1. Star Wars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gvqpFbRKtQ George Lucas's rough draft of The Star Wars (written in 1974) - summarised
here - sounds like the strange, woozy dream you might have following a Blu-Ray marathon of the complete saga. You catch odd echoes of characters from the completed films, yet they're... off, somehow. Who is Annikin Starkiller," and why is he the son of a Jedi named Kane? Why is Luke Skywalker an army general, and why is Han Solo an alien? The plot of the treatment is, suffice it to say, virtually unrecognisable. The broad brushes are the same, yes - a young man, a princess and two robots do battle against an evil, imperialistic Empire but iconic scenes and elements such as Obi-Wan, lightsabers, the Death Star, the Rebel Alliance and the Stormtrooper who hits his head on the door are all missing. Like The Wizard of Oz, this is one of those cases where hindsight overpowers any sense of objectivity, but it's hard to believe that this rather flat rendering of the mythology would have had anything like the success of the film released three years later. Odd as this version of the film may seem, it has
recently been announced that Dark Horse Comics are going to publish a graphic novel based on Lucas's original treatment. Whether they'll choose to integrate or even acknowledge its blatant contradictions of the canon remains to be seen.
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