There was a great deal of potential material to exploit for the writers and producers of Lucasfilm when they started building the prequel to A New Hope.
The old Star Wars canon of that time was teeming with banished Jedi, brave heroes, and baddies who never got a chance to appear on the big screen. Ultimately, they selected a bunch of heroes and villains who were either bankable on the big screen or absolute newcomers. However, latest reports indicate that it was not always this way.
Filmmaker Marcos Cabota who had made a documentary titled I Am Your Father based on the David Prowse (the guy who created the Darth Vader mask), appeared on a podcast titled La Fosa Del Rancor. He spoke about a friend who had auditioned for Rogue One seeking a similar name on the script of that part.
“In fact, they were talking about a Jedi,”Cabota said, “who then did not appear in the movie but did appear somehow… Rahm Kota was in Rogue One, I can tell you, he was a blind Jedi. And what do we find in Rogue One? A blind user of the Force… In the script we had from Rogue One, before coming Rogue One, it was Rahm Kota.”
In case you are clueless, Rahm Kota is a past Jedi Master who had appeared in the video games of The Force Unleashed. He is a terrific character, a Jedi in the mold of a nasty Samurai warrior who battles the Empire and has his own private army.
In the initial stages of The Force Unleashed, he had attacked an Empire base aiming to challenge Vader, but, he gets attacked by Starkiller and loses his sight. He was later seen in a drunken state in the Cloud City, and then he gets selected to mentor Starkiller on his path to the light.
Cabota suggested that Kota later evolved into ChirrutImwe, who was Donnie Yen’s typical monk like Force first seen on Jedha. Screen Rant also pointed out at the occasional misnaming of characters in the earlier scripts as an attempt to create a smokescreen. Therefore, Rahm Kota might just have been a fun misnomer for someone who was never going to be a Kota.
It’s a pity that the character was never developed further or maybe it was for the benefit of Rogue One to come up with a standalone creation. Also, you might be thinking that Kyle Katarn is by far the coolest Jedi Master belonging to that old canon, and, we are going to agree to disagree on that possibility.
