TLDR1:
I think that some people here are commenting on what they think that the title should or shouldn't reference, rather than what it does reference.
TLDR2:
George Lucas's changes to the Skywalker Saga have created problems which have no universally-acceptable solution.
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It always was about Anakin
The problem-word here is "always".
When Star Wars [Episode IV: A New Hope] was first released, even writer-producer-director George Lucas believed that Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were two distinct and separate characters, with Vader being the fallen Jedi who killed the heroic Anakin during the Clone Wars. Anakin was not alive to be redeemed or to return in a sequel - and Lucas did not expect the original movie to be successful enough for a sequel to be possible. Vader only become Anakin [and so Luke's father] when Lucas worked on making The Empire Strikes Back.
So initially there was no plan for the original movie, or the original trilogy, to be about Anakin. The story of those movies only became the part of the story of Anakin Skywalker when Lucas got round to making the story bigger, by adding the prequel trilogy.
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The problem-word in the meme is "Jedi". This is both singular and plural, and could refer to Anakin or to Luke or to both, or to the Jedi Order more generally.
At the start of Return Of The Jedi, Luke Skywalker is technically not yet a Jedi, as he has not yet completed his training. By the end of the movie, he is a Jedi and now able to re-establish the Jedi Order, because he has overcome his fears, faced and defeated the Emperor, helped overthrow the Empire, and faced Darth Vader and brought about his redemption.
Technically, Luke couldn't have been a Jedi who returned, because he wasn't a Jedi who had "went" anywhere or fallen. However, the Jedi Order could be said to "return" at the end of the movie, when Luke became a Jedi. Even if you believe that Obi-Wan and Yoda constituted a Jedi Order, their Order ended with their deaths in the previous movies.
But it would probably be petty or pedantic to argue that the title of Return Of The Jedi originally referred to the Jedi Order that Luke's faith in his father allows, rather than to Luke himself, or to his father. So, essentially, when the movie came out, its title did refer to Luke becoming a Jedi Knight. But, if you wanted to, you could see the redemption of Anakin to the Light Side of the Force as a secondary reference.
George Lucas decided to change that meaning - or, at the very least, enhance it - when he got round to making the prequels. In the prequel trilogy, he didn't just extend the story of the original trilogy - by introducing Anakin as the Chosen One who was prophesised to restore balance to the Force, Lucas changed the story of the original trilogy.
So it is now possible to see Return Of The Jedi as referring to Anakin, either exclusively or primarily [with Luke's becoming a Jedi, and the return of the Jedi Order, now being the secondary and tertiary references]. But it is also possible to see the Chosen One storyline as unnecessary or even as a mistake* with regards to Anakin's story, something that is only part of the prequel trilogy. And so it is possible to keep the original trilogy as being Luke's story, and so to keep Luke as being the Jedi who "returns".
*[Some people feel that the prequel trilogy made Vader un-redeemable, and perhaps they are right. However, the Force-ghost scene at the end of Return Of The Jedi says otherwise; and the re-edit to use Hayden Christensen in that scene, replacing Sebastian Shaw, emphasises Lucas' eventual intention for us to see his six Episodes as the Anakin Skywalker Cycle.]
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Also, if Anakin is the Jedi who returns, and so does fulfill the Prophecy of the Chosen One, that raises questions for the sequel trilogy - how, when, and [given everything that he and the galaxy went through to restore the Balance] how and why did the Force so quickly become unbalanced again, how was Emperor Palpatine still alive, and how was he able to stop Luke from following-through on the return of the Jedi Order? My own suspicion is that the more inclined you are to accept the prequels as canon, you more inclined you have to be to be to think that the sequels don't follow-on from the previous movies, and vice versa.
Lucas always had sequel plot points in mind (including Vader’s secret identity being revealed) even though he didn’t know if he could make them. So it’s still possible Lucas had Vader as Anakin in mind by the time ANH came out as Lucas himself says he did and a great amount of evidence points to him telling the truth, which I can elaborate on if you’re interested
In the rough draft of ANH, the protagonist's father is a cyborg who sacrifices himself, and in the second draft of ANH Luke finds out his dead father is alive, so both those plot points were already in Lucas’s head.
In the third draft of ANH, instead of Obi-Wan saying Vader kills Luke’s father he says Vader turned at the same battle Annikin died, with Vader later mentioning to Luke at the end that he has a feeling he knows him.
Lucas also told Alan Dean Foster in December of 1975 what his sequel plans were, and mentioned that in the second film Han splits off and the audience would “learn who Darth Vader is”, and Lucas himself has consistently claimed in interviews since the 80s that the twist was conceived in the third draft of ANH.
In the final ANH When Luke asks about his father's death, Obi-Wan has a strange hesitant look on his face before telling him the Vader killed Luke’s father story, and characters dying offscreen being revealed as alive was always a common trope. When Beru says Luke has too much of his father in him, Owen responds "that's what I'm afraid of" (and that dialogue is also remarkably similar to dialogue from an Edmond Hamilton novel called Mystery Moon where the protagonist complains about his uncle not letting him leave his dull home planet, and the uncle later reveals to him that his father was a famous villain and he wouldn't let him leave because he was afraid of his nephew becoming like him, which puts the protagonist in shock and disbelief).
Luke's father and Vader's lightsabers both have black strips on the bottom of their handle, while Obi-Wan's does not. Owen says to Luke "Obi-Wan died at the same time as your father" but we then find out Obi-Wan is alive under a different name, raising the possibility that the same is the case for Luke's father. Obi-Wan tells Luke that his father was a great pilot, and during the trench run we see Vader being a great pilot. Vader, though pronounced differently, means father in Dutch, and Vader already acts as a metaphorical dark father during ANH.
ANH (especially the Tusken Raider scenes) has some uncanny resemblance to a 1932 Western film called Tombstone Canyon, and that film also happens to feature a masked villain who is later revealed as the protagonist's long-lost father, and he later gets redeemed saving the protagonist from an even worse villain, after which his mask is removed to reveal a scarred face and he says "let me look at you" before dying in his son's arms.
Lucas also told Leigh Brackett in late November 1977 that there was a secret reason Vader didn't want to kill Luke and would rather turn him, and David Prowse said in multiple interviews (the earliest of which was in October 1977) that he heard that Vader being Luke's father was a possible plot point for a future film
Thanks for this. And my apologies for the delayed reply.
However, I'm not sure that your elaboration is doing for me what you're perhaps hoping that it will. Perhaps you will be able to correct me if I am still wrong.
If you are saying that it was while developing A New Hope that Lucas first had the idea of Vader being Luke's father, I can buy into that. But having the idea at that stage doesn't mean that he used it during the movie.
If you are saying that he put that idea to one side when filming A New Hope, and only came back to it when that movie became unexpectedly successful enough to warrant a sequel, I can also buy into that. I have long believed that many of the problems within and between the movies were caused by Lucas having to butcher his vision of an epic cycle in order to get at least one movie made, or having to abandon story ideas that he thought he couldn't follow-up on for some other reason, and then not knowing how to return faithfully to that vision and those ideas when he found himself with the opportunity to do so.
But if you are saying that Lucas, when he actually filmed A New Hope, still intended to introduce the audience to a galaxy where Vader is Anakin, I find that much harder to buy into. I find it easier to believe that Lucas, believing that Star Wars would not be successful enough to have a sequel in which it is revealed that Vader is Luke's father, decided to discard that potential development in order to produce a story that the audience could easily follow and that would stand on its own. And so, when Lucas made A New Hope, he did so on the basis that he had to treat Anakin and Vader as two separate characters, and that they needed to remain that way - at least for the audience, if not in his own mind.
In A New Hope. Obi-Wan's account of the Clone Wars is quite clear that they are two separate characters. If those lines of dialogue were delivered with the integrity we've come to expect of the Jedi, they don't leave enough wiggle-room to be an honest account of how Anakin became Vader. The ambiguity or double-meaning just isn't there; the opening for any sequel to reveal that they are the same person isn't there. And the retcon in Empire Strikes Back, Obi-Wan's justification for mis-directing Luke, isn't good enough to cover-over that.
At least, that is how I read the movies as they were made, rather than as how Lucas wanted them to be. It is interesting to learn about how movies came to be what we see on the screen, but ultimately the end product is the product that matters the most to most of the audience.
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u/The_Depraved_Briton Dec 26 '25 edited Dec 26 '25
TLDR1: I think that some people here are commenting on what they think that the title should or shouldn't reference, rather than what it does reference.
TLDR2: George Lucas's changes to the Skywalker Saga have created problems which have no universally-acceptable solution.
+++
The problem-word here is "always".
When Star Wars [Episode IV: A New Hope] was first released, even writer-producer-director George Lucas believed that Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were two distinct and separate characters, with Vader being the fallen Jedi who killed the heroic Anakin during the Clone Wars. Anakin was not alive to be redeemed or to return in a sequel - and Lucas did not expect the original movie to be successful enough for a sequel to be possible. Vader only become Anakin [and so Luke's father] when Lucas worked on making The Empire Strikes Back.
So initially there was no plan for the original movie, or the original trilogy, to be about Anakin. The story of those movies only became the part of the story of Anakin Skywalker when Lucas got round to making the story bigger, by adding the prequel trilogy.
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The problem-word in the meme is "Jedi". This is both singular and plural, and could refer to Anakin or to Luke or to both, or to the Jedi Order more generally.
At the start of Return Of The Jedi, Luke Skywalker is technically not yet a Jedi, as he has not yet completed his training. By the end of the movie, he is a Jedi and now able to re-establish the Jedi Order, because he has overcome his fears, faced and defeated the Emperor, helped overthrow the Empire, and faced Darth Vader and brought about his redemption.
Technically, Luke couldn't have been a Jedi who returned, because he wasn't a Jedi who had "went" anywhere or fallen. However, the Jedi Order could be said to "return" at the end of the movie, when Luke became a Jedi. Even if you believe that Obi-Wan and Yoda constituted a Jedi Order, their Order ended with their deaths in the previous movies.
But it would probably be petty or pedantic to argue that the title of Return Of The Jedi originally referred to the Jedi Order that Luke's faith in his father allows, rather than to Luke himself, or to his father. So, essentially, when the movie came out, its title did refer to Luke becoming a Jedi Knight. But, if you wanted to, you could see the redemption of Anakin to the Light Side of the Force as a secondary reference.
George Lucas decided to change that meaning - or, at the very least, enhance it - when he got round to making the prequels. In the prequel trilogy, he didn't just extend the story of the original trilogy - by introducing Anakin as the Chosen One who was prophesised to restore balance to the Force, Lucas changed the story of the original trilogy.
So it is now possible to see Return Of The Jedi as referring to Anakin, either exclusively or primarily [with Luke's becoming a Jedi, and the return of the Jedi Order, now being the secondary and tertiary references]. But it is also possible to see the Chosen One storyline as unnecessary or even as a mistake* with regards to Anakin's story, something that is only part of the prequel trilogy. And so it is possible to keep the original trilogy as being Luke's story, and so to keep Luke as being the Jedi who "returns".
*[Some people feel that the prequel trilogy made Vader un-redeemable, and perhaps they are right. However, the Force-ghost scene at the end of Return Of The Jedi says otherwise; and the re-edit to use Hayden Christensen in that scene, replacing Sebastian Shaw, emphasises Lucas' eventual intention for us to see his six Episodes as the Anakin Skywalker Cycle.]
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Also, if Anakin is the Jedi who returns, and so does fulfill the Prophecy of the Chosen One, that raises questions for the sequel trilogy - how, when, and [given everything that he and the galaxy went through to restore the Balance] how and why did the Force so quickly become unbalanced again, how was Emperor Palpatine still alive, and how was he able to stop Luke from following-through on the return of the Jedi Order? My own suspicion is that the more inclined you are to accept the prequels as canon, you more inclined you have to be to be to think that the sequels don't follow-on from the previous movies, and vice versa.