CT How did you envision Star Wars before the prequels?

I always fantasised about the concept of Vader fighting on a lava planet and being injured, as Lucas originally envisioned. I didn't think anything in my mind could live up to that. But more or less, it did. It's one of my absolute favourite Star Wars scenes.

 

- I thought Force Lightning was something that the Emperor had kept secret for centuries, never using it or allowing anyone else to know that it exists.

- I thought the Jedi dressed like Luke in ROTJ. I thought they either all used the same saber color or used all saber colors.

 

I now want to see this happen. Bring on the "What If Star Wars" comic!

 

I never imagined the Jedi as a small army with a temple in the Galactic Capital. More like Knights who share a religion. The Jedi being as big and as public as they were in the PT just makes no sense when compared with some of the dialogue in the OT.

Never imagined the force would be explained by cellular micro-intruders

Never imagined Palpatine as such a conniving character. Was actually a nice surprise.

Never thought Leia would only know her mom that she had memories of for about 5 seconds.

Do ALL planets in Star Wars HAVE to have the same terrain throughout?

 

The prequels came out during my lifetime, but I saw the originals first on video. Before I saw the Phantom Menace when I was eight (VHS was still common back then) I imagined Obi Wan and Anakin to be older and I thought the Jedi of that time lived in isolation. I read a kids picture book of ANH before I saw it (and when Attack of the Clones was still in Redbox) and I actually thought Luke's father had asked Obi Wan to give Luke the lightsaber. I even thought this after seeing TESB and ROTJ, until I saw ROTS not long after it came out on DVD.

 

If Rogue 1 turns out great I hope after the spin-offs run their course, they'll use the same crew to remake the prequels. Rogue1 already shows they completely got rid of the distracting dorky designs Lucas chose in the prequels & ROTJ. There can be some "cute" designs such as R2D2, BB8 etc. , but they got to serve a purpose, not make the whole background and civilization look like it's just filled with goofoff cgi clutter.

 

Here's a question for you all: How did you think the Emperor learned to use The Force? Did you think he had a dark side master,'did you think he was a fallen Jedi, or did you think he was self-taught?

 

Interesting point...He was so mysterious, as we had learnt almost nothing about him in the OT.

Well, back in the OT days and before the PT came in, I more or less envisioned him as a political figure (senator Palpatine, from ANH novel prologue and a few marvel comics I happened to read), who had secretely learned the ways of the Force, and self-turned to the dark side for more power and control.

I didn't think at all about a rival order (Sith), sworn enemy of the Jedi one.

 

- I didn't expect at all that Anakin Skywalker would be close to Palpatine/the Emperor before the later is able to turn him. Thought he would meet and deal with him much later, near the end actually.
Probably because that's the case for Luke in the OT...

- I didn't expect that Palpatine would contemplate the Clone Wars and the fall of the Republic from the beginning. Thought, and hoped, that he would be more ambiguous and less deeply evil in the
beginning.

- As many mentioned above, I expected the Jedi order to be far less centralised and hierarchical. Better reflecting the way they are portrayed in the OT.

- Couldn't have imagined for a second that Anakin Skywalker would turn to the dark side and join the Empire because he was over-attached to the ones he loved. His Wife especially...What a
letdown.

- Thought Anakin Skywalker would be much older when the story begins, about the same age as Luke.

- And last, but not least, really expected Mother Skywalker would go into hiding/exile on Alderaan, daughter in tow, when Anakin turns to the dark side and the Empire is born. It would have been far
more emotional and tragic than this infamous sudden broken heart death we ended up with in ROTS. No, seriously George, how could you do this !!!

 

These posts always give me a chuckle. Disney could not care less if you like, love, hate, or pretend the PT did not exist. They care that you see their movies. That is all. The PT and the OT will never be remade. TFA nonwithstanding.

 

I always envisoned that Anakin and Obi Wan were the same age, based purely on the fact they used Sebastian Shaw at the end of Jedi as his force ghost, who looked similar in age to Alec Guiness to me.

With Obi Wan saying Anakin was a pupil of his it made me think they had like an academy where Obi Wan was teaching more than one person.

I always assumed that the Empire would have been the villains throughout any prequels, with The Emperor as their leader.

I thought that Yoda had always lived on Dagobah and was a mysterious teacher that people got sent to to train as Jedi. The reason he was hidden away there was because it was kept a secret where Jedi went to train.

I thought Darth Vader was going to be the main villain for more than he was and he would be shown tracking down Jedi.

With Obi Wan referring to Ankain as a cunning warrior and the best star pilot in the galaxy I thought he was around Lukes age before he started to find the ways of The Force.

I thought the Jedi were present on every planet as some kind of police force

 

Never thought all that much about the background. Vague ideas, images, little more.

I didn't have many ideas about the Jedi. Never thought of them as organized, but I never thought much about it. I imagined they were more active, for sure. Oh, not every day superheroes on patrol, catching every petty thug or anything like that. They would would be like Yoda and Obi-Wan from the OT, just chilling like a hermit most of the time, only they would get the call, and answer it. The very beginning of TPM is pretty close to the idea. Big trouble brewing, call in a few Jedi Knights to settle things.

Obi-Wan, though, I thought was more idealistic when he was younger, more active than most. I actually thought of him as more of a medieval knight in shining armor, and Leia's father his lord. The Clone Wars were his crusade, and he took his apprentice Anakin with him, because this kid Anakin was the best pilot he'd ever seen, and the Force was with him. He'd make a damn good warrior.

Anakin I saw as pure action hero, almost certainly due to the influence 80s action heroes had on me at that age. When he showed up, things exploded and the enemy died in large numbers. Only, he was overzealous. He had a real drive to win (for the sake of winning) and he took it too far, became a very nasty, ruthless person, and joined the Empire to ultimately put an end to all of it, one way or another.

Didn't think about the dark side at all. It's just part of the Force, having always been part of the Force. The Force didn't have any special origins, it was just part of the universe and always had been.

Didn't think the Empire was born from the Republic, no. Thought it came to rise during the Clone Wars. Started as just another faction, until Vader joined and helped it wipe out all the other factions, including the Republic.

Didn't think of the Emperor running both sides of the war, but I did think of him as a clever manipulator.

 

• I always got the impression that Vader wasn't from Tatooine, that Owen wasn't actually his brother (but that he did know Anakin)
• Since Vader was a 'lord' and wore a cape etc, I always imagined him as some sort of prince or duke or something. That he was from the upper crust as it were. If you look at the original drafts for Star Wars, the Prince Valorum character kind of echo's this as well. So I don't think I was crazy in thinking that.
• That Vader was a large physically imposing person, even without the suit
• That the Mandalorians were somehow involved in the clone wars (I have no idea where this notion came from)
• That there was a difference between Jedi and Jedi Knights. As in 'Jedi' was the religion, and the knights were a specific order or something. So Obiwan and Anakin were Jedi Knights, but Yoda was just a Jedi teacher. That only knights carried lightsabers.
• I did not expect Yoda to be the leader of all Jedi
• Luke's black costume in ROTJ was the uniform of a Jedi Knight
• Other people have said it before, but I feel like the prequels greatly inflated Vader's importance to the whole saga.

 

That was certainly the approach the ROTJ novelization took - stating outright that Owen was Obi-Wan's brother.

 

Something else I wanted to add, if you are interested in people's perspective on Star Wars prior to the prequels a really good source is the early EU material, such as Zahn's trilogy, the X-Wing novels, and the Dark Empire comics. What I find fascinating is that a lot of those had a very "military sci-fi" bent to them, focusing on ship battles etc, whereas after the prequels it felt like a lot of the EU material became much more 'Jedi-centric'.

 

Me too. And I guess many of those who wondered about the future PT...

Probably either from ESB Novel ("B.Fett was dressed in a weapon covered, armored spacesuit, the kind worn by a group of evil warriors defeated by the Jedi knights during the Clone Wars"), or a couple of marvel comics involving the character of Boba Fett, which I clearly remember mentioned the same thing in the 80's.

 

So true.

 

the only things that jump out were that I didn't know Anakin would start off as a child being trained. the jedi not being able to marry really surprised me.
other than that I don't think I really thought about it too much.

 

This is a fascinating place for me to go. I was a young child when I saw the 1977 movie in the theatres. First, I thought of Anakin was a much more heroic and self-assured person than Hayden Christensen portrayed him (Hayden never got the grasp of the character's full gifts and inner conflicts, imo). And to be honest, I thought the prequels, the mythical episodes 1-3 which only existed in my imagination, would be a lot more packed with tragic meaning and terrible deeds. They weren't necessarily kid's movies, at all.

The problem is, I wanted George Lucas to reward those of us who had grown up with Star Wars right from 1977 onward to have movies that were at our maturity level, not the prequels that were made. I don't really bemoan that the prequels do have a lot of child-friendly elements (especially TPM), but I expected that Episodes 1-3 would be more adult in their treatment of the complexity of Anakin's fall from grace and turn to the Dark Side, and the "dark times" of the Empire.

Maybe because when I saw ANH as a child, I was so affected by the horror of the charred bodies of Owen and Beru, and the allusion of Darth Vader "betraying and murdering" Luke's father and killing all the Jedi, that I imagined the prequels were the "adult" part of the story Lucas didn't want to film at the time (he was pretty young too). So specific things don't occur to me as much as I thought the tone of the prequels would be filled with less politics and more galactic conflict (much more than we got), and be tailored to fans who grew up in the 60's and 70's who knew the theatrical cuts of the originals better than the special editions.

In my imagination, as I grew up and became an adult, I applied my own complex experiences with love and life to the story of Anakin's fall from grace. In my imagination of the prequels, Anakin's fall to the Dark Side involved a much more emotionally complex romantic relationship with Luke and Leia's mother, a much more complex friendship and teacher/student relationship with Obi-Wan, and eventually a more sinister reason to fall to the Dark Side than naively believing Palpatine's promises to end his nightmares about Padme.

 

This single image below of original concept art from the 90's is what I always imagined of the Prequels. Anakin was still in his prime when he turned to the darkside, and hide the transformation from his loved ones for quite some time as he secretly hunted down and betrayed the noble jedi knights... even his loving wife fears him and what he has become. Finally a reluctant Obi Wan is forced to confront his former friend and bring him in for his crimes of treason.

 

Yeah this is very much inline with my image of prior events pre prequels.

Yoda specifically and the Jedi kind of linked together in this view as I viewed his position on Degobah not just as "in hiding" but the kind of environment he'd lived in for a very long time to help him train Jedi wioth the inference that the Jedi as a whole were a much more informal order.

I think the key thing it comes down to is that I imaged the story as much less focused on the political specifics of the Jedi's fall and Palpatines rise and more on Anakin. I'd say a lot of the choices Lucas made with the Jedi in the prequels were down to wanting to see them as weakened and vulnerable allowing Palatine to paint them as enemies of the state openly. I imaged more that the Jedi operated a good deal less openly and Vader hunted them down for years in the shadows after turning himself.

 

I really love The Skywalker Flame

 

Btw, was anyone else tempted to answer the thread question with "good." ? Because I was, for a heartbeat there. I thought it, I laughed, then I thought better of it, because it was just too easy a joke to make. Not to mention, I'm halfway through a little essay that's trying to take a very different Saga-positive position. And yet, the devil on my shoulder can't seem to resist suggesting it.

Is there a section of the forums where that kind of snark is a-ok, btw?

 

As others have pointed out, as a kid I always imagined they'd be wandering about, helping the downtrodden etc. A bit like the A team, if you could get word to them they'd come and sort out that evil doer who's bothering your village sort of thing. I imagined Anakin and Obi wan being really close. Not bickering constantly.

I've added nothing new here.