CT How we viewed Star Wars in 1998

The "Rewriting the OT to fit the prequels for humor" thread got me thinking: what did I think of the Clone Wars, the Empire, Vader's backstory etc... in 1998, a year before the prequels.

At the time, I was a pretty big Star Wars fan. I suffered even through the Crystal Star (by otherwise good author Vonda McIntyre).

1. The Clone Wars were fought against some organization that used clones vs the Old Republic. In the OT, Obi-Wan and Luke are the definition of vague about what the Clone Wars were, and it didn't really matter. What mattered was that Obi-Wan and Luke's 'father' served in a war together, giving the audience the impression of a "Band of Brothers" like relationship between the two, at least. The idea that the Republic's antagonist was the one to use clones was further backed up by statements of both Mara Jade and Captain Pellaeon.

2. The Galactic Empire had reigned for much longer than 19 years, more like about 50 years. In fact, Bill Slavicsek's 1993 Guide to the Star Wars Universe lists the Clone Wars/Foundation of the Empire about ~50 BBY. This makes Anakin and Obi-Wan much older. A.C. Crispin's Han Solo Trilogy talks about the Jedi as though they were space legends of long ago, and the ship Han grew up on, the Guardian of the Republic is described as a relic of the Clone Wars at the time when Han was a boy.

3. The identity of Luke and Leia's mother was incredibly ambiguous. At best, I think the Black Fleet Crisis had Luke searching for his mother, but I doubt any of that storyline was related to Padme since it pre-dated the Prequels. Honestly, at the time, I didn't really care who Luke's mother was. I cared more about Mara, Kyp, Ysane Issard etc...

4. I had the impression that Palpatine gained power in a way similar to Julius Caesar, Napoleon, or Hitler (not that I am morally equating any of the three, I speak of their fairly totalitarian rises to power). In a sense, Palpatine does rise to power that way, but the numerous plot holes by Lucas kinda ruined it. I envisioned the Emperor as some sort of "Francis Urqhart" (of the original House of Cards, at the time) who gained power through cunning, intrigue and the dark side. Instead, Palpatine's plan, with its numerous plot holes and logical absurdities, makes Winston Churchill's plan to disguise ships as icebergs seem like the execution of the Austro-Prussian War on the Prussian side. (The Prussians beat the legendary Hapsburg Empire in a mere seven weeks).

5. Yoda didn't use a lightsaber, and Jedi masters generally did not either. Until episode II, you don't really see Yoda having to resort to physical violence in order to make his point. As RedLetterMedia did with the Plinkett Reviews, there is "ESB Yoda" and "AOTC Yoda" just like there is "TV Show Captain Picard" and "Movie Captain Picard." "TV Show Picard" and "ESB Yoda" very rarely (if ever) resorted to violence to get their point across, or resolve conflict. They just kinda said wise things, and were peaceful leaders or mentors. With "Movie Picard" and "AOTC Yoda", you have both characters running around like Rambo with either phaser rifles or lightsabers. All the violence that Yoda did in AOTC could/should have been done by Mace Windu, doing something bad*** with a "gritty light side" attitude.

 

Sorry, this is the point where you lose credibility. I'm with you on some points, but bringing in that Plinkett hater of all "reviewers" ruined them all for me. I like the prequels mostly, and say to hell with the haters. If you don't like them then don't watch them, simple as that. I was a SW fan since I first watched the original at age 12, and still like the prequels. So what? Why should I bother with idiots like Plinkett or others who have nothing good to say about them at all? The answer is: I DON'T.

 

Yeah, before the prequels I also imagined Anakin being older before becoming Vader, maybe even between age 30-40 since when he is unmasked in ROTJ he is clearly a man of around 60-70 years.

 

"A young Jedi named Darth Vader...."

 

At that point, Vader was young. Anakin Skywalker wasn't.

This is what happens when you merge characters, folks.

 

I really tried not to make too much backstory in my mind, because I knew a new trilogy would change any preconceived notions I had, but like most people, I had assumed that the Clone Wars were fought against clones.

 

They were. It's just that the side fighting clones, had droids instead.

 

I was too little to come up with stories about the prequels.

 

I like TPM but it def. skewed towards a younger audience and cheap humor.

 

Yes! I always thought it would've connected the sagas better and made the events of ANH even more poignant if Anakin & Owen actually had a proper relationship in the prequel era. Anakin should've been a teenager when we met him, an orphan, but best friends with Owen (& Beru), maybe Owen's family had kind of semi-adopted him. Anakin could've been reckless, always getting into trouble, desperate to leave Tatooine and go off on some adventure, whereas Owen could've been the sensible, responsible one who just wanted to inherit the family farm, settle down and live a quiet life. Then Obi-Wan comes along, sees something special in Anakin, thinks he can train him, and offers him the chance to go and fulfill his destiny. Owen warns him against it but he goes anyway. It would explain Owen's later resentment of Obi-Wan and his general world-weariness amd cynicism - Obi-Wan had taken his best friend from him and now he was worried that he would do the same with his 'nephew'. It would've added even more emotion to the scene when Owen and Beru are killed, because ultimately Vader would've been responsible for killing his best friend.

This would also tie up with Obi-Wan's dialogue in ANH, where he says that Owen thought Anakin "should've stayed here and not gotten involved", and him being worried about Luke "following old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade, like your father did" - those lines don't tie up with what we saw in the prequels, because Owen and Anakin only met once and that was 10 years after Anakin had left Tatooine. It was a real missed opportunity to connect the stories, IMO.

 

I'm not convinced this was the case.

For one thing, there was a Marvel Comics issue released in November 1979 which established that both Darth Vader and Luke's father were contemporaneous students of Obi-Wan Kenobi during the Clone Wars. Obviously this was a tie-in product, but I think it throws into question the notion that it was a well-accepted fact back then that Darth Vader was supposed to be a young student of Kenobi's while Luke's father was a much older colleague. Rather, the only definitive statement on the matter (as far as I know) from an official Lucasfilm product released before The Empire Strikes Back supports the notion that Darth Vader and Luke's father were seen as equivalent in both age and rank.

We also have this statement from Lucas from 1977:

“The thing about Vader wasn’t really developed until the fourth draft, when I was sorting out Vader’s real character and who he was.The backstory is about Ben and Luke’s father and Vader, when they are young Jedi Knights."

While the phrasing is a bit ambiguous, the "young Jedi Knights" here seems to be referring to "Luke's father and Vader." Ben presumably would not have been considered a "young Jedi Knight" at the time he was training Vader, whom he himself describes as being a "young Jedi" at the time. So, two points of evidence so far for Luke's father being conceived as a young man equivalent in age to Vader.

Then we have this exchange from from the Return of the Jedi story conference, regarding how Anakin Skywalker will look upon being unmasked:

Marquand: He’s as old as Alec, isn’t he.

Lucas: He’s not as old as Alec.

Marquand: But visually.

Lucas: Visually, he is close.

So here we have Lucas clarifying that Anakin Skywalker is "not as old" as Alec Guinness's character but appears to be close "visually." Now, there would be no reason for Lucas to emphasize the "visually" part unless it were in fact his intention that the unmasked Anakin Skywalker actually be younger than he appears. This tracks with the prior two points of evidence indicating that Anakin Skywalker was in fact always conceived as being close in age to Darth Vader.

So I think the received wisdom that Anakin Skywalker's age was revised downward--either upon the conflation of the character with Darth Vader or upon the development of the prequels--is nothing but a flawed assumption based upon scant evidence and faulty extrapolation.

Now when it comes to the age of the Empire, as far as the original films go, there doesn't seem to be any indication that the Empire was around for much longer than twenty years. In the rough draft, Lucas envisioned the Empire being around for "one hundred thousand years," with the Jedi Knights serving as guardians of the Empire before being displaced by the "Knights of Sith" who helped established a "New Empire." At this point, the Empire proper was obviously the analog of the Republic of later drafts, with the New Empire being the analog of the Empire of the later drafts. But from the second draft onward, the advent of the Empire over the Republic is loosely traced to the rise of the Sith and the extermination of the Jedi. This could theoretically have taken place over the course of years, but there's no particular reason to think that the Empire predated Luke's father's death by a very great amount of time.

Honestly, I suspect Lucas didn't give a great deal of thought to the exact timeline back then. But what we do know for sure from the original film is that the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Republic, that the Republic was replaced by the Empire, that this was accomplished through the extermination of the Jedi through the efforts of Darth Vader, that Darth Vader killed Luke's father, and that Luke is about 18 to 20 years old. Put this all together and it seems only logical that the Empire was created around the time that Luke was born, which is presumably why Lucas, upon having to go back and actually establish a logical timeline, established this to be the case. Anyone who ever thought otherwise wasn't paying very close attention to the clear facts that were already established, IMO.

 

Good post. However, I would add that the second draft also suggests the idea that the Empire has been around for several generations, and only with the third draft do we get a firmer sense of the Empire's founding being roughly contemporary with Luke's birth.

In the second draft the Imperials think Luke's father is "over three hundred years old". Numerous of Luke's siblings have evidently fought and died for the Rebellion -- at one point Luke's guardian Owen Lars says he's trained "seven of your father's sons" -- so the war against the Empire has been going on long enough to be a family affair.

In fact, the whole plot hinges on the fact that Luke's father is getting old and can no longer fight the Empire without magical aid of the Kiber Crystal. As Owen puts it, "Your father is getting very old... If he at last has asked for the Kiber Crystal, his powers must be very weak."

This idea seems to have been allied to a more gradual corruption of the Republic into an Empire, which had numerous Emperors over time, allied with the Sith Knights and the systemic corruption of the "Power and Transport guilds". This more institutional Empire is what lies behind the surviving reference in Alan Dean Foster's novelization to "the later corrupt Emperors".

In fact, Charles Lippincott's blog points out seemingly the exact moment when Lucas junked the ideas of a gradual decline of the Republic and having multiple Emperors, replacing this with the idea of a single evil mastermind. From a taped conversation between Lucas, Lippincott, and Alan Dean Foster, of July 27, 1976:

GL: ...It's like a Republic and Senate, and at one point, the President decided he would rather be called the Emperor than the President, and it sort of passed. And as people began to realize it, a lot of the senators began to be bought off and were intimidated and pretty soon there wasn't any Senate anymore. There was still a Senate, but it wasn't as strong and pretty soon the Emperor was becoming a Fuhrer. [...]

ADF: This is the present Emperor?

GL: Yes. It just happened within Ben's lifetime. He was the last of what remains of the Jedi which was the Big Betrayal when Luke's father was killed. It all happened very quickly.

[...]

ADF: Well, since we're eliminating all of this history about a succession of Emperors, and this is the first Emperor — an offstage character — who suddenly makes himself Emperor, President or whatever he makes himself, then I can't have (garbled) Empress...

GL: Yea. No, that was another thing. I was ... I don't want... The idea is that she [Leia] doesn't become an Empress. I have to sort of work that whole thing out. She becomes, maybe a Senator in the New Republic. I know she is a Senator, but she's been ex-communicated. The Princess is, that her father is the King of Alderaan...​

In the same conversation, Lucas tells Foster to eliminate mention of other Dark Lords of the Sith (another holdover from earlier drafts), as he's revised the story so Darth Vader is the only Dark Lord we know of. Though that also slipped through somewhat, hence the novelization's sentence about "Fear followed the footsteps of all the Dark Lords."

 

Good point about the second draft, I guess I misremembered some details. But yes, I was actually going to mention the reference to multiple Emperors in the novelization and how it was a relic of earlier drafts. The main thrust is, Lucas changed the timeline of the Empire from a longer, more gradual process to something that happened fairly quickly in the relatively recent past. Again, my suspicion is that Lucas never thought about the new timeline in that much detail, and certain vague impressions of the earlier timeline may have seeped into the final product despite not really according with other solidly established details.

So, taking the original film itself at face value, the Empire was pretty clearly established about twenty years ago, give or take. I don't think there's anything in any of the movies that explicitly contradicted this, but I know some people feel as if the Empire should have been around longer just based on the way it's presented and talked about in the films. I'm not sure I can agree or disagree with this, but it doesn't really matter, because the backstory given in the original film implies what it implies.

I also know a lot of people feel as if the original movies give the impression that Luke's father was more of a middle-aged character, but again, I don't think there's much in the actual films that gives any real indication of that. The unmasked Anakin in ROTJ was intended to be younger than he looked, and I'd argue all bets are off as to how young or old Sebastian Shaw's last-minute-addition Force ghost was actually supposed to be. Other than that, there's at least some implication in the original film that Luke's father was still a pupil of Obi-Wan's at the time of his death, which the Marvel Comics writers either picked up on or were explicitly told by Lucasfilm. Personally, this would strike me as strange if Luke's father were meant to be much older than thirty.

There's also a more literary argument to be made. Even at this early date, Vader's backstory as a promising young pupil of Ben's who turned to evil is obviously meant to serve as a dark mirror of the journey Luke is about to undertake. At the same time, Luke's journey parallels that of his father before him. So it makes some amount of sense that both Vader and Luke's father would have been peers in their time, rivals competing under the tutelage of Obi-Wan, perhaps even brothers of a sort. Thus the story of Vader's betrayal of Luke's father takes on the cast of a Cain and Abel story, with Obi-Wan in the role of the Father whose approval is being sought. Being a huge James Dean fan, Lucas would have been intimately familiar with this type of story (see East of Eden).

Seen in this light, it also gives some support to Lucas's contention that the idea of conflating the two characters occurred to him at the point of the jump from the third to the fourth draft. If the characters were already so similar, conceived in some measure as mirrored counterparts of each other foreshadowing the two paths Luke may take, then it seems almost natural that the point when Darth Vader took on the signature attribute of the father from the rough draft (being part-robot) would also be the point that Lucas had the notion that this dark version of the father actually was the father. It strikes me as more natural than the idea occurring to him abruptly, almost out of nowhere, upon his first hasty attempt at a rewrite of TESB's rough draft upon the untimely passing of Leigh Brackett. The notion that he had the idea earlier on at the exact point where the Sith villain was conflated with aspects of the original cyborg father, and then waffled back and forth before finally committing to the idea after a TESB draft by Brackett that simply wasn't working, seems to me perfectly plausible.

Again, the fourth draft jump is just where it makes the most sense from the standpoint of narrative development. The conflation of the Sith and cyborg characters suggests a conflation of Vader with the father, whereas nothing that happens in the narrative development subsequent to that point especially suggests it. So why would it suddenly occur to him then and not before? Isn't the simplest explanation that he's telling the truth?

 

Things that imply an older age for Luke's father, OT films and related material.

In the script, when red leader talks to Luke before the DS attack, he mentions that he met Luke's father when he, red leader, was a boy. And Luke's father was then a great pilot. Red leader is described as being in his 40's.
So given boy and red leaders age, this would be about 30 years ago.
If Luke's father at the time was say 25, given that he is a pilot and has a reputation as a great one. That would make Luke's fathers age in ANH around 55, had he lived.

Then we have Beru and Owen, they both knew Luke's father from when he lived on Tatooine and given that Luke call them uncle and aunt, it is likely that Luke's father is the brother of either Owen or Beru.
Owen is mentioned more in relation to Luke's father, not all that much granted.
Anyway, both Owen and Beru look somewhat old, the actors were in their late 50's and if that is how old they are supposed to be then it is reasonable to think that Luke's father was of an age with them.
So again about 50 makes some sense.

Obi-Wan age in ANH was supposed to be about 70, the PT made him considerably younger.
That fits with Owen calling him "a crazy old man." And also fits with Tarkin thinking he must be dead by now.
If Luke's father was say 10-15 years younger that gives his age around ANH as about 55, which fits with Owen and Beru and also what red leader said.

In the earlier drafts of RotJ, both Obi-Wan and Luke's father come back to life at the end. And from what I've read, Luke's father is referred to as "old man" and "elderly".
If Luke's father was say 58 in ANH and given 3-4 years, that would make him a little over 60. Which fits with "old man" and "elderly", makes him a bit younger that Obi-Wan but visually close.
And I think Shaw could pass for 60 as the ghost.

About Vader, the ANH script have Obi-wan not just call Vader a young Jedi but also "a boy that I was training".
Thus making him sound quite a bit younger.

About when Lucas made Vader into Luke's father.
If he had the idea before the writing of ESB, why would he not mention that to Leigh Brackett?
She was writing the script and Vader being Luke's father was a massive change and keeping your script writer in the dark makes no sense.
Even if Lucas had not committed to it, talk it over with Bracket, get her feedback or at the very least, make it clear that she not include anything about Luke's father, like his ghost appearing.

Also, the various drafts of ANH, the father goes from cyborg that sacrifices his life during the course of the film. To not being a cyborg and being alive at the end, to being dead but Luke has memories of him to dead and Luke did not know him.
In the third draft, Obi-Wan had a mechanical arm and Vader has some sort of breathing mask but he could also drink. Vader also had a breathing mask in the second draft but that might just be for when he went between ships.

Vader goes from human general, bad guy and dies at the end. To sith lord, bad guy and still dies in the end. To sith lord, bad guy and lives at the end.
You also had the Valorum character, who was a bad guy but had some honor and who switched sides during the film. But in the second draft he is gone and Vader is now the sith but has no good qualities and dies at the end. So no redemption there.

In short, Lucas reused concepts, Luke's father was a cyborg, then Obi-wan was and then Vader.
The father was alive but died during the film, lived through the film and was dead before the film.
Vader went from minor villain who died, major villain who died to major villain who lived.
To me there simply isn't anything in the various drafts of ANH that points to Lucas combining Vader with Luke's father and plenty that contradict it.
Adding the fact that the first draft of ESB still had Vader be the killer of Luke's father then the simplest explanation is that Lucas made Vader into Luke's father with the second draft of ESB.

Why is that so unbelievable?
Lucas had hired a noted sci-fi writer and experienced script writer for ESB. And he had had script meetings with her.
But the first draft was not to his liking and now she was ill and could no longer work.
So now Lucas was stuck, he had a script he didn't like and no writer, plus a ticking clock.
So he went at it himself.
Desperation can be a boon to inspiration.
Also, the father had not much function in the first ESB draft and was sort of redundant.
getting rid of him by making him Vader solved a lot of problems with the script. Plus it added a lot of drama.
And there was enough wiggle room in ANH to allow for it.

Bye.
Old Stoneface

 

At any rate, during the making of ANH, Vader was envisioned as a young man at the time of the Empire's rise, with Obi-Wan as a mentor of mature years (and elderly by the time Luke comes along). Simple enough.

Whether Anakin was the same age as Vader or Obi-Wan or somewhere in between is murkier, though I personally think it makes more sense (what with Red Leader knowing him and Own & Beru's ages) if he was at least a little older than Vader. Though Anakin was still young enough that he was the one who "followed" Obi-Wan on his "idealistic crusades", rather than the other way around.

The Vader/Anakin merger is what makes Vader's age such a vexed question. For the reasons above, plus Sebastian Shaw's casting, it's possible to imagine Vader-Anakin falling to the Dark Side as a mature man, perhaps due to political disillusionment with a failing Republic, in the vein of Dooku. However, the pull of the "dark mirror" narrative, where a young Vader's journey parallels & contrasts with Luke's own brush with the dark side, was a strong one. Especially since it predates the Father Vader conception.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Lucas favored the idea of Anakin falling as a mature Jedi while making ROTJ. At that point the concept was probably newly minted & thus especially interesting. But when the time came to make the PT, he went with the original "dark mirror" concept, though perhaps retaining an echo of the other idea with the character of Dooku.

 

All this implies is that Luke's father was of combat age when Red Leader was a boy. He could have been about Luke's age when Red Leader was a boy, as you say about thirty years ago. This accords perfectly well with an Anakin Skywalker who was around 30 at the time he is said to have died, about twenty years before the events of the movies. A bit older than the Anakin we got in the prequels, perhaps, but nowhere near the middle-aged figure people posit. Nor that far off from a presumed age for Darth Vader at the time.

I have no dispute with an age that would put him around 50 circa ANH.

I agree that Obi-Wan was originally intended to be much older. I don't see how that has any bearing on the intended age of Luke's father. You're pulling the "10-15 years younger" estimate out of thin air. Just call it twenty years younger and you get the age I'm arguing for, which is around 30 at the time of his presumed death, making his age around ANH 50.

The only reference I know of in early scripts refer to him as an "old man." Would that not reasonably describe someone in their mid-fifties? That's how old Owen is in A New Hope, and I'd certainly describe him as "old." I probably wouldn't call him "elderly," which has a bit more of an extreme connotation, but as far as I know there are no references to Anakin as being "elderly."

And Vader calls Luke "a boy" in TESB when Luke is about 22 years old. Meanwhile, Han Solo is in his early thirties and is a big brother figure to Luke. Thus my theory that Vader and Father Skywalker were intended to have a similar age gap and to have had a brotherly, Cain and Abel-like relationship, with Obi-Wan Kenobi as the father figure whom both pupils followed on "some damn fool idealistic crusade." The conflation of the characters would thus come rather naturally to Lucas, being as they were already positioned as paired counterparts.

In any case, I don't see why the argument about some assumed substantial age gap between Darth Vader and Father Skywalker is supposed to preclude Lucas having had the idea to combine the characters given the fact he ultimately did combine them regardless. Lucas has never disputed that they originated as separate characters, and that he was considering keeping them separate characters even as he was considering the alternative. So it seems uncontroversial to me that certain disparities in character attributes may have remained even as Lucas was considering conflating the two.

He wasn't keeping her in the dark. By his own account, he hadn't committed to the idea yet. If he decided to, all he'd have to do is take out the ghost of Father Skywalker and change a bit of the ending. Hardly a Herculean task, given that he actually ended up doing essentially that in his first rewrite of her script.

The human general named Vader in the rough draft has essentially nothing to do with the Vader character we know other than the name. General Vader was the analog of Governor Tarkin. Lucas switched names around a lot, often rather arbitrarily, and so basing any analysis on such things is pretty meaningless. It makes more sense to look at character archetypes and attributes. Through that lens, then the cyborg attribute is assigned to a father figure in the foundational rough draft and a father figure (Ben Kenobi) in the third draft. There is a strong association between father figures and the cyborg attribute. The fact that the cyborg character in the final draft also ultimately became a father figure is, in my view, no coincidence. And being no coincidence, it makes the most sense to me that the Sith character would have taken on both the cyborg and father attributes at roughly the same time in Lucas's mind.

Because Lucas himself says he had the idea when he made Vader the cyborg in the fourth draft, which makes sense. Second, he says he hadn't committed to the idea and was considering simply going with the straight story given to us in the first movie, which no evidence actually contradicts despite claims to the contrary. Third, as I've mentioned, Lucas's version of events seems more economical than the idea that he suddenly had the idea to make the cyborg character the father figure, for the third time, but only all of a sudden, upon having to hastily come up with his own first draft after losing Leigh Brackett.

The crux of the issue, as I've said, is that there's nothing in the historical record that actually contradicts what Lucas has said. The fact that he never told Leigh Brackett is utterly unremarkable given Lucas's own admissions on multiple occasions that he was considering just going with the story that Vader and Father Skywalker were indeed two separate people. I repeat, the Leigh Brackett draft doesn't actually contradict any aspect of his account. You can say he's just making it up, but you haven't actually proven anything, because you can't prove what was in Lucas's mind. He knows better than you do what was in his own head, and I'll take his word over yours or anyone else's when it comes to that.

 

Can you provide any links to these claims from Lucas? Because I've never read/heard Lucas telling "on multiple occasions" that he was considering both story options at some point.
Instead, I've heard Lucas explaining how the first original script was about Vader as a monster who was revealed to be the father of Luke and Leia....

 

double post....

 

It implies a bit more than that as Luke's father wasn't just a pilot, but a really great one. And since Red Leader, being a boy, could not really have flown with him, that implies that the reputation Luke's father had was very considerable.
So that implies he had been a pilot for some time in order to get that big a reputation.
So Luke's father would likely be a bit older than just twenty and starting as a pilot.
I would peg his age as being at least 25 or a bit older.

If Anakin/Vader is in his early/mid fifties in ANH and he turned just before Luke was born, 18 years earlier, than that makes him mid/late 30's when he turned. Late 30's would qualify as middle aged to me.

The PT instead have him early/mid twenties when he turns.
So a difference of 10-15 years.

Nope, I base that on the apparent ages of Owen and Beru, mid/late fifties and since they knew Anakin from way back, that makes it likely that he is of age with them.
It also fits with red leader meeting a 25 year old Anakin, who had big reputation as a pilot, some 30 years ago.
So Anakin/Vader being mid/late 50's in ANH fits.

The elderly comes from a later version of the script, when Luke removes the mask.

Notice the "IS". Not an elderly looking man but an elderly man.

First, Vader tries to downplay the danger posed by Luke, calling him a boy and saying that Obi-Wan can no longer help him.
He wants to persuade the emperor not to kill Luke, but to turn him.
If the emperor gives a clear order for Vader to kill Luke then Vader has to obey and if he does not, the other imperial officers could report him to the emperor.

Luke is 18 in ANH, Han's age is never stated, but Harrison was in his mid 30's at the time.
So an age difference of at least 15 years. That is a bit big for brothers.
And if Anakin was 15 years older than Vader and given that Obi-Wan calls both him and Luke's father Jedi knight but Vader he calls;

Luke's father was a full Jedi Knight so his training is implied to have been complete but Vaders?
Notice "I was training" suggesting that Obi-Wan was training him when he turned.
Which is reinforced when Vader says "When I left you I was but a learner.."

So it does not seem that Anakin and Vader trained together under Obi-Wan. Rather that, if Obi-Wan did train Anakin, that he had completed that and Luke's father was a full Jedi Knight and then some years later, Obi-wan started to train Vader.
No doubt Vader could have met and known Anakin, since he was Obi-Wans friend and they likely met.

The age gap is more than assumed, Luke's father is called Jedi Knight, Vader is young Jedi, boy.
The RotJ script calls Anakin old man and elderly.

As for Lucas, he has said that Vader was always the father and at most he toyed with the idea of not keeping him as the father when making ESB.
So according to Lucas, he never combined the two as the never was a moment when Vader and Luke's father were separate characters.

He is totally keeping her in the dark, having the main villain be the father of the hero is a very substantial change. And it would be idiotic for him to not let her know about this. She is writing the script, a script that is going to be used to make a a movie. And not just any movie, the movie that will make Lucas independent of the studios and build him his dream. So a LOT is riding on this.
Lucas does not have time to waste, he is using his own money here and having Brackett write a draft that is not usable and must be re-written, thus taking more time. That is wasting both time and money.
And I give Lucas credit for not being stupid enough to do this.

And if he has not committed yet, talk to her about it. Lucas talked over his ideas with Foster and several other people when making the first film.
And secrecy is not an excuse, writers in Hollywood sign confidentially agreements and if they talk, it can cost them. So the odds that Brackett would have gone blabbing to the press is very unlikely.

Plus as I said above, Lucas has said that he was thinking of making them separate, not joining them, as Vader was the father from the start.

That big "The Tragedy of Darth Vader" script that Lucas has talked about. That he supposedly wrote in 1975 and that had Darth Vader as the monster that is later redeemed by his children.

Since you had the father in the second draft and not being a cyborg, the cyborg thing is just a concept that is getting shuffled around.
Tarkin was a good guy at one point, Alderaan was the home of the empire, Valorum was honorable bad guy that had a change of hearts and joined the heroes in one draft and then he was the sith master in the next.

Take these examples;

And

The first is from the third draft, when Vader fights Obi-Wan and the second is from the second draft, where vader fights Deak Starkiller.
Quite similar.
But Deak and Obi-Wan are quite different characters and serve different function in the story.

Lucas reuses concepts, names etc quite a bit so the cyborg thing could very well be coincidence.
C3PO calls himself "Human-Cyborg relations".

Lucas is not always reliable. For ex he talked a fair bit about the ST back in the early 80's and he even said he had short outlines for all three ST films. Later he denied ever having any plans for the ST and claims it was all an invention by the media.

Apart from Lucas saying that Vader was the father from day one, which is provably not the case.
The Vader character changes over the course of the drafts, from minor villain that dies, to major villain that dies, to major villain that lives to fight another day.
That progression makes sense.
For Lucas to have him not the father, if we go with that, then combined him with the father, then split them up again and then joined them again.
What about this is economical?
He invents the character, changes him, makes a big change, but then changes him back and then changes him yet again.

To me, it makes more sense that Vader grew in importance as the villain in the first film and the second film was to move on from there. But when Lucas had a draft he did not like and no writer, he had to go at it himself and now he could see what the problems were. Like the redundant father ghost.
At that point, joining the two makes better sense than doing it for no apparent reason while making the first film.

Lucas had no idea that the first film would be such a hit, at most he thought it would do Planet of the Apes money and he could do maybe two low budget sequels. One of those was what later became, "Splinter in the Minds eye." Written by Foster. And that has Luke meet Vader and yet no father reveal.

Why would Lucas for no reason combine Vader with Luke's father at that point?
It does not come up at all in the film so it is pointless for that story.
Luke's father is not in the film and only gets talked about a little bit and serves as part of the motivation for Luke to leave with Obi-Wan. The character plays no part in the plot or story.
But in the first draft of ESB, the ghost of Luke's father is there but he is redundant. He adds almost nothing that Obi-wan does not add. So now Lucas could see that the character was not really useful.
Now he had more or a reason to change things.

The first ESB script does contradict it because he had no good reason to mislead his writer.
Plus Lucas has spoken of Obi-Wan, Luke's father and Vader as separate people AFTER the making of the first film.

Second, if, while writing the first film, Lucas only just thought about making Vader the father but never wrote it down, never mentioned it to anyone. That is un-falsifiable, there is no way to prove it wrong.
But what we do have is Lucas saying and writing down the exact opposite, that Vader and Luke's father are separate people. The final film have three people say that Luke's father is dead but Vader is shown to be very much alive.

Third, what you are doing is an appeal to authority fallacy, your argument is "because Lucas said so."
That there exist no written evidence that supports this and plenty of other written and spoken evidence that speaks against it.
I prefer to look at as much of the evidence as I can. What Lucas says now is relevant but so too is what he said back then and what he wrote back then.
And the written evidence has Vader becoming Luke's father in 1978, with the second draft of ESB.
And on the balance, that I think is the most likely to be correct.
If I had a time-machine and the ability to read Lucas mind, I could back to 1977 and see if he did have Vader as the father back then. But I can't.

Lastly, what is in a persons mind is not always that reliable.
Your present thinking can influence your memories of the past.
If you for ex start to dislike a person, then that can color your memory of that person and you can think that he did or said something bad even if he did not.
Lucas has had Vader as the father for quite some time so it is not strange that he figures that that was always the case.

Like this;

And

Lucas changed SW to only 1 to 6 and so then that is what it always was in his mind, even in the past.
Despite him saying the opposite years earlier.

Bye.
Old Stoneface

 

"As that evolved and I did the first film, I didn't know how the public would take all this, and that it would be as successful as it was and Darth Vader would become the character that he became, and so when I got down to the second film, I had to make a decision about whether I really was going to go through with this thing, of him being his father. And I finally decided that that really was the way--that was the original story and that was the one I really liked the most, and so I'd stick with it." -- George Lucas, 1983



"Originally, there was the good father, the bad father, and the good father was Annikin Starkiller and the bad villain was Darth Vader. In the course of writing the scripts those two characters switched around a little bit, and I went back and forth. Ultimately, they merged into being one character." -- George Lucas, 2004

Because in those instances he's simplifying and condensing an extremely complex creative process for the purposes of providing soundbites for an interview. If Lucas were really as invested in maintaining the vast, decades-long cover-up some purport him to be, why would he so freely talk about earlier drafts where the two were separate characters and personally oversee the publishing of making-of books which, again, show that they were separate characters in earlier drafts? He's never denied that.

I'm sorry, once again I'd like to respond to your post, but you make so many separate claims and counterclaims in each individual line of your post that it would be prohibitively time-consuming for me to do so. If you were to condense the points you make into cohesive paragraphs which each make a single general point which can be addressed, then it would be much easier for me to both digest your post and format the response to it. Just a friendly suggestion to possibly make it easier for us to continue this back-and-forth.

 

First of all, thanks for the quotes and the link to the video (I had forgotten where that first quote came from!)

Secondly, I still think you are interpreting those quotes in a very particular way to try and maintain that "Lucas has never lied".
-The first quote says that Vader was the father in the original story (which contradicts every script available), and that he had to decide whether to stick to that story. In other words, he's using the "it was planned all along" mantra to justify the story of TESB/ROTJ.
-The second quote is a bit more specifict about the two characters being merged into one, but then again, it goes against every script available. Should we trust the objective information and sources available or should we trust the statements of a person because he is the writer?
(as @Samuel Vimes has explained in the previous post, we have multiple examples of Lucas giving contradictory statements about the number of sequels planned, about the amount of material he had written from the beginning....)

Thirdly, you say that Lucas often simplifies a very complex writing process for the sake of the audience. That is true (and even so, I always think his explanations are really interesting, and contain relevant information, often buried in simplifications and/or misleading statements). But the thing is, other than the two quotes you provided, Lucas has created and perpetuated the very specific story of a "huge original script that was too big, so it was cut in two halves, but it was still too big so he cut one of the halves in thirds and created the first movie, but everything was already written" (or the alternative version of "a huge original script that was too big so it was cut in thirds and created the first movie, but he had also developed a long backstory). There is a clear intention of making fans (those who won't look into it any further) believe that everything was planned all along. And that, we know, is not the case.

Fourthly, I don't think all this is a "vast, decades-long, cover up" that Lucas is desperately trying to keep. We are not talking about a huge conspiracy. It's much simpler and more inocent. Lucas has tried to defend the evolution of the story by claiming that everything was planned all along, which is a way of avoiding criticism from the general public who won't read the scripts to know if that's true or not. The creators of LOST did the same thing (and Lucas wrote to them saying that it was a good thing to do). I'd probably do the same as well. He's probably more relaxed about it now. (but note that the Making of books, which are fantastic, don't go into detail about when Vader became Luke's father)

And lastly, I admire Lucas very much (and I love his Star Wars Saga). The fact that we can question (or even criticise) his statements about the creation of the saga don't erase that. And I'm not trying to prove that Lucas is a lier, or anything like that. I'm not even criticising the man. It's just that it's wrong to assume that everything Lucas (or anyone) says is absolute truth, if sources don't support what he says.