PT Did Lucas forget that Uncle Owen meets C3PO for the first time in ANH?

So in AOTC we see that c3po has been living with the Lars family for quite some time but in ANH Owen acts like he's never met him. Do you think George Lucas forgot about this or do you think he thought about it but just decided to let it slide for story purposes and let audiences assume he had developed alzheimer's or something? I know it's been a long time but you'd think he would remember the droid.

 

C-3PO looked completely different when Owen owned him.

Add to that the general overlooked nature of droids in general, and it's not that much of a stretch.

 

there are thousands of droids that look like 3p0 and r2. maybe hundreds of thousands.

 

Originally, Threepio looked even more different because his parts were still showing when Anakin and Padmé arrived at the Lars Homestead. A scene where Padmé covered him up was shot, but it was ultimately scrapped and new footage with a completed Threepio was inserted into his first scenes.

I think he still looks different enough, though.

 

Literally no one who sees C3PO in the OT has any reason to recognize him from the PT. He had a different shell in AOTC and Vader never sees him or interacts with him. Obi-Wan never had that much to do with C3PO so wouldn't have thought about it. His mind was also wiped so even if someone did consider a resemblance 20 years later, he would probably brush them off. Plus, he looks like any other protocol droid.

 

I'm also pretty sure Threepio never refers to himself by name in ANH to Owen. He never gets the chance because Owen keeps interrupting him.

Of course I could be wrong, but that's what I'm thinking anyway.

 

C3PO was a different color and he was just a protocol droid. Like all the other ones

 

Exactly.

We know about Owen's attitude to droids. They are just mechanisms to him.

3PO was Shmi's droid and then became Anakin's again in AOTC.

With his attitude to droids which was not "Hey let's be friends" and the fact that protocol droids all look the same and sound similar there is no reason to think he would "recognize" 3PO.

Now if he had the chance later he would find out the name but he never does though you can speculate that once Luke mentions Obi-Wan in relation to R2 he may be thinking of something but he doesn't want to know and simply decides that they will have their memories wiped.

 

I think that's the most likely answer

 

I think Lucas knew audiences would be smart enough to realize that:

1. Visually, 3PO looked completely different in AOTC compared to over 20 years later when Owen meets him again in ANH, there's no reason to believe that Owen is going to think the droid he meets in ANH is 3PO any more than he would suspect any other protocol droid he may have met in the intervening 20 years to be 3PO.

2. Owen never learns the name of the droid he buys in A New Hope. He tells the droid to shut up and buys him. In the following scenes we see that Owen never has a chance to interact with the droids after he buys them, and before Artoo disappears and Luke/3PO go after him.


So did Lucas forget anything? No!

Are we supposed to assume Owen has Alzheimer's? No!

The answers are there...

 

Surely he mentioned his name.........He always mentions his name, I'm gonna look it up

 

mikeximus Hey dude, wassup? Haven't seen you in forever. Happy to know you're still around here.

 

No he didn't and that is why Lucas was able to do it. Obviously if 3PO had said his name to Owen then Lucas would have just had to keep 3PO with Watto until Anakin showed up and took his droid back. Then 3PO would have stayed on the ship and Owen never meets him.

They usually are it seems.

 

These excuses are all well and good but why are they necessary? GL could've just done it differently and there would be no need for any confusion. I get that it is a very, very minor thing but I thought I'd bring it up anyway.

 

I mean...the confusion's not there in the film itself. Rather it's in the audience's perception of what happened, when it was actually quite different. Lucas shouldn't have to worry about that, rather he should only have to concern himself with the story he wants to tell.

 

who's to say Owen didn't remember him?

he's not exactly the sentimental sort is he? I know an uncle I've not seen in probably 24 years and if I was to see him tomorrow, he would act exactly as Owen did.

 

No, I'm sure Lucas didn't forget this. He put an immense amount of detail, work, and care into his six movies, as shown by the Ring Theory (and even without. You can tell how much work was put into the films just by watching them on one viewing)

He wouldn't have overlooked something like this, no matter how extraneous it is. As others have pointed out, 3PO looked completely different and Owen probably wouldn't have recognized him anyway.

 

Say isn't that the toaster my stepbrother owned back in the day? .....naw.

 

How are they excuses? Those explanations are all very plausible to me. 3PO was one of many identical protocol droids. It's not that Anakin designed him, just built him according to a fixed design, presumably like we make model kits with pre-built parts and instructions. His type of unit maybe is the most common design of protocol droids in the SW universe. There could have been millions of them. We even see 3PO together with the same model twice in the OT, then again the exact same model at the beginning of TPM. Only the outer surface was slightly different in color and shininess. So we know it's a common enough model in the SW galaxy, nothing special. Droids in SW may have personalities but they are still mostly treated like objects by living creatures. To Owen he was not much more than a tool. Why would he make a big deal of buying the same type tool he used to own 25 years earlier? Also, like someone already mentioned, Owen doesn't strike me as the sentimental type. He's a farmer and needs these machines for his farm work, not as companions. His father might have recognized 3PO had he been alive. But Owen in AOTC was young and probably had lots of other things on his mind besides farm work, just like Luke. He probably went out to meet friends a lot and didn't pay much attention to his father's farm tools.

 

Hundreds of billions. no exaggeration.

 

I don't know that there is any confusion. For every person who doesn't like that R2 and 3PO are in the PT, there are people who like that they get a bit of an origin story. Lucas has always shown a bit of the action through the lenses of these droids, and it's a bit of nice continuity there.

I would guess that most people who saw the PT didn't think deeply about how the droids would interact in the OT. Anyone who thought a bit deeper could just watch the OT and notice that there were no continuity errors. The only character capable of recognizing 3PO never saw him, and the only other character who would have noticed R2 wasn't totally truthful in ANH.

 

Excuses? Confusion?

There aren't any excuses given. You know that in ANH, C-3Po is who he is, but, Uncle Owen did not.

Or do you believe that every time Uncle Owen comes across a protocol droid he automatically should assume it's C-3PO?

One day Owen comes across TC-14, should Owen automatically assume it's a droid that he owned over 22 years ago?




What about K-3PO? Should their paths ever cross, would Owen automatically assume that it's C-3PO?




What about E-3PO (the rude droid on Cloud City)? Should Owen continue to assume every droid he meets is C-3PO?



So when Owen comes across some seemingly random droid in a Jawa Droid Sale, why would Owen assume it's C-3PO (a droid in that the last time he saw looked completely different), and why is it a problem that Lucas did it? Because some in the audience can't tell the difference between what they know and what the characters know? I believe that's the heart of the problem here, that people forget that what they know is not the same thing as what the characters know.

 

3PO in AOTC: Dull gray. Presumably Owen knows his name.

3PO in ANH: Shiny gold. Owen never hears his name.

Every other 3PO in the galaxy: Looks and sounds extremely similar.

HaloWithStyle: Ignores obvious explanations, calls them "excuses".

Every other poster in this thread:

 

of course they're obvious explanations I'm just saying that regardless of how similar 3PO is to other droids these are still two characters who have clearly met before and GL could've just done it differently where we don't even need to come up with our own explanations.

 

I've heard the "toaster" explanation before. Frankly, I never really cared for it. I mean, 3PO is a pretty tough character to forget. If Owen had to live around him for any decent period of time, I'm not sure how he could possibly forget him.

But the only logical excuse that will work, is that Owen is under the assumption that all protocal droids virtually look, act and speak the same. And since he spent no real time with 3PO after the Jawa sale, 3PO didn't look the same and never gave his name, Owen had no reason to believe it was the same droid. It's plausible. But I'd have preferred a different explanation.