One of the most striking changes was that Luke Skywalker, who was eventually portrayed as a young man longing to escape his boring desert house, was actually a much older character. Luke Skywalker would be an older soldier and would likely be reinvigorated by the new rebellion. The adventure may have been the same, but teaching an older character how warfare evolves is quite a different concept than a young man learning about the vastness of the galaxy for the first time. For many sketches, Luke’s name was a derivative of “Annakin Starkiller,” and some early sketches even saw the character as a woman.
The Dark Side of the Force also once had a more colorful name. It was originally called Bogan, and to this author’s ear, it’s much more evocative than simply calling him the “Dark Side”. Meanwhile, the Light Side of the Force seems to have always remained the same.
The snobby and not very trustworthy smuggler Han Solo was a very human-looking character, eventually played by Harrison Ford. In Lucas’ original version, Han Solo was supposed to be an alien very much like a frog. While it’s possible to imagine such a thing using modern CGI or motion capture, creating a frog alien in live action in 1977, perhaps in a cell-animated form like “Heavy Metal”, would have required technology that wasn’t quite like that. available yet. Han Solo’s sidekick Chewbacca would always be tall, but not always sasquatch-adjacent. Some early concept art Christopher McQuarrie saw the character as hairless and dressed in a tunic, but Lucas eventually The unexpected inspiration behind Chewbaccai.e. his own dog.