Q&As About 'Star Wars': In the original Star Wars films (before Return of the Jedi) were there any clues given that Darth Vader was Luke's father?

Owen Lars, Luke Skywalker, and Beru Lars. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

In the original Star Wars films (before Return of the Jedi) were there any clues given that Darth Vader was Luke's father?

In Star Wars (aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope) there were no clues that Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, was the father of either Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia Organa. All of the available evidence (story treatments, film outlines, internal memos, and various drafts of the screenplay) points to Vader being a separate and distinct individual from “Luke’s father.”

Now, it’s possible, however unlikely, that in his mind George Lucas decided that Vader and Luke’s father were one and the same during principal photography, thus explaining why Uncle Owen is so reluctant to talk about the subject of his supposedly dead father and his connection to the mysterious “Obi-Wan Kenobi” in the dinner table scene in Act One of Star Wars. or why, after Aunt Beru says “Luke is just not a farmer. He has too much of his father in him,” Owen replies, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Darth Vader enters the recently-captured Tantive IV (Rebel Blockade Runner). At this point in the making of the Star Wars saga, Vader and "Luke's father" were separate and distinct individuals. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Yet, the preponderance of the written record shows no evidence that in 1975–1976, the crucial period in which Star Wars was written and filmed - Lucas knew for sure that Darth Vader had a relationship to the film’s protagonist beyond the role of antagonist and henchman to Grand Moff Tarkin, the Big Bad of A New Hope.

As late as 1979, when Lucas was working with his first collaborator on the script for The Empire Strikes Back, Leigh Brackett, Vader and Luke’s father were still separate characters. Per Lucas’s original story and Brackett’s first (and only) draft, Luke even has a vision in which his dad (who still had no first name) appears and helps him during his Jedi training with “Minch-Yoda.”

For various reasons, Lucas did not like Brackett’s script, but before he could work with her on another draft based on a draft Lucas himself wrote, she died of cancer. Lucas didn’t want to write the final screenplay himself (he has said many times that writing is the hardest part of the filmmaking process), so when Lawrence Kasdan turned in the script for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucas hired him to rewrite The Empire Strikes Back, which was about to begin principal photography at Elstree Studios and on location in Norway.

It was sometime around this stage in the making of Empire that Lucas came up with the now-famous twist that Darth Vader wasn’t just Luke Skywalker’s main foe, but was his father as well.

"No, Obi-Wan killed your father." This was the "dummy" line given to Dave Prowse (Darth Vader) when this scene was filmed at Elstree Studios near London. Production painting by Ralph McQuarrie. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 

To keep the Big Reveal a secret from the media and fans who were eager to know every detail about The Empire Strikes Back at least till mid-April of 1980 (which is when Del Rey was scheduled to publish Donald F. Glut’s novelization), Lucas had Kasdan write a section of the screenplay with misleading dialogue where the plot twist was Vader’s revelation that Obi-Wan had killed the elder Skywalker. (Which, in a way, could be interpreted as being a version of the truth, all things considered.) Even Irvin Kershner wasn’t told until shortly before THAT SCENE was about to be shot. David Prowse, one of the two men who performed as Darth Vader in Empire (the other being sword fight expert Bob Anderson) wasn’t told; he read the dummy lines on stage and did the hand gestures and stances per Kershner’s storyboards and on-set directions, but he wasn’t told that what he said during filming and what audiences heard on May 19, 1980, would be quite different.

In this version of the "Emperor's holographic Skype call" scene, Palpatine doesn't mention Vader's possible connection to a certain Jedi-in-training. Instead, the Empire's new enemy is referred to as "the son of Skywalker," as if this other Skywalker were still a separate and distinct character from Lord Vader. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

In the original (1980) version of The Empire Strikes Back, the viewer and Luke Skywalker got quite the surprise when Vader spoke the famous (and oft-misquoted) line, “No, I am your father.” There was no hint, not even in the brief scene between Vader and a hologram of the Emperor, that the Dark Lord was the Jedi apprentice’s father. This brief scene, of course, was infamously replaced in 2004 when George Lucas, in a misguided attempt to link the Classic Trilogy with the Prequels, rewrote and reshot that brief exchange between Vader and his Master, Emperor Palpatine.

If the 2004–2011 versions of The Empire Strikes Back are the only ones you’ve watched, I can understand why younger, post-1980 viewers would be confused. It doesn’t help matters that Lucas tells us a narrative of how the Star Wars Trilogy was created (one massive 360-page script that he later pared into three parts) that further obscures the truth.

We older viewers (and readers of the novelization and screenplays) remember things just a little differently, because prior to Return of the Jedi, which is when Anakin Skywalker’s name was first revealed, and his transformation to “Darth Vader” confirmed, the only hint about that was the No, I am your father line.