Marjorie Eaton - The Original Emperor

darklordoftech · Apr 6, 2025

Sauron_18 said: ↑

I appreciate the fact that we have an older, somewhat different version of the Emperor out there. It gives us a look at the early concept behind the character before later films defined him into the character we’re now familiar with. But in 1980, the Emperor was still a mystery, a powerful villain whom we only saw in this brief glimpse. Lucas was introducing us to the personification of evil, an embodiment of the dark side of the Force that had enslaved Darth Vader. This Emperor was the master of the dark side, served by the Dark Lords of the Sith who protected his Empire.

Some of that concept survived into ROTJ, but my impression is that many fans considered the movie a let-down at the time. It did not meet the expectations that TESB had set up, and perhaps that included what people expected from the mysterious Emperor. Lucas had to downplay the big villain he’d been building up because the pressures of making more SW films convinced him to resolve the series in a single movie rather than many. So he never got to make the Emperor into the cosmic threat he would’ve originally been.

McDiarmid’s performance was iconic, of course. But seeing the Eaton-Revill Emperor reminds me that the same general concept could’ve been executed in a very different way. It’s similar to how Vader changed from being a young Jedi student who was seduced by the dark side and killed Luke’s father to actually being Luke’s father. It’s interesting to wonder what the story would’ve been like if concepts like these had been used instead, and honestly I think that was not a small part of what J. J. Abrams was doing in TFA.

Kylo Ren was a version of the original Vader, Rey was a version of the original “other” female Jedi, the Knights of Ren were a version of the original Dark Lords of the Sith, and Snoke was set up to be a version of the original Emperor. The last of these ideas was not followed through with, and Johnson made Snoke even more like McDiarmid’s Emperor and killed him off. But I think part of why Snoke was so intriguing to fans in TFA was that potential in the unknown, which I think was the same kind of deal with the Eaton-Revill Emperor, and is likely was Abrams was hoping to emulate.

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I think a more interesting question is if there were fans who thought that Vader shouldn't have master and/or that the Emperor shouldn't be a Force-user considering that Motti calls The Force a "sad devotion to an ancient religion" and Tarkin says, "The Jedi are extinct. You (Vader) are all that's left of their religion."

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Marjorie Eaton - The Original Emperor

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