Was this really all that surprising? I mean you paid attention to all the signs and clues it was obvious

Reminder that Vader actually recognized Luke in the very first movie and that is what forced Vader to blow up the Death Star.

It was, because Lucas wrote the script for Star Wars without knowing any of this. Kasdan made it up.
No, really. Watch Star Wars again: Lucas thought that Leia, Han and Luke were a classic love triangle. His Vader was a scary henchman, but nothing more meaningful than a big baddie.
Uncle Owen didn't want Luke to go around having dangerous adventures.

For ancient anons who saw this in the theatres, what was the bigger initial shock, that Vader was Luke's dad, or that Luke got his hand cut off?

I thought Vader couldn’t into force lightning

None of that screams "Vader is Luke's father"
Yeah Luke is special in some way but without context there was no way to say in certainty that vader is luke's father

>His obsession with Luke through out ESP.
This is literally the only hint there, everything else can be chalked up to him being another student of Obi-Wan's.

>Was this really all that surprising?
Yes. And here is why: In ANH, Obi-Wan literally refers to Anakin and Darth Vader as TWO SEPARATE PEOPLE.

Try watching the movies before you post, you fucking zoomy.

You dumb little brats don't understand anything.

There was no internet. There were no discussions about films except with your friends at school, that was it. Even stuff like trailers were not even on tv that much, trailers were mostly things you only saw at the theater. It was impossible to spoil anything if you went to something in the first week it opened because even if someone wanted to they had no means. What are they going to do, put up flyers?

There wasn't even entertainment MEDIA period when this film came out. Period. News was for news, media outfits had maybe one movie person who got like five min a week airtime to review one film. It's almost inconceivable to anyone born in the last couple of decades because now we are constantly saturated with entertainment media every second of every day. That didnt even start at all until the early/mid 80's. Before that you only knew about movies that were coming out if you saw the trailer at the theater. That was it. Unless you worked in the industry you had no idea what was in development. No one did.

TL;DR - you couldn't get spoiled back then, except by direct acquaintances/friends. No one saw this coming. When you went to a movie at this time usually the only thing you knew about it was the name and what the poster looked like.

Attached: 1505611884748.jpg (640x480, 41K)

I saw it in theaters in the 90s re-release and already knew the twist, but you're looking for people in their 50s that would have seen the original run

Aside from that I was obsessed with star wars in middle school, when the only material was the original trilogy and some video games

god time is a cruel master

There were also movie reviews in newspapers, and you had to really go out of your way to find film essays, but libraries were stocked with books about movies

Other than that, did they have the same promotional circuit? Like actors going onto talk shows to talk about upcoming films?

Amazing post

Nobody was gonna guess that Luke is Vader's kid because Luke is white

Attached: eee902af690ed7157b30cb2941c05a4f.jpg (320x241, 8K)

Probably the hand, although Lando selling the rebels out to the Empire was bigger than both.

>There was no internet.
Maybe in your shitty flyover state, you dumb hick. There are still records of SW discussions as way back as 83 thanks to services like Compuserve.

Besides the early version of the net, there were also fanzines and mail-based fan groups. Being a die-hard fan back then was a true test of patience and endurance. It is far too easy today to claim status as a hard-core fan.

Attached: compuserve-logo.jpg (320x320, 25K)

>Other than that, did they have the same promotional circuit? Like actors going onto talk shows to talk about upcoming films?

No. This type of thing did not exist except for people going on Carson on The Tonight Show and later on on Letterman. There was no promotional circuit because there was no platform. News was on twice a day for one hour. Usually at 6pm then the late news at 9pm. That hour was only for the news of the world, condensed. There was no time for entertainment news. The movie guy was maybe on once a week for five min on Friday and was forbidden from spoiling anything.

Stuff like CNN, entertainment tonight, etc didn't launch till 80/81 and it would be half a decade before it really started to take off. Only people with satellite dishes had CNN. For everyone else it was The Nightly News at 6pm on your favorite network and you could only watch one because they were all on at the same time. "Entertainment Media" did not exist. If you missed a trailer or seeing someone on the tonight show you were out of luck unless someome videotaped it.

Vader means Father in Dutch
>Dark Father
Bravo, George.

Fuckhead, Eternal September was when the population of the Internet doubled - from 2.5% of the US population to a whopping 5% of the population. That was in 1993.

When the Falcon is taken aboard the Death Star in the original film, and Vader says "I feel something, a presence I've not felt since...", this can be taken to refer to Obi-Wan, or Luke, or both.

yes when you've had decades to pontificate about this character development it does seem rather obvious

The original Sam Raimi script draft was something else

Attached: cea5d45620b3f447df8ab3af840ba66db04353b818467e33e0836c466f09782e.jpg (500x636, 55K)

You don't understand anything. You were not even alive. Do you think the average person had a home computer in 1980 when empire came out? Let alone the internet. I had an Atari 2600 and an intellivision and I was very lucky to have that.

Reminder that it was a completely shocking unexpected twist that Schwarzenegger wasn't the villain in Terminator 2

Attached: guns and roses.jpg (600x400, 116K)

Not how he designed the name though, read The Making of Star Wars Episode IV. There's scans of a Lucas note where he lists "menacing" names and starts morphing them until they sound cool.
>Dark Invader
>Death Invader
>Darth Invader
>Darth Vader

No, it can only be taken to refer to Obi-Wan regardless of if you know that Vader is Anakin because Luke had never met his father until he gets a glimpse of him onboard the Death Star.

There were probably 50,000 people in the whole country with home access to usenet back in 1983, and ESB came out in 1980.

>•Vader was a Jedi.
>•A Great pilot.
>•Connection to ObiWan
>•Skilled fighter
Means jack shit
>-His obsession with Luke through out ESP.
>Nobody is gonna be that motivated over trying to capture the Son of somebody else unless you have some kind of connection to them personally.
He blew up the death star which k assume made him a pretty high profile target for the empire. Plus being the last jedi alive meant he was the only threatto the sith. Moreover we discover the emperor wanted him as an apprentice.
>-Uncle Owen being worried about Luke being like his "FATHER". From what ObiWan tells us Luke's dad was a good man, so why would Owen be afraid of that. Unless there is a darker reason.
He may as well have been afraid that the boy he raised and presumably loves like a son would have ended up getting himself killed like his father before him.

I mean it isn't hard to imagine Owen gained an understanding that Anakin was some emotionally fragile guy who went into situations that would get himself killed

Kasdan didn't make it up.
And Kasdan was the one who came up with the second death star and Yoda doing stupid lightsaber battles.
And he wore a fedora, pic-related.
Don't forget he wrote the scripts to some of the nu-Star Wars too.

My bad, here's the picture.

Attached: kasdan.jpg (1457x989, 155K)

So? It's not like "I'm gunna make them two charcturs related durr. Is gonna be a plot tweest!!" requires a lot of talent or brain power.

t. Kasdan or his son

>Lucas planned more than one movie ahead

kek

>advanced force users can't sense their own offspring

El WRONG-O!

Kasdan didn't do shit. Just about everyone opposed Lucas on many of his ESB additions like Lando or Luke being Vader's son.

My thoughts exactly. I was alive to see I though but I was a toddler and have no memory of the twist. As far as I can remember, Darth Vader was always Luke’s father. One of my earliest memories when I had to have been almost 4 was of Luke removing vader’s mask and being creeped out by him. It was also creepy that the villain apparently wasn’t a villain anymore, too deep for my 3 and a half year old brain at the time.

Having known no twist, it would have been nice to experience as you say. But meh. I showed my kid SW in episode order. Fuck it. Way more of a mind fuck to watch Anakin grow up into an evil youngling killer and also the Palps is Sidious twist isn’t as obvious we thought (assuming you have no knowledge of the OT)

How was that a compliment to Kasdan?

>You now remember that Darth being a Sith title was invented after the original trilogy
Hell it may have even been the prequels

>As far as I can remember, Darth Vader was always Luke’s father.
He wasn't. Originally, Vader and Anakin were two different people.

It blends elements of Aristotelian and Shakespearean tragedy. It's considered 'complex' because of the revelation.

Attached: Aristotelian tragedy.jpg (648x1024, 106K)

George Lucas has read Aristotle hasn't he? We know he has a library, but what books are in it?

>Aristotelian and Shakespearean tragedy

which is better?

Kasdan's mocking the poster who says George's idea of Luke being related to Vader was good.

Pretty sure he knows Anakin is Vader

>Darth Insidious
>Darth Sidious
>Guy schemes and fools everyone into giving him control of the galaxy

Jesus christ I'm retarded I only just got this

Attached: poetry.gif (323x233, 1.54M)

you forget newspapers

This. If you think about. Empire is the movie that made the original trilogy work and set the path for later prequels

Kasdan is actually responsible for it all

Well I tried to have movie discussions through them a few times, but the two week delay in the letter I wrote physically arriving at the paper and then eventually being printed in the movie column really made it difficult to keep the thread "bumped" if you get what I'm saying.