CT Silly new Star Wars film rumor dated 1986

Featured as a brief piece of news in the November 1986 issue of French movie magazine STARFIX, stating :

"Here we go again. the 4th episode of the Star Wars saga is about to begin shooting next January (1987) in the UK. Title has already been reavealed : The Clone Wars..."

Had already mentioned this once in another topic, but really wanted to give it a thread of its own.

Does anyone, especially OT Era fan old enough at the time, remember hearing or stumbling upon such a gossip around this particular period, in the press, movie magazines, TV, radio or whatsoever ?

Just asking, as STARFIX was back then in France considered a pretty serious and reliable publication, not known to relay completely unfounded noises or rumors, at least without having some material. I've always been much intrigued by that, and always wondered where this could have come from.

Indeed, it wasn't mentioned anywhere else in the French media, and of course, it didn't take long to realise it was pure crap.

 

interesting!!!

I'd really like to know what the original ideas for the Prequel Trilogy were.

 

I remember reading in a "Starlog" magazine around 1985 that the prequels would be filmed and released in reverse 3, 2, 1...

 

At a convention in 1987, George Lucas is asked about the prequel and the sequel, to which George answers, that if he does make them, then he will make the prequel first and then the sequel.
This was filmed by a fan and can now be bought on Ebay. And no, I am not the one who filmed it and I am not the one who is selling it. I did buy a copy though, that's why I know it.

 

I remember my brother telling me back in 1983 (he read an interview with Lucas during the Jedi promotion):

-Lucas would take 2 years off after Jedi

-Episode VII would start shooting in 1985, and be released in 1988

-Episode VIII & IX would be out in 1991 and 1994

-Lucas would then take another 2 years off

-Episode I, II, III would come out in 1999, 2002, 2005

I remember the spring of 1987 reading in some scifi magazing that Lucas was done with Star Wars and there would be no Episode VII. I remember being totally bummed as I thought at the time, that was the end of SW.

 

Sounds like your brother was mistaken, or you remember it incorrectly. All mentions of films past ROTJ stated that the next trilogy would be the PT, & that should GL decide to do the Sequel Trilogy, that would happen after the PT was completed ("if the actors were old enough", apparently).

GL taking a couple of years off after ROTJ, however, does sound familiar.

 

This used to be in the Sequel Trilogy entry on Wookiepedia, it's since been removed, as there was absolutely no further references & was probably just fan speculation in the first place:

 

I have trouble remembering things from last week, so anything from over 25 years ago might not be totally accurate.

 

Gee...

I see there were other weird rumors along with the one I've mentioned. This one really takes the cake ! Why the hell would they start with episode 3, going in reverse of the chronological order ???

By the way, I remember an old weekly Sci-Fi French TV program called "Temps X" (Time X) running from the early 80's, following the wave of the newly Sci-Fi/Space/Computer trend and interest among young generations.

One was almost exclusively dealing with Star Wars just before ROTJ came out over here (fall of 1983), and they inevitably addressed the future of the saga and the new episodes.

I clearly recall them mentioning the 3 trilogies plan (prequel-current-sequel), Lucas of course having already written the whole... But especially that the next would be the prequels (I-II-III), with Episode II dealing with the Clone Wars and Episode III with the birth and organization of the Empire.

I really wonder where they got their info. Don't think it was from Lucas, Lucasfilm, Marquand, Kershner, Kurtz, or any other official sources...Most likely from other media and the press I guess.

 

Why the hell would anyone deliberately start at Episode IV of a nine part saga?
Oh, I'm sorry, six-part saga, the media made up the other three episodes.

Here's something I turned up a while back, it just goes to show that with so many of these publications throwing every idea under the sun out there, a few are bound to hit pretty close to the mark:

Let's pretend (and that's the name of the game, isn't it?) that we can see July 1986 through the Force, and Episode 1: The Clone Wars has just opened in San Francisco theatres.
The story opens with young Obi-wan Kenobi pushing his way through a crowded, far-off city, when he senses a tremor in the Force. He follows it to a slave boy surrounded by an angry crowd.
Slavery keeps appearing in the Star Wars galaxy, and one of the duties of the Jedi Knights was to stop it. The mark of a slave is a steel collar around the neck. It's also an obedience device. At a radio signal, solenoids tighten the collar around the slave's throat, choking him. (The slave collar appears in Han Solo At World's End, a Star Wars novel by Brian Davey). (sic)
The boy's collar was too small for him, and when his cruel Master touched the punishment button, it started to crush his windpipe. Out of blind self-preservation, the boy used the Force. Like Luke, he had no idea it existed, but in his last desperate moment he willed his Master to know exactly how it felt to die. To his surprise, he discovered that the illusion of suffocation was just as deadly as the collar itself.
The penalty for killing a Master was death, but Obi-wan intervened. He purchased the boy at a fair price, recognizing him as a lost Jedi offspring. The boy gave his name as Darth Vader, but when he tried to call Obi-wan "Master", the great warrior admonished him sternly.
Upon their return to his ship, the Millennium Falcon, Obi-wan watched carefully as the boy met the Falcon's pilot, Skywalker. Carefully, because he had recognized Vader as an identical clone to Skywalker, though several years younger.

- Fantastic Film, December 1980

This was part of a purely speculative article which degenerates into the same sort of nonsense that was published during the 1990s - Boba Fett is a clone of Anakin Skywalker, same as Darth Vader, etc etc etc.

However, it's fascinating because it came up with the idea that Darth Vader was once a slave, & nothing from the official sources at the time even hinted at it. My theory is that they put Darth Vader's Force-choke from the films together with the slave collars in the Brian Daley Han Solo novels & came up with the slavery backstory for Vader. Could have gone another way - they could just as easily have specul

 

Indeed, really amazing.

Didn't know that those kind of speculative articles ever existed in standard Sci-Fi movie magazines.

Of course the more the Imagination is free to express itself among many people, the more chances you'll have to hit some of the target.

Fair enough. But all in all, post 1983, when the backstory was pretty sure to be the next movie series/trilogy (Episodes I II III), it would really have been non-sense to begin with Episode III...Although all began with "Star Wars" later christened Episode IV ANH, we still came up with IV V VI in chronological order, no ?

Yeah, I became aware of that couple of years ago...

 

That I can understand. What a depressing thought !!!

From What I read and heard since ROTJ's release till the mid 80's, it was bascially mentioned that Lucas actually wanted to take a long (very long indeed) break, and that someday he would return to Star Wars to deal with the backstory/PT, although it kind of became more and more uncertain and elusive by the end of the decade.

I personally never really doubted that he would one day come back to it. Couldn't imagine he would skip on that, given the huge success of the OT and that the rough backstory he ended up with had so much epic, dramatic and tragic resonance. Also I guess I was so eager to see it onscreen one day, that I actually couldn't envision it the other way. Though it would not have been so unbearable in the end. You always have to move on.

 

these stories are fascinating, i wanna see more of these stories some of them are so funny. i own the trilogy of the han solo adventures but in my opionion they are so awfull and boring to read, if only because they were basicly cash ins designed to hold people over until the "fad" went away.

 

Looks like they at least got the dates right for Eps I, II and III.

 

After Return of the Jedi, I, like a lot of people, figured STAR WARS was over. I didn't know anything about plans for prequels, but then apparently one had to be attentive to the sci-fi magazines or TV interviews (which I have since seen) and I was not.

 

I was just a little kid, didn't buy the sci-fi mags, but I heard about the PT (and supposed Sequel Trilogy) by word of mouth around the time of ESB, don't recall hearing many specifics about any more films apart from ROTJ past that, but I certainly didn't forget. After ROTJ was done, I was still expecting the first episode of the PT by 1986.
About 1987 or so, however, I accepted that it was all over, and sadly, with adolescence descending, I didn't care.

 

Most of what I read when ROTJ came out, and some short time after, mentioned Lucas would take a long time off before returning back to SW with the backstory. Mad Movies, another local Sci-Fi/Horror magazine, weirdly speaks in October 1983 of a possible Episode III dealing with the Old Republic and the Clone Wars, or something more about Luke Skywalker's childhood... (where did it come from ?), saying of course it's only rumors so far : indeed, the latest really sounded like a phoney noise.

Anyway they mention the early 1990's ("about 1990") as the likely date for a future entry in the Saga. That's the only precise stuff I stumbled upon in the media regarding the release dates of the next episodes actually.

I stumbled upon another rumor about possible new films in the late 80's, again in Starfix, among an article related to upcoming projects in the UK...

Then there was a long article in Mad Movies in late 1990 looking back on the Star Wars phenomenon, mentioning that, according to Lucas, he would not return to the saga before 4 or 5 years. It happened to be true.

That, for me, happened between ESB and the impending realease of ROTJ, although I knew there was another movie coming. I was caught again when the news about Episode VI started to come in.

When did you begin to care again ?

 

1995, on my birthday, no less. I spotted an ad for the 'Sith War' comic series which piqued my curiosity, as I'd always heard the term 'Sith' used in referring to Vader, but had no idea what it meant, so I checked it out.
Besides, the rumblings about the PT were well underway, the EU was in full swing, the bug caught me again.

 

Imagine, a Star Wars movie centering on a little kid....

 

A lot of the official mentions about the PT mentioned that Luke would probably appear as a kid in Ep III, including at least one from GL himself that even said he'd be about three years old.

Of course, just to confuse matters, Mark Hamill said at one point in the 1980s that Luke would be appearing at the ripe old age of eight years old in Ep III. That's just yet another one of the many quotes I like to cite when questioning Hamill's credibility, however innocent & well-intended his confused babblings might be.

 

The han solo adventures have always been some of my favorite EU books ,the only ones with the sense of adventure episode iv had in my opinion.
Getting back to topic wasnt there a rumour in the early 90s about Macaly Culkin playing a young Luke in the prequels ,cant remember where it was most likely in the tabloids

 

I remember rumors that Kenneth Branaugh would play Obi-Wan Kenobi.

 

And Emma Thompson would play "Arcadia Skywalker".

 

That rumour stemmed from a quote by artist Hugh Fleming, who did this incredible painting of a young Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan for the 1994 Topps Galaxy Two series of trading cards:

[image=http://i1015.photobucket.com/albums/af277/Duffman_2010/obi-wan_fleming.jpg]

On the back:

"I beg of you, George, don't succumb to inevitable studio demands that Steven Seagal play young Obi-Wan in the next trilogy..." frets Australian illustrator Hugh Fleming. "My vote is with actor/director Kenneth Branagh, the only performer with the dignity and presence to fill Sir Alec Guinness' Jedi robes."