Neil, I appreciate your post a great deal, but I respectfully disagree with your take on Vader in Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, so I'd like to share with those here my response to your repost of this at the FSM board. To all those wondering who I am, well... I guess I'm a new poster! Hi, everyone. I've lurked a bit, but this is my first post on these boards. ----- I think you tremendously overstate Vader's "lack of authority" in the original film. He's still clearly one of the very highest-ranking people in the Empire, and feels no trepidation about dealing with high-ranking Imperials like Motti in the manner to which we've become accustomed. His exchanges with Tarkin have a bit of give-and-take. And his hands-on engagement in combat actions are simply part and parcel of his characterization as a fallen Jedi warrior. It wouldn't make sense for Tarkin to fly into combat, but it would for Vader, a more adept pilot than any ordinary pilot, and one who does so because he chooses to do so, not because Tarkin says so (similarly, he personally takes troops into Echo Base on Hoth. This is principally because of his personal obsession with capturing Luke, of course, but it's still noteworthy for this conversation). One may safely assume Imperials by-and-large at the time of A New Hope have much the same fear for Vader; it's just that the film narrative never provides quite the same opportunity to depict it that The Empire Strikes Back does (the novelization of the original film, published six months before the film's release, describes the fear rank-and-file Imperials hold for the Dark Lord, so clearly it was intended to be part of the characterization, even if not explicitly so). Motti's "standing up" to Vader is hardly typical; it comes across more as plain stupidity (of a sort not entirely dissimilar to that demonstrated in Empire by Ozzel, who dares question Vader's insistence the Rebels are on Hoth). Motti's brief display in the conference room is done in the presence of Tarkin; I seriously doubt he'd take the same tone with Vader alone. Yes, it's indeed true Vader has perhaps ascended somewhat by the time of Empire (and why not? The officers closest to his rank from the original all perished in the Death Star's conflagration; he's the only guy left at that level. Besides, the Death Star was the Death Star, practically a small planet; of course it'd have a lot of highly-placed persons running it. The Executor, big though it is, is a hell of a lot smaller than the Death Star), but to describe his role in the original as having a "lack of authority" and only later becoming someone "not to be messed with" is grossly misleading (what, do you think Vader in A New Hope is someone you can safely mess with??). Besides all this, Vader is important in all the movies not because of his rank within the Empire, but because of significance to the story, from his relationships to Luke, Leia and Obi-Wan. Whether he gets a theme or not has nothing to do with what rank he has; Artoo and Threepio have a signature motif, and they're the lowliest principal characters in the trilogy in terms of their social standing within that universe. The real reason the Imperial March isn't in the first film is that Williams simply hadn't composed it yet. It wasn't necessary for the original film, true, but it wouldn't necessarily have been totally out of place there, either. It's not as though Williams came up with it in '76 but deliberately held it back until he thought Vader was ready for it. It's just one of the new themes Williams came up with for The Empire Strikes Back, and he saw fit to use it again in future installments of the saga (falling both after and before Empire in the series chronology) whenever appropriate. Now, I originally wrote that its use in the prequels so far is entirely appropriate, being used as it is to foreshadow the events of the classic trilogy (and certainly, it's no more inappropriate in its use there than the use of Leia's theme when Obi-Wan is killed, or Yoda's theme during the heroes' escape from Cloud City, both of which can be validated in terms of the relationships held between the significance and relationships of the characters represented by the themes to those in those scenes, and vice versa), but on reflection I'm not so sure you're completely wrong on this. I do think there's some legitimate room for quoting the march in those instances in the prequels, but I'm not sure how prominent it should be. I just think you seriously understate Vader's significance in the original film.
