14 Star Wars Moments George Lucas Wanted You To Forget

11. The Poor Guy Who Played Anakin First

For Star Wars fans, Sebastian Shaw's involvement in Star Wars is a case of extremes. He has a very limited amount of screen time, but the performance was immediately iconic enough to make it the defining performance of his entire, long career. Regardless of how well the fans responded to him, or how enduring the image of the fragile, unmasked Darth Vader is, George Lucas chose to dilute his impact to "tie the two trilogies together." So instead of Shaw appearing as a force ghost at the end of the original trilogy, his slot went to inferior, unwelcome pretender Hayden Christensen, whose blue eyes also took the place of Shaw's in the infamous death scene. Quite what purpose the replacement actually served remains to be seen: there can surely be no fan who only realised that the two characters were the same when Christensen's character appeared as a ghost, and it's hard not to feel like Lucas made the change in order to defy fan sentiments that Christensen perhaps wasn't the best choice for Anakin.