PT Should Yoda have been left out of the Prequels?

Nothing about Yoda during the PT era was set in stone. I'm glad we got to see him as one of the Jedi Council members. I liked seeing Yoda somewhere besides Dagobah and seeing him on Coruscant was a 180 from where he'd been in TESB and ROTJ.

Had Yoda not been in the PT at all, that would have been a disappointment to me.

There are three books (all written and released with Lucas' approval) that state that no, he did not.

If you think it's unwise to believe verifiable evidence and you think it's wise to instead listen to one person who says otherwise even though he has nothing to support his claim... then wow.

 

George Lucas wrote scripts for all the episodes, and what I said above he shared in an interview. So its his own words, not pretending to know.

 

Not all at once.

Yes, and it was a lie.

 

You are calling GL a liar? Woah.

 

Yes, GL has made it apparent on multiple occasions that he wishes everyone would assume he wrote some massive 300 page screenplay that he later had to cut in thirds.

What actually happened is that he cut out two sequences from his ANH screenplay, put one sequence in TESB and put another in ROTJ.

 

And your source is?

 

I already posted all three of them. The MAKING OF books released in 2007, 2010, and 2013.

 

Are they compiled by GL or someone else?

 

J.W. Rinzler was given access to the Lucasfilm archives to write these three books.
Copyright LUCASFILM LTD

 

I've always wanted to read those books. Are they worth it?

 

Absolutely. I'd buy the digital editions, though, as they have some content that's not in the original print versions.

 

I much prefer physical copies. What's the extra content in the digital versions?

 

Extra photos, as well as video and audio clips. In particular, things like early test-footage versions of the SW title crawl that are absolute gold.

The Making of SW book digital edition also includes some storyboards that were only featured in a limited-edition release of the physical book (which was rather annoying, and probably why they didn't repeat it with the subsequent books).

 

I think he said it was around 200 pages in the ANH commentary track.

 

Average screenplay is between 90 to 120 pages. 200 pages seems like some sort of epic that no one has ever actually laid their eyes on.

The original title was something to the effect of THE ADVENTURES OF LUKE STARKILLER: SAGA ONE: THE STAR WARS and the story is all over the place, but once GL landed on the story that would ultimately be ANH, he ended up putting the cloud city type prison scenes on the Death Star itself (Originally Leia wasn't held on the Death Star), he took out the extended asteroid chase sequence that would have followed the escape from cloud city/Death Star, and there was a scene on Yavin 4 (or whatever planet it was called at the time) where our heroes met some natives and had to befriend them before they got to where the Rebel base was located.

So Cloud City and an asteroid chase was what GL took out for TESB and the native subplot was put in ROTJ. So when GL talks about his splitting his epic screenplay into thirds... that's actually what he's talking about. He's talking about a city design, one action sequence, and a short subplot.

 

Yoda is key in the Prequels, he is one of few figures in each of the three trilogies. He is Palpatine’s opposite, the Jedi Sage.

 

The Jedi Sage who made his own mistakes. Why hide the truth?

 

“Failure the greatest teacher is.” -Yoda, TLJ

 

For what it's worth, the 1974 rough draft of Star Wars was indeed absurdly long, so much so that according to JW Rinzler, Lucas considered cutting it up into a two-part film in the vein of Kill Bill. The title at that point was just "The Star Wars".

The 1975 second draft introduced the "Saga One" subtitle (along with the relegation of "The Star Wars" to an episode title) and in particular the idea that Star Wars would be a multi-part ongoing film series. The asteroid-chase sequence was also deleted from the script at this point - perhaps with the intent to revisit the idea in a sequel.

 

Was that this??

I never read this, but it's interesting.

I think Vader is just a general and someone named Valorum (not the Chancellor, another character with the same name) ends up changing sides from bad to good. The Death Star gets blown up at the end.

I'm not sure if this was the draft where they found Yavin natives who ended up flying ships to help blow up the Death Star or not. That might have been the second draft.

 

Yes, that was JW Rinzler's comic-book adaptation of the 1974 rough-draft script. The original script is out there on the Internet, as are the other script drafts for SW 1977.

 

There is a theme of both Obi-Wan and especially Yoda going from the highest position, literally the highest tower on the capital planet to humbling themselves as exiles on backwater planets. I think it's interesting that they seem somewhat detached in the prequels, and then become more in tune with the Force and the Netherworld in the OT. Yoda "failing" in the Clone War gives more substance to his line about wars not making one great. And the theme of Yoda (and Obi-Wan) being wrong about Anakin plays through the prequels to the originals. So I think thematically Yoda being the Council leader in the PT gives important resonance to the whole saga.

 

I wasn't talking about a planned trilogy. I was talking about the apparent original outline that had the death star the whole time, not the trilogy as is.

 

Heck no lol it was a privilege to see more of Yoda before his exile on the dagobah system.

 

I think he should have been in the prequels , but used sparingly and above the use of a lightsaber ,and the same goes for Palpatine . Yeah , it was fun to see and it is what it is , but I envisioned them both as being beyond the use of them .George Lucas initially had this conception of Yoda in a production meeting from July 1981 attended by George Lucas, director Richard Marquand, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan and producer Howard Kazanjian, as chronicled in Rinzler's Making Of Return Of The Jedi book ..." The Force is "like yoga ... everybody can do it. If you want to take the time to do it, you can do it; but the ones that really want to do it are the ones who are into that kind of thing."...Lucas also describes Grand Master Yoda as "a guru; he doesn't go out and fight anybody." I also would have liked to have seen Obi Wan stop over at Dagobah towards the end of ROTS with Luke in hand , before taking him to Tatooine and giving more meaning to Luke saying that there was something familiar about the place in ESB