Star Wars: Return of the Jedi’s Original Ending Completed Vader’s Story
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi brought George Lucas’ original Star Wars saga to its perfect conclusion. From the perspective of the film’s original audience, watching Return of the Jedi as the final installment of a Star Wars trilogy, that ending meant the Empire got defeated, the Rebels were victorious and Luke Skywalker’s journey toward becoming a Jedi was complete. And when the prequels were released years later, and Anakin Skywalker’s story got further explored, greater significance came to Return of the Jedi as the story that saw Anakin redeemed by his son, completing a story arc that spanned all six movies.
Too many, those SIX films are the ONLY Star Wars CANON films. So the story arc is COMPLETE.
For George Lucas, of course, Star Wars was always the story of Anakin Skywalker and his redemption. Long before Lucas committed to making the prequels…
It was also said back at the time that Star Wars was the story of the Skywalker family (and not just Anakin).
The original plans for Return of the Jedi included not one but two new Death Stars under construction. The forest moon that later became Endor was still there, but it was a sanctuary moon over the planet Had Abbadon – a sprawling city-planet at the center of the Imperial government. Had Abbadon would eventually become Coruscant but never made it into Return of the Jedi due to the budgetary and logistic constraints of creating such a world on screen. Thus, the film’s final confrontation between Luke, Darth Vader and the Emperor moved to the second Death Star. Before Had Abbadon got cut, however, the scene played out in the Emperor’s throne room deep beneath the Imperial Palace on the city-planet. And concept art by Ralph McQuarrie shows the Emperor’s throne situated over a lake of lava.
It did make it in the re-released/special edition versions of the films. Instead of the complete celebration with the Ewoks, we got images from around the Galaxy of people celebrating the fall of the Emperor, and that included the city-planet Coruscant.
Had Anakin’s return at the end of Return of the Jedi occurred in the volcanic surroundings of Had Abbadon’s throne room, it would have been as though he had re-emerged from the same destructive flames into which he had vanished decades prior. Where Obi-Wan had failed to save his friend and instead watched him meet his demise, Luke would have saved his father from that same fate and instead brought Anakin back from his supposed death. The confrontation in the Emperor’s Death Star throne room is an iconic Star Wars scene, but Return of the Jedi’s original molten pits would have ended Darth Vader’s story where it began, more powerfully affirming Anakin’s redemption as the fate for which he was always destined.
Much like the story of the Phoenix, at its rebirth in FIRE after its death, the same metaphor would have applied to Anakin/Vader/Anakin.
The death of Anakin lead to Vader. The death of Vader lead to Anakin.
Death/rebirth twice in the fires of lava.
Instead, the closest we got was the funeral pyre where Vader’s body was BURNT in a parallel to how Anakin’s body was BURNT (and we got the force ghost of Anakin in BOTH versions. The original film showing Anakin at the age he went from Vader to Anakin-like the original concept, or the re-release where we got the Anakin from when he died to become Vader, so that when Vader died he returned to his post-Vader form.)
This NOW makes sense how we got Hayden Christensen in the re-release, instead of Sebastian Shaw we got in the original release of Return of the Jedi.
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