Saga SW Saga In-Depth In-Depth Discussion Thread

There might have been stuff in unpublished notes, but really until the leadup to TPM there was no way to know what Lucas meant "Sith" to mean -- could have been an order, a species, a place, a Mexican restaurant. But I never thought there were meant to be multiple Lords of whatever it was... there was some Sith, and Vader was its Lord, was how I read it. Something creepy that he got to be in charge of other than the Empire itself or its military.

 

Timothy Zahn knew. He wanted the Noghri to be called "the Sith" to explain Vader's title, and had to be informed what exactly the "Sith" were.

 

Ah, so an insider approached the word with one of the many options on hand -- or two, both a "faction" and a species of which Vader was the leader.

As a kid in the '70s I always pictured "the Sith" as a sort of mystical realm where Vader could go to reflect upon and refine his, like, evil-ness, or something.

 

A Dark Lord of Tir na Nog? Interesting.

 

Tir na Nog sounds like some offbrand of Eggnog. I'm sorry, but it does.

 

Before the prequels came out it was often speculated that Obi-Wan Kenobi's first name signified him being a clone ("OB-1").

The name "Obi-Wan" first shows up in the March 1976 revised fourth draft/shooting script; in the August 1975 third draft and the January 1976 fourth draft, Ben Kenobi was Ben Kenobi was Ben Kenobi.

A few months back I read Frank Herbert's 1966 novel Destination Void. It's about a crew of clones on a spaceship tasked with trying to create a machine consciousness, who are all distinguished as clones by bearing the middle name "Lon". As in Lon Chaney, "man of a thousand faces".

I'm pretty sure George Lucas read this Herbert novel. If nothing else, because one of the clone crewmembers is called "Prue Weygand", and a "Captain Prue" shows up as a minor character in the 1974 rough draft.

It wouldn't surprise me if Lucas took further inspiration from Herbert in supposing for a time, right around the filming of SW, that Obi-Wan was a clone, and that clones might be distinguished from their originals by appending the suffix "-wan" to their first names. (As in "a pale imitation" of their genetic donors). So the fan theory was right in principle, though fuzzy on the details.

In point of fact, I read Frank Herbert's 1978 revised text of Destination Void rather than the 1966 version (though I did skim the original Galaxy Magazine publication also). Herbert apparently revised some of the technobabble to make it "more realistic". I don't think it's a good novel either way, but one thing amused me: at one point in the revised novel (but not the Galaxy text), a crewmember passes by several cryo-tanks with other clones held in storage, including one labeled "Legata Lon Hamill".

Since a "legate" was the representative of a high-ranking official in ancient Rome, one might conclude that this is Herbert irreverently acknowledging his most notable "clonester" in popular culture: George Lucas, whose GFFA film analogue of sorts (Luke S.!) was played by Mark Hamill.

 

Maybe just calling Luke a clone of Paul Atreides?

On this point, I think Lucas didn't tell him anything--he preferred to keep his options open, or he had a plan and wanted it to remain a secret.

 

If Palpatine is “Nixon”, is Mon Mothma George McGovern? Are the victims of Order 66 Martin Luther King, Jr.?

 

And this raises the question: who would be the Imperial equivalent of J. Edgar Hoover? Or, in a SW 1975 style setting where the Emperor was a power-hungry politician/warlord rather than a Sith sorcerer, would he fill the role of his own spymaster?

 

In TPM, the Trade Federation is angry about tariffs. Tariffs were a big political issue in the 1990s (NAFTA, WTO, Pat Buchanan, Seattle protests, etc.) There was talk about how the world was headed towards a future where there would be no nations or governments and corporations would rule the world with private armies. The Trade Federation has a private army and seems to be a governing body.

Vader perhaps? Espaa Valorum in the 2nd draft?

 

At the time of TPM’s release, Lucas compared Valorum to Clinton. That seems even more true now than it did then (with Palpatine being Bush 43). Interestingly, AOTC was already done filming when 9/11 happened, and I wonder how much of ROTS had thought out as of 9/10.

 

It is quite eerie on how so much of the imagery in AOTC mirrors the early War on Terror with the movie opening up with a terrorist attack in a metropolis. The Battle of Geonosis is quite interesting to parallel to Afghanistan with the dominant force (the Republic) attempting to quell an insurgency and capture the Osama Bin Laden analogue in Count Dooku. Obviously, that was no way intended given the filming began in 2000, but it is quite oddly fascinating.

 

Continuing with the Vietnam analogy, are the Separatists North Vietnam/the Vietcong, is Dooku Ho Chi Minh, and are Sidious in his role as the Separatist leader, the Trade Federation, the Banking Clan, the Techno Union, etc. the Soviet Union and Maoist China?

 

This is cool to read

 

"If Dooku escapes, rally more systems to his cause he will" by Yoda can be interpreted as trying to stop the spread of communism (separatism).

 

Indeed, the “domino theory”.

 

Two questions about the different drafts of ANH’s screenplay:

1. Why did Lucas rename “Utapau” to “Tatooine” in the fourth draft?

2. Why did Lucas have the Senate dissolved in the “revised” fourth draft? In the “unrevised” fourth draft, Tarkin informs the Senate that he destroyed Alderaan.

 

1. Names were changed back and forth, without any clear reason. If I had to speculate however, I'd say Tatooine sounds closer to Tunisia and Tozeur, where it was shot...

2. The main theory seems to be that the revised draft tried to make the film as self-contained as possible, eliminating things that suggested that the story was not over. The Death Star becomes effectively a substitute to the whole Empire, because visually we identify Empire=Death Star.

 

1. Perhaps it was simply about the sound of the name. Tatooine actually sounds like an empty and lonely place, unlike Utapau imo. But maybe that's just me.

 

One thing I really like about the original six movies is that Lucas was careful to make it all in a way that there could be numerous different political readings and interpretations that people could apply to different eras and situations. Is the Empire more like the United States, or is the republic sort of modeled on the United Nations? People can lay the template on early 20th century Germany but he also used imagery evoking the Russian Revolution. The name Palpatine evokes "Palatine" and thus the Roman Empire. The fact that the Geonosians are ruled by an Archduke elicits memories of the first World War, but Dooku taking the Death Star plans suggests Operation Paperclip. Federation leaders have names suggesting contemporary US leaders but also a Japanese admiral from World War II and some that I haven't personally unpuzzled. One could even see a criticism of the centralization brought about by the US civil war which did lead to militarization and the conquest of the Plains Indians and so forth.

It's possible to get all kinds of different readings because he deliberately made sure it wasn't a set analogy for any one historic situation. That makes it "mythical" in the sense that it can be read as a template legend concerning the rise of dictatorship from popular representative government. It's clear he was thinking about the transformation of the Roman Republic to the rule of the Emperors, but he has also compared the Empire to the United States. Yet there are also direct allusions to Communism, Nazism and Fascism going on. But it's in a context where there can be planetary representatives in a democratic system alonside titled nobility and religious warrior monks who are guardians of peace and justice. I have to hand it to Lucas, he took the idea of a heroic myth and then went another step further to make a tragic political myth.

I don't think the sequels added very much to this highly potent multivalent ambiguity and all the possible readings. The did explore the notions of resurgent totalitarianism and fanaticism a little. There was the interesting digression about war as a business, and the mutilayered resurgency where one totalitarian reactionary group is only the vanguard for an even more oppressive core group secretly waiting in the wings. What came in the sequel trilogy was mainly mythic on the personal level, dealing again with character journeys. All the problems of restoring and rebuilding were given less detailed attention than the fall of the republic in the prequels.

 

The second draft says that “The Skywalker” started the Jedi. Maybe that became “the Prime Jedi”?

 

I’m not sure where else to put this, but I liked this video:

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tataouine

 

In the first draft of ANH (“The Star Wars”), the Empire is trying to conquer the “independent systems”. In AOTC, Dooku’s faction is called the “Confederacy of Independent Systems”.

 

In the first draft of ANH, the Republic called the “Old Empire” and the Empire is called the “New Empire”. Why would Cos Da**** change the name if they were already an “empire”?