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What was Lucas's original Plan for Ep. 7?


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Guest El Chalupacabra

I knew my friend was dating a girl, but I was still surprised when he secretly married her.

Sure, I get things like that can and do happen. I definitely like Tank's idea, and I was not trying to be critical. Just saying that was the first question that came to my mind. I would want to know why Obi Wan let things slide. It is definitely implied he knows Anakin has a thing for Padme in the beginning of AOTC, and I am sure he had suspicions when Anakin would disappear during the Clone Wars, when he went off to see Padme. But in ROTS, Obi Wan did seem surprised. Not to mention it had always seemed to me Anakin and Padme hadn't seen each other for some time at the beginning of ROTS. Not saying there is any huge plot hole there, or anything like that, and I am sure most people wouldn't have that question. I am sure that I am (once again) in the minority. It's just a question that comes up for me. And really, if Darth Maul can be retconned in Star Wars, anything can! :D

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Back in the day alot of people expected that's how Episode III would begin. Anakin walked away from it all, with Padme, Obi Wan shows up on Tatooine basically saying "we need you, we have no chance without you". And Anakin returns to the war.

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I never got the feeling that Obi Wan was surprised that Anakin had gotten her pregnant. In ROTS when he asks her, Anakin is the father isnt he? And when she doesn't respond he just says he's sorry. He doesn't seem shocked by it. To me he sounded more like, fudge, I knew it. I was really hoping I was wrong but nope. Damn Anakin couldn't keep it in his pants.

 

Heck when Obi Wan and Yoda decide to go after the Sith, Obi Wan tells Yoda he doesn't know where Anakin is and doesn't know where to look. Yoda responds with use your feelings and find him you will. I almost think Yoda also had his suspicions and Anakin and Padme. They both seemed to be dancing around the obvious answer of, just follow Padme and you'll find Anakin.

 

That's why I loved Tank's idea for the opening of a Kenobi film. It doesn't seem that much of a stretch to add to the saga with what's already there.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

I never got the feeling that Obi Wan was surprised that Anakin had gotten her pregnant. In ROTS when he asks her, Anakin is the father isnt he? And when she doesnt respond he just says hes sorry. He doesnt seem shocked by it. To me he sounded more like, fudge, I knew it. I was really hoping I was wrong but nope. Damn Anakin couldnt keep it in his pants.

 

Heck when Obi Wan and yoda decide to go after the Sith, Obi Wan tells Yoda he doesnt know where Anakin is and doesnt know where to look. Yoda responds with use your feelings and find him you will. I almost think Yoda also had his suspicions and Anakin and Padme. They both seemed to be dancing around the obvious answer of, just follow Padme and youll find Anakin.

 

Thats why I loved Tanks idea for the opening of a Kenobi film. It doesnt seem that much of a stretch to add to the saga with whats already there.

Perhaps surprise isn't the best way to describe Obi Wan, after all. I re-watched the scene here:

https://youtu.be/NsM-fpkK2aQ?t=117

 

However, I would say that it seems to me maybe Padme's hesitance and stating she doesn't know where Anakin confirms suspicions that he didn't know for sure, up to that point. Based on that, I have to say I have to go back on my earlier opinion a bit. Maybe Tank's suggested scene does work without additional retconning, after all.

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  • 2 years later...

In the last month or so it seems alot of this has come out through a few different sources. Some of which is pretty interesting.

First Pablo Hidalgo said in some book that the original treatment by Lucas had Luke being pretty darn similar to what we actually got in The Last Jedi. Lucas commissioned concept art with the description that Luke be like Col Kurtz from Apocolypse Now. Basically hiding in cave away from the Galaxy. And that he would have died in VIII. 

 

More recently it came, from Lucas himself as far as I can tell, that Darth Maul was going to be the main villain of the ST under Lucas. That essentially in the wake of the Empire crime syndicates rose to power and Maul was able to place himself at the head of these syndicates (I wonder if this somewhat inspired Maul's role in "Solo" or if it is a coincidence." He would have a female apprentice.

This is interesting for 2 reasons I think. First is just basically its self contained. You wouldn't have fans yelling "who is Snoke?" because we all know who Maul is. Secondly the idea that the bad guys are like this crazy crime syndicate which has run roughshod in the wake of the Empire is pretty cool. It does somewhat feel more like a natural extension of the story than basically the Empire coming back under a different  name 25 years later. 

Also Lucas said that after Luke's death that Leia would have stepped up and been shown as the ultimate hero of the saga.

None of these ideas are bad on their own at all. I don't love the idea of Maul being back but I suppose it could be done in a fun way (and has bee done really anyway). 

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Bringing Maul back was one of the worst ideas, up there with bringing Boba Fett back.

Basically Lucasfilm has shown that they suck at making new villains, so they have to keep focusing on the same characters over and over.

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With the notable exception of Snoke I think they've done a pretty decent job with the villains. Kylo is a great character, let alone villain. Director Krennic is really good from Rogue One. Even to a lesser extent Dryden Voss from Solo is pretty cool and different from other villains we had seen in Star Wars.

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This is from a new archives book centered on the PT. i have a scan of it, but nightly won't let me post pictures.

I think this particular direction is actually older. We saw a lot of this come about in CW, Rebels, and obv Solo and Mando to some extent.

seems clear to me this was his plan, and Filoni was let in on it and used sone of it.

I'm sure the plan adapted to what we talk about above along the way around the time of the Disney sake.

 

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15 hours ago, The Choc said:

With the notable exception of Snoke I think they've done a pretty decent job with the villains. Kylo is a great character, let alone villain. Director Krennic is really good from Rogue One. Even to a lesser extent Dryden Voss from Solo is pretty cool and different from other villains we had seen in Star Wars.

I’ll give you Krennic, and Kylo in TFA. Solo bored me to sleep, so I had to watch it over three different attempts. 
 

Kylo would have been better if they had made him be an actual villain the whole time, and killing Han had been the last moment of the old Ben. Instead, the way they used him made him a horrible attempt at a villain.

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I read that he had planned to make Darth Talon Maul's apprentice, inspired by two statues he'd seen together at LucasArts. That would have been problematic for the EU, of course, since Talon wasn't supposed to have been born for like another 100 years. Some writers would have had to make some major retcons.

No EU complaining! I'm just pointing it out!

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52 minutes ago, The Choc said:

They probably would have just decanonized it

Doubt it. Lucas' relationship with the EU was one where he respected it and even consulted it (there's ample proof of this), but he would freely break with its continuity when it didn't suit his purposes and had a team (the Holocron Community) to clean up the mess behind him. I don't think the Great Decanonization would have happened under Lucas' watch, though it probably would have have major continuity problems had he made those sequels. But he only wrote those story treatments to sell to Disney, having long since been firm on his stance that his saga wrapped up with Episode VI.

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14 minutes ago, Fozzie said:

I don't get why you have to keep bringing up the European Union in Star Wars discussions.

 

 

Funnily enough, when the Brexit was announced, I said on Facebook, "I heard the UK is leaving the EU. I strongly urge them to reconsider as it has many great stories to enjoy. I have a meme on my home PC that references this, which I'll find once I'm done slacking off on my work laptop.

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24 minutes ago, Zerimar Nyliram said:

Doubt it. Lucas' relationship with the EU was one where he respected it and even consulted it (there's ample proof of this), but he would freely break with its continuity when it didn't suit his purposes and had a team (the Holocron Community) to clean up the mess behind him. I don't think the Great Decanonization would have happened under Lucas' watch, though it probably would have have major continuity problems had he made those sequels. But he only wrote those story treatments to sell to Disney, having long since been firm on his stance that his saga wrapped up with Episode VI.

Isn't decanonizing it better? Rather than having it being considered a mess that needs to be cleaned up in the wake of the real story?

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In the end I think this is why Im not a fan of these huge interconnected universes that are all the rage now. Stories arent meant to be messes to be cleaned up. They should not be told to make already existing stories fit together. Thats just not how it should work.

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I didn't say the EU itself was a mess. It wasn't, by any means. If you think it was, that "mess" was far more consistent that anything that had come before it. Other franchises have since taken lessons from Star Wars in keeping their secondary materials coherent.

For me, the EU's biggest charm came from not knowing what George Lucas was going to do next and adjusting accordingly, coming up with clever ways to connect previous threads in creative ways. I'll give you one tiny example: in 1997 was released my favorite PC game of all time, Star Wars: Dark Forces II - Jedi Knight, the catalyst that propelled me into the EU, in fact. In that game, you play as Kyle Katarn who fights to stop the Dark Jedi Jerec from locating an ancient, sacred place called the Valley of the Jedi, a nexus of Force power which had the potency to propel the one who absorbed its power into near godhood.

A year later, a trilogy of novellas were released, which were novelizations of the game and revealed that the Valley was the sight of an ancient battle between dark and light which ended up having all the souls trapped in its nexus, producing immeasurable Force power. A year after that, The Phantom Menace was released in theaters, where it was revealed that the Sith have been extinct for a millennium, where previously they had been shown to have been a rival Order to the Jedi numbering in the thousands in the Tales of the Jedi comics, set 5,000 to 4,000 years in the past. Later, when Attack of the Clones came out, it was revealed that Republic had only stood for a millennium, whereas previous continuity had established that the Republic was 25,000 years old by the time of the films, taking literally Obi-Wan's comment that the Jedi had been the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic for over a thousand generations.

Clever EU writers--with the blessing of, and lore provided by George Lucas--took these two discrepancies and explained them both, killing two birds with one stone. In the Jedi vs. Sith comics, it was established that one thousand years prior to the films, Darth Bane (a character conceived by George Lucas) came to believe that the Sith's infighting were holding them back, and that their strength was not in numbers. So Bane devised a scheme to kill the Sith, along with their Jedi rivals, by providing his comrades with an ancient spell that would detonate a "thought bomb," killing everything in its immediate vicinity and trapping their souls in a Force cocoon. Once the Sith were destroyed, Bane, the lone survivor, took an apprentice and established the Rule of Two.

From this story also came the Ruusan Reformations, where the Republic underwent major transformations, disbanding its centralized military and other drastic things, to the point where some historians distinguished it as a completely new government from what came before. So there we have the problem of the Sith and the age of the Republic solved.

Not only that, but they built on previous lore and connected the Ruusan incident to the plot of Jedi Knight, explaining that the Valley of the Jedi is where the Force nexus is kept containing all the souls of the Jedi and Sith from a millennium prior, explaining that the Jedi returned to the planet and built an ornate sanctuary around it to honor their fallen comrades before deliberately losing the coordinates to Ruusan. Kyle frees these spirits after defeating Jerec.

I know I'm rambling here, but I'm sure that paints a good picture of what I mean when the EU's growth was unique and special. It came together in creative and innovative ways almost organically, and it is a certain special charm that the new EU (or whatever they're calling it) can never hope to recapture.

You may not agree with it or find what I said appealing, but I'm sure you can understand why certain people would, myself included.

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I dont see how any of this is appealing. I don't see how anyone can care that Palpatine in AOTC claimed the Republic existed for 1000 years while in ANH Obi Wan said the Jedi were the protectors of the Old Republic for 1000 generations. I don't see why anyone would want that reconciled. I don't see how anyone would take it to mean anything other than the Republic has existed for a very long time and the characters don't really know exactly how long its existed. Which, if anything, just makes it more mythic.

And really its not just a problem with EU fans or with the EU. It exists with large segments of the movie only fandom too. The people who needed to know how Maz got the saber or why Artoo turned on. These things just don't matter. Going back to the PT you had people complaining that Obi Wan went by that name after Luke was born, while in ANH he said something else.  When you think things like this matter you get stupidity like Palpatine created Snoke. 

So don't take this as some attack on the EU or it's fans, cause like I said its present in the movie fandom too. But like I said in my previous post this is why I don't like all these interconnected universes. The just kinda get too dense and collapse upon themselves in continuity and painstaking minutae. 

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