Movies - TV
George Lucas' First Star Wars Draft Was Completely Different From A New Hope
By WITNEY SEIBOLD
George Lucas’ 1977 sci-fi film “Star Wars” became a cultural phenomenon that launched an overwhelmingly successful franchise despite the first movie’s initial mid-size budget of $11 million. Due to this limited budget, the original script saw many changes, with Biography revealing that Lucas’ early vision for “Star Wars” was quite different from the final film.
Some original ideas included the Dark Side being called the Bogan and several characters having different backgrounds like Luke Skywalker as an older military man named “Annakin Starkiller” or Han Solo as a frog-like alien. While a frog Han Solo could be easily done now with modern CGI or motion capture, the technology wasn’t available then.
Many of the movie’s familiar features began to take shape in the film’s second draft, including the young farmer Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader; the third draft would introduce Obi-Wan Kenobi, followed by the fourth and final draft with punched-up dialogue. While the film would become a success, Lucas was stumbling through many ideas until just three months before the movie began filming.