My interesting takeaways after listening to the George Lucas audio commentary on STAR WARS

Interesting takeaways from audio commentary of STAR WARS.

No Death Star in episode--pushed forward for the climax. (Compare to Pacific Rim movie.)

Episode IV was not on prints when first run in theaters, Lucas said.

The two droids & characters from The Hidden Fortress movie: And, to me, if this was such a great idea, why did he drop it in the prequels?

"When I wrote the original screenplay, I had written a backstory for all the characters so I knew where they came from and since I was starting this in Episode IV, I had to know where all these characters come from and how they fit together and what the story was. So that was written up in an outline form with brief descriptions of who everybody was and where they came from."

"I never really intended it to be turned into a movie but now it's the basis for Episodes 1, 2, and 3, which tells you how Obi-Wan got here in the first place."

"I had the outline so I kind of knew how the dots connected but then there's a whole story that has to fit around that. You have to sort of make...turn that into, you know, another six-hours film when all that it really is is just a little backstory of what the Jedi were like and what the Republic was like and what the relationship of Obi-Wan and Darth Vader was, and obviously Luke and Leia's relationship to Darth Vader. The Emperor. What is the Empire."

On the death of Ben Kenobi: originally Ben didn't die in the script--he got all the way through the movie without being killed. "I was re-writing the script as I was shooting the movie." He brought Ben's death up earlier and it became a shock to Alec Guinness.

Death Star clearing the moon was only added in post-production, not in original script.

Empire: "The middle of the first trilogy." Yoda was a second thought--it was supposed to be Ben, but he killed him off and said he'd figure it out if he ever did a second movie.