It makes sense if you force that justification on it, yeah. Shaw's Anakin ghost made sense just fine for decades.
The Special Editions Turn Twenty
- Thread starter Tallguy
- Start date
Still, it kind of raises the question, if Anakin's ghost is younger, why isn't Obi-Wan's?
^ Personal preference?
Considering how often they've gone back to fiddle with it, I'm surprised it isn't much worse actually. The last few revisions sound like they only bothered to make the audio decent enough for the average living room TV setup. I don't expect they even bothered to go back to the masters for the new sound mix, just plugged it into a second or even third generation track.
The logic is that Anakin reverted to good person he was before he was Darth Vader. Obi-Wan was a good person right up until he died, so that's what he looks like. From a mythological standpoint, I think that actually makes a lot more sense.
From a logical standpoint it makes even more sense as Shaw looked (and was) about a decade older the Guinness, which of course shouldn't be the case. If we proceed on the assumption that his immersion in the dark side prematurely aged him (at least outwardly) then it makes even less sense for Shaw. Also, the version of Anakin that looks like Shaw never had hair...or limbs. So then it becomes much less a "true self" image and more of a "what if". As in "what if he was never evil and lived to 80."
That said, I fully expect that if ghost Kenobi shows up in the new films it'll be McGregor, in which case it's flexible as to how a force apparition manifests. Probably the simplest way around it is that the image is at least partly subjective from the POV of the one seeing them.
Last edited:
If you look at the camera angles used in the Vader unmasking scene I imagine from a technical viewpoint it would be very easy to do this. Maybe Lucas had this idea all along and had Richard Marquand shoot it that way, and for some reason didn't follow through. On the subject of the quality of the CGI, many of the space battle scenes in 'A New Hope' still stand up and the Mos Eisle scenes can be given a 'fresh coat of CGI paint' especially the Jabba scene. Jedi is the one that needs the most work in my opinion. I'd have a CGI Rancor monster and maybe revisit the speeder-bike chase.
There are also a number of deleted scenes from Empire and Jedi which I think were good character moments that I'd put back in such as C3P0 tricking the Stormtroopers into encountering the Hoth monsters (with the previous scene establishing that the rebels have the creature also inserted). The longer scene with Luke and the others in the sick bay as well as the fate of Lando's computer aide Lobot. On Jedi the scene of the Imperial Officer who Vader encounters in the opening scene, raising objections during the battle to using the Death Star and the little battle Han & the rebels have when they first try to enter the shield generator.
There are also a number of deleted scenes from Empire and Jedi which I think were good character moments that I'd put back in such as C3P0 tricking the Stormtroopers into encountering the Hoth monsters (with the previous scene establishing that the rebels have the creature also inserted). The longer scene with Luke and the others in the sick bay as well as the fate of Lando's computer aide Lobot. On Jedi the scene of the Imperial Officer who Vader encounters in the opening scene, raising objections during the battle to using the Death Star and the little battle Han & the rebels have when they first try to enter the shield generator.
The SE of SW77, aka ANH, is awful. The SE of TESB is probably the best of the lot.
Because they showed the most restraint. But making Luke scream is unacceptable and a good example of something that clearly wasn't "the original intent" or "what we would have done if we could" made even more of a good example by the fact that it was removed in later revisions.
The Vader in Rogue One had limbs, didn't he? Arms, at least. We saw them when he was in the bacta tank.
No he had stumps, just like we saw in RotS.
I never understood putting Christensen's Anakin in the force ghost because when Anakin was turned into Vader, he was a teenager. Shaw's Anakin was more adult, which made better sense at the time.
I just watched a clip of the two back to back, and I like the Jedi Rocks song better, but the original scene is a better scene. In the original the old song was just a part of the setting as they're showing Jaba's thrown room, but the Special Edtion basically turned it into a music video in the middle of a Star Wars movie. I can see where it might seem like kind of a fun idea, but it was really unnecessary.
If so, then it was a bit of a strange choice to film new footage of her in the rancor den. Perhaps part of it was to increase the tonal contrast rather than mitigate it?
As for the singing into camera thing, if you look there are little floating devices around the stage which one can assume are holo-recorders. I take those shots as POVs. They're rare in Star Wars movies but hardly unprecedented.
