Рет қаралды 487,115
According to Star Wars creator George Lucas, he experimented with various combinations of names for the character built upon the phrase "Dark Water". Then he "added lots of last names, Vaders and Wilsons and Smiths, and ... just came up with the combination of Darth and Vader". After the release of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Lucas stated that the name Vader was based upon the German/Dutch-language word Vater or vader, meaning 'father', making the name representative of a "Dark Father". Other words which may have inspired the name are "death" and "invader", as well as the name of a high-school upperclassman of Lucas's, Gary Vader.
As no other character with the title "Darth" was introduced until the release of The Phantom Menace (1999), some viewers interpreted it as the character's first name, in part because Obi-Wan Kenobi addresses him as "Darth" in the original film. The moniker is bestowed upon Anakin in Revenge of the Sith (2005) upon his turn to the dark side of the Force.
Director Ken Annakin's films Swiss Family Robinson and Battle of the Bulge influenced the original trilogy, leading some to believe that Anakin was named after him. Lucas' publicist denied this following Annakin's death in 2009. Anakin and Luke's original surname "Starkiller" remained in the script until a few months into filming Star Wars, when it was dropped due to what Lucas called "unpleasant connotations" with Charles Manson and replaced with "Skywalker".
In other countries
In France, the character's name was changed to "Dark Vador" starting with the original film. The names of other characters were changed too, but his is the only name that has been maintained even in the most recent films. The title "Dark" was used in place of "Darth" for the other Sith lords as well.
In the Italian-language editions, Darth Vader is named "Dart Fener". In 2005, before the release of Episode III, an online survey asked Italian fans whether they would rather maintain the Italian name or switch it to the original: the first option won. In 2015, when Episode VII had to be released, the Italian localisation decided to change the name to the English "Darth Vader".
In Iceland his name is "Svarthöfði" (which means "blackhead").
Concept and writing
In the first draft of The Star Wars, tall, grim general "Darth Vader" was already close in line with his final depiction, and the protagonist Annikin Starkiller had a role similar to that of his son Luke's as the 16-year-old son of a respected warrior. Originally, Lucas conceived of the Sith as a group that served the Emperor in the same way that the SS served Adolf Hitler. In developing the backstory for The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas condensed this into one character in the form of Darth Vader.
After the success of the original Star Wars film, Lucas hired science-fiction author Leigh Brackett to write the sequel with him. They held story conferences and, by late November 1977, Lucas had produced a handwritten treatment. In the first draft that Brackett would write from this, Luke's father appears as a ghost to instruct Luke. Lucas was disappointed with the script, but Brackett died of cancer before he could discuss it with her. With no writer available, Lucas wrote the next draft himself. In this draft, dated April 1, 1978, he made use of a new plot twist: Vader claims to be Luke's father. According to Lucas, he found this draft enjoyable to write, as opposed to the year-long struggles writing the first film. Lucas has said that he knew Vader was Luke's father while writing the first film, though the relationship is not explicitly evidenced before said draft of The Empire Strikes Back.
The new plot element of Luke's parentage had drastic effects on the series. Author Michael Kaminski argues in The Secret History of Star Wars that it is unlikely that the plot point had ever seriously been considered or even conceived of before 1978, and that the first film was clearly operating under a storyline where Vader was a separate character from Luke's father. After writing the second and third drafts in which the plot point was introduced, Lucas reviewed the new backstory he had created: Anakin had been Obi-Wan Kenobi's brilliant student and had a child named Luke, but was swayed to the dark side by Palpatine. Anakin battled Obi-Wan on a volcano and was badly wounded, but was then reborn as Vader. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan hid Luke on Tatooine while the Galactic Republic became the tyrannical Galactic Empire and Vader systematically hunted down and killed the Jedi. An early draft of Return of the Jedi ended with Luke taking Vader's helmet and declaring, "Now I am Vader."