George Lucas Had A Good Reason For Scrapping Luke Skywalker's Original Last Name
If one were to read George Lucas' original 1974 script draft for "Star Wars: A New Hope," entitled "The Star Wars," without any context, one would be forgiven for assuming they had stumbled upon the script for a weird, bootlegged ripoff of Lucas' 1977 classic. The script speaks of "Jedi Bendu," referring to them as "the most feared warriors in the universe," and features an 18-year-old boy named Annikin Starkiller. Other key characters include the "large," grizzled General Luke Skywalker and a "huge," green-skinned non-human named Han Solo.
Major elements of "The Star Wars" would be dropped entirely in later drafts, with many of them eventually being re-imagined for future "Star Wars" projects. "Bendu," for example, is the name of the mystical entity that exists between the light and dark sides of the Force in the animated series "Star Wars Rebels." By the time he got to his fourth script draft, entitled "Star Wars: The Adventures of Luke Starkiller," even Lucas was repurposing aspects of his earlier work. Now Luke was the adventurous teenager and "Annikin" had become Anakin, Luke's father and, while nobody knew it at the time, the corrupted Jedi Knight turned tyrannical Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader.
"Starkiller," as we can probably all agree, was a far too malicious-sounding name for a naive (and whiny) yet good-natured farm boy from the planet Tatooine, as Lucas himself would tell you. "All the names have history, but sometimes I make mistakes," the filmmaker admitted to Rolling Stone in 2005. "Luke was originally going to be called Luke Starkiller, but then I realized that wasn't appropriate for the character." This ultimately led to him swapping out "Starkiller" for "Skywalker," the character's original surname in "The Star Wars," in an example of things coming full-circle.
What's in a Star Wars name?
Whereas "Starkiller" has an innately violent ring to it, "Skywalker" is much more ethereal. It's also very much the sort of thing you would expect a Chosen One to be called in a prototypical hero's journey narrative, like that of "Star Wars: A New Hope."
Interestingly, thanks to the release of George Lucas' prequel trilogy, the name "Skywalker" has come to take on a much more complicated connotation. Indeed, for all their faults, those movies played a key role in reframing the Skywalker Saga at large as a familial epic marred in tragedy, in which one generation after another are left to "fix the sins of the last generation," as Lucas put it in his Rolling Stone interview. It's part of what has allowed "Star Wars" to function as a mirror for the real-world, where we ourselves are constantly forced to fight the same battles as those who came before us (in slightly different forms), over and over.
As Lucas pointed out, however, this was all the more reason for Luke and, naturally, his sister Leia to have an uplifting surname:
"[...] The first three episodes are a tragedy, and the second three go slightly goofy, but they're inspirational: Even the worst, most evil people find compassion. Darth Vader has compassion for his children, and that's ultimately what children are for."
As for "Starkiller," well, it's not a bad "Star Wars" name — it's just not fitting for Luke and Leia. Heck, it was good enough for J.J. Abrams to make it the name of the First Order's planetary base nearly 40 years after "A New Hope" hit theaters. Perhaps /Film's Bryan Young put it best: "No good idea goes wasted in the halls of Lucasfilm." Lucas would definitely know something about that.