Deleted Scenes

[Darth Cognus]

Tagged as PT since most of the interesting material pertains to the prequels and episode 3 in particular.

I've binged a mostly watchable playlist of deleted material covered by someone who went over both officially known deleted stuff and things that are maybe not as well known. A lot of it wouldn't materially change much, however some of it does offer useful expansion to what I've always found to be more rushed presentations in the films.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1rcEagAFESnw0qfNpdZCtgb3U_MqRiHk

You might want to watch before getting into the highlights but I'll have them here anyway. The playlist has some restricted videos and there's a fair amount of made-up stuff to sort through at times, concepts and whatnot, but the gists appear to be legitimate.

Starting with episode 3 in no particular order:

• I was aware of the deleted scene where various senate leaders - Padme, Mon Mothma, Leia's adoptive father for starters - were discussing the decline of the republic and planting seeds of the rebellion. I didn't know there was a payoff to that scene where those leaders actually confronted Palpatine, with Anakin in the room. It didn't get anywhere but Palpatine took the chance to scrape at Padme's trustworthiness. Speaking of which,
• There was a more elaborate subplot with Palpatine implying that Kenobi had been 'fooling around' with Padme, and was attempting to take him from her. This sequence would have happened after the last time Kenobi and Anakin said goodbye in the movie. It certainly lends a bit more to the 'You turned her against me!' and the buildup of the mustafar fight.
• Anakin was originally meant to fight Dooku alone with an extended fight to mirror his botched fight from before, and even including that flip which aged horribly against Kenobi later. Kenobi would have been off sneaking around and saying hello to Grievous. Kenobi would get the upper hand and engage in a bit of dueling while trying to link up with Anakin and Palps. At some point Kenobi would discover parts of Grievous's armor were in fact invulnerable to lightsaber attack.
• The Palps vs Windu scene would have been very different. We got three jedi masters deleted and a lot of closeup shots with Palpatine and Windu until Anakin appeared later. In earlier production Anakin had always been there and Palpatine straight up stole his lightsaber to have it out with the masters, with a stunt double who'd give them a real run with their money. You can see trails of this in the released films: watch palpatine's lightsaber closely and see if it's familiar... but at the last minute Anakin was dropped from the early scene, Palp's actor had like 15 minutes to learn swordplay and we got what we got. I think including anakin later was ultimately a better choice but there was definately missed potential in flexing Palpatine's capabilities. Oh and there was footage of Anakin duking it out with Windu personally.
• And speaking of palpatine's capabilities, the fight against Yoda would look rather different as well: extended cuts with flying droids to record the whole thing, big monitors, and a climax with Palpatine escaping on a senate pod through a blown-out roof while clone commandos come in and give Yoda a real reason to pick up and go.
• There was an early take of Yoda and Kenobi entering the jedi temple after the massacre where a mind trick would be used to get in the vicinity and clones would try and pretend to be jedi, leading to the short-lived fight we still see pieces of in the final film.
• There would have been more destroyer droids both in the massacre of the seperatists and the battle of corosaunt. That would have been interesting as they seem to have totally disappeared by the third film when they were the only things that the seperatists could throw that seriously inconvenienced the jedi individually.
• Overall the battle of Coruscant would have been over an hour on its own, and the overall cut 4+ hours.
• In Episode 1, the final battle would have looked mostly the same but there was a take with Maul straight up throwing Kenobi over his shoulder, an alternate to the force push trick that sent him in the shaft. Would have been cool but the push is more poetic. For Episode 2, well, lets say Yoda vs Dooku was a fair bit longer. Otherwise nothing huge from this series.

Evidently that channel has a bit of trouble with lucasfilm going after them for copyright, so do report if the initial link becomes useless/goes down. As it is there are a number of entries you'd need to skip through unless you sign up to the creator's channel.

The video game adaptation of Episode 3 reputedly has a number of deleted scenes, and the book (which I heartily recommend) does an excellent job putting pieces together. But clearly, to include all of the above would have given us a very lengthy Tetralogy. It was certainly the most jam-packed episode in the first place.