Episode IV: A New Hope
Far off in a distant galaxy, the starship belonging to Princess Leia, a young member of the Imperial Senate, is intercepted in the course of a secret mission by a massive Imperial Star Destroyer. An imperial boarding party blasts its way onto the captured vessel, and after a fierce firefight the crew of Leia’s ship is subdued. The dark, forbidding figure of Darth Vader appears, brutally interrogating the crew and ordering his stormtroopers to search the ship for the secret documents he believes it is carrying: the technical readouts for the Empire’s mightiest weapon—a planet-sized battle station called the Death Star. In the confusion, Princess Leia slips away and hides the secret documents, as well as a recorded plea for help, in the memory of R2-D2, a maintenance droid (robot). Leia is taken prisoner, but R2 gets away in an escape pod, along with his best friend, the protocol droid C-3PO. After crash-landing on the planet below, a barren, desert world called Tatooine, the droids set off in search of civilization but soon quarrel over the way to go. R2 insists that he has a mission to perform, but C-3PO wants no part of such an adventure.
The two droids go their separate ways but are soon reunited when they are both captured by Jawas, child-sized scavengers who trade in droids and technological scraps. The Jawas sell the droids to Owen Lars, a moisture farmer on a remote homestead. Owen’s nephew, young Luke Skywalker, cleans the droids and, as he does so, stumbles across a bit of the message Princess Leia had hidden inside R2. The holographic message is addressed to “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and Luke, fascinated by the beautiful princess, wonders if she means Ben Kenobi, a mysterious hermit who lives out in the desert wilds. R2, however, refuses to divulge any more of the message. When Luke asks his uncle about the identity of Obi-Wan, Owen is reluctant to even discuss the subject, but he does drop one tantalizing hint: Obi-Wan was a friend of...