Long ago, so the rumour has it, Lucas commissioned a prequel treatment, and it got written. Episode three it was, and it was called "The Fall Of The Republic." There wasn't much to it, but it did have a young Han Solo, and it did have a climactic battle between Obi-Wan and Anikin after a fallout involving Princess Arcadia and some business about killing all the children in the galaxy (the author literally references the slaughter of the innocent directly from the Bible). And in this big scrap, ther is some sort of fall into a volcano. As I recall, there is a resurrection of the notion of a force-enhancing crystal, straight out of the Alan Dean Foster novel.
Anyway: the legend is a lie. I have read the thing (albeit a long time ago), and it is not a real story treatment. No professional writer working for a major studio would ever turn in something as fraught as it was with bad spelling and grammar, and it had all the other usual markings of fan fiction, including references to novels and the appearance of young versions of favorite characters. It is certainly not associated in any way to the official STAR WARS stuff, even if Lucas himself is guilty of similar crimes with his own work.
All the same, I bet Lucas uses the volcano thing, and I bet he thinks he wrote it.
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 03 May 2004 - 06:34 PM
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).