Leia, do you remember your mother? Your real mother?
Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.
Talk about burying the lede, Leia. JFC.
If GL hadn't sold, there would eventually have been a superduperhyperspecial edition that would have changed that line, among others, because he obviously didn't mean it literally and it wasn't his actual vision and only 1980s technical limitations forced him into permitting scripted lines that turned out to be bullshit. :-)
I just assumed she meant her adopted mother, Mrs. Bail Organa. Or did I miss something here?
Edit: nevermind, just looked it up and Breha died on Alderaan when the Death Star blew it up. Lame.
That detail wasn't in any of the movies so the line in ep 6 still makes sense the way you thought. I'm pretty sure anyone would assume that's what she meant, since we never hear that she knew she was adopted. Whoever made Bail's wife die in the explosion of Alderaan is the one who messed up, or Lucas ignored that addition when making episode I.
See, I went completely the other direction. We know from the Dagobah scene that Luke already knows Leia is his sister, and he's dealing with some pretty serious parent shit right now, so it would be on his mind. There is almost no reason for him to ask that question and specify "real" mother unless he already knew (from their years of acquaintance by this point) that she was adopted and that this would be his last chance to ask her and get a response uncolored by the impending revelation.
Lucas ignored that addition when making episode I.
I mean.... this is just what he did. A lot. And not just with EU stuff. The mental gymnastics necessary to square the scripts of the OT with the PT would impress Simone Biles.
Oh Luke was definitely asking her about their birth mother, knowing that it was the same woman. The question here is that Leia didn't know what he was talking about. Since she gives him an answer about someone who died when Leia was young, maybe she's just thinking that Bail remarried later.
Before the prequel trilogy came out, it could have been their birth mother she was talking about, and she just didn't know that Luke was her brother; but after ep 3 came out, and we see Padme die, we have to assume Leia was adopted by the Organas, but Bail's wife died when Leia was young and he later remarried, and Leia is thinking about that woman after Padme and before Bail's new wife, thinking that she is her real mom.
And yeah, it's completely possible that Lucas originally intended for Padme to be the one Leia was talking about, but the point is, the movies don't actually specify if she meant Padme or the middle wife, so it can still be explained.
And yeah, it’s completely possible that Lucas originally intended for Padme to be the one Leia was talking about, but the point is, the movies don’t actually specify if she meant Padme or the middle wife, so it can still be explained.
I personally like the fan theory that Padme's life force was transferred to Anakin with the help of Palpatine.
Do you ever get the feeling that all the right story beats are there, if only it were guided by a more masterful hand
Oh definitely. It has the makings of an epic series, that gets dumbed down and ruined at every opportunity for greatness.
It's such a shame. Hamill & co were the perfect ages to do a sequel trilogy in the 90s, if only Lucas had handed the reigns to someone else and said "do a Thrawn trilogy adaptation".
Didn't Hamill wreck his Corvette and end up requiring facial reconstruction? I thought that's why he moved to voice work back then.
The crash happened in between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, which is why at the start of ESB his character gets whomped in the face and why in the Holiday Special the camera only shows him from far away. The reason he made a career move to voice acting was that he was type cast as Luke Skywalker and simply couldn't get work doing much else (except for Wing Commander).
Go back and watch one of the original trailers for the Phantom Menace. They cut that scene from the final movie and it gave him more lines than the entire rest of the movie.
At one point, Lucas admits to going back in to post-production and drastically recutting the movie to fit a more kid-friendly Disney-esque media market. Specifically, he was very excited to give Jar Jar Binks a bigger role. I'm convinced there's actually an excellent film laying somewhere on the cutting room floor and Lucas's own vanity was what stole it from us.
Also incidentally, the original New Hope screenplay was a total wreck. His first wife had to completely recut it before shooting began. She became good friends with Carrie Fisher, and Fisher learned the trade of script-doctoring from her masterfully. They both went on to work behind the scenes in a number of popular movies (Fisher even has a cameo in the first Austin Powers, where she tells Austin to quit all the silliness and get to the plot). There's a good reason to believe that Marcia Lou Lucas was the hidden hand that made Star Wars a hit.
That theory missed something that jumped my synapses right at the end. Palpatine killed Vader in order to revive. He pulled the same fucking trick, his love of Vader and his hatred at his betrayal mixed right at the end, and he used it to hitch a ride to his clone stock. Man, fuck, that just ruined the sequels all over again.
Phantom Menace was 2/3rds of a good movie and 1/3rd of just doing A New Hope again, but worse.