anything?