Star Wars didn’t happen overnight. George Lucas underwent a lot of false starts and concepts before zeroing on the real Star Wars as we have come to know. While it is nearly unimaginable, we nearly got a film that would have been totally different from our familiar and dear Skywalkers saga. If it had been the way Lucas had planned initially, then there won’t have been a Rogue One or Force Awakens. It would have been a really dark world then.
Han Solo was originally a huge green monster
Han Solo is undoubtedly the hottest among the original three guys (Chewbacca might have been hotter courtesy the costume), but, he was originally conceptualized as a huge green monster which was absolutely unlike the Han Solo of the films as known to us. Agreed that Han is a grumpy nerd sort of person, but, he is extremely handsome at it. Just imagine how the famous “I love you/I know” scene would have been if Leia had been talking to something closer to a giant praying mantis than a human. Would anyone have bothered then if had got trapped in carbonite? In fact, he had gills once.
Fortunately, Lucas came to a conclusion, “That costs too much, and also maybe I should just use a human?” His next choice was “flamboyant pirate,” which instantly makes us recall Jack Sparrow! Finally, he decided on an innocent carpenter as a rogue smuggler. Good heavens, because if that didn’t happen, then he won’t have been able to fall in love with the original Luke.
Don’t get us wrong..Luke wasn’t supposed to be gay, but, he was.
Luke was to be a girl.
As per the original plans, Rey was supposed to be the second leading female Jedi in theStar Wars trilogy. The thing is that when Lucas was scripting Star Wars, it changed a lot and once he contemplated Luke being a sixteen-year-old girl in love with Han Solo because it won’t have been controversial to depict a sixteen-year-old romance an older rogue, right?
It was necessary that everything Star Wars gets converted into a toy, the original Luke lady (named Starkiller, because that was cool) was also made into a toy. Frankly, she looked more like Rey. Considering the relationship between Rey and Han, we might say that Force Awakens was indeed a remake of older, dormant ideas from Lucas. The only twist was instead of falling in love with Han, Rey thought of Han as a father figure.
Luke was originally supposed to be the Obi-Wan “old mentor” guy
Once during his numerous drafts, Lucas thought about showing Luke Skywalker as a general who would also be a Jedi with good experience. He was to be just what Obi-Wan Kenobi happened to be, an old Jedi mentor from the prequels.
But then came the question about who would learn from him? Whom will he teach about the Jedi ways? Who would undertake the heroic journey and fell in the age group of 18-35 that the main characters had to be? One option was AnnikinStarkiller. Yeah, that’s right. The first Star Wars episode was originally much similar to Attack of the Clones then ever admitted.
Finally, Lucas planned to merge Skywalker and Starkiller into one character (sounds crazy) but we got the light-skinned blonde lad that we all have come to know and love. Therefore, when Luke Skywalker is seen in The Last Jedi, just remember that he is almost the same guy that Lucas had initially planned to show in the first Star Wars film.
It originally didn’t have the trench run.
Do you remember how Star Wars ends in an amazing and epic way? Just check the video above! Darth Vader attacking Luke and Luke turning off his targeting machine and just then Han Solo bursting in to shoot Vader off Luke’s tail. Luke then hurtling down to blast the only weak point in the whole Death Star.
That was such a tense and gripping scene, and it won’t have been shot if Lucas’ wife hadn’t been around. She suggested it. His original concept involved Solo joining in much earlier and showed Luke attempting the trench run twice. It wasn’t as if the existence of the entire Rebellion was at stake or something. It seems that all the original Lucas ideas were just about as awesome as The Phantom Menace and this drives home the point that you always need to have two drafts ready and listen to your wife of course.
Darth Vader wasn’t some cool robot guy
There is no doubt that it was among the coolest Star Wars things, Darth Vader was originally planned to look like any other normal human. So what prompted the change? Concept art!
Do you remember how at the start, Vader came on board Princess Leia’s ship? In the original concept, he was supposed to fly it by wearing a specially made suit. After the suit was shown to him, Lucas was so impressed by it that he decided, “That! Let’s just make him look like that!” This came handy with the later revelation about him being Luke’s father as it eliminated the need for facial similarities, but, they did the same thing with Leia so who can say?
Even after he decided, he wanted it to be a cool and menacing cyborg sort of thing. Lucas commissioned some changes in Vader’s design and finally chose the incredible, scary costume that we all love.
However, that’s not the only change between the original Darth Vader and the one that we have grown to see in almost all Star Wars films. (The visual of his charred helmet in Force Awakens also counts as a Vader appearance.) There was another massive change to the concept apart from the design.
Darth Vader wasn’t the main bad guy.
In the original plans, Darth Vader wasn’t the steely cold and omnipresent villain who was connected to all the characters. He wasn’t the one who killed Ben and wasn’t the one who “killed” Luke’s father and he wasn’t the one who choke slammed that little guy who talked about the Force not being real. He was just a background guy who would dictate the others to attack the lead characters – similar to Darth Sidious of the prequels.
The main villain was someone called Valorum, a name given to one of the characters in the prequels. Hrm. (In case you feel, we are talking too much about the prequels, it is not by chance. Lucas stated that when he went on to write the prequels, he first read the old drafts as he thought about taking out the old materials and making three movies sourced from them. That won’t have been messy at all).
However, this is the same Star Wars version that had Luke Skywalker as a Jedi general mentoring AnnikinStarkiller. The script was nearly the same to what we eventually got, in fact, a comic company was like, “Hey, we like money,” and then it was converted to a comic book that can be purchased. And of course, that’s not the only readable alternate Star Wars film.
The original second Star Wars
This sequel that never happened was titled Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. At a time when Lucas was unsure about how Star Wars would fare at the box-office, he employed a writer to draft a cheap sequel story, so that, if need be, he would have been able to make a sequel for a much lower budget. However, Star Wars turned out to be a galactic blockbuster and Empire Strikes Back was made instead of Splinter.
This story showed Luke, Leia and the droids travel to a swamp planet in search of something called a Kyber crystal. The thing that Jedis use in their lightsabers and the Death Star uses to power its destructive blasts. In the original draft of the story, these things also enhanced one’s ties to the Force, and that’s why Luke was after it. Darth Vader followed him and the ensuing battle saw Luke chopping the arm of his father before escaping. As we can see, some of the elements from this story were used in Empire Strikes Back including the final battle between Luke and Darth, the swamp planet and a crazy ending, however, overall it is extremely difficult to predict how Star Wars would have been if Lucas had hung on to his original sequel ideas.
Despite continuing with Empire, he wasn’t able to instantly create the version that we all love. He had to make changes here as well.
Leia wasn’t Luke’s sister.
Yes, right until the time of the filming of Empire Strikes Back, Lucas was not sure whether Leia was Luke’s sister. They were going to discuss their feelings about each other, and it would have been awful after the revelation of their being siblings. Even worse than a kiss.
However, this was more sensible. Just think about the film’s ending! It would have been crazy if they were anything but twins. They had an inexplicable Force tie at the end, and it is logical for Force-powered twins, but, not so sensible for two unrelated people who just hung around at times. It would definitely have been better after the weird guy saving Princess storyline of the first film and being by his side and frequently calling him hot won’t have been creepy. But, then do we know anything?
Lucas didn’t decide until he made Return of the Jedi (originally titled Revenge of the Jedi). It is not as if Lucas was not aware of Luke’s sister. He rather had a plan that he intended to implement.
Luke was to meet his sister in Episode VII.
That was the idea. Episode VII which later became Force Awakens was the one. Return of the Jedi wasn’t going to finish the series, but, it was to be the end of the first of the three trilogies that Lucas planned to make. He wanted to wait some more and then create another three films featuring Han, Leia, and Luke which also showed Luke meeting his sister called Nellith besides a lot of other incredible stuff. It would have handled the scenario of Luke being an incredible Jedi along with Leia and then going on to battle the Emperor and rebuilding the Republic. R2 and C3PO were to be there because those two droids are the ultimate showrunners.
Darth Vader wasn’t going to be his dad
That’s right. The original idea wasn’t to show Darth Vader as Luke’s father. Even at the time of Empire Strikes Back, he wasn’t his father. In the original concept, Yoda’s planet was where Luke was to meet his father’s Force ghost, and it wasn’t going to be Vader. Although, it is easy and weird to state “Vader killed your father” as “from a certain point of view,” it could not have been so successful after Luke met his father’s ghost.
This adaptation finally included Vader’s attempts to charm Luke so that the duo could then rule the Universe jointly, just like what we saw in Return of the Jedi. Therefore, it wasn’t much different, right? No, it was extremely, greatly different. Can you imagine a Star Wars series without the father issues? We definitely can’t.
