Surprising ROTJ didn't have Emporor's Palace in 3rd act..

Well, if I recall correctly, an original concept (was it Ralph McQuarrie?) had Luke and Vader meeting the Emperor in a lava chamber deep in Coruscant. I'm not sure why that was scrapped, though.

 

According to Wikipedia, it was originally planned to be set on the capital planet, but this concept was too complex for the special effects of the time.

If they had proceeded with that plan, it would have been called Had Abaddon because the name Coruscant did not exist until 1991. I like "Coruscant" better anyway.

In a way, it is sort of a "double retcon" because the Death Star was originally intended to appear at the end as the ultimate weapon. It was moved into Episode IV back when GL didn't know if he would get to make any more episodes.

 

Ralph's concept.​

 

This is sort of like how ‘Cloud City’ was cut from Ep4. That was where Luke & Co. were supposed to rescue Leia from originally, but was changed to the Deathstar on account of budget. Then got recycled for the sequel.

It was probably for the best. A 1977 version would have been far inferior to the 1980 production, just like a 1983 Coruscant would have looked way worse than 1999.

Plus, a throne room surrounded by lava is a little too ‘Bond’ villain. A bit over the top. “How evil am I? Well, just look around, you jerk.”

 

I've never been entirely satisfied that this pic is legit, but it was passed around a while ago, alleged to be a behind the scenes pic of tests on creating "lava lair" effects for ROTJ which were abandoned when the script no longer called for a lava setting.
Like I say, I'm not really convinced it is legit, but I can't find much evidence either way (unless anyone here can spot straight away that it is from a different movie, or an April fool prank that somehow passed me by or something).
I'll have to check back in the making of book to see if it is plausible within the timeline of the script development vs production etc that this might have happened...

 

Well, the guys on the right are certainly legit. Too legit in fact. Too legit to even quit.

 

There was concept art of the Emperor's lair that was in a lava cave...

 

Man, that’s just insensitive to Vader.

“What? Not a fan of lava? Oh, that’s right . . . . well, this is awkward.”

 

Would have been ironic if his lava cave throne room was on Mustafar.

 

probably becsuse it didnt make sense for him to travel from the ds to coruscant for a cool scene and/or it had a lot to do with budget and time constraints.

 

Just out of interest, the pic I posted above was actually from the Making of ROTJ book. Didn't realise it was in there for some reason. The caption reads:
Inside their shop at Elstree Studios in England, senior effects technician Rodney Fuller lights the cigarette of special mechanical effects supervisor Kit West. Behind them is the Emperor's lava lair in prototype form. When Marquand returned form the US with the updated script "One Line," he put a stop to that work, as that set had been eliminated from the story. "We were experimenting in creating a bubbling vat for the Emperor's throne set," West would say. "We were going to do it on a large scale, on either side of a platform which led up to the Emperor's throne, but in the end it was designed a different way, so we didn't use it at all."


Also from the making of book, here are some of the extracts from the story conference transcript (July 13-17 1981) which explain some of the thinking behind why Had Abbadon was eventually squeezed out.
Seems to me like budget / FX constraints were not an issue at all, and ultimately the capital planet was dropped because they just couldn't make it jive with the story in a satisfying way...

Marquand: I really love the lava. I love the Emperor being this chilly man... What do you think of that? You didn't like it much.
Lucas: I don't know. It's hard to rationalise it on Had Abbadon unless we did it in a different way: Instead of being a cavern down in the planet, it could be like a fountain or pool.
Marquand: That has contributed to the pollution.
Kasdan: More like a volcano.
Lucas: At the end of the scene, the way it is now there is a volcanic...
Kasdan: I don't like that.
Lucas: I can't rationalise it; I like it, but I can't rationalise it. When you say everything takes place in a throne room with the Emperor in a gothic castle, it all makes a lot more sense. That doesn't mean we know how we are going to kill the Emperor. I came up with the lava because it was easy just to dump him in the river. Maybe we could have a more horrible kind of death.
Kasdan: I feel like the boiling lava is not new enough.
Marquand: Well, snakes are pretty old.
Kasdan: True, but Raiders embraces everything that is old. A lot of the Star Wars stuff is new.
Lucas: No matter what you do, you are going to be doing something that's old. Let's face it, there is no new image.
Kasdan: I know, but this is the Emperor.
Lucas: The thing is it's not clever and it is not believable. You know that the only reason that you have created that lava pit is to throw somebody into it. It telegraphs the movie.
Marquand: Yes, I agree with that.
Lucas: We're not going to have Vader kill the Emperor without semi-killing himself, so maybe we could have them have hand-to-hand combat. Vader chokes him and the Emperor chokes him back.
Marquand: It has to be somehting huge, something amazing.
Lucas: One of the reasons that it works is the element of surprise. Nobody expects it to happen, least of all the Emperor. But it's tricky to set up and not give it away before it happens.

---

Marquand: I had an idea about these Death Stars, which Larry doesn't like. I wonder if this is a great thing for the Emperor to know. That these half-built Death Stars do work and they are complete.
Lucas: The one thing that Death Stars do, which I like, is they create a time lock: The rebels have to attack before the Death Stars are finished. They can't wait until next year. They have to attack Had Abbadon. One thing I also visually like about the Death Stars, if they are spidery half-finished things, then the rebels can fly through them.
Marquand: Exactly.
Lucas: Somehow we work it out that the Death Stars are turned toward the planet of Had Abbadon. The idea of those Death Stars is: one, a time lock and, two, as the device that blows up the capital and is the Emperor's downfall. That's how we connect him to those Death Stars.
Kasdan: Why do you want two of them?
Lucas: We don't have to have two of them, we can have one.
Kasdan: My problem is that it's complicated. I like the idea of it being a trick, I like that very much. The Death Star looks half finished, but it's not. That's a lovely idea, but it should be only one, because we're getting a lot of targets here.

---

Lucas: We've also been talking about getting Luke, the Emperor, everybody on the Death Star and doing it up there.
Kasdan: Might be workable to have Luke's scene with Leia and then he just goes to the Imperial transport place and says, "Take me down there." We do a wipe and he's brought in and says to the Emperor, "I've turned."
Lucas: What if Vader says, "I'm going over to the moon" and the Emperor says, "Okay, bring him back here to me." Luke senses that Vader has arrived on the moon. He tells Leia, "He's here, he's coming after us, so I'm going to him because it's me that he wants." Luke goes and we have one of those little Imperial shuttle bases. Luke confronts Vader and tries to get Vader to come to his side: "This is your chance, Dad - come on, throw off the shackles of the Emperor and come over to me. I know it's in you." Vader says, "I am not going to come over to you; I am going to take you to the Emperor..."
Kasdan: "... My entire wardrobe is black..."
Lucas: "... I will have to buy a whole new outfit." No, but we play it so that Luke can make a convincing enough statement.
Kasdan: That's great.

---

Lucas: One of the troublesome things for me on a practical level is the rebel fleet destroying the planet. How the hell are they going to do it? You can blow up a city by bombing. You can't destroy the whole planet. What does the audience get that tells them, "Oh, boy, the Empire has been destroyed." It has to be something that gets blown up. The universe has been cleansed of this evil thing. In the first show, it was a Death Star. That was the personification of the Empire.
So there is a very convenient thing of being able to have the Death Star blow up the planet and have the rebel fleet blow up the Death Star. We've gotten ourselves into a fix here.
Marquand: What you really have to decide is whether you want the rebel air force to destroy Had Abbadon or not.
Kazanjian: Let's think it out.
Lucas: What about this, if the rebel plan was to capture this half-finished Death Star, turn it around so that it's pointed at the planet, the guys over there pull the plug on this protective shield and we zap the planet.
Kasdan: I can't imagine an operational Death Star is so easy to take over.
Lucas: I agree.
Just having the moon and the Death Star and not having Had Abbadon at all is then you can have Vader's fleet, a limited number of starships out there. It's out in the middle of nowhere. It justifies a primitive moon. Right now, Had Abbadon is getting in the way of everything. It's cumbersome. And I like the idea that the trap is that the rebels think they're fighting a half-finished Death Star.
Marquand: It's wonderful.
Kasdan: I think Had Abbadon is worth saving. I think it's worth destroying the nerve centre of the Empire. Forget the Death Star.
Lucas: But then you are still dealing with the question as to why have the fleet? The thing about the Death Star is it's so manageable. The planet is not manageable at all. It is too big to be manageable.
Kasdan: But it's much more interesting and it is new. The look of it is new and the idea that it's bigger than the Death Star is interesting.
Lucas: There is something wrong here that we have to solve. I can't put my finger on it, but it has to do with the relationship of everything that's going on. We are trapped on this moon.
[Various ways of destroying Had Abbadon are discussed - turning it on its axis, igniting its atmosphere and so on - until Lucas returns to the idea of the Death Star.]
Kasdan: I trust your instincts to what is satisfying to an audience. I think you have a pretty good fix on that. The question is, is there some alternative that is almost as good? For example, the Emperor's palace on Had Abbadon is a particular kind of edifice. When that came down, you would have an enormous moment; the audience would invest almost anything with that kind of special significance if we let them. If this is his place and the heart of the Empire, an explosion that destroys it and is part of a bigger attack could be very satisfying.
Lucas: It's conceivable, but it's hard for me to visualise, but it's conceivable that we could have the air to ground attack on Had Abbadon and bombers were coming over and blowing up things and all that kind of stuff. It would work even more if we had a central target on the planet.
Marquand: ... a government centre...
Lucas: The main power centre and that's what they're trying to blow up.
You give them a very specific target that will essentially shut down the whole planet.
Kasdan: It'll be interesting when the planet goes dark.
Marquand: It dies.
Lucas: And we could make it more than one target. We could see a bunch of them blow up and as they keep blowing up, more and more of the planet blows up.
Kasdan: Going over to the dark side.
Lucas: Forget the Death Star - for the time being we are back to the moon and Had Abbadon.
Kasdan: Well, I like that.
Lucas: The Emperor is on Had Abbadon, the shield is on the moon that's protecting it, the trap is that the fleet is going to come in, but the shield will be in force.

---

Kasdan: I like the idea of Had Abbadon.
Kazanjian: So do I.
Kasdan: I think it looks neat and I think the Empire should have a home base.
Kazanjian: I agree.
Marquand: But if you make it their home base rather than a planet, then it's a destructible thing and you achieve what George wants.
Kasdan: You mean blowing it up?
Marquand: Yes.

---

Lucas: Let me say what I thought about it. I have pondered everything and thrown everything out and cleansed my mind even to the point of throwing the Emperor out. I went through the whole thing and I wasn't successful in coming up with another idea of how to finish it off and still keep my Ewoks going. I kept falling back into the same rut. After stripping everything away, these are some of the thoughts that I had - and I go back to getting rid of Had Abbadon. Forget it.
The Empire has set up a facility to build this secret Death Star; it is half complete. The idea is that in the beginning of the film the Emperor arrives on the Death Star and Vader greets him. The rebels have spies in the Emperor's troops and have discovered that he's gone to visit a secret base where they're building a Death Star. It is not complete, so it's defenseless, and the Emperor is there and he is very vulnerable, and they could destroy this Death Star before it's used against them. "We can also kill the Emperor, all in one swift stroke."
Kasdan: Isn't that a little weird that the Emperor is going to a defenseless Death Star?
Marquand: Maybe it's for the ceremony when it's ready in three day's time.
Lucas: He's going to inspect it.
Kasdan: He's checking the progress. That would be great.
Lucas: He's unhappy with the progress and he's going to take a look.
Kasdan: It's taking them longer than planned.
Kazanjian: He's almost using himself as a lure.
Kasdan: If we have the Emperor arriving at the beginning of the movie, is he just going to go there and hang out? Why is he hanging around this half-completed Death Star after he shows up?
Lucas: Well, the alternative is to have him show up after the Jabba the Hutt sequence.
Marquand: You could have Darth arrive at the beginning.
Kasdan: The Emperor arrives in the middle.
Lucas: What if Vader arrives and says, "The Emperor is very pissed off with the progress and he is going to be coming here shortly..."

 

Awesome

Wait, wait, wait. The Ewoks are the reason we didn’t get the Imperial home world? Those little furry bastards

 

http://starwarz.com/starkiller/revenge-of-the-jedi-revised-rough-draft/

That's the original Revenge of the Jedi draft from Summer 1981 which features the scenes you are looking for.

(I'm still hoping for an illustrated edition that will make use of all the concept art etc.)

 

And I'm sitting over here like, "You fools! They should be burnt to a crisp from the convection!"

 

What a waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaste ! I thought that never having the Empire planet base was a choice due to budget constraints but those transcripts show that it was more a storyline issue... leaving us with the forest and ewoks instead of Had Abbadon and lava. I could even imagine a cataclismic ending with lava flowing everywhere like in a Pompei movie... That would have been great. Alas !!!

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 21, 2016, Original Post Date: Dec 21, 2016 ---

Death to the teddybears !!! Hum, sorry, I am getting emotional again (and there is a specific thread on those "little furry bastards"

 

Yeah, as much as I like ROTJ (absolutely love that space battle) Endor always seemed like a weird place to end it all. Just kind of anticlimactic- the only people with an actual stake on the planet were Ewoks, and I guess the Empire (simply because of the shield bunker). Always thought it'd have been more interesting to see a more populated planet. They did a good job with Cloud City, I feel like they could've handled a core world.

 

Constructing DS2 was supposed to be a secret though (mostly). They wouldn’t have built it in plain view. A backward system off the beaten path makes sense to me. The Empire discounting the natives of that world also makes sense. I just don’t see why that required they be frolicking teddy bears.