Did Lucas, himself, go to the Dark side?

I had the opportunity to go see Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith on Thursday.

I must say I was very pleased with this movie. It had everything it needed to have and was more story driven that the first two atroci…er I mean movies. I was reading a review that I thought was amusing. It said, “To say that Lucas cannot write a romance scene is an understatement. A greeting card shows more emotion.” It was completely accurate too, from my point of view. Other than that, the movie wasn’t really dumbed down or catering to anyone other than tying up all the loose ends to lead into the original trilogy. It made me sad to see Aayla Secura die though. 🙁

I was reading a few articles today about the movies. The first was an interview with Ian McDiarmid, aka Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine aka Darth Sidious. The other article I read had an interesting commentary from the original director of Star Wars Episodes 4 & 5 (A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, respectively). The article talked of the potential of a sequel trilogy following the exploits of Luke Skywalker as a Jedi knight, but revealed something rather different.

The director was mentioned as saying at the time of the first Star Wars movie (episode 4) that there was enough material to do as many as 12 movies, but 9 would be the more likely outcome. The original full blown plan potentially could have had the trilogy, a prequel trilogy and a sequel trilogy. Lucas apparently had a timeline written out expansing this whole timeline and lots of background on it all. Originally, Return of the Jedi never involved Ewoks, a second Death Star, nor the death of the Emperor. It did, however, contain the death of Han Solo among other things. Leia would leave to help lead the survivors of her former planet and Luke would continue training. The Emperor, originally, was only supposed to have a few cameos and not even show up until the end of the sequel trilogy where an older, more disciplined Luke Skywalker would confront the evil Sith Lord.
This director left over differences with Lucas over the Return of the Jedi film. The director was apparently quite opposed to the changes that Lucas instituted to the original storyline. The first of a long line of changes, Lucas has made with immense backlash from the fandom. I wonder if Yoda was originally supposed to die in Jedi like he did.

Oh, to be a proofreader of that original draft of the timeline!

Feel free to post your thoughts.

On another note, I’m thinking about going back and re-reading the Star Wars books I’ve read and reading some others I have that I just never got around to.