Illustration by Audrey Estok (@AudreyEstok)
There are two key myths at the heart of the Star Wars saga: first that creator George Lucas came up with all the events of the saga, then split it apart into different films; the second is that the story was always intended to be about Anakin Skywalker’s downfall and redemption by his son Luke.
It’s true that Lucas struggled to pare down his complex scripts into the final draft that became 1977’s Star Wars. He had more ideas than he could use for a single film. At different points, Lucas claimed that the story would unfold over multiple film series (either 6, 9, or 12 films in total).1 But as much as aspects of this claim may be true from a certain point of view, there’s simply no one document or master plan that outlined everything that Star Wars would become.
The truth is more complicated than myth, and the quickest version of that truth is that Lucas built out the Star Wars saga through retroactive continuity, or “retconning.”2 Simply put, this means that Lucas fleshed out the backstory as he went, adding character histories and ideas that changed our understanding of the material. This is especially evident when examining the character of Darth Vader. Looking at textual evidence, A New Hope (the subtitle itself added for a 1981 theatrical re-release) rebuts the notion of the saga being Anakin Skywalker’s story. We now read into the first film—his training as Obi-Wan’s apprentice, what the Clone Wars were, how Emperor Palpatine took power—with ideas that have been put into our heads ex post facto. But in the original film, Darth Vader is more henchman than primary villain, sidelined in scenes by other Imperial officials.
Lucas began to rewrite our understanding of A New Hope almost immediately, first with the release of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, turning Darth Vader first into the central antagonist, then into the object of a son’s redemptive love. Lucas’s revamping did not stop there, of course. He famously tweaked the original trilogy’s special effects for the 1997 Special Edition, even adding new scenes and lines of dialogue. His prequel series was the ultimate “retcon,” pivoting the franchise into a story about the consequences of Anakin Skywalker’s Faustian bargain, his Miltonian fall from grace, and the galaxy’s transformation from republican rule to dictatorship. Some aspects of the larger story were hinted at from the beginning, but the prequel trilogy made subtext into text, sometimes awkwardly so.
By using his then-full legal control of the movies (until he sold the franchise to Disney in 2012), he was able to not only alter the story, but also how we remember it—by denying access to the unaltered original cuts, Lucas has left us without critical cultural documents in a modern format. The fuzzy, analog videotapes and laserdiscs of the original trilogy are about the only artifacts of that time, continuing to degrade as our memories fade.
It’s really no wonder that Star Wars fandom is so generationally-biased: the current cuts of the films streaming in 4K on Disney+ are not the films that fans saw in cinemas on opening day. The shifting story and ever-broader scope of the Star Wars saga, including the recent sequel trilogy, continues to alter the meaning of the films for those who saw them in the 1980s, 1990s, the early 2000s, and those first encountering them today. There are now generations of viewers who have never seen the theatrical versions of the first three films. When kids today see Greedo shooting first or Hayden Christensen, not Sebastian Shaw, as Anakin at the end of Return of the Jedi, their Star Wars is fundamentally different from those of people who were children in the 1980s.
Over nearly forty years, Lucas took Star Wars from crowd-pleasing whiz-bang fun to a full-blown family soap opera. When it comes to the story behind the story, perhaps Lucas reacted like many of us might, preferring to craft a tidy narrative in retrospect in order to make some sense of the chaos and stress he experienced while making the films. But in the process, Lucas rewrote our memories of what Star Wars is, at the same time obscuring where it came from and how it became such a cultural touchstone.
Editor’s note: you can find all of the pieces in our December 2019 Star Wars issue here.
- “Did George Lucas Plan to Make Three Star Wars Trilogies — Nine Films in Total — All Along?” The National Post, October 31, 2012.
- Benjamin Moore, “Is The Original (Unaltered) ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy Finally Coming To Blu-Ray?” Forbes. September 22, 2015.
