10 Essential Parts Of Movie Franchises (That Weren’t Introduced Until The Sequel)

2. Vader Is Luke€™s Father - The Empire Strikes Back

The Iconic Element: Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker. Like the Planet Of The Apes being Earth or Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes being terrible it's one of those twists so well known it barely even count as shocking nowadays. Heck, they made an entire trilogy based around the "I am your father" line. From a modern standpoint, the fact that Vader is Luke's father is so integral to the series it's hard to think of time when that wasn't the case. And many people would insist there wasn't one; Vader is father in Dutch, a very obvious naming trick from the man who once seriously called a villain Grievous. When It Was Actually Introduced:As the genesis of the character proves, Darth Vader was never meant to be that big of a deal in the vast Star Wars pantheon. In fact, he only survived the first film by complete chance. It wasn't until writing the second draft for The Empire Strikes Back that the notion he was a Skywalker was introduced (and even then it wasn't George Lucas' idea). Before that point, Star Wars was set to go in a very different, less ground-breaking direction. It sounds unbelievable in retrospect, but the clues are all there; isn't Darth just a contraction of Dark Lord of the Sith and Vader a shortening of invader (which is how the character's introduced)?