The Perennial Question: When did Lucas "know"?

Galvatron · Post by **Galvatron** » 2006-10-03 12:27am

Did Lucas plan the Corellian bloodstripes?

Elfdart · Post by **Elfdart** » 2006-10-03 12:32am

Galvatron wrote:Anyway, getting back to the OP, here's a wiki entry about "Lucas bashing" that should provide plenty of examples, quotes and citations for you.

I read through all that and it's horseshit. The idea that Lucas couldn't have thought of Luke being Vader's son before he started working on TESB is kind of stupid, given that a very popular movie that came out when Lucas was still working on the original story for Star Wars has a very similar twist. In Chinatown, Faye Dunaway confesses that the missing blonde Jack Nicholson was looking for was her sister and her daughter.

VT-16 · Post by **VT-16** » 2006-10-03 03:39am

Did Lucas plan the Corellian bloodstripes?

Has he ever said anything about those or are you just trolling?

Kane Starkiller · Post by **Kane Starkiller** » 2006-10-03 12:47pm

Some of the stuff there is BS but some is right on the mark. George Lucas does like to pretend that it was always THE GREAT VISION that he had but this is simply not true. The best part was when he claimed the "studio people" forced him to put up english words and numbers in ANH. Please. What did they came up to him and said: "OK now here we want you to put English text and then show a closeup view of it"? If he didn't want english and arab numbers in ANH then he could've simply omitted them.
Not to mention some early drafts that lie around like this one:

It is the thirty-third century, a period of civil wars in the galaxy.

Galvatron · Post by **Galvatron** » 2006-10-03 02:20pm

VT-16 wrote:
Did Lucas plan the Corellian bloodstripes?
Has he ever said anything about those or are you just trolling?

Trolling.

Brian Daley made up the history of Han's bloodstripes.

Wyrm · Post by **Wyrm** » 2006-10-03 05:53pm

The GREAT VISION claim is obviously bullshit. We only need look at the early drafts of SW to see this, helpfully provided by Starkiller. Lucas is switching elements and names around in the drafts, the Death Star in particular coming into prominence and then being deemphesized, only to come back again. Lucas is definitely playing with the ideas. As he should.

However, as early as the revised first draft, you can see some monomyth elements start to take shape: We do, for instance, see a refusal of sorts (on the part of Justin, the apprentice hero), and a price paid in the death of his brother. We still have a mentor, Luke Skywalker, to introduce Justin to this whole heroing gig, and the stormtroopers are still the threshold guardians to the wider world of space, though the timing's a bit off because Justin by this point is already a pilot/hero. There's still a whale to go through the belly of (a space fortress, the obvious predecessor of the Death Star), to go down into the belly of, a goddess (princess) to rescue and later to claim with a kiss. And this is just a skimming of that draft, without reading too deeply into it.

In the later drafts, Lucas does much revision and switching around of elements, trying to figure out how to to execute the script. However, a sequence of elements following the general form of the monomyth, though not always with all its classical elements (the refusal price doesn't seem to be in the second draft, though I am admittedly skimming it). It's as if Lucas is using the monomyth as a general guide to story construction, rather than a dogma to follow to the bitter end.

I would argue that is as it should be.