More proof, if proof be need be, of the way that Lucas would sabotage anything if he got his own way, lies in the original documents that lead to the creation of Star Wars. In execution, the Star Wars movies bore some of the most enduring characters, concepts and the like ever seen on screen, and one of the most well-realised fictional universes ever dreamt up. Which, when you look back at the first scripts and the rough outline for the series Lucas came up with in the early seventies, seems like something in a miracle. Can you imagine living in a world where Annikin Starkiller is one of the most popular heroes in modern culture, where the famous opening crawl was as dull as the one for The Phantom Menace, where everything awesome is terrible? Doesn't bear thinking about. Which is okay, because George Lucas already thought of all those things for you. The rough draft for The Star Wars is a horrible mess of half-finished ideas, unnecessarily convoluted backstory and character names somehow more stupid than Han Solo or Leia Organa. This was the version of Star Wars that Lucas showed to pals like Francis Ford Coppola, who practically begged him to rewrite it a bunch before showing it to any studios, worried that he would embarrass himself and become the laughing stock of Hollywood. Thankfully he took their advice, eventually taking a good three years to get the screenplay to the version we eventually saw on the silver screen. Still, there's no denying that this is a crappy script, and that Lucas wrote it, and that he thought somebody would actually make it into a film. Besides stealing most of the plot from the Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and not even trying to hide it, the film is also bogged down with the sort of tedious world-building and unnecessary expository dialogue that made the prequels such a drag. So when the new Star Wars films were so crappy, that wasn't because Lucas had suddenly turned insane; it was just that nobody was around to stop his insane ideas from coming out. Where were you, Francis?
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
