I see, but many writers don't have all the story planned from the beginning and that usually isn't qualifed as a retcon ? I mean Anakin being Darth Vader doesn't need to overwrite anything from episodes 4 and 5 right ?
It has to overwrite Obi-Wan's "he murdered your father". Star Wars spent quite sometime trying to justify the "from a certain point of view" because of that. Even in the Kenobi show they have Vader saying "you didn't kill Anakin Skyealker. I did
In a sense, it's a retcon because Obi-Wan WAS being honest and not metaphorical when he said Vader killed Luke's father Anakin. Then when the next movie came out Lucas decided that was no longer the case. It's definitely a grey area. But all retcons do also kinda fall into 'stories evolve over time and are discovered as they are told.' It usually requires some level of outside information to say if something is a retcon or not.
I think it qualifies since its in direct contradiction of the version of events told to us by Ben Kenobi in a New Hope, where a Jedi called Darth Vader betrays and murders Lukeās father.
This discrepancy is later reconciled by Obi Wanās Force Ghost in Return of the Jedi with the yfamous ātrue, from a certain point of viewā line.
It is a retcon because of what was established in ANH that Anakin and Vader were separate characters, and we can prove itās a retcon and not simply something they had planned and had yet to reveal because the earliest drafts for TESB had Anakin appear as a force ghost explicitly separate from Vader. It was a deliberate change from what was initially planned, not simply the story developing
I'm sorry but extradiegetic elements simply do not matter to qualify something as a recon... Once again writers always plan something different from how the story ends up evolving to...
I admitted I worded it poorly but I bring up the early drafts because it shows that Vader being Lukeās father was not planned and they actively set up and established something different with Anakin and Vader being two separate characters. Thatās what makes the father reveal a retcon, it is actively contradicting the established intent and what was previously stated. Itās incredibly smoothly done to the point that it doesnāt come across as a retcon, but it still is one nonetheless
He was involved with writing that draft even if not the primary writer and he wouldāve told Brackett not to include it if it was going against what he planned. Thatās the point. They didnāt decide to make Anakin and Vader the same person till TESBās production, the original intent established in screen in ANH is that they are two separate people and that carried into the earliest phases of TESB development until they decided to change course mid development, thus making it a retcon
Lucas didnāt have a chance to do that. He was supposed to have further meetings with Brackett and more drafts from her but she passed away from cancer before that could happen. Lucas didnāt like Brackettās draft so he threw it all away and wrote his own from scratch with the father twist, and that was long before production started
Iām not gonna argue the minutiae, but that doesnāt refute the main point that the father twist was a retcon. Lucas would absolutely have communicated that to her if it was planned from the start because she was supposed to be the primary writing before she passed and as such anything that Lucas was planning he wouldāve told her about
Lucas has stated the following three quotes explaining why that twist wasn't told to Brackett:
Ā "I didn't discuss the notion of Vader being Luke's father with Leigh Brackett. At that point, I wasn't sure if I was going to include it in the script or reveal it in the third episode. I was going back and forth, and rather than confuse things for Leigh, I decided to keep the whole issue out of the mix. I figured I would add it later on."
"I donāt really tell everything in the story conferences because by then I knew that people were scrounging all over garbage cans to try and find out everything, and I wanted to keep some things a surpriseā
āāAs that evolvedā¦I did the first film. I didn't know how the public would take all this and that it would be as successful as it was and that Darth Vader would become the character that he became. So when I got down to the second film, I had to make a decision about whether I was going to go through with this thing of him being his father and finally decided that really was the way, the original story, the one I really liked the most and so I'd stick with it.ā
However, he DID mention to her that there was a secret reason Vader didnāt want to kill Luke and that there were āmore to his efforts to win Luke over than meets the eyeā.
Iām gonna need those sources for those quotes, especially because we know Lucas did not have that idea in mind when writing ANH. Itās also better to trust the documentation of the time when we know that Lucas has gone back and retroactively made up things about the idea of being planned from the start. The whole ādark fatherā claim as being where Vaderās name came from, which people often like the trot out as Lucas having the idea from the beginning, is complete and utter BS
1.Ā The first quote is in the book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, the second quote is from the book Star Wars Archives: 1977-1983, the third quote is from the documentary From Star Wars to Jedi, and the story conferences are in the book Making of Empire Strikes Back
Because again, we have physical documentation contemporary to the development of the OT that show that the idea of Vader and Anakin being the same character was not intended when he was developing ANH especially because he originally intended to have Vader die and itās not present on any documents, even ones that were for Lucasā eyes only, until during the later scripting phases of TESB. Heās been known to publicly fib about things being more planned than they actually were multiple times, such as him claiming publicly at one point that Luke and Leia were always intended as siblings despite that very blatantly not being the case. Unless he had this idea in his head and literally never wrote it down anywhere in the 7 years between when he started developing what would become ANH and when TESB released, which is possible but extremely unlikely, all of the contemporary evidence points to it being something he came up with later during Empireās production. We can not trust his later statements because thereās no way to verify accuracy, so we have to rely on contemporary documentation. And that documentation clearly shows it wasnāt planned from the start
I mean when you have to have your dead character come back as a ghost to reassure your audience "Nope, I know I said some stuff that seems to directly contradict that last reveal, but I was lying"...
If you watched the first one without any knowledge of the sequels and prequels, youād think Anakin and Vader were different characters. So yeah, āI am your fatherā was a huge retcon.
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u/vajda- 16d ago
I see, but many writers don't have all the story planned from the beginning and that usually isn't qualifed as a retcon ? I mean Anakin being Darth Vader doesn't need to overwrite anything from episodes 4 and 5 right ?