Welcome to week seven of The Hype Awakens, PorchDrinking.com’s Star Wars-centric journal of one passionate nerd (me) who’s very excited for The Force Awakens to come out. If you’re new to the blog, you can catch up here:

• Week one
• Week two
• Week three
• Week four
• Week five
• Week six

And if you just want all the latest stuff, skip ahead here:

A link to the latest post from today (Sunday)

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Sunday, December 6

I’ve said before that it’s going to be a challenge for me to listen to Kylo Ren’s voice in The Force Awakens and hear anything other than Adam Driver, the guy from “Girls.” The trailers have him saying a few scary dark-side-y things, though, and it sounds as if the producers have been generous with the voice modulation for Kylo. It’s somewhat reminiscent of another Star Wars villain with a modulated voice.

The Darth Vader voice is iconic. His heavy breathing and deep baritone voice, coming out of a helmet which hides its occupant’s true face, was effective at terrifying audiences and intimidating characters in the Star Wars movies. But if you were on set for the first Star Wars film, you wouldn’t have imagined that was possible.

At first, the man inside that suit, an English bodybuilder named David Prowse, provided the voice of Vader. It was only after he’d shot his scenes – delivering all lines on set – that George Lucas hired a new voice. James Earl Jones worked for one day on the first Star Wars, and was paid only $7,000 for recording the lines.

But did they really need to replace David Prowse’s dialogue? Wellllll, here’s this clip of David Prowse reading Vader’s lines in A New Hope:

And here’s the voice of James Earl Jones in the same scene:

Got a bit more bite, huh?

And as if being replaced wasn’t bad enough for David Prowse… he was (according to legend) very upset to find out that Vader was Luke’s father only when he saw the completed Empire Strikes Back movie. On-set, in order to preserve the reveal of Vader and Luke’s relationship, George Lucas gave David Prowse fake dialogue for that scene. When Luke says “[Obi Wan] told me you killed my father,” Prowse said, “No, Obi Wan killed your father.” He didn’t know that Vader was in fact the real father until later, and was not too pleased.

At least Adam Driver won’t suffer that fate.

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