Q&As About 'Star Wars': What was known about Padme, Luke and Leia’s mother, prior to the release of the Prequel Trilogy?

What was known about Padme, Luke and Leia’s mother, prior to the release of the prequel trilogy?

Before the run-up to Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace’s release in May of 1999? Certainly not much. And what little we did know was either wrong or was learned from tidbits in action figure packages in late 1998, when Hasbro added a Flashback line of Star Wars figures from the Classic Trilogy but with Lucasfilm-supplied nuggets of information about major characters from the upcoming film.

For instance, a Power of the Force figure of Princess Leia Organa with Flashback packaging was my first inkling that Luke and Leia’s mother was Queen Amidala of Naboo and that Leia was not just royalty by adoption, but she was also royalty - of sorts - by heredity. Hasbro’s writer did not divulge the fact that on Naboo “royalty” was elected and wasn’t necessarily hereditary, but Lucasfilm kept a lot of pesky details about such things close to the vest.

But before 1998, we knew next to nada about Padme Amidala Naberrie. The only semi-canonical blip on the radar - other than the scene in Return of the Jedi where Luke and Leia discuss Vader’s presence on Endor and their shared heritage as Anakin Skywalker’s twin children - was a tidbit of information in the Jedi novelization which later proved to be inaccurate.

See, Lucas (or perhaps one of his senior assistants) apparently gave Kahn an outline with Luke and Leia’s backstory, one in which not only was Owen Lars really Obi-Wan’s brother, but also a story in which Leia and her then-unnamed mother went to live on Alderaan with Bail Organa instead of dying in childbirth.

In Kahn’s version of the Skywalker twins’ origins story, Mommy Skywalker raised Leia on Alderaan while living in a palace under the protection of the Royal House of Alderaan. She died when Leia was four, which is consistent with Leia’s often remarked-upon line that she has a few (if rather vague) memories of her real mother.

Because one of George Lucas’s few edicts regarding which eras the Expanded Universe could delve into prior to 1999 was that the Prequel Era was a no-write-about zone, none of the EU/Legends novels dared to speculate about Mommy Skywalker. One author did use Luke’s earnest wish to learn more about his family history as a plot device in The Black Fleet Crisis, but it turns out that the woman who claimed to Luke and Leia’s long-lost mother was lying.