Over the last few days I watched the five currently-released Star Wars films with my girlfriend, as she hadn’t seen either of the prequels and didn’t remember much from the original trilogy (sidenote: within 20 minutes of Phantom Menace starting she announced that it sucked, and she didn’t like AotC much better. She loved all of the “good” movies. I think I’m dating a keeper. ;)).
When we finished watching Return of the Jedi, I complained that I didn’t like Lucas’s revisionist crap of adding Hayden Christensen as the ghost of Anakin for the DVD release. I said it defeated the whole point of the entire Star Wars saga. Lucas’s logic, I believe, is that Anakin would spend his eternity as the good man he once was before he fell to evil. This makes no sense to me; isn’t the theme of the trilogy, and Return of the Jedi in particular, that Luke saves his father and brings him back to the light? Doesn’t the title of the film refer to the return of the Jedi Anakin Skywalker to the side of good?
When discussing this today with one of my coworkers, he claimed that the title was about Luke restoring the Jedi order, which made little sense to me since Luke did no such thing in the film. Other than a throw-away line of Yoda telling Luke to “pass on what you have learned” and another line of Luke telling Leia that in time she will learn to use the force, there’s nothing to suggest that Luke did anything to train a new force of Jedi and recreate the order.
I don’t think it is any more than the return of a Jedi Knight taking on the forces of evil. Luke defeats darkness as a Jedi. He is The Jedi - singular, not an order.
The title makes more sense than “Attack of the Clones” since the clones are fighting for the forces of “good”, i.e. the Republic.
Ditto for me. The Jedi order had been wiped out. Open-me-one Kenobi trains up a brash young pup who goes on to grad school with Y-O-D-A. He comes into his own and takes out his dad. The Jedi as a force of good has returned to the universe in a single person, Luke Skywalker.
For me, once I heard that the original title was supposed to be Revenge of the Jedi, I always assumed that Darth Vader was the Jedi being referred to in the title.
I always thought it was called that because:
a) They didnt want to use the word ‘revenge’ because Jedi don’t look for revenge.
b) Luke comes back after getting completely fucked up at the end of Empire as a full-on Jedi Knight.
But I also think its really stupid to edit Hayden into the last RotJ scene because it completely undermines the fact that Luke succeeded in turning his father back to the light side. Nevermind the fact that he has never even seen how his father looked in his younger days and wouldn’t even recognize how he looked. And nevermind the fact that young Anakin… was kind of a prick.
Lucas has said several times on the record that the title is a holdover from the original setting he intended for the movies: West Virginia and the Ohio River valley in the 1860s.
Luke was supposed to be a farmhand named Jedediah Knight, whose prowess with a rifle in the Civil War earned him the nickname “Jed-i the Deadeye,” but who has also learned from his commanding officer Obadiah Juan Kenoby (a veteran of the Mexican war) that he is the bastard son of Robert E. Lee. Having lived with a Choctaw medicine man for a year learning the medicine ways of that all-but vanished tribe, young Jed-i returns to the hills to set things a-right.
It was definitely “Revenge” first. They even released posters.
Then someone pointed out to Lucas that Jedi’s don’t get revenge, so he changed into something different, but not, you know, too different. Which tells you all you need to know about how much thought he was putting into it at that point.
“What? Yeah, they look like squids. Let’s call them the Calamari! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“Plot? Sure, I got a plot. It’s like the first movie, but bigger!”
Yes it is true, it was originally Revenge of the Jedi and yes some one-sheets (now very, very valuable) were printed before the name change for the reasons stated (too mean/negative/anti-kids, etc.)
It wasn’t just posters. The first round of action figures in the UK had Revenge as the title on the backing card. And the pictures of Ewok figures back were blacked out, because they were supposed to be a surprise at the time. That’s ‘surprise’ in quote marks, obviously.
Lucas has stated many times that the entire film anthology is primarily about Anakin/Vader. Ep’s 1-3 obviously deal with Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side, but Ep. 4-6 is as much about his redemption as it is anything else. It probably means both, really. I recall an interview (not that you can really trust what Lucas says), where he says it’s both, and that he originally went with “Revenge” thinking “Return” would be a giveaway to the ending. Which, 20 years later, we can see it pretty much wasn’t.
IMO, he made most of this stuff up as he went along. I can’t reach any other conclusion, having read Lucas’ original pitch for the movie and an “official” Star Wars novelization I have on paperback somewhere.* Also, if he really had all of this planned out for 30 years, wouldn’t he have done a better job with some of the basic continuity? And at least come up with a halfway decent plot?
The way I see it:
During the '70s, Lucas wanted to make a good action/adventure/sci-fi movie. So he did, and it was successful. So he hired some other people to write the sequels, realized that he’d created a cultural phenomenon, and scrambled to put together a “mythos.”
Throw out the new movies. Can anyone honestly look at the old trilogy and tell me it was about Vader? Of course not, it was about Luke. Luke becomes a hero, Luke champions a great cause, Luke redeems his father and ascends to greatness. As a subplot, you have Luke’s friends and their struggle to defeat Vader and the tyrannical Empire.
The old trilogy was about Luke and a struggle against the Empire. The new trilogy is about Lucas cashing in on merchandizing deals.
In short,
George Lucas produced three Sci-Fi movies that came out between 1977-1983. Two of them were really fuckin’ good (in the opinion of most) and a third got mixed reviews (I liked it). Twenty years later, he made three more Sci-Fi movies, two of which were awful and one of which is still under consideration.
That about sums it up for me.
I don’t know if there are multiple novelizations, but it’s the “original” one with all of the descriptions of exploding stormtrooper heads. Hell, maybe I can dig it up.
Hasn’t Lucas only been saying that since he decided to do the prequels? Because no way the first three movies are primarily about the redemption of Vader.
Well, Lucas did kind of make it up as he went, though even his novelization of Star Wars it was Episode IV, though I think Episode I (at that point) was supposed to be “The Journal of the Whills” or somesuch. I have a feeling at the time it probably didn’t have anything to do with someone named “Annie” or racially stereotyped Gungans.
For some reason I think that a bit of Episode III would have been how the radio dramatization of Star Wars went (which coincides with a grouping of X-Wing missions) with Leia getting away with the diplomatic-mission-as-a-guise-for-the-rebels scheme in front of Vader (which is why he says “this time” in SW), Bail Organa, theft of the Death Star plans, the transmission, Captain Antilles, etc.
Since SW started as “Episode IV” it would logically beckon that perhaps down the road Lucas would have an open door to do the first three movies. Depending on when and who you talk to, Episodes VII-IX were never conceived, though I could have sworn that Lucas said that the first Timothy Zahn trilogy served as the latter trilogy.
I always thought that it was Luke that got revenge… on the Empire… for killing his aunt and uncle, you know? Unless you count as Darth Vader getting revenge on the Emperor, but that would be thinking too much?
I mean really, with a title like “Attack of the Clones” you have to look at the obvious when trying to decipher the title.
