Jump to content

Grade School Star Wars theories


Tank
 Share

Recommended Posts

I'm old. I was in grade school when the OT movies came out. Some of you are as old as me... at any rate, I recall my friends and I having a LOT of theories about things over the years. I think some of them were really fun, and recall a lot of them. It's also been fun to try and figure out where they came from considering there was no internet back then, and spoilers didn't exist.

The few I can recall--

1. OB-1. A lot of people wondered if Ben was a clone of the original Obi-Wan. I think this came from how sometimes R2D2 and C3P0's names were spelled out phonetically. At some point that log was reverse applied to Obi-Wan. Dude talks about the Clone Wars, and sure sounds like a clone name. I've googled this up to see if anyone had this theory way back when and see a LOT of people did. Some people even claim that it was going to be canonized in the PT. I don't know if that is true, but I foudn this theory:

Quote

The brief synopsis of how this idea would be woven into the prequels is that there is no secret clone army; instead, the Jedi are intentionally cloning themselves to keep up their numbers in the face of some threat. However in keeping with the Thrawn trilogy, cloning and the force have an adversarial relationship and cloning, force-sensitive people in particular, leads to mental weakness and instability in the clones. 

This weakness makes these ersatz Jedi particularly susceptible to the Dark Side, which leads to large numbers of them being recruited by a Sith Lord and ultimately to epic Jedi-on-Jedi battles, including the killing of Ben Kenobi by his apprentice Anakin as part of Anakin's fall and transformation into to Darth Vader.

After Ben Kenobi's murder, it is OB-1 who has Leia taken to Alderaan and who takes Luke to Tatooine to be raised in the desert while he keeps a distant watch.

I mean-- I kinda like that.

2. The Biggs scenes-- I had a friend who SWORE he saw them when he saw the movie, when the rest of us just saw the pics of it in the official kids storybook version of the movie. I remember him acting it out in great detail beyond what the storybook covered. I eventually realized that he had heard the radio drama. Which was actually the source of a lot of know-it-all information for a couple kids who seemed to know WAY more about Star Wars than anyone else.

3. Lightsaber colors-- so this one was funny. I don't actually recall seeing ANH in theaters as I was too young (3). But by the time I was 5 I had a lot of Star Wars toys. ALL of them had Luke with a yellow lightsaber. ESB and ROTJ I remember seeing in the theater. When ESB presented Luke with a blue lightsaber I was a bit confused. When the trailers to ROTJ came out and it was GREEN, my know it all friend said that lightsabers could change color depending on your level of Jedi. This was "proven" by the fact that the official lightsaber toy we all had had a decal that had buttons/lights of each color. CONFIRMED!!!! 11 one omg

4. Boba Fett-- This one came from me. Everyone had a theory about Fett and I claimed to know the truth. I had issue #68 of the Star wars Marvel comic that came out post ESB. In it, was a dude named Fenn Shysa in Mandalorian armor. I've since gone back and confirmed that really, the set up was that this dude fought with Fett during the Clone Wars. But back then I mis have not read closely, I assumed it WAS Fett. All of that has of course been retconned.

5. Vader was a clone. Based purely on not understanding that the cave sequence on Dagobah was allegorical, some kid in my third grade class insisted that Vader was a clone of Luke's father (who still had no name art the time) and took it one step further saying that Luke was also a clone, since they all clearly had the same face.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I grew up believing a variation of the Ob-1 Theory.  I went as far as "remembering" the Kenner packaging listing his name as Obi Wan (OB-1) Kenobi.  In that theory cloned jedi fought cloned Boba Fetts. 

Biggs: I was one of those who swore by the cut Biggs scenes, and upon rewatching ANH, wondered what happened to them.  It was all the storybook's fault!

Yellow lightsabers!  Blame Kenner for that, too.  Obi Wan's figure pictured a yellow lightsaber, and Luke came with one.  As a kid, I had to correct this by swapping the figures' sabers out. 

My theory of Boba was he was the last of a clone army of Boba Fetts (before I knew what a Mandalorian was) that fought the jedi.  I was sort of right on that one!

I once had a theory that Vader was a robot that had a man inside. I think that came from The Black Hole, with Maximillian.  Again, sort of correct. 

R2D2 could fly!  I think every kid who had a figure made R2 fly.  Again I was right!

I never knew what Lord of the Sith meant in the Vader description in the kid story books, but I imagined there was a war where the jedi army fought dark jedi I called Darths.   Probably inspired by Excalibur. 

The Clone Wars were a series of wars over many years, not a 3 year long war.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/25/2021 at 9:27 PM, Tank said:

This weakness makes these ersatz Jedi particularly susceptible to the Dark Side, which leads to large numbers of them being recruited by a Sith Lord and ultimately to epic Jedi-on-Jedi battles, including the killing of Ben Kenobi by his apprentice Anakin as part of Anakin's fall and transformation into to Darth Vader.

After Ben Kenobi's murder, it is OB-1 who has Leia taken to Alderaan and who takes Luke to Tatooine to be raised in the desert while he keeps a distant watch.

This sounds cool as I have always wanted to see a huge Jedi battle. Sadly, I think the only time this happened in the movies (if memory serves me correctly) was the arena battle on Geonosis in AOTC where the Jedi were just fighting a bunch of battle droids. On the flip side, I think this theory would make certain things in ANH seem kind of awkward. For example:

1. Did Anakin know he killed Ben Kenobi? If so, then why then say "When I left you I was the learner, now I am the master."?

2. What caused Anakin to have to wear the Vader suit? Something similar to what happened in ROTS?

3. Why would Luke know OB-1 as Ben but then Leia refer to him as OB-1 in her message asking for help? Does she know the truth about the Clone Wars (as told to her by Bail) while the truth has been kept from Luke (because of grumpy Uncle Owen)?

4. If Anakin did indeed kill Ben, how did OB-1 wind up with Anakin's lightsaber in order to give it to Luke on Tatooine?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not that I thought it totally through, but I always thought Anakin actively left his saber behind upon quitting being a Jedi, leaving it and Obi-Wan at the same time. He turns bad, then he and Obi-Wan fight to a stand still. Obi-Wan dies, Anakin is so messed up he goes in the suit (the ANH novel had said Vader has fallen into a molten/lava pit and they fought on a volcanic field.) He doesn't know about OB-1 who has taken Luke to Tattooine. The name stuff could just be OB-1 getting familial. 

To be honest, there's no version, fan or canon, where Luke or Ben keeping their last names while in hiding on Darth Vader's home planet is smart. Worst incognito ever.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Tank said:

Not that I thought it totally through, but I always thought Anakin actively left his saber behind upon quitting being a Jedi, leaving it and Obi-Wan at the same time. He turns bad, then he and Obi-Wan fight to a stand still. Obi-Wan dies, Anakin is so messed up he goes in the suit (the ANH novel had said Vader has fallen into a molten/lava pit and they fought on a volcanic field.) He doesn't know about OB-1 who has taken Luke to Tattooine. The name stuff could just be OB-1 getting familial. 

To be honest, there's no version, fan or canon, where Luke or Ben keeping their last names while in hiding on Darth Vader's home planet is smart. Worst incognito ever.

Unless Skywalker is a super common name on Tattooine. Skywalkers on Tattooine or as common as ***holes on Earth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Zathras said:

Who else thought Anakin actually fell into a volcano when he dueled Obi Wan?

I did-- but also knowing that's impossible, I always thought he landed on a ledge and the hot air burned his lungs. I never thought he was burned up.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Jedi were totally different than I envisioned as a kid. I thought there were very few. Like under a hundred. I also didn't think they were one huge group who was a wing of the government. I pictured like a few Jedi masters spread throughout the galaxy who taught those they felt worthy. The two most prominent were Yoda and Palpatine.

As for the Republic I thought more like the Roman Republic rather than what seemingly was a peaceful place for 1,000 years with peaceful transitions of power. More like officially a democracy but from time to time there would be those who would vie for power through violence.

I kinda always had something like this in mind for the opening of Episode I:

Anakin shows up on Coruscant wanting to be trained as  Jedi, he has a saber. He is cocky as shit. He walks into a bar and hears 3 men talking about the force and lightsabers and all that. He approaches them and asks if they know Yoda, because Anakin seems him to be trained by him. However these men are not Yodas, they are Palpatines. The 2 schools have a very fierce rivalry. They give Anakin a hard time but he is too cocky to know any better so he wont back down. Suddenly we hear a voice from the far end of the bar, its Obi Wan, mocking Palpys men for picking on a boy. Ofcourse Anakin takes exception to being called this. Nevertheless it ends up Anakin and Obi Wan vs the the 3 guys. Its a fun, swashbuckling type sword fight. The fate of the Galaxy is not at stake here, its just some guys who don't like each other fighting through the streets of Coruscant. They trade barbs and mock each other. They find themselves fighting in some funny or unique places.

Eventually the 3 of Palpys guys flee and Anakin and Obi Wan have no idea why but they look around and are surrounded by 50 or so police bots or police men whatever with their blasters pointed at them. Anakin asks if they could take them to which Obi Wan replies "we could but we really shouldn't" and they end up in jail. A short time later another student from Yodas school, a woman, shows up to get them out. It seems like this is not the first time Kenobi has been goaded into this kind of thing. She gets them out and they go back to Yoda. She ends up being the twins mother. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Zathras said:

Who else thought Anakin actually fell into a volcano when he dueled Obi Wan?

Yep totally!  I think it was based on an interview Lucas had done for the fan club magazine if I remember.   Volcano was defo mentioned (in my head at least!) and so that was the image with him falling and being burnt by the lava.   

I was born in '76, so was only able to see ROTJ at the cinema first time round (having watched ANH and ESB soooo many times at home - a regular Sunday treat to be able to pick one to watch!  But now being a dad myself, it's clear to see it was a treat for my parents to shut me up for 2 hours!  Ha ha!), but me and my mates at school here in England had very similar thoughts.   The Kenner card or sticker album definitely implied the clone thing for OB1 Kenobi, that was a very clear memory for me.  And I think the yellow lightsaber was based on Kenner's early initial viewings of the special effects before it was converted to blue.  Saw that on some netflix type documentary - quite a rushed job to get the toys out there to cash in.

Now you say it, I also thought that there were fewer Jedi that what we saw.  Some of these things have been clouded a bit with the prequels being out so long now - scary to think how long we wait to watch a new film between ROTJ and TPM - 16 years felt like forever.   And now it's been 22 years since TPM...  Ouch.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/31/2021 at 7:22 PM, The Choc said:

The Jedi were totally different than I envisioned as a kid.

I don't remember the Jedi seeming unusual when Phantom Menace came out. But I think by that point most Star Wars lore had become fairly uniform.
I think it went a little off the rails by the next one though. I mostly thought of Jedi as being (like you said) more independent, remote? Fewer in number. Some being monks/zen masters, others being generally tethered to a certain location in service of a person or group (a la knights, of course). Like, they were mysterious wizard archetypes who farmed out some of their talent... again, like we saw in Phantom Menace. But by II and III they just felt like an overcrowded police station or something.

I think what I get from this type of discussion is that a lot of things in Star Wars are really better left to the imagination.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Before the PT had come out I had read enough of the early SW drafts and the annotated screenplays, and those all painted the Jedi more like the Mentat in Dune. They were trained under a unified academy/school/temple of some sort, and they all lived by the same code of ethics, but then went off to walk their own paths. Again, like the Mentat, in those early drafts, every planet was sort of independently ruled (and those in the Republic had senators to UN type government), and each leader of a planet may have an advisor or head general that was a Jedi. (In Dune, both the Harkonnans and Atriedes houses had their own Mentat advisors). Other Jedi were deputized (as Lucas described them as ronin/marshals) to look over certain wilder areas, others simply wandered righting wrongs.

I had thought during the Clone Wars they would have united together (and been cloned as per earlier theory) but given the changes in allegiances, you could see Jedi facing each other.

Funny enough, the Bene Gesseret in Dune ended up being the better model for the Jedi. Like the Mentats, they were an independent entity training people with special powers who would then go off to serve different houses as advisors, but unlike the Mentat they had political clout. And, more like the Sith, they had an agenda to skew politics in their favor.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.