Old Star Wars Interview From 1980 Reveals Original Idea For The Prequel Trilogy

May the Fourth - popularly known as Star Wars day - just passed and we were blessed with an interview from 1980 with Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher shortly after they finished filming what would be Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

The BBC released an old video from its archive of an interview with the actors who played Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia on the children’s show Blue Peter. The show opens up with R2D2 (crashing into a dog), C3PO, Chewbacca, and Darth Vader. It appears though it is just the costumes and not the real actors inside the suits, as we don’t hear any of them talk. Or growl, in the case of Chewbacca.

You can check out the trailer for the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi TV show in the video below.

The most interesting part of the video (apart from when Carrie Fisher has a cheeky peep at the underside of the tortoise) was when Hamill began describing where he thought the franchise was going. Both him and Fisher confirmed that there would be a third film in the trilogy, the then titled Revenge Of The Jedi, before Lucasfilm later softened it to Return Of The Jedi. 

However, Hamill goes on to describe a trilogy of films he thinks will begin development. The films he described are now known as the prequel trilogy. 

“We finish off the trilogy, then we go back 20 years and we do the story of young Darth Vader, the young Anakin character, and in the third film which precedes Star Wars [A New Hope] you see, Luke is about 5 or 6 years old.” 

While a number of details about the films changed since the ideas which Hamill described in the 1980 interview, we can see that the bones of the trilogy were clearly already in place. While Hamill describes a young Luke Skywalker, when the real prequels end around the time of his birth, the main character of Darth Vader remains the same.