‘The Adventures Of Luke Starkiller’: Peter Mayhew releases pages from his 1976 Star Wars script
Early drafts of George Lucas’s space epic were notably different from the final film
Self-declared Star Wars nerds: listen up and get online (you’ll feel at home there, we promise).
Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew announced yesterday that he will be releasing pages from his personal copy of the original 1976 Star Wars script, and posting them on his Twitter account.
The actor also teased that the posts will be leading up to a “big announcement”.
"Peter’s script along with Peter’s wookiee coffee thumbprints and notes scrawled on the pages are a treat to read and brings us back to the root of what made Star Wars great," reads a press release on Mayhew's announcement.
If you’re already not already familiar with the early Star Wars drafts, expect to see some unfamiliar names, scenes and storylines that never made it into the final version of 1977’s A New Hope.
Back 1976, George Lucas’s film was titled The Adventures Of Luke Starkiller as taken from the Journal Of The Whills.
While he later decided to not to use the term “The Whills” in Star Wars – the name was originally used in place of the more familiar “the Force” – the word still crops up within the Star Wars universe.
Online Star Wars encyclopaedia Wookieepedia explains that the Ancient Order of The Whills were a “higher order of beings deeply connected with the Force”, and that the Journal of the Whills was their record of Galactic history.
When he first began planning Star Wars, Lucas conceived the film a story within-as story, taken from the aforementioned mega journal.
"Originally, I was trying to have the story be told by somebody else (an immortal being known as a Whill); there was somebody watching this whole story and recording it, somebody probably wiser than the mortal players in the actual events,” he recalled in Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays (via Wookieepedia).” I eventually dropped this idea, and the concepts behind the Whills turned into the Force.”
The title character Luke Starkiller, meanwhile, famously went on to become Luke Skywalker. But the original name is referenced in the most recent film in the Star Wars series, JJ Abrams’s The Force Awakens, in which the evil First Order build their galaxy-destroying super weapon on a planet called Starkiller Base.
Filming for Rian Johnson’s Star Wars Episode VIII began earlier this week, with Peter Mayhew set to reprise his role as Chewie (although the 71-year-old will share the action-heavy part with the Finnish sportsman and former insurance salesman Joonas Suotamo, who also featured in The Force Awakens).
