CT How we viewed Star Wars in 1998

Precisely. Dooku's line "this contest will not be settled by our knowledge of the Force, but by our skills with a lightsaber" is an exact inversion of what Lucas thought Jedi Master-level Force showdowns were like around ROTJ.

 

1970/80 era Lucas would have written that line reversed. "This contest will not be decided by our skills with a lightsaber, but by our knowledge of the force."

 

I liked this post on the understanding that WAY COOL is ironic, right?

 

Well, that's not actually what Lucas said. He said that Yoda would be no good in a lightsaber fight against Darth Vader, which is true, because Yoda is very old and frail. He also said that he is more like a guru/teacher and that he doesn't go out and fight anybody, which as we see in the prequels is true. Yoda stays at the temple to sit on the Jedi Council and give advice, and when he isn't doing that he's teaching. He doesn't go out and fight like Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan do. That is, not until the Clone Wars calls him out of retirement--and we know how that turns out for him.

As far as "original intent" goes, well, take a look at Leigh Brackett's TESB rough draft, you know, the one we're all so fond of when it comes to "proving" Lucas's original intent regarding the identity of Luke's father:

LUKE

Ben! Is it really…

BEN

It is. Stand clear, Luke, and watch.

He brings the saber to the formal salute. So does Minch. They begin a fencing match which develops into a thing of breathtaking skill and beauty…and Minch is clearly the superior. His skill with the light-blade is dazzling. Luke watches, still not quite believing. At last Ben breaks off,

CONTINUED

132 (cont.)

brings his saber again to the salute and deactivates it. He bows to Minch.

BEN

The victor, as always.

Minch smiles, salutes, and deactivates his saber.

BEN

(to Luke)

Minch was my teacher. He was a Jedi knight, one of the best of them. We came from many worlds, each with our special talents.

Well, would you look at that! Minch (Yoda) is quite the virtuoso with a lightsaber.

Really? Here's Lucas talking to Leigh Brackett in 1978:

“Earlier, Luke talks to Ben; when he brings him up as a ghost, we portend what is going to happen. Ben says, ‘Vader has more power than you can imagine. When he and I met, we fought on such a level that there didn’t appear to be much of a battle; it appeared to be a swordfight, but it was a battle of our wills that was really going on in the beyond.’ I’d like to make it [the Luke vs. Vader duel] into a battle (which we did in the Alan Dean Foster book, which is what I wanted to do in the first one with Ben and Vader) with lightning or electrical bolts, and throwing things around the room; an Exorcist kind of battle where you can bring all kinds of supernatural powers to bear. We’ll have Ben say, ‘Vader couldn’t use his supernatural powers against me, because I was too strong; he had to rely on brute force, which wasn’t of any value, because I was too advanced for that, so everything he did to me was useless.’"

So let's compare what Lucas says about what a battle between two equally matched Force masters would look like in 1978, and what happens in Episode II:

"‘Vader couldn’t use his supernatural powers against me, because I was too strong; he had to rely on brute force, which wasn’t of any value, because I was too advanced for that, so everything he did to me was useless.’"

So Lucas says that Vader couldn't use his supernatural powers against Ben because it would result in a stalemate--exactly what we see happening between Dooku and Yoda in Episode II. So Vader proceeds to use brute force out of necessity, which is exactly what Dooku does in Episode II. Where's the contradiction?

 

Yes, a draft written by Leigh Brackett, of which hardly nothing was used and Lucas gave her a writing credit just to be nice. Not the best source for what you're trying to get across.

This is Lucas trying to make an excuse for the ANH lightsaber battle looking like two old dudes standing in a hallway banging two sticks together. Hey, if you wanna clap until your hands fall off every time Yoda swings his way cool lightsaber around in the prequels, be my guest.

What?

He was retired? source?

The PT creates a problem with Yoda that didn't exist when it was still just 4, 5 & 6. In TESB we're shown an old creature who is (we find out later) one year away from his deathbed. No one ever asked themselves why Yoda wasn't helping the Rebellion. No one expected an old man to go and fight.

Then the PT establishes that Yoda can hop around at great speed and is apparently one of the best Jedi with a blade. So, why was he just hiding on Dagobah? I mean, Ben hiding makes sense because he's been making sure Luke is okay, but Yoda just went into exile because reasons...

 

On a mysterious planet, Luke meets “Minch Yoda” and gives him food. The creature eventually claims to be a Jedi Master, the teacher of Ben Kenobi. Meanwhile, when Han and the Falcon come out of hyperspace, the Empire is waiting for them—somehow the Imperials have managed to locate the Rebel rendezvous point. Han takes them into an asteroid field and hides the Falcon in an asteroid cave. Back on the bog planet, Yoda lifts the X-wing out of the swamp to prove his powers. Not long afterward, “Minch uses Luke’s laser sword to kill a monster that attacks them.” Luke “practices with the sword and seeker balls, seeker balls, defending himself against a dozen laser beams …”
--THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK TREATMENT BY GEORGE LUCAS, NOVEMBER 28, 1977

BZZT. Try again.

Interesting to hear that the Brackett draft isn't admissible as evidence for anything, though. I guess that means we can't use it to prove Lucas didn't intend for Vader to be Luke's father at that point. Okay then, fair enough. No arguments from me.

However, I would point out that the public copy of Brackett's draft shows every word of the draft that Lucas crossed out. He crossed out a lot of stuff, down to minor word choices. He did not cross out anything having to do with Yoda using a lightsaber (naturally, as he also uses a lightsaber in Lucas's story treatment excerpted above).

 

Oh, well I guess that explains why Yoda had a lightsaber in TESB and ROTJ then.

 

Now you're moving the goalposts. No one ever claimed he had a lightsaber in TESB and ROTJ. Here's what you claimed:

We have now established that Lucas's original intent was in fact for Yoda to use a lightsaber, have we not?

I also forgot to address this:

They didn't? You're the one who cited this conversation:

Kasdan: You mean he wouldn’t be any good in a fight?

Lucas: Not with Darth Vader he wouldn’t.

Kasdan: I accept it, but I don’t like it.

Kasdan seems pretty surprised to hear it, and he's the one who wrote Yoda's lines!

e: Also relevant. Note that when Kasdan asks if Yoda would be any good in a fight, Lucas doesn't just say, "No." He says, "Not with Darth Vader he wouldn't." In other words, he deliberately qualifies his statement. Now why do you think he might have done that?

e2: More from Kasdan on Yoda, quoted during the making of TESB:

“Yoda is the lead samurai from Seven Samurai,” says Kasdan of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film. “Seven Samurai is for me the greatest film ever made and enormously influential for George. If you see Seven Samurai, you see Yoda is Shimada, the lead samurai. He’s the mentor figure who gets the whole picture.”

If you haven't seen the film, Shimada is a wise older warrior who has grown weary of war due to his firsthand experience participating in it. Now who does that sound like?

Let's have Dave Filoni explain it to us:

"We finally landed on this big story, which in some ways is connected to the Mortis trilogy that we did. It’s kind of the other side of that coin, where Yoda gets directly involved in the bigger questions about the Force. George and I would discuss this story all the time, because it’s Yoda, and it’s very important to him, and I wanted to make sure we got it right. So I was always asking George things about Yoda, how he would behave, what he would do and what he would question.

...

[Yoda] basically reaches a certain point of enlightenment and it ties into Qui-Gon and what Yoda talks about in Revenge of the Sith. It makes all those things come together. And then when you look at it, and you hear what he says at the end of this arc versus what he was saying at the beginning, you realize he’s come to a different understanding. In Empire he says things like, “Wars not make one great.” Well, he fought a war. You have to fight through the war, and you have to get through that, and see other people that do that, to have any understanding of that truth. So he can’t be that way [during The Clone Wars]. “A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense. Never attack.” Well, the Clone Wars-era Jedi don’t seem to think that way. Maybe that was a long-lost governing principle, but they’re certainly not behaving that way in the Clone War. So you understand that, fundamentally, what a Jedi is during the Clone Wars and the prequel era is different than what Yoda, Qui-Gon, and eventually, Obi-Wan, understand is the truth of being completely selfless. Certain things in life you cannot defeat through conflict. You can only defeat them through being selfless and giving of yourself for others. Inspiration, enlightenment, teaching. I mean, that’s all in The Empire Strikes Back."

Funny how everything just seems to tie together, isn't it?

 

That make no sense. I understood exactly what that line meant when I was a kid, so obviously it's not true that you "have to fight through the war, and you have to get through that, and see other people that do that, to have any understanding of that truth"

Unless you're implying I hate fought in a war by the age of ten.

He's saying this because it makes no sense that Yoda wouldn't be able to crush him like an empty tin can.

No, we haven't. You seem to be cherry picking quotes and not understanding the subtext. I bet you actually think Kasdan wanted Luke to literally wear Vader's helmet at the end of ROTJ when Kasdan talks about Luke going to the dark side.

 

A notable point: most of the handwritten corrections in the Brackett draft as it's come out on the Internet don't appear to be in George Lucas' handwriting.

Lucas has a very distinctive hand, with wide letters loosely connected. One of his particular flourishes is drawing hollow circles for the dots of lowercase I's, like in the "official Walt Disney signature" that Disney has stamped for decades on so much merchandising. He also displays frequently idiosyncratic spelling - notes for the 1974 draft suggest the Emperor came to power after his predecessor was "assinated", and outlines for ESB refer to tauntauns as "snow lizzards". (In fact, some SW books with photos of pages from that outline - but not others - went as far as to Photoshop out the extra Z...)

The Brackett draft corrections are by someone whose handwriting features narrow letters packed tightly together, with excellent spelling but frequent concern for what particular turn of phrase would sound best. And no hollow-dotted I's. That writer wasn't Lucas. It was quite likely Brackett herself.

Furthermore, we know these aren't Lucas corrections because he did make handwritten annotations on his own copy, as mentioned in JW Rinzler's Making of ESB:

Those are definitely Lucas corrections, right down to the Dune plagiarism. And evidence that he wasn't happy with Brackett's work. But Brackett's script did follow, slavishly, a plot outline Lucas gave her - one in which there was no mention of Vader being Luke's father. AFAIK the outline doesn't mention Minch's lightsaber duel with Ben Kenobi's ghost either. However, it does say at one point “Minch uses Luke’s laser sword to kill a monster that attacks them.”

So Minch/Yoda has a sword, but would he use it in battle against a powerful dark Force user such as the Emperor?

Lucas told Brackett "We’ll have Ben say, ‘Vader couldn’t use his supernatural powers against me, because I was too strong; he had to rely on brute force, which wasn’t of any value, because I was too advanced for that, so everything he did to me was useless.’" This implies that Vader used brute force because Ben severely outmatched him - but also that, in a battle where both Force users wielded colossal power, something beyond just a lightsaber duel would happen.

Besides which, Lucas himself says he'd have made the Ben/Vader fight in ANH a telekinetic battle, relying on using the Force to shape the environment rather than a lightsaber duel, if he could've made it work. The Sidious/Yoda fight in ROTJ actually comes much closer to this than Yoda's AOTC duel with Dooku - though in both cases it's the villains who do this, while Grand Master Yoda just goes whackity-whack with his glowy sword.

 

As a kid, I fully understood that Yoda used to be a great warrior, but he doesn't like war anymore. This was obvious to me.

And when Kasdan wrote that line, he wrote it with the understanding that Yoda was like Kambei Shimada, a character who fits that exact description. Lucas then depicted Yoda that way in the prequels, right down to giving him mannerisms based on that character:



Later, he told Dave Filoni that Yoda's motivations were like that character's motivations, just as Kasdan said back during the making of The Empire Strikes Back.

I think Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas, and Dave Filoni are right about the character, and that my impressions as a child were therefore also right. I think that your impressions of the character as a child were wrong, and that you are wrong now.

So you're simultaneously basing your argument about original intent on what Lucas is saying here, but also saying that what Lucas is saying makes no sense? Then why should we even care what he says here?

How am I cherrypicking quotes? Find me one single quote from anyone involved in the making of the films--other than the conversation Lucas had with Kasdan that we've just discounted as worthless--that says Yoda can't fight with a lightsaber or that he was never, ever a warrior. Just one. If I'm cherrypicking, it should be easy to find a lot of them. I can tell you, though, it wasn't hard to find all these quotes supporting the opposite conclusion. In fact, they're the only kinds of quotes I could find on the matter.

 

Jedi are great warriors, that doesn't mean they like war or crave to be part of one. Yoda never liked war, before and after those (or the one) he was involved in. It's not some sort of change of heart that he has between the PT and the OT. He's making a point to Luke, that being a Jedi is not about being a great warrior, even though they are great warriors. Being a Jedi is not about seeking power, even though they are powerful.

That's the point that Yoda was making. It's a bit of wisdom to humble Luke.

 

Fair enough, I didn't realize that. But as I pointed out, it's irrelevant, because Lucas's story treatment features a scene where Minch uses a lightsaber to kill a deadly monster that attacks them.

I don't think that's what that says. Lucas is saying that Ben and Vader were too equally matched. If Ben severely outmatched Vader, he could just use his own Force powers to overwhelm Vader. It's only in a battle where one of the combatants severely outmatches the other--as in Luke vs. Vader--that it makes sense for Force powers to be used, because they can provide a decisive advantage.

Yes, but he couldn't make it a telekinetic battle, so he came up with an explanation for why it wasn't, and he stuck to that.

In ROTS, it isn't true that Yoda "just goes whackity-whack with his glowy sword." First, he takes out two Red Guards with a flick of his wrist. Then, after Sidious knocks him out with lightning, Yoda retaliates by blasting him backwards with the Force. But since both of them just get up afterwards, it's just like in Episode II--it's a stalemate, there's no point in doing the exact same thing over and over again hoping the other gets tired before they do (this would also be very boring to watch). So they draw their swords and fight just like Ben and Vader do in Episode IV. It's not like this is something strange and new to the series.

It's only after Sidious loses his lightsaber (which was cut out of the movie but he clearly doesn't have it) that he starts flinging pods around and eventually manages to disarm Yoda, forcing both of them to have a pure Force battle. And once again it ends in a stalemate situation which results in both of them being hurled backwards:



Yoda, realizing the futility of continued fighting, flees.

Lucas remains perfectly consistent with the rules he's established for himself. Force powers are useful when the combatants are unevenly matched. They result in stalemate when the combatants are evenly matched, and swords must be used instead.

e:

Well, Filoni specifically says otherwise, after having extensively discussed just this specific topic with Lucas during meetings for the Yoda arc. Which tracks exactly with Lucas saying the Jedi have been "corrupted" by being generals and fighting in a war and doing something they're not supposed to be doing.

This isn't to say that Yoda is a total pacifist or that he thinks it's wrong to ever fight. He'd be a total hypocrite if that were true. But it means his perspective on war and a Jedi's role in relation to it has changed.

 

So Yoda got to be 870 years old before he realized war was bad? That's embarassing.

It really does seem like in order for Palpatine's plan to work, everyone else in the galaxy has to be a complete moron.

 

He always thought war was bad. But he had to experience the war to have a true understanding of exactly what it means to wage a war and participate in a war, and to have the strength of will to say "No" even when it seems like you have no choice and it's something you have to do for the greater good. Again, much like the Kurosawa character on whom Yoda was based, and on whom Yoda has always been based (yes, even when you were a child watching the movie with a full and unvarnished understanding of all its various subtexts and implications).

I take it you don't and have never supported a single war, from any point in history, for any reason? Good for you. But many wise people today and throughout history have done so, only to later realize the extent of their folly. Not everyone can be as wise and all-knowing as you. Some of us have at some point in our lives been, in your words, "morons." But we learn, and we never stop learning, no matter how old we get. That's life (at least for some us).

 

Luke says that he is looking for a great warrior and Yoda says that wars do not make people great. Luke is young and hasn't learned this lesson yet. But to say that it took 870 years for Yoda to learn that lesson makes no sense. You and I both see what Yoda is saying, right? I don't know how old you are, but it's safe to assume we both know this after only a few decades of existing. It too Yoda over 8 and a half centuries to learn what we both know. It makes him look like an idiot.

 

What do you think Yoda would say about World War II? Do you think it would make him a "moron" if he decided that he was morally compelled to participate in it at the age of 870? Remember that as far as Yoda understood, the Clone War was a struggle for the very existence of the Republic he had pledged his life to serve.

All of this is very simple, yes? It's very simple to say that war does not make one great, even war for a just cause in defense of the innocent. It's something anyone who's not a moron or a child already knows. Would you agree? Of course you do realize that's what Yoda is saying, right?

 

But people are saying this is Yoda's arc in the six part saga; that he has to learn this lesson. And a Filoni quote has been used as reference to this arc.

Which means that Yoda didn't learn this lesson for over 8 centuries.

 

What lesson did Yoda learn? In your own words?

 

For me, it boils down to this:

George Lucas often played things fast and loose with the planning, development, and making of Star Wars. This does not negate his genius, it actually enhances it. Some of the the most masterful artists in the world create with a healthy dose of improvisation and revision as they go about creating.

That said, let's not kid ourselves. The idea that George Lucas always had a Star Wars "master plan" that he always adhered/referred to seems to be, at best, to be a mixture of fact and fiction.

Therefore, you have scenes in ESB broken as Luke and Leia are now, unwittingly, incestuous siblings.
Therefore, you have things like Obi-Wan having to clean up exposition from Episode 4, with "certain point of view" exposition in Episode 6.
Therefore, you have elements, story threads, plot points/details that don't line up between the Prequels and Original Trilogies...at all.

As much as I love Star Wars, and I love it a hell of a lot, it never has been 100% seamless. It's close enough for me to either, not care, or to make it work in my head.

The core of the entire saga, and the brilliance of the concept, the beloved characters, and the innovative reframing of classic mythology into innovative modern story telling is enough for me to shrug off these inconsistencies...perceived or real.

So, while I totally think AOTC /ROTS warrior mode Yoda, is more than a bit incongruent with what Yoda originally is/was in the OT, I also think: If George Lucas didn't care, why should I?

Like the man said, "Continuity is for wimps."
It's a motto that serves one well when jumping from film to film, trilogy to trilogy. Yes, even the Disney era stuff.

 

What I have to say about it is irrelevant. A Filoni quote, where Dave claims to be paraphrasing Lucas, is what we're discussing in here. But I bet you'll claim that quote doesn't mean what it actually says either. When it comes to quotes from Star Wars content creators you seem to cherry pick with little to no context at best or just blatantly try to mislead at worst. Either way, I'm done going around in circles with you. Have a good day.

 

Okay. Not sure what inspired this. But I accept your concession, I guess. I enjoyed the debate. Have a good one.