Early Installment Weirdness / Star Wars

The Original Trilogy as a whole

• Palpatine's name is never spoken in the Original Trilogy, with even the credits to Return of the Jedi simply identifying him as "The Emperor". While the name Palpatine first showed up in the novelization to A New Hope, and was used extensively in the pre-prequel EU, it wasn't until The Phantom Menace that it was said in the actual movies. His first name, "Sheev", wasn't revealed until the 2014 novel Star Wars: Tarkin.
• Also, Palpatine's Sith name "Darth Sidious" is never said in the Original Trilogy. This is because the practice of the Sith using "Darth [New Name]" as a title for all members wasn't established until The Phantom Menace, and was done solely to explain why Anakin Skywalker became known as Darth Vader after having turned to the Dark Side (in fact, in the Original Trilogy, even promotional materials treated "Darth" and "Vader" as if was a first name and a surname respectively). A possible in-universe explanation would be that most people in the Galaxy, even many Imperials, were unaware of this custom of Sith Lords and simply assumed Darth was Vader's first name, as well as ignoring Sidious' moniker altogether. It's rather Luke, who knew better, who calls Palpatine "Darth Sidious" when he mentions Palpatine in a conversation with Rey in The Last Jedi.
  • The EU ultimately explains this handily; most of the galaxy did not know that Palpatine was a Sith Lord at all until after the empire was brought down. Even a bit of a plot point in a few books, with some characters being skeptical about the idea that the emperor was actually force sensitive.
• Darth Vader is the only villain in the Original Trilogy to have a lightsaber, which one could easily attribute to his status as a former Jedi. The fact that the Sith also use lightsabers as their primary weapons wasn't established until the Prequel Trilogy. This is especially notable when it comes to Palpatine, who tells Luke in Return of the Jedi that he is "unarmed", implying that he doesn't use a lightsaber, and who attacks Luke using only Force Lightning. Despite this, Palpatine is shown to have a lightsaber in Revenge of the Sith (along with a backup he used during his fight against Yoda after the first one was knocked out of his office window by Mace Windu, with Palpatine having even used both sabers at once during his duel against Maul and Savage Opress in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "The Lawless"). Supplemental material explains that the reason why Palpatine never uses his lightsaber in Return of the Jedi is because he views lightsabers as "a Jedi's weapon" and only used them because A)He was trained to as part of Sith tradition, and B)to defend himself against other saber-users when necessary. Since the Jedi are all but extinct during the events of the Original Trilogy, he would have no need to use or even carry a lightsaber most of the time ^note There were a few instances of him using a lightsaber after the Prequel Trilogy, such as the Lords of the Sith novel and the Star Wars: Crimson Reign comic, which is set shortly before Return of the Jedi. And by the time he's resurrected in The Rise of Skywalker, he has become so proficient with the Dark Side of the Force that he no longer even needs to use a lightsaber.
• The general perception of Jedi and the Force is a lot different than in the prequels and pre-prequel Expanded Universe. Going by the original trilogy, you would think the Jedi were some small group that could be come to be considered a myth at some point, and especially that the Force is similarly esoteric. Most striking are Han's lines about the Force being a "Hokey Religion", and how he hasn't seen anything that would lead him to believe there is a Sentient Cosmic Force at all, even though he would have been 10-13 years old during the Clone Wars, during which Jedi routinely did supernatural feats in public, and his best friend Chewbacca fought alongside Yoda himself during the Battle of Kashyyyk. Hell, his ex-girlfriend Qi'ra even works for former Sith Lord Maul (though Maul doesn't make his appearance known until after Han leaves Crimson Dawn). Even if Han never met a Jedi in person nor directly witnessed any of this, it's a little hard to believe he wouldn't have watched, or insisted to disbelieve, anything on the news about the Jedi being superpowered people involved in a galaxy-spanning conflict. Rather than a Muggle everyman understandably out of touch with the whole thing, it unintentionally makes him look like a stubborn Flat-Earth Atheist instead.
• In general, while the concept of the Dark Side is developed in the later two films, no mention of a Light Side is present anywhere. The Force is talked about in a general sense, and Force-users who give in to their baser impulses and lust for power are said to have immersed themselves in a dark aspect of it, but no concept is present of a true dualism. The concept of the Light Side evolved later, in part due to extrapolations by EU writers from the prequel trilogy's discussion of how Anakin is fated to balance the Force (although the prequel trilogy actually makes no mention of a Light Side as such either). It only entered the films with The Force Awakens. Additionally, the Force is talked about in much more passive terms than later works tend to; concepts such as the Force having a will, desires, plans, or direct influence on people have no presence in either the original movies or the early EU, which tend to instead depict the Force as "just" being a magical spiritual force that certain beings can interact with. The idea of the Force having actual agency of its own was first sketched out and vaguely entertained in the prequel trilogy, but only developed into its modern form in Knights of the Old Republic - where it is actually discussed rather than enforced.
• The entire franchise has Aerith and Bob tendencies, as some of the characters have names that sound like familiar Western Earth names, while other names are made-up and fantastical. However, the original trilogy had more of the former than later installments, especially among the main human characters: names like Luke, Ben, Owen, and Leia (the odd spelling notwithstanding) wouldn't have been out of place in a film set on Earth in present-day USA. The prequel trilogy is much bolder about foregrounding characters with highly exotic-sounding or downright fictional names: Anakin, Padmé, Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and Shmi can evoke real Indian, Chinese and Japanese names, but are quite far from what a modern Western audience would be familiar with. Disney's sequel trilogy falls somewhere between those two extremes, as names like Finn, Rey, Poe, and Kylo sound vaguely like Western Earth names but would still be relatively uncommon in our world (and there is one character with a fairly common Western name, Rose). The Force Awakens (which was largely framed as a throwback to the original Star Wars) also makes brief mention of a gang on Jakku called "The Irving Boys", which is the kind of name that one would expect to hear in the earliest installments.
• In later stories, as well as virtually his entire image in pop culture, Vader is nearly always portrayed as an unstoppable powerhouse of a fighter, a relentless and brutal Implacable Man who's always got his opponents on the run, but this is not present in the original trilogy. Compare his slow, somewhat clumsy lightsaber fight against Obi-Wan in ANH to stuff like Rogue One where Vader inflicts a full-on Mook Horror Show immediately before the start of this movie. In the original trilogy there is no implication that Vader is an One-Man Army: in all of his appearances in the first film, imperial authority aside, he only proves to be a big, strong man with sword training and some psychic powers that suffice to strangle a person, all of which make him certainly fearsome by human standards but not a walking tank by any means. It is not until The Empire Strikes Back that he shows stronger and more diverse powers, and still, neither that film nor Return of the Jedi actually suggest he is the type of character that could take on an entire battalion, something that, in turn, it is loosely suggested with Yoda, who is able to lift an entire spaceship. His true characterization as a powerhouse only started in the EU, if early, and went in crescendo over the years until peaking in the current Disney canon.
• Due to a combination of a lower special effects budget and CGI not being available then, almost all of the planets are rather Earth-like, with Bespin being the only one that couldn't actually pass for somewhere on Earth. They were also all shot on location except for Bespin and Dagobah (they apparently originally planned to film the Dagobah scenes in a real swamp, but realized that would be far too dangerous). We also don't see any shots of the surface of Alderaan before it's destroyed, despite it being of pivotal importance to the story, which also seems very odd in retrospect. The Prequels have a lot more CGI and a lot more alien-seeming planets, such as Coruscant, Kamino (an ocean planet), and Felucia (a planet with a bunch of giant mushrooms and tentacle-like plants everywhere). Even most of the fairly Earth-like planets have some alien locations, such as the underwater city on Naboo. We also finally see Alderaan in Revenge of the Sith, but only a brief glimpse near the end. We don't see it properly until "Part I" of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Curiously, the Sequel Trilogy goes back to having mostly Earth-like planets. Crait is probably the most alien (being basically a desert with salt instead of sand), and even that's not that far-fetched, as salt flats exist on Earth. This could have been a deliberate decision on Disney's part to Win Back the Crowd by avoiding the infamous digital backlots that resulted in the overuse of CGI in the Prequel Trilogy (at least until the StageCraft technology developed for The Mandalorian demonstrated a more naturalistic application of digital sets).
• At no point in the Original Trilogy are the Jedi referred as an order (they're simply called "The Jedi"), nor there are any hints about how they were organized or their hierarchy, if they had one, with A New Hope hinting that while they all worked to keep peace in the Galaxy, they mostly went on their own. Similarly, Yoda is never referred as their former leader, just as a very old and wise individual who trained Obi-Wan among many other Jedi, which would made one think he was just an instructor (albeit an impressively powerful one). In fact, it doesn't even seem like the Jedi have a leader, given that the Jedi in the pre-Rise of the Empire expanded universe that came before the prequels don't seem to have one.
• All of the Stormtroopers (including the variant types) wear white armor. The Expanded Universe reveals that variants with different colored armors exist, such as green "swamptroopers", and the prequels showed some Clone Troopers (who would eventually become Stormtroopers as well) with different colored armors. This raises the obvious question of why the Empire didn't use the green-armored troopers on Endor (which would have some camouflage), instead of the standard white-armored kind, which obviously stick out like sore thumbs—though this is easy to Fan Wank as the troops on Endor being severely overconfident.
• The Tusken Raiders were portrayed as all bloodthirsty assholes who attack people for no reason. This was mostly played straight in the prequels as well, although Anakin wiping out an entire tribe (including the women and children) is portrayed as his Start of Darkness, which means they at least weren't born evil, if the Children Are Innocent. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic would go on to make them more sympathetic. Namely, when the other races first discovered Tatooine, they almost wiped out the entire species in order to colonize the place. While they are still portrayed as a very warlike and xenophobic race, they at least now had a Freudian Excuse, and were implied to be nicer before their bad encounter with the first aliens (from their point of view) to come to their planet.
• Also, the Tusken Raiders were referred to as "sand people" in A New Hope. The name change possibly came about due to "sand people" (and other variants) being a derogatory term for Middle-Easterners, though the Tuskens are still sometimes called "sand people" in later works, such as Palpatine referring to them as such in Revenge of the Sith. Perhaps it's considered a slur in-universe as well.
• Due to the movies being made in The '70s and The '80s, there is nothing akin to the Internet in the Star Wars Galaxy. This seems very odd, as if the Galaxy has invented Mile-Long Ships and Faster-Than-Light Travel, it's a little hard to believe they wouldn't have invented the Internet. The Prequels try to fix this by saying there is something called the Holonet, which is basically the same thing as the Internet. However, this raises the obvious question of why no one uses or even mentions it in the Original Trilogy, as even if the Empire removed it from civilian use, you'd think the Imperial military would still use it all the time.

A New Hope

Early-Installment Weirdness is a given, due to the film being the first released, though perhaps with A New Hope^note Which, for all anyone knew, could have been the only Star Wars movie (it was originally released, and still referred to by some as simply "Star Wars", without the "Episode IV: A New Hope" name; it wasn't used until the 1981 theatrical re-release). it becomes more noticeable given that it is the fourth chronologically in a series of films, with the first three not produced for another 20 years. However, there are still a few bits that are particularly prominent, especially to the eagle-eyed viewer, because some of the background world-building wasn't as fully developed when the movie was first filmed. To wit:

• Grand Moff Tarkin seems perfectly comfortable with acting like he's Darth Vader's superior — and even weirder, Vader doesn't give any hint of having a problem with it. This sort of dynamic would never happen in the latter two movies (or even Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Rebels and Rogue One, for that matter), where Vader is a tyrannical, dictatorial head honcho answerable only to the Emperor, commanding Admirals and even disposing of them as he sees fit.^note Kieron Gillen's Star Wars: Darth Vader comics ended up turning this into a plot point—they suggest that Vader by the time of A New Hope actually wasn't the second-in-command of the entire Empire. Though he was highly-ranked and considered one of the Emperor's best agents, he didn't hold such importance that he could feasibly order around or execute admirals with no consequence, with others jockeying for support with him and high-ranking officers freely speaking to him as an equal. For much of the series, Vader is forced to work with a small retinue and build a power base outside of the Imperial military to get his schemes going. By the end, Vader has successfully killed off most of his rivals, put down a major rebellion, and won several great victories, making him the greatest power in the Empire after the Emperor himself and leaving him largely in his familiar role as The Dragon. Other comics have also had Palpatine trying to do everything possible to keep Vader too busy and distracted to overthrow him as per the usual "Rule of Two" among the Sith, including explicitly demoting Vader and forcing him to be a subordinate to certain figures in the military, creating rivals for Vader and pitting them against each other, giving Vader tasks and quests to keep him busy and running all over the galaxy, etc. Given that Lucas had originally planned for the Emperor to be a powerless figurehead at the mercy of his advisors (which is even how he's described in the official novelization), it's possible that Tarkin was originally intended to be one of the top-level advisors who really ran the Empire (the Hideki Tojo to Palpatine's Hirohito, in other words), with Vader merely being his brutish enforcer; since Lucas didn't settle on the Emperor being a malevolent Evil Sorcerer until the next film, the idea of Vader being his apprentice likely wouldn't have occurred to him at the time. Partly to explain this, in Star Wars: The Clone Wars Tarkin and Anakin meet and hit it off quite well and Tarkin was given a lot of prominence and importance by Palpatine in the Imperial days to make him an exception to the rule. Books even demonstrated Tarkin had deduced Darth Vader was Anakin Skywalker, and it's implied Vader was aware he knew. In that context, it comes across that Tarkin is able to order Vader around because he's one of the only people Vader actually respects.
• The Imperials' treatment of Vader in this film, in general, is vastly different from the films made later; despite Vader obviously having high status, he comes across more like a weird annoyance that they are required to keep around rather than anyone they have real respect for. While Vader is not a nice man by any means, most of the Imperials don't seem to be particularly afraid of him. Admiral Motti, in particular, sneers in Vader's face, decries his Force abilities, and has the nerve to talk cocky to him at all; while Motti pays for his outburst, he and the others, including Tarkin, seem to be surprised by Vader's reaction. In the subsequent works, by contrast, Imperial officers tremble with fear at the mere sight of Vader, clearly aware of what fate awaits them if they somehow get on the Dark Lord of the Sith's bad side. It can be inferred that with the one Imperial subordinate Vader was not allowed to Force-choke gone, they realized that when it comes to Vader, anything goes. Going by earlier drafts of the script, Darth Vader was likely originally planned to be akin to a Psycho for Hire who wasn't technically part of the Imperial hierarchy, which would explain the Officers' attitude towards him.
  • This disrespect extends to the script itself, as the ending, where Vader's TIE fighter is sent comically spinning away by the film's lovable rogues in the Millennium Falcon, seems to play on him the joke that he is just a big bully who gets entertainingly screwed in the moment he ceases having everything on his favor. It's only from Empire Strikes Back onwards that Vader starts retaining a dead serious, dignified image even in the face of defeat, especially with the revelation of not being just a colourful henchman, but the protagonist's long lost father.
• The opening scenes have Vader receiving (fairly sensible) critical feedback from an Imperial officer and actually taking it in stride, something that would never happen at any other point in the franchise. Expanded universe material would clarify that Vader knows that this particular officer is competent, and as such Vader has enough regard for him to accept critical feedback as long as he remained respectful.
• More generally, the relationships between the characters can seem a little bizarre in retrospect — and this is caused by two relationships having not actually been established yet from the perspective of ANH's script: Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker and Luke & Leia.
  • The movie seems to treat Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker as separate people... because, in this script as written and shot, they were. Hence why Obi-Wan refers to "a young Jedi named Darth Vader" and calls Vader "Darth" as if it's his first name. After the reveal that Vader was really Anakin Skywalker, the prequel trilogy established "Darth" as a title held by all Sith, with Palpatine being given the Sith pseudonym Darth Sidious and his first two apprentices being called Darth Maul and Darth Tyranus (who's more commonly referred to by his true identity of Count Dooku, due to him being the public face of the Confederacy of Independent Systems). In retrospect, it comes off as Obi-Wan consciously differentiating between his former pupil and the monster he became, which is consistent with the view of the subject that Obi-Wan expresses in Jedi. Obi-Wan Kenobi would later reinforce this interpretation, with Obi-Wan calling Vader "Darth" after finally accepting That Man Is Dead. In addition, Sir Alec Guinness's acting manages to sell, likely through simple good luck, that Obi-Wan is hiding things from Luke (like when he first sees R2 with a sort of twinkle in his eye or how he briefly hesitates when Luke asks what happened to his father). The idea of Anakin and Vader being distinct individuals was later "canonized" as far as most people in-universe were concerned: the official story as to what happened to Anakin was that he died defending the Jedi Temple from Vader during the events of Revenge of the Sith, and it wasn't until sometime between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens that it became public knowledge that Anakin and Vader were one and the same.
  • Some of the scenes with Luke and Leia (never mind some of those posters) seem a little weirdly incestuous now... and that's because, in the movie as shot, Luke and Leia aren't meant to be related. In A New Hope, Leia was simply intended as a noblewoman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then in the right place at the right time, one might say, and as a result the mild flirtatious elements were supposed to be completely innocent and expected of the movie's genre. It wasn't until a couple drafts into writing Return of the Jedi that Lucas decided that Leia was Luke's sister, which also explains why they were still teasing the possibility of a love triangle well into Empire. This also affected a few very early expanded universe works, most notoriously Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which has a lot of very obvious Luke/Leia Ship Tease that now feels incredibly uncomfortable, and the Marvel comic series, which heavily pushed Luke and Leia together (even ignoring the Han/Leia teasing from Empire) until Return of the Jedi forced them to very suddenly nix the idea entirely and start pushing Luke with someone new every issue or so.
  • The two combined also lead to one other bit of weirdness: Leia's captivity right next to her dad. In the movie as shot, by itself, there's nothing odd because Vader and Leia aren't related at all, so he has no reason to take note of her beyond a tool for information. In the context of the rest of the movies and any EU material, even post-reset material, not only is it very strange that he doesn't notice a strong similarity to both Padmé and himself in Leia, but the Force should be all but screaming at Vader that something is up with Leia, even through the veil of the Dark Side. Note that Vader does react to feeling Luke and Obi-Wan's presences, although he never identifies the former as his son either, just as a particularly powerful Force-sensitive. Revenge of the Sith would establish that Anakin believed his and Padmé's child (not knowing she was having twins) had died as well when he accidentally killed her, and he didn't learn that his son had survived until sometime before Empire Strikes Back and never learned that Leia was the other, only that Luke had a sister after reading his feelings during their final duel.
  • For that matter, there's nothing in this film indicating that Darth Vader, the separate character who is not Anakin Skywalker yet, is even human at all. He's never referred to as a human (Obi-Wan refers to Vader as a "young Jedi" rather than a "young man", when talking with Luke about the latter's father's "death") and he's never seen without his mask or suit at any point in the film. All of the other unusually tall characters are aliens, so it's not unreasonable to assume that Vader might be one as well. We briefly see the back of his head in The Empire Strikes Back while his mask is being lowered into place, but he's bald, pale and covered in scaly scar tissue (which only later was revealed to be third degree burns). It's not evident that he's human until he reveals himself to be Luke's father and his ravaged face isn't shown until Luke unmasks him near the end of Return of the Jedi. Also, there is no mention or even hint that Vader is a Cyborg in the original film — the first suggestion of him requiring the suit to live occurs in The Empire Strikes Back, and Obi-Wan confirms that he is "more machine now than man" in Return of the Jedi. Yes, the respirator sound helps define Vader's first appearance on-screen, but why he needs it is never addressed or dwelled on in A New Hope itself and in just observational context, it could be one of multiple things, such as him being an alien that can't breathe oxygen (a concept that would later be used for Jedi Master Plo Koon).
  • Owen and Beru do not seem to recognize R2 and 3PO in A New Hope even though Attack of the Clones reveals that 3PO lived with the Lars family for several years while Anakin's mother Shmi was married to Owen's father Cliegg, and R2 was with Anakin and Padmé when they visited looking for Shmi. While 3PO had a dull gray outer shell instead of his trademark gold-plated shell when he lived on the Lars' homestead, that still isn't quite enough to explain it away. However, similar to Alec Guinness during the scene where Obi-Wan hesitates to tell Luke that Vader "killed" Anakin, Owen, while examining 3PO, says "I have no use for a protocol droid" in a way that suggests he's familiar with them and Owen and Beru's actors give each other concerned looks when Luke is talking about Obi-Wan and the droids, which helps to (retroactively) suggest that they did figure out the droids' identities and are trying to hide the truth from Luke. The scene where Owen orders Luke to have R2's memory wiped takes on a new meaning after watching the prequels.
  • Obi-wan hiding Luke on Tatooine makes sense in context of just the first movie: Tatooine is a far off backwater planet, so he probably assumed the Empire would never think to look there. With the decision to make Anakin and Darth Vader the same person, it seems like one of the WORST places to hide him, considering that Vader was from there as well. Later works would fix this somewhat with the explanation that Obi-Wan figured due to his bad childhood and other bad experiences there Vader/Anakin would never want to go there again, as well as it possibly being a sort of Violation of Common Sense thing (i.e he thought Vader wouldn't think to look there precisely because he figured Vader would think it was too obvious.)
  • One last bit of relational weirdness is the implication that Anakin and Owen grew up together on Tatooine before Anakin left to become a Jedi, as Obi-Wan notes Owen wished Anakin had "stayed here"; the set-up doesn't even imply a step-sibling relation, but that Owen is Anakin's brother by blood (Owen's last name of "Lars" wasn't given until Attack of the Clones). In the prequel trilogy, Anakin left Tatooine long before he even became Owen's step-brother, and was already a Jedi during their brief interactions in Attack of the Clones. Also, while Owen saying he's afraid of Luke becoming like his father takes on a new meaning after Empire, it had never been clearly implied that Owen was aware that Anakin is Vader. In Obi-Wan Kenobi, Owen is under the impression that Anakin is dead. It's possible that he somehow found out the truth later (Obi-Wan initially thought Vader was dead too, and it's possible that he told Owen some time after the fact), or knew that Anakin had turned to the Dark Side before his "death", but no EU material as of this writing elaborates on this. Even if Owen somehow knew that his stepbrother was Vader, his response is fairly subdued for what one would expect under such circumstances. There is also the detail that Beru claims to see "too much" of Anakin in Luke, despite the angry, brooding Anakin she met in Clones resembles very little the passionate but comparatively mellower Luke we get to see onscreen. In the original script, the easy read-in was that Beru knew Anakin from back when she, he and Owen were young and they grew up together before Anny ran off to be a clone-warring space wizard, and she's supposed to be wistfully talking about Luke's wanderlust and sense of adventure being the exact same as the not-yet-well-defined Anakin she knew.
• Luke refers to the red astromech droid that blows up as an "R2" unit. It became known years later that astromech droids are not limited to R2-series units - this specific one is named R5-D4 - though Luke probably didn't know either.
• Admiral Motti's description of the Force as a "sad devotion to that ancient religion" seems surprising, given that its existence was treated as common knowledge in the Prequel Trilogy, a timeframe in which Motti would almost certainly have been alive (albeit very young). This is largely because when the film was written Lucas envisioned exact knowledge of the Force and Jedi powers to be something which only a select few had knowledge of, which was gradually contradicted by the Expanded Universe novels and comics, and then jettisoned altogether by The Phantom Menace. Some later works re-framed the lines by having the young Motti witnessing Jedi in action but being still very skeptical of what they could actually do, an attitude that is not necessarily odd - but as nothing of this was mentioned in the film proper, a viewer might still find weird Motti being so incredulous.
• Darth Vader has No Indoor Voice for most of his scenes on the Tantive IV, and yells at prisoners and officers alike with abandon. This is a stark contrast to all his subsequent scenes and the sequels, where he is The Stoic and expresses his anger solely through Tranquil Fury. His voice is also somewhat higher-pitched than in the later movies, where it was also further enhanced to sound more robotic. However, given the events of Rogue One, we at least know why Vader is angry during the Tantive IV scenes. This angry Vader also rears his head in Obi-Wan Kenobi, once in Part IV when he yells at Reva for letting Obi-Wan escape Fortress Inquisitorious, and a few more times in Part VI during his second rematch with Obi-Wan.
• The Imperial March leitmotif does not appear in the film, as it was not composed until The Empire Strikes Back. Oddly enough, it's the Rebel Fanfare that's more associated with the Empire in this film. A separate "Imperial motif" used to represent the Empire and the Death Star in A New Hope would never again be used by John Williams in the franchise, though other composers would eventually resurrect it for short uses in Rogue One, Solo and Rebels alongside the more familiar March.
• Right before Luke returns home to find Owen and Beru dead, he refers to the droids as "robots," something that would not be said in the rest of the series. Later works from the old Expanded Universe did have some droids referred as "bots" and "warbots", but this was never commonly done.
• In the cantina, Obi-Wan uses his lightsaber to lop an arm off a barfly, which feels surprisingly drastic for the calm, diplomatic Obi-Wan we knew in the prequels. After the release of the prequel trilogy, the presumable lecture here is that the Jedi Purge and his twenty years of exile have hardened him a bit, but is still odd considering the old Ben doesn't seem to be particularly bitter or angry otherwise. Moreover, the severed arm is then covered in blood, even though it's later shown that lightsabers also cauterize wounds. It was later Handwaved as this particular species (Aqualish) having Bizarre Alien Biology that makes them bleed even after lightsaber wounds. This is also the only scene where a lightsaber damages something, and the most famous property of lightsabers—their ability to cut through virtually any solid object—is never acknowledged.
• When Chewie first enters the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, he bumps his head against a pair of hanging dice. Besides the holiday special, they were not seen again in the rest of the original trilogy, and were not seen again for a long time in general. Even the original Expanded Universe, known for giving lengthy backstories and much detail to many minor characters and objects, never elaborated on them. They finally reappeared in The Last Jedi. Luke gives them to Leia on Crait, although they're revealed to be an illusion, just as Luke's presence on the planet is. They also appear in Solo as the film covers Han's origins.
• The film's novelisation — credited to Lucas — contains additional weirdness as it is based upon an earlier version of the script.
  • Among these is an eye-opening reference to ducks; considering that every other piece of wildlife seen in the franchise has a non-Earth name^note the name of Han's ship, the Millennium Falcon, could be seen as an implicit exception this was considered somewhat odd. (As was the context of the statement which seemed to hint that Obi-Wan knew of Earth, likely predating the decision to set the film in "a galaxy far, far away.") There was a half-hearted attempt at rationalizing this in The Phantom Menace by showing actual ducks on the planet Naboo, but even then the Expanded Universe works referred to them as pelikki. Luke also recalls owning a dog.
  • One of the biggest differences in the novelization is a passage describing Emperor Palpatine as an ambitious politician who has fallen under the control of various advisors and yes-men — a far cry from the later Evil Sorcerer who serves as the Greater-Scope Villain of the franchise. Some of the earlier tabletop RPG sourcebooks attempted to explain this as being the general perception of Palpatine among the public and lower ranks of the military, but the prequels made nonsense of that explanation. Palpatine specifically set himself up as a strong, unifying dictator, and would never allow his reputation to suffer that kind of insult.
  • An even bigger departure from the eventual canon is that, while Palpatine is credited with turning the Old Republic into the Empire, the novel makes it clear that this was long ago, and that there have been other emperors since then. In fact the Empire itself wasn't necessarily a bad thing at first, and the current situation is only the result of Vader's influence on the "later corrupt emperors".
• The lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader.
  • For those familiar with the fast-paced, high-flying lightsaber duels of later films (especially the prequels), the fateful final showdown between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker is... pretty stiff and rigid. Both are holding their lightsabers with both hands (Vader would primarily use one-handed strikes in later works). George Lucas originally intended for Jedi to wield their lightsabers with both hands and fight like traditional swordsmen, much like some of the heroes in old serials that inspired George. However, by Return of the Jedi and to a lesser degree earlier in The Empire Strikes Back, Luke and Vader's duel already involves a lot of jumping and often using one hand to fight with lightsabers, as shown in the Prequel Trilogy. Another reason for the change is that in the first film, Vader’s regular actor David Prowse did the fighting scenes, while in the sequels, professional fencer Bob Anderson did them. According to George in the DVD commentary, the duel in A New Hope is retconned to be because Obi-Wan is old and out of practice and Vader is part-machine (and also wants to humor Obi-Wan and humiliate him).
  • On the flip side are works like Star Wars Rebels that portray Obi-Wan as extremely potent in battle despite his advanced age; this is the same Obi-Wan who had easily defeated Darth Maul — the extremely experienced Sith warrior who murdered Obi-Wan master and was nothing to sneeze at in terms of skill and raw power — in a Single-Stroke Battle just a few months before (and had also shown Vader utterly dominating that series' heroes in a fight they barely escaped). The previous fight between Obi-Wan and Vader nine years earlier in Obi-Wan Kenobi also recontextulizes their final duel. Obi-Wan pounded Vader with dozens of thrown boulders, destroyed his life support panel and chopped off most of his helmet, leaving him a wheezing, barely living shell of a man. It's entirely possible that Vader — having been crippled and left for dead by Kenobi twice — is afraid of his former master and is fighting more cautiously because of it, while Obi-Wan isn't giving it his all because he's distracting Vader while the other heroes escape from the Death Star.
  • In some shots Vader's lightsaber appears to be far longer than usual. It's most notable when we see him fighting Obi-Wan from a distance in the hangar, and it looks almost twice as long as Obi-Wan's. This was justified in Legends EU material as Vader's blade being a rare "dual phase lightsaber" that can extend and retract in length thanks to an extra Kyber crystal, though this nifty feature is never explicitly shown in any other media.
  • Older Legends EU material did attempt a somewhat more graceful explanation, in revealing that there are (as one might logically suspect for such a long-lived weapon and knightly order) multiple forms or stances of lightsaber combat, and the way that Vader and Kenobi fight is treated as both using a traditional, somewhat defensively-oriented dueling form. Precisely how much of this is still true post-Disney remains unclear.
  • On a related note, the fact that the main lightsaber duel takes place some time before the final battle. Starting with Empire Strikes Back, the big lightsaber duel happens toward the end, and the final act of A New Hope is instead just the starfighter battle, which is also the only space battle in the series where the Big Bad directly takes part in the dogfight (until The Last Jedi, anyway). Things would come full circle with The Rise of Skywalker, where the big lightsaber duel again occurs around the two-thirds mark (though another fight involving lightsabers does occur during the climax).
• In this film, Han is very much a drawling cowboy type. In the next two films, he abruptly becomes much more of a James Bond-style hero. Justified as being with the Rebels has changed his outlook somewhat. Furthermore, in this movie Han says he doesn't believe in the Force and he's never found any evidence of it in his travels. Later films clearly establish that Jedi are well-known throughout the galaxy and very recently (less then 20 years before A New Hope) used to play a major role in galaxy politics. As such, it is inconceivable that someone who has traveled all over the galaxy would be unfamiliar with it.
• The portrayal of the Force is much subtler than in subsequent movies. For the most part the Force is not a visible superpower: Obi-Wan can make Stormtroopers see, hear and say what he wants them to, it guides Luke when he's training with the remote and when he destroys the Death Star, and Obi-Wan and Vader have a sixth sense that heightens their intuition. The only tangible appearance of the Force is when Obi-Wan's body disappears, as not even Vader Force-choking Motti can be visually counted out from being a form of mind trick rather than actually telekinetically strangling someone. It's not until Empire that more familiar Force abilities, such as telekinesis, appear. This also explains Han and Motti's weird skepticism; the Force as portrayed in A New Hope could be written off by cynics as a combination of tricks and luck, but no-one could deny stuff like Luke summoning his lightsaber to his hand like in Empire or Palpatine shooting lightning from his hands in Jedi.
• In the scene with Jabba that was re-added to the 1997 Special Edition onwards, Han comes across as quite fresh and dismissive towards Jabba, something that flies in the face of the latter's reputation as one of the most feared crime lords in the galaxy. This was because in the script, Jabba was written as being a small-time gangster with an inflated ego, albeit one who could still make Han's life seriously inconvenient. The Special Edition tries to square the difference between this and Jabba's more established characterization by tweaking his dialogue to imply that Han had been reliably working for him long enough (something backed up years later by Solo) that Jabba gave him more leeway than he would most men in Han's position, but by the time of Empire Strikes Back he's clearly lost his patience with Han and put out a bounty on him.
• What a Hutt precisely is hadn't been nailed down at the time of Jabba's first-ever mention—it was only in Return of the Jedi half a decade later when he finally debuted and became codified as an alien slug monster. For all the audience knew, "Hutt" was a fictional title not unlike "Moff" rather than a race and Jabba could easily have been human, which really was the case when the restored Special Edition scene was originally shot. At that time, he was played by a similarly large but normal human actor, one Declan Mulholland, which is why Jabba is so much smaller (and more mobile, "walking" alongside Han while they talk) in the Special Edition of A New Hope than he is basically anywhere else, being a computer-generated effect superimposed over Mulholland. This also explains why Han calls Jabba a "wonderful human being": he originally was human, although Han is obviously being completely sarcastic, so it still kind of works. The official Marvel tie-in comics for the film went in a different direction and did make Jabba an alien, though a yellow humanoid one with a resemblance to a cat or walrus◊. Both of these possibilities were of course overridden with Jabba's official film appearance and establishing that the Hutts are a whole species.
• The term "Star Destroyer" is never uttered in the film, even though we see one right at the beginning. Han Solo refers to them as "Imperial Cruisers" while persecuted by two of them leaving Tatooine and he talks about outrunning Imperial "big Corellian ships", yet Legends never explained what kind of ships he was referring to (there are capital ships named Corellian corvettes, which are what the Tantive IV from the opening was - however, as that intro established, they are nowhere near as big as Star Destroyers, and weren't usually used by the Empire). Solo showed some kind of Star Destroyers being built above Corellia, strongly implying that's what he meant, although it's still odd he wouldn't know the proper name for them if he's native to that planet.
• The Executor Super Star Destroyer doesn't show up until the next movie, even though the latter two movies imply Vader is always commanding it. He instead is just in charge of a normal (Imperial-Class) Star Destroyer. As the Executor doesn't show up during the Battle Of Yavin it's likely the writers hadn't thought of it yet, as is at Endor the protect the Death Star II.
• The Dark Side is mentioned exactly once, in passing, when Obi-Wan says Vader was "seduced by the dark side of the Force." In this context, there is no indication that the Dark Side is an actual thing unto itself, or that Obi-Wan's use of the term "dark side" is anything but a figure of speech, in the same way that one might refer to the dark side of drug use. Vader never boasts about the power of the dark side as he is wont to do in the other films, instead speaking of the Force in general terms or phrasing it as his own power. The idea of the Force being tied to emotion is similarly absent; the concept of Vader drawing strength from his anger is never mentioned — he and Obi-Wan seem equally composed during their confrontation (although admittedly we cannot see Vader's face during the ordeal). Jedi being unflappably calm Zen masters and Sith being snarling, ruthless berserkers or hateful, arrogant egotists was a later development. As a result, no concept of a "Light Side" or of dualism in the Force is present in the first movie at all.
• Despite the numerous Exposition Dumps, the term "Sith" was never used (outside of an extended version of the Death Star conference, the footage of which was not released until much later) and there was really no indication that these events were part of a millennia-long war between two factions, or that Darth Vader and the Emperor were anything more than a single evil wizard of some kind who convinced one Jedi to go rogue. Tarkin even refers to Vader as though he were still a Jedi, if an evil one ("all that remains of their religion"). This extends even further with a lot of very early EU works, which tended to refer to villainous Force-wielders as "Dark Jedi" instead of Sith, suggesting at least some writers were under the impression that "Jedi" was some kind of generic term for Force-wielders. While this isn't noticeable for some characters (since a fallen Jedi is not necessarily a Sith and vice versa), in other cases it is very much so; it's rather odd, for example, to hear Desann and his shadowtroopers refer to themselves as Jedi despite their decidedly Sith-like Might Makes Right philosophy (and after Desann himself was expelled from the New Jedi Order), especially when his former apprentice Tavion later does refer to herself and her movement as Sith, and even more so to hear Jerec be consistently called a Jedi when, as a former Inquisitor, he would've been personally trained in some Sith arts by actual Sith. The novelization does refer to Vader with the title "Dark Lord of the Sith", but it never explains what the term means, and when taking the latter detail in account, the notion of the Sith as the evil counterparts of the Jedi, while being actually in Lucas' early drafts, wasn't reflected till long after the fact.
• This is part Early-Installment Weirdness and part Plot Hole in the film itself, but it still applies: despite Jedi being a forbidden thing of the past, Obi-Wan doesn't seem to be very good at keeping a low profile in exile.
  • From what we see, it appears he wears a robe indistinct from what the prequel trilogy establishes to be Jedi robes, uses an alias that keeps his real last name, and whips out a lightsaber in a public setting — and given that Owen even feels comfortable calling him a "wizard" in front of Luke, it's suggested he hasn't even bothered to hide the fact that he has supernatural abilities. In both continuities, especially in the Disney canon, this would be a dangerous mistake for any Jedi after Order 66 — Ezra Bridger, Kanan Jarrus, and Cal Kestis can attest to that, almost immediately being accosted by Inquisitors the moment they reveal their Force abilities, and they were the ones lucky enough to survive those attacks. Some of this would be explained in other media by suggesting Kenobi is a fairly common last name even if would be a stretch that he would not change it^note It would be like someone in our world named Oliver Jones going by Larry Jones after entering the Witness Protection Program. (Luke does assume Obi-Wan is connected to Ben, but this could be considered just the most reasonable conjecture to explain the droids' presence in Tatooine), and Obi-Wan's eponymous series establishing that Obi-Wan believed Vader was dead for a ten year period. Even after finding out Vader was alive and Luke's whereabouts being discovered by a former Inquisitor, Obi-Wan's decision to remain on Tatooine and not to relocate Luke was likely down to his belief that Vader would never return to Tatooine due to the painful memories of his past.^note There's also the fact that Leia knew right where to find him and approach him for help; some entries to the franchise, such as the radio drama, insinuated that he was something of a liaison between Alderaan and the Jedi (which also has it that she was explicitly sent to Tatooine to retrieve him at her father's request rather than just happening to be there after acquiring the Death Star plans, all of them knowing that the civil war was coming to a major turning point), and Revenge of the Sith would fully address it by having her adoptive father be one of Obi-Wan's Secret-Keepers.
  • Production-wise, of course, this is all backwards - what happened was that Obi-Wan was so distinct, impactful and memorable that his appearance in A New Hope more or less set "The Jedi Look" in stone, and they all follow on from that. In fact, going by the visual language of the film by itself, the intent appears to be that he's dressing locally (compare his outfit to Luke's when he's relaxing in his home, or especially to Owen's) and just throws on a hooded cloak when he's abroad (which is a fairly sensible idea in an environment as harsh as the named-in-film Jundland Wastes). Obi-Wan uses that outfit for the rest of the film (both logically, since it's what he left Tatooine in, and also just as a cost-saving and viewer silhouette-identification measure) and then shows up in that outfit as a Force ghost, since that's what he passed on in and is what Luke (and the viewer) would recognize from ANH. So the intent appears to be that, if anything, perhaps a "Jedi Knight" would be expected to look a bit like Vader, albeit maybe slightly less creepy and dark, possibly something similar to Ralph McQuarrie's early concept art of Han as a fellow in light armor and a cape. The Jedi were conceived of as being very samurai-like, and the armor was often part of the badge of office for a warrior caste such as that, so nobody in the film as shot would have a reason to take much note of "Ben" as anything other than just another old, sun-weathered, tunic-wearing local on Tatooine. They don't expect him to use Jedi mind powers, and really don't expect him to bust out a lightsaber (and in fact, him doing so is what really puts the troopers on their trail).
  • Where this all got sticky was first in the immediate sequels — when we meet Yoda, he's also wearing a very simple robe (which makes sense for a hermit living in a swamp with nobody else around at all) and does draw a visual connection to Obi-Wan, but it's not yet explicit this is how Jedi "look". Return, however, did two things: it introduced Palpatine wearing a robe not unlike Jedi ones, but black (thus reinforcing Empire's insinuation that Vader was wearing an "evil" version of a standard Jedi look), and then at the very end, it introduces Force Ghost Anakin wearing identical robes to Obi-Wan. Visually, this is clearly meant to signal him being redeemed and fitting in with his old friend, and would square with him being from Tatooine (thus keeping the through-line from ANH consistent in visual design), but it's just so easy to look at it and assume "aha, this is what Jedi Look Like™ and what they wear habitually as part of their office". This is what the visual designers of various Star Wars products ran with, from the various EU/Legends properties through to the prequel trilogy, eventually leading to a Hand Wave explanation in the prequels' materials: yes, that is how Jedi commonly dress, but their "uniform" is actually pretty universal clothing in the galaxy, chosen in order to help them blend in (a Jedi wearing their hooded brown cloak is usually treated as an effective way to appear anonymous and indistinct) — the main problem with this explanation is that, outside Tatooine, very few background people are shown wearing that kind of clothes in the films, which can make it hard to realize without knowing this piece of info.
    • For further Early-Installment Weirdness, some comics released between the Original Trilogy and the Prequels showed a young Obi-Wan dressed in the same black outfit that Luke wore in Return of the Jedi, insinuating that this was actually the "true" Jedi uniform and Luke wearing it was (retroactively) a sign that he'd advanced from the half-trained kid who left Dagobah and got his hand cut off by Vader to a grown man and master-level Jedi who goes on to defeat Vader and defy Palpatine's temptations. After the fact, this comes across more as a personal fashion choice by Luke; he continues wearing it in the immediate future following the Return of the Jedi as shown in both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, only to have changed to a more classically "Old Ben" ensemble during the Sequel Trilogy.
  • With the surname, meanwhile, the "destruction of the Jedi" is a lot more vague in ANH; Order 66 was decades away from even being conceived, as were Inquisitors. It's easy to assume that either the Empire thinks Kenobi is already dead, or at least as written here doesn't have a detailed list of every Jedi ever and thus he simply slipped through the cracks, something which has been consistent with several further Order 66 survivors in both Legends and Disney's continuity.
• The first film vaguely implies that droids have their own religion, and worship a creator god known as "The Maker" (hence C-3PO's exclamation "Thank the Maker!"). This idea is quietly dropped after the first film, and never really comes up again after that, and if droids are portrayed as religious at all in later works, they generally just practice the same Force religions as everyone else (e.g., 4-LOM being a Force worshipper in Legends). The idea of "the Maker" was brought back in the Prequels, though it's clearly a personal thing for 3PO: after seeing Anakin (who canonically built him from spare parts) for the first time in years, he joyfully exclaims, "The Maker!" Some of the Legends books did at least attempt to explain this discrepancy by saying that "The Maker" just refers to whoever built the droids, rather than some kind of deity they believe in.
• C-3PO, as a C-series protocol droid, describes his job as being "human-cyborg relations". While he doesn't do much protocol work in the subsequent movies, most of what he does do involves relations between different organic species, not between humans and droids (aside from translating for R2-D2, that is). Furthermore, Vader, the only actual Cyborg in the OT, is never seen using any C-series protocol droids, which makes the whole thing come across as even more of an Informed Attribute.
• The first film suggests that the primary form of Fantastic Racism seen in the setting is against droids; in particular, the Mos Eisley cantina explicitly forbids them from entry in a scene with parallels to segregation. The Imperials do refer to Chewbacca as a "thing," but it's Leia who refers to him as a "walking carpet," and the Imperial spy at the cantina is clearly an alien with an elephant-like trunk. Later Expanded Universe materials tended to use nonhuman species as a persecuted class under the Empire instead, and the cantina's no-droids policy is established as less about hating droids and more not wanting any possibility of them recording anything that goes on in the cantina. Season 3 of The Mandalorian would revive the notion of droids as effectively second-class citizens, with their own communities (including separate droid bars) and many existing in fear of being scrapped should they fail in their programmed duties.
• The original film includes a few fleeting references to Real Life human cultures, seemingly hinting (albeit very vaguely) that the human characters are descended from the people of Earth. Most glaringly: according to the supplemental materials, the leader of Gold Squadron is officially nicknamed "Dutch", and the control panel for the Death Star's tractor beam has labels clearly written in English. Subsequent films would generally go out of their way to avoid any sort of tacit acknowledgement of Earth, with all visible written text being written with "aurebesh" (a fictional alphabet used by characters in the Star Wars universe) so as to avoid use of the Latin alphabet^note  Apart from the names of spacecraft like the X-wing and Y-wing, which were excused by the Grandfather Clause., and the characters' default language being officially called "Galactic Basic". The Special Edition even altered images of the Death Star's control panel to include aurebesh labels.
• With the exception of Grand Moff Tarkin, all of the Imperial rank insignia are single rows of red, blue, and yellow tiles, often mixed. Empire would introduce the more familiar insignia of a double row of red and blue tiles.
• This film contains several utterances of "damn" and "hell", while the remaining pre-Disney films feature little to no cursing. Return of the Jedi, The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith contain no profanity at all, while The Empire Strikes Back contains only one use of "hell" and Attack of the Clones contains only one use of "damn;" another rare example occurs in The Clone Wars when one of the clone troopers of Domino Squad exclaims about a monster "What the hell was that!?" The Sequel Trilogy, and especially the live action TV series, would amp up the profanity quite a bit. The official explanation for referring to "hell" at all was eventually established as being that the cosmological realm called "Chaos" by much of the galaxy is called "the Nine Corellian Hells" by the Corellians, justifying Corellia-raised Han Solo, at least, invoking it in A New Hope.
• Overlapping with Technology Marches On: the way the Death Star plans are depicted in this movie seems very dated and odd. They are treated almost like a physical, on-paper blueprint separated into pages on microfilm, rather than something more comprehensive for the setting like a full 3D render. There's also Motti's now-infamous line where he refers to the plans as the "stolen data tapes", which dates it closer to 1970's computer technology that was replaced with disk drives and solid state drives. We even see the plans briefly, and they even look kind of like a VHS tape. This last detail was given something of a visual Retcon in Rogue One (which shows how the rebels found and stole the plans), where they are now depicted as being stored on a futuristic USB-stick-like device.
• The visual design of the lightsabers change from scene to scene. Originally it was intended to use on-set Practical Effects with reflective tape on the blades to create a glowing effect, with a motor in the hilt to make it spin and look like it is pulsing with energy, the general idea being that they would look like the solid props with moving parts that they were to those observing them on-set but would appear to be made of energy on film because of how the camera picked up their motion and reflective qualities. The effect was unreliable and inconsistent in quality (the props were understandably delicate so the fight scenes couldn't be too intense) so in post-production was largely replaced with Rotoscoping effects, but individual shots remain where Luke's blade is very pale rather than the blue it is supposed to be as well as wobbling to match the spinning prop. Later films and the prequels used rotoscoping by default, though the sequels would have LED blades to illuminate the characters and environment before still rotoscoping for consistency; the TV shows would do away with the LED blades with minimal post-production.
• The original trailer doesn't have the iconic font or part of John Williams' score, not to mention it features all of the special effects that were ready to be viewed at that time.
• The opening crawl says that the Rebels have "scored their first victory over the Empire". Both Legends and the new canon would go on to depict a lot more than one victory occuring prior to A New Hope. Furthermore, calling the Battle of Scarif a victory on the Rebel's part is a pretty big stretch, since, other than recovering the Death Star plans, they pretty much got their asses kicked, and most of the Rebels present died.

Holiday Special

• Boba Fett makes his Early-Bird Cameo debut in the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special, playing the role of villain in the animated short segment. He is radically different from the character he will come to be defined as from Empire onwards, though you can see some of the DNA there. Most obviously, he's played by an entirely different actor — Don Francks — than either Jason Wingreen (who dubbed him in Empire) or Temuera Morrison (considered the voice of the character in much the way James Earl Jones is to Vader) and thus lacks all of their trademark mannerisms for the role. In their place is a very deep, gravelly voice with a strange and measured manner of speech, plus a Verbal Tic of calling people "friend" that never appears again. Characterization-wise, he comes off as more of a trickster and manipulator instead of a blunt, pragmatic warrior; his plan involves pretending to be a rebel in order to trick Luke into leading him to Han, whereas the Boba Fett of later stories would be more likely to just try and capture Luke to interrogate him directly. He's somehow simultaneously more and less heroic, being far less brutal but also lacking all his Noble Demon qualities, as well as being portrayed as abusing animals and making nasty cracks about "lower life forms", two things that would be strikingly out of character for the later Fett. And on top of it all, there's zero mention whatsoever — in the special or the Original Trilogy itself — of his Mandalorian heritage or his status as the alpha clone of the same genetic host as the Republic's clones (for the obvious reason that the lore about Mandalorians and what they were, let alone Boba's own backstory, hadn't been developed yet).
• Like in A New Hope, there's no Aurebesh writing anywhere; most writing seen is in plain old English. The animated segment features some "alien" looking text instead of English, but it looks nothing like Aurebesh and is obvious gibberish.

The Empire Strikes Back

• Emperor Palpatine makes his first appearance here, and is played by a completely different actor, who is a woman in fact (Marjorie Eaton), although the heavy makeup, cloak, and distortions of the hologram make it impossible to tell. "His" voice (provided by Clive Revill) and speaking style are completely different, and they superimposed chimpanzee eyes over the actress's to make "him" look especially bizarre.^note In the DVD special edition, Ian McDiarmid was inserted into the scene and his voice was used instead. Similar to Vader in A New Hope it's not even clear that Palpatine is meant to be human at all, and as late as Return of the Jedi concept art shows him with a much more distinctly alien appearance. Even in the final film, Palpatine in Return of the Jedi still looks quite inhuman — sporting yellow eyes, sunken, red eyebags and pale, heavily wrinkled, almost reptilian-looking skin — to the point where many viewers probably assumed he's some kind of humanoid alien. It's not until The Phantom Menace where we see that Palpatine was once a normal-looking man, and his disfigured appearance was the result of having his own Force Lightning deflected back into his face by Mace Windu in Revenge of the Sith. His yellow eyes were also turned into a trait that most Dark Side users develop, either permanently in the case of Maul (or Palpatine himself after the scarring) or temporarily when extremely enraged in the case of Dooku or Vader.
• Yoda's signature odd grammar is a lot less extreme here. He sometimes talks with normal word order, and it's implied to be partially Obfuscating Stupidity, as he doesn't want Luke to know who he is at first. The next movie has him talking the same way, confirming it really is his normal speaking style, but it's still fairly subdued. It's not until the prequels that he seemingly can't speak a single sentence like a normal Basic speaker.

Return of the Jedi

• Bib Fortuna is the first Twilek to be featured, and he looks a fair amount different than the rest. While they are usually rather colorful, his skin is pasty white. He also has red eyes, fanglike teeth, and weird lumps on his forehead. As Oola (who's also introduced in this movie, and is the only other Twilek in the theatrical version of Return of the Jedi) looks like a "normal" Twilek, and so does Lyn Me (added in the special edition), it's likely they were originally intended to have Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism, or possibly even be different subspecies. Bib's teeth at least were later explained by saying some male Twileks file their teeth into fangs to look scarier.
• The novelisation of Return of the Jedi introduced the idea that Emperor Palpatine is in fact beloved by much of the galaxy, when Vader contemplates betraying him and considers that his death would potentially make the civil war between the Empire and the Rebels even worse (which may relate to the quickly-abandoned idea set out in the prologue of the novelisation of the original Star Wars that the Rebels are actually trying to restore the figurehead Emperor's power which had been whittled away by corrupt courtiers and military officers). This idea was alluded to in some RPG supplements which suggested that on Courscant and the other Core Worlds, Palpatine is revered by the populace as a god. Some vague shades of this idea were retained in the prequel trilogy, in which Palpatine is a genuinely popular politician and declares himself emperor with the support of the senate, but Lucas himself would pour water on the idea that he was still revered by much of the galaxy, or at least the urban core of the galaxy, by the time of his death in the special edition release of the movie, with the addition of the scene in which Palpatine's statue on Coruscant is torn down by crowds celebrating his defeat.
• During his chat with Luke Obi-Wan's ghost strongly implies that Vader's cyborg parts are part of why he turned to the Dark Side, saying that Vader is "More machine now than man. Twisted and evil." Luke himself gains a prosthetic hand, whose symbolism doesn't get lost when he chops off Vader's and he realizes both of them have one. There's no evidence anywhere else in the franchise that having robotic parts turns you evil, and the prequels make clear that Anakin's Face–Heel Turn was previous and completely unrelated to him becoming a Cyborg. Anakin had already turned to the Dark Side before receiving most of his cybernetics (all he had was his mechanical right arm). His slaughtering of an entire Tusken Raider tribe in Attack of the Clones (including the women and children) happened when he was still 100% flesh and blood.
• Emperor Palpatine's Force Lightning is portrayed as the ultimate Dark Force power and the film implies that it's a power only he possesses. Luke cannot defend himself against it at all, and the only thing Vader can do is take the brunt of it while tossing Palpatine down the Death Star's reactor pit. Later works in the franchise portrayed Force Lightning as a common Dark Side Force power (and even some Jedi were capable of using it in the pre-Disney EU), making Palpatine's use of it seem less impressive. Furthermore, Attack of the Clones showed Obi-Wan blocking Count Dooku's Force Lightning with his lightsaber, while Yoda was able to absorb it with his bare hand and fire it back at Dooku. While one could assume that this is due to Dooku's lightning being weaker than Palpatine's, Palpatine's lightning is blocked by both Mace Windu (who managed to deflect it back at Palpatine with his lightsaber, resulting in the facial scarring Palpatine sports in Jedi) and (again) Yoda in Revenge of the Sith. This retroactively makes Obi-Wan and Yoda look like morons for not teaching Luke how to block Force Lightning (though in all fairness, Luke kept leaving in the middle of training, so it's possible that they never got around to it, especially given that it does look like a master-level technique), and Vader also looks dumb for not summoning Luke's lightsaber to block it (his own saber had fallen down to reactor shaft after Luke severed his mechanical hand). Also, this raises the question as to why Vader never uses Force Lightning in the Original Trilogy despite nearly all other Sith and Dark Jedi being able to use it^note It likely requires at least some degree of advanced Force training to be able to cast Force Lightning, hence why lower level Dark Siders such as Maul, Asajj Ventress and most Inquisitors are never seen using it. But Vader, who's more skilled with the Force than those aforementioned, should be able to. The EU later established that this is because Vader's cybernetics prevent him from being able to use Force Lightning.
• While there's a lot of potential treachery floating around the idea of Luke turning to the Dark Side, it is also clear (both here and back in Empire) that, on some level, Palpatine would be perfectly okay with the idea of a triumvirate, with Luke and Vader being co-equal under him and his main goal is just to subvert Luke (and assuming that the destruction of the Rebels will be guaranteed if he pulls it off, which it nearly is). Back in '83, the Rule of Two hadn't been introduced yet - the concept that a Sith only has one apprentice, and that said apprentice is watched for treachery and is expected to be treacherous and eventually usurp their master's position as proof of their superiority. There's no real hint of that in this script, with Vader being the sole apprentice-but-still-master-himself simply due to the paucity of force sensitives in the OT. The situation in this film inspired the very idea, however, and in the 90s the Rule of Two became canon, with it being an explicit part of The Phantom Menace. This does, however, make Palpatine's behavior here a little odd in retrospect; while it could be waved away as Palps simply not putting that much stock in Sith tradition (which remains something of a theme with him in the Prequel Trilogy), he does generally stick to the Rule if only to avoid challenges to his authority, so it comes off as odd here that he might be cool with a triumvirate. (There is plenty of material in RotJ itself suggesting he also expects it'll ultimately be Vader offing Luke and becoming Palpatine's forever, or Luke replacing Vader via patricide, but this is more just evil gloating and is written as a Palps-specific thing rather than some kind of Sith Rule.)
• When Luke enters Jabba's palace, we see him do what looks like a force choke on the Gamorrean guards, as he holds out his hand and they start grabbing their throats and making choking noises, the problem being that force choke would later be explicitly defined as a Dark Side power. The most likely explanation is, like with the early video games, they hadn't settled on the "some powers are just inherently evil" rule yet, although it could also be that it's only considered a Dark Side act if you choke someone to death using it.

The Phantom Menace

• This is the only theatrical film in the Prequel Trilogy shot on film rather than digital video. Also, a sizeable portion of it was shot on location and with real sets rather than extensive Chroma Key like the other two Prequel Trilogy films. As a result, the film has more of a visual continuity with the original trilogy (especially the Special Editions) than with the subsequent films, which almost look like cartoons by comparison.
• The Dark Horse comic adaptation of the film has the Droidekas Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan fight in the opening being capable of speaking and in fact uttering a handful of lines, something that didn't happen in the movie and never happens again in either the films or their respective tie-ins.
• Jar-Jar's dialect is far more extreme here than it is in later movies or The Clone Wars. This may have been due to the heavily negative reception Jar-Jar received following The Phantom Menace.
• Watto's voice is deeper and more guttural here compared to his later appearances, and has more of a Yiddish sound to the accent. In his later appearances, possibly due to charges of veiled anti-Semitism that were leveled against the first film, the accent is closer to Italian, and his voice is higher in pitch. He also tends to use "thee" in place of "you" when he's talking to someone in a respectful manner, which is something that he never does again after this film.
• The B1 Battle Droids lacks the nasal-sounding Helium Speech they're known for from subsequent installments, and are actually depicted in a serious light to any non-Jedi character (quoth Captain Tarpals, "Ouch time!"). When later installments begin introducing larger, more competent droid units, the B1's Butt-Monkey status begins kicking in.
• Darth Maul's characterization. It can be a little hard to see TPM Maul (an extremely terse, quiet, and mysterious brute who wordlessly follows Palpatine's every whim) played by Ray Park and voiced by Peter Serafinowicz as the same dude as The Clone Wars-onwards Maul (a brash, talkative, emotional, and intelligent Tragic Villain fighting to be his own man) voiced by Sam Witwer, even if one takes into account his Sanity Slippage and Character Development. Even their heights are different! Compare the rather short and stocky build Maul has in TPM to his appearance in The Clone Wars, where he tends to tower over most people and has a pretty lanky, if toned, build (that, of course, is a bit justified since he was cut in half and robotic legs were built for him at least twice, and he would have lost a lot of weight while trapped on Lotho Minor due to lack of food, although it is still weird).
• Yoda was originally depicted by a physical puppet which looked very different than the one used in the original films or the digital version used in the subsequent prequels. It was replaced in the 2011 Blu-ray release by the same CGI model used in the rest of the prequels, while his next appearance as a puppet (in The Last Jedi) would use a design much closer to the original trilogy.
• Leia's adoptive father, Bail Organa, is first mentioned on-screen in Phantom Menace and becomes more important in the next two Prequel films and then in The Clone Wars and Rebels. Aside from the retcon to Leia's parentage, Bail was changed noticeably compared to his earlier Expanded Universe appearances, such as in the radio dramas where he plays a prominent early role in that adaptation of A New Hope. For one thing, his name is different: prior to this, he was given as being Prester Organa, which is reconciled by that being his middle name. It's also established that he's not strictly the king of Alderaan—he enters the story mentioned as a senator running in the recall election to replace Chancellor Valorum, but is later confirmed out of the films to be the Viceroy of Alderaan, not its king, and that he married into the royal family, meaning that he's more of a king-consort than its head-of-state as he was written earlier.

Revenge of the Sith

• The film treats the two-on-one duel between Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Count Dooku as the first encounter between the three of them since the end of Attack of the Clones, and the duel between Obi-Wan and General Grievous as their first physical encounter period. While this was true when taking the 2-D Clone Wars miniseries into account, the 2008 CGI series The Clone Wars would establish that the relationships between Anakin/Dooku and Obi-Wan/Grievous would be personal to the point that the two duos practically became arch-enemies with each other, having one major duel nearly every season: counting all the prequel-era works, they dueled a total of nine times (including the Final Battle in ROTS). While several works now part of Star Wars Legends also had them meeting in between the time frame of those two films, most of them were made before Revenge of the Sith came out, so those had the excuse of not knowing what the next film would establish.
• General Grievous coughs and hacks with nearly every breath, and he speaks with a thick Russian accent. His voice also has a thick robotic filter making it sound tinny. All three of these speech traits would be greatly toned down in his future appearances such as The Clone Wars and Battlefront II.
• B2 Battle Droids uses the same comical, high-pitched voice as their B1 counterparts (especially evident when two B2s tries arresting R2-D2 early on). They sound rougher and coarser starting from the Clone Wars series.

Expanded Universe

• The whole rule that Sith lightsabers are always red didn't seem to really be a thing until the prequels, as Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II has five of Jerec's seven Dark Jedi using yellow, orange, purple and even blue lightsabers, and, even more strikingly, Dark Empire has Palpatine using a blue lightsaber.
• There's nothing to suggest that red lightsabers are only used by Sith, either. Expanded Universe material that came out around this time tended to assume that lightsaber color was entirely a matter of personal choice, with no relation to the user's alignment or affiliation, and there were a fair number of Jedi who used red lightsabers—Luke himself made a secondary, shorter red lightsaber that he used in tandem with his main, green one to counter Lumiya's lightwhip in the Marvel comic, and in Ambush at Corellia he gifts Leia another lightsaber with a red blade—as well as unusual colors like purple or yellow being much more common. Even after The Phantom Menace showed Darth Maul's lightsaber to also be red, the comics continued to suggest that lightsabers came in a greater variety of colors among both Jedi and Sith. It wasn't until Attack of the Clones, which features a small army of Jedi using only blue and green lightsabers, that the idea that other colors were very rare and only the Sith used red became cemented^note The reason for this, in Canon at least, is because kyber crystals — the lightsaber's main power source — do not take on a red color naturally and are attuned to the Light Side of the Force, taking on their color based on the wielder's personality, with blue and green being the most prominent colors. A blue blade signifies a "Jedi Guardian", a Jedi who focuses primarily on lightsaber combat. A green blade signifies a "Jedi Consuler", a Jedi who focuses on negotiation and Force connection. In order for a Dark Sider to use a kyber crystal, they must "bleed" it by using the Dark Side of the Force to bend the crystal to their will, which results in the red blade. Former Jedi who become Sith will either bleed their own crystals or take one from a Jedi they've slain. A Light Side Force user can "heal" a crystal that has been bled, which will cause it to give the blade a white color. Ahsoka Tano's white lightsabers were the result of her healing crystals taken from Inquisitors. Ironically, that film also debuted Mace Windu's purple lightsaber - when in the comics, toys and video games released after Phantom Menace but before Clones, his saber was always depicted as blue. This was due to Samuel L. Jackson requesting a purple blade during filming of Clones because he wanted his character to stand out^note The in-universe explanation for this one is that purple lightsabers belong to primarily Light Side users who can tap into the Dark Side as needed without falling to it, and Mace is shown in various media to be able to do just this.
• There's zero mention of Jedi being not allowed to marry or form outside attachments prior to the Prequels, and the Jedi's treatment of the Force in general seems a lot less dogmatic and rigid than how the Prequels would portray them. Compare and contrast Anakin's angst over keeping his marriage to Padmé a secret in the Prequels to older EU works like Tales of the Jedi featuring scenes where Jedi Masters openly encourage their students to date and get married. Later works would notably make this one into a genuine part of the story, portraying the more rigid, emotionally-repressive Jedi of the Prequels as being the result of a minority hardliner faction taking power in the Order following the events of Tales, with older Jedi like those of the Old Republic and newer ones like Luke's Order not being nearly so dualistic and opposed to attachment (indeed, he marries Mara Jade eventually), although this can be explained as Luke just being a more "liberal" Jedi than the Old Republic Jedi Order was.
• Compare and contrast how later stories firmly portray Force Lightning as a move only used by Sith (to the point that Rey doing it accidentally is treated as worrying) to stuff like Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, where one of the first things you hear is Kyle Katarn, a member of the Jedi Council and one of the greatest Jedi of his generation, literally saying "powers aren't inherently good or evil, it's how you use them"; an idea later demonstrated when Katarn himself casually hurls around Force Lightning like it's no biggie, and game mechanics allow his new apprentice Jaden Korr to learn it right from the get-go, resulting in some inconsistency when later novels starring Korr establish that he's heavily worried about how easily he can call upon Force Lightning. The Knights of the Old Republic video games make a sort of middle step by showing that yes, Force powers are not unforgivably restricted to an alignment or another, it's just that an affinity to the Dark Side makes it easier to use some of them (the most aggressive or conventionally "evil") while the Light Side eases the opposite kind (like those who heal). The “powers aren’t inherently good or evil, intent is what matters” idea was even canonized in-universe as a small philosophical group within the Jedi Order called the “Relativists”, being treated as a dangerous step towards becoming a Dark Side-corrupted Knight Templar.
• Reading a lot of expanded universe material released prior to or concurrently with the Prequel Trilogy reveals that a lot of writers made wrong assumptions about just what exactly the Clone Wars and the purge of the Jedi entailed, though by luck most steered clear of the era or wrote about it in ways that were easily smoothed over by later works. Still, it's pretty jarring to see some older material and see how the canon evolved:
  • Read The Thrawn Trilogy and you'll quickly realize that while later developments and retcons made sense of the oddities, at the time Timothy Zahn was clearly writing under the impression that the Clone Wars was something involving the Jedi fighting against an evil army of clones that invaded the Republic. Similarly, the writers of Galaxy of Fear thought the Clone Wars were fought over cloning ethics instead of being a civil war where a significant chunk of the Republic seceded. Some writers also seemed to think that the Clone Wars happened a lot longer ago than they did (around 40 years before the OT as opposed to the 20 or so that turned out the be the case)—much like how the destruction of the Jedi was implied to have taken place much longer ago than it was eventually established—and/or thought they were a separate conflict unrelated to the Jedi Purge and the rise of the Empire. Tellingly, early EU content often implied the Jedi served the Empire for a time before the once just Emperor was replaced with Palpatine or before Palpatine revealed his true colors
• While various EU creators knew broadly about General Grievous and the role he would play in Revenge of the Sith, they were not so privy to the specific changing details of the film's development, which included Grievous being reworked into more of a non-action, pragmatic type who can be dangerous in a straight fight but is hardly Final Boss material. As a result, you got Star Wars: Clone Wars and its contemporaries, which portray Grievous as a nightmarishly powerful and hyper-durable Hero Killer who could perform incredible feats such as taking on six Jedi at once and winning or tanking a direct missile shot to the face, with only incredibly powerful Jedi like Mace Windu being a match for him… a far cry from the obviously ailing, twilight-of-his-life Grievous of the movie, who runs first and fights directly only when he has to or has a perceived advantage over his opponent. The character has since wavered between the two depictions before settling on a middle ground. This change also affects his voice; compare the distinctive hoarse, wheezing voice his typical voice actor, Matthew Wood, portrays him with to the Clone Wars microseries, where he's instead voiced by John DiMaggio, who gives the character a very posh, healthy manner of speech free of coughs. While Clone Wars shows Grievous in excellent health and making his characteristic cough only at the very end of it, when Mace Force-crushes his "chassis" as he's making his escape with a captive Palpatine, later entries to the franchise and especially The Clone Wars insinuated that his cough came from the procedures that turned him into a cyborg not being perfected yet—part of his being retroactive foreshadowing of Vader—rather than being from an injury that he'd acquired recently.
• Splinter of the Mind's Eye was the first Expanded Universe story, produced before even Empire was in the planning stages, and it shows. Han is completely absent, since at the time it was uncertain if Harrison Ford would be willing or able to return for a sequel. There's a lot of romantic tension between Luke and Leia, something that gets incredibly awkward after Return of the Jedi revealed them to be siblings. And when Vader shows up, he's easily defeated by Luke in a lightsaber duel, a far cry from how their battle in the next film would go. Luke and Leia have radically different characterizations (the former portrayed as an abrasive Guile Hero and natural liar, the latter as a prissy and self-righteous Jerkass), Darth Vader casually uses Force Lightning (when it's a minor plot point in later works that he can't channel it because of his cybernetics), and a giant Kyber Crystal treated as some sort of battery of magical energy instead of a more subdued kind of magic crystal used to make lightsabers. There's a lot of odd stuff going on.
• The Lando Calrissian Adventures came out inbetween Empire and Return, and, similar to Splinter, has a fair amount of weirdness. There are several details which seem too Earthlike for the setting, such as Lando smoking a cigar at one point. The Galactic Empire is referred to as the Centrality a few times, something that never happens again. In Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of Thon Boka, Lando has to help save the Oswaft, a race of huge (around 500-1000 meters across) manta ray-like creatures that live in outer space and have natural hyperspace travel, from the Empire. While he succedes in saving them, they never show up again, even though you'd think they'd help him out with things like the Battle of Endor or the Yuuzhan Vong War. Finally There is a Dark-Side user named Rokar Gepta, who is not a Sith, but rather the last of the Sorcerers Of Tund who has a Force power named Torture By Chagrin, which forces the victim to relive all the painful and humiliating moments of their life. This power doesn't show up again until Star Wars: Legacy (which is chronologically over a hundred years later), with Darth Maladi using it, even though you would think Palpatine, being the supposed greatest Sith Lord and Dark Side user of all time would have access to it.
• Dark Forces, the first game in the Dark Forces Saga has some oddities. Kyle Katarn has no lightsaber or Force powers, and the game is more of a straight First-Person Shooter. You also can't save during a mission, unlike in the subsequent games.
• While his characterization and personality as a Noble Demon and Proud Warrior Race Guy set in fairly quick after The Empire Strikes Back, it took a long time for Boba Fett's backstory to get really set in stone, resulting in him having a big Multiple-Choice Past going on. One story he would be described as a former stormtrooper who went rogue after murdering his commanding officer, the next he would be a deposed leader of the Mandalorian people, and the next he would be a cop named Jaster Mereel who got exiled from his homeworld for treason. These various contradictory origin stories would eventually be justified as the result of Fett being Shrouded in Myth in-universe, and once the Prequels introduced the skeleton of a more solid origin for him, the EU writers built off that by fusing elements from all the prior backstories into one coherent whole (so he was now the clone son of a deposed Mandalorian leader and former cop who was exiled from his home for killing his commanding officer, as well as the grandson of Jaster Mereel). There's also nothing even remotely hinting that he's a clone in the pre-prequel works, again because that detail didn't exist yet.
  • The "former stormtrooper" origin for Boba is especially notable for providing yet more early weirdness, as old lore tended to describe Boba as wearing the armor of so-called "Imperial shocktroopers of Mandalore", showing not only an early conception of Mandalorians as being the Elite Mooks of the Empire (an idea that got thrown out very quickly), but the entire existence of such "elite troopers" and the iconic Mandalorian armor that holds such cultural significance to them being a mere variant of stormtrooper gear. All of this is the result of production changes during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back; originally, there was a whole squad of elite soldiers menacing the heroes on Cloud City, but budgetary restraints and simple practicality led to the legions of shocktroopers being merged into a single bounty hunter who serves as Darth Vader's enforcer, thus creating Boba, who evolved into his own dude from there, while the Mandalorians as a culture would similarly be heavily reworked when they finally made into actually released products rather than just being an unused idea the movie writers had. Likewise, the concept of "elite" stormtrooper units would later be revived in significantly different manners with groups and characters like the Dark Troopers. Years later, Star Wars Rebels would riff on the whole matter by introducing the idea of Imperial Supercommandos, Mandalorian traitors who sold out to the Empire during its occupation of Mandalore.

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