First Revelation of Darth Vader's disfigurement

I'm getting nostalgic it seems. I think this is the right forum for this. If not, sorry.

I seem to recall being around 7 years old (which would have been 1981) and having another kid in my neighborhood tell me "Darth Vader got that way because Obi-Wan Kenobi dropped him into a pool a lava"

So I am wondering, when and where was this revealed? Was it in a comic? A newsletter? Something else like that? Surely someone's got to know. I didn't make this up in my own mind, did I?

 

I believe it was the Return of the Jedi novelization. That wouldn't explain your experience, though, so perhaps an earlier source had it as well.

 

It was a comic. Before the movies came out. Some kid told me before ROTJ that Luke and Leia were sibling and DV was their dad. i got all insulted.... I was really little. This was like telling me Prince Charming killed Snow White. LOL....

 

I think I remember reading it in the ESB novelisation.
It is the only novelisation of the first three movies I read and I remember knowing that there was a story with a volcano before even seeing RotJ.

 

Lucas stated it in a Rolling Stone interview from May 25, 1977.

At this point Annikin and Darth are separate characters, but the story is already somewhat there... I'd imagine that it became common knowledge from fans passing that info around, it being used in novelizations/comics/spin-offs, Lucas or other creators mentioning it again, etc.

 

Thanks. That definitely explains it. Someone I knew must have read that interview.

 

That quote rocks... I never get tired of reading it.

 

if only we had the internet back then... THAT would have been funny.

 

How to put this in PG terms? I kind always wondered if the injuries are such that Vader needed equipment for his... equipment.

 

I don't know, and I try not to think about it..

 

that's why Luke and Leia don't have any younger half sibling

 

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. That sounds like fertile ground for TFU 4.

 

what about the revelation of episodes 7,8,9?

 

I didn't know about the interview above (which is a really cool find), but the earliest canon work that I know of to feature the lava thing was the RoTJ novelization, published a few weeks before the film came out. The RotJ comic adaptation was published a few months later, while the TESB novelization, to the best of my knowledge (I have it right in front of me, and have read it a few times) contains no mentions of it.

The RotJ novelization contains a much longer conversation between Luke and Obi-wan than what appears in the film, which contains a cool look at what GL envisioned for Anakin's history in 1983, and serves as a nice kind of "alternate history" to what we see in the Prequels:

Later on in the novel, Vader also mentally recalls the sensation of "lava running down his back".

And for a line that reflects an even earlier "alternate" take on the GFFA, look no further than the ANH novelization.

I for one find it delightfully ironic that the reading of the scene and of Obi-wan's character given in the above passage is exactly opposite to the one that post-TESB canon dictates...even though all of the dialog and description given, apart from the one line of inserted omniscient-author description, are fully consistent with what we learn about Vader in TESB.
Ah, well...

 

lol..

 

I've always sorta wondered if the redemption storyline of ROTJ would have worked equally as well with Vader not being Luke's father.

 

It'd have probably been more powerful. As things stand, people can always say "well, he only saved Luke because he was his son/Luke only gave a crap because he was his father". If, however, Luke had brought out the good in -- and refused to kill -- his father's murderer? That would have been epic.

And the line "I am a Jedi, like my father before me" would have been more spine-chillingly awesome. As it is, whenever I hear the line I can't help but think: "Well, hopefully not too much like your father...."

Of course, ESB would have suffered... but the saga as a whole? Probably better.

Which is why I hope -- when they inevitably remake the Star Wars films in the decades to come -- they don't just repeat every aspect of the story. They should do a completely new interpretation of the central "mythos" and reinvent it in the same way that the King Arthur story (for example) is reinvented.

(As for the novel extract, I think we're supposed to interpret what Ben is saying as an uncomfortable lie, now )