“A powerful Sith you will become. Henceforth, you shall be known as Darth Vader.” Those are the words of the insidious Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who rechristens the Jedi Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) as his Sith apprentice in 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith. Seduced by the dark side after seeking the power to stop death and save pregnant wife Padmé (Natalie Portman), the black-clad Lord Vader does his master’s bidding, first marching on Coruscant’s Jedi Temple with a legion of clone troopers before wiping out Separatist coalition leaders on the volcanic planet Mustafar.
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The blood-red planet is where Vader and Skywalker’s master, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), have their fateful first duel. Seizing the high ground, the Jedi maims his Sith opponent, severing Anakin’s remaining flesh-and-blood limbs in one fell lightsaber swoop. As the Chosen One writhes in agony whilst being burned alive, consumed with anger and hatred, Obi-Wan leaves his brother-in-arms to die there on the edge of a lava pit.
The charred figure is whisked to a medical capsule and then a rehabilitation center, where he’s encased in black armor with a fitted helmet and life-saving breathing apparatus. Once construction is completed, Darth Sidious’ twisted, tormented apprentice undergoes a final transformation, and Darth Vader rises once more — this time more machine than man.
While the result is the prototypical Darth Vader suit from the original Star Wars trilogy, it’s the fallen Anakin’s dark Jedi look that underwent several permutations. As shown in the 2005 making-of book The Art of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, concept art for the dark-sided Skywalker by artist Iain McCaig foreshadowed the cyborg Darth Vader’s fate:
“We wanted to bring Anakin forward to Darth Vader,” McCaig says in the book. “Even the shape of his hair was meant to suggest Vader’s black helmet.”
When the hooded Vader arrives on Mustafar to assassinate the Neimoidian Viceroy Nute Gunray and other Separatist leaders like the Geonosian Poggle the Lesser and the Muun San Hill, the yellow-eyed Vader wears simple black robes. But in one version that could be mistaken for the future Kylo Ren, Vader might have worn a slimmer suit with flowing cape:
“George wanted to see Anakin in a costume similar to the one that Luke wears in Return of the Jedi,” explains conceptual artist Sang Jun Lee, referring to Luke Skywalker’s all-black outfit that the Jedi wears in his final encounter with the redeemed Anakin.
Whereas the apprentice Anakin had shorter hair with a Padawan braid in 2002’s Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, the Anakin of Episode III (set three years later, with the Jedi Knight a battle-scarred veteran of the Clone Wars) has shoulder length hair. Writer-director George Lucas “wanted Anakin to look more like Qui-Gon Jinn, to show that he was going beyond what Obi-Wan was teaching him, hence the long hair,” McCaig notes of Liam Neeson’s late Jedi Master.
While Revenge of the Sith features a number of species — the Mon Calamari, Gungans, Wookiees, Zabraks, and the squid-like Quarren among them — the film at one point had designs for “lemur people,” which were developed by Erik Tiemens. (Although this alien race didn’t make it into the final cut, the lemur-inspired Lurmen of Mygeeto eventually appeared in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.)
“In San Francisco, on Nineteenth Street, there was a zoo exhibition flag that had two lemurs on it, which George [Lucas] saw,” Jun recalls. “He called Fay [David] right away and said, ‘I saw a poster with a lemur. It’d be a good idea to build a character up from there.” Ultimately, the blue-skinned creatures didn’t make the leap to the big screen.
In between other conceptual ideas showing the Jedi Plo Koon in battle armor with a wrist-mounted lightsaber and a war-ravaged Ki-Adi-Mundi with an eyepatch, there’s pieces of concept art for the Separatist villain General Grievous.
Before he was a cybernetically-enhanced Kaleesh, the general of the Separatist Droid armies might have been an insectoid female with wings; a red-eyed Droid General clad in white robes; a disembodied, floating head creature; a cyborg “Medusa”; or a bug-eyed ‘bot. Per Lucas’ wishes, the new villain could be “part alien or droid,” but the general’s design had to immediately register as an enemy. “It has to have a lot of personality,” says Lucas. “It’s gotta be, ‘Uh-oh, this is the bad guy!’”
As those designs morphed into the four-armed, lightsaber-wielding General Grievous who gets blown to smithereens by Obi-Wan, there were plans for a different four-armed alien — a Jedi. “I thought it’d be interesting to have a four-armed Jedi,” says Jun. The four-armed Jedi went the way of a young Han Solo, whose cameo didn’t make the final cut.
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