Star Wars VII-IX discussion: There be spoiler here! Go no further if you have not seen The Force Awakens or do not want to know what is coming!

When Star Wars: Episode IV was released in '77 I was a freshman in college. It was a game changer as far as fantasy and Sci-Fi entertainment. I was hooked. We had never seen that kind of story with those special effects ever. I waited in line hours each time I saw it. Even took Mom and Dad when the lines died down later in the summer. Dad loved it (Mom didn't understand). When I went back to school in the fall of '78 my new roommate, David (a very brilliant guy, valedictorian of his HS Sr. class) who was just as taken with the story, told me he knew a guy who knew a guy at ILM. He told me that fall over beers (we were in that narrow window where 18 was the legal drinking age) that in episodes I-III Anakin (told me his name) was a young Jedi who was very powerful with the force and was supposed to be the one to bring balance between the light & dark side, was Obi-Wan's apprentice. He turned to the dark side and fought Obi-Wan on a volcano planet and lost his legs and arms & had to wear an iron lung to breathe and became Darth Vader. He also told me that in Episode V it would be revealed that Anakin was Luke's and Lea's father & that he caused their mother's death.

All this in '77...22 years before Episode I came out. Needless to say Ep. I through III proved this to be right. Talk about advance spoilers. Also, I remember in about '78 or so hearing George Lucas in an interview. When asked about the characters he said that the only ones in all IX episodes were C3PO and R2D2. So far that's true.

After Return Of The Jedi, Lucas authorized some novels to fill the gaps between Ep. VI and VII. He even wrote a forward in the first one saying he approved the story as cannon and that he had no intention of doing VII-IX. He said nothing about I-III. The stories said that Han and Lea had twins (boy and girl) and that Luke had a son that were all about the same age.

Later in about '97 or so there was a website that popped up that laid out the outline for I-III and VII--IX. The outlines for I-III matched what I had been told 19 or so years earlier. The outlines for VII-IX said that the remnants of the old Empire were fighting against the New Republic. The old Empire was gong to search for DNA from Vader and Luke to make a new clone army to re-take the galaxy and would be defeated by the children of Luke and Lea & Han.

When JJ and Disney took over they said at the beginning they were going to go in a new direction from Lucas's outlines for the next episodes VII-IX but I believe they may include some elements of his original stories.

Let's talk in the comments about what you think may happen and what you thought of The Force Awakens.

SPOILERS BELOW---

As for The Force Awakens I thought it was very good. I thought the effects were very realistic and much better than the computer-game-like I-III. I was surprised they revealed in the opening crawl that Luke had gone missing and how early they revealed who Ren's parents were. As for me I don't buy the explanation they gave for Luke's disappearance. They are hinting heavily at Rey's heritage but not sure if we can trust that this early in the trilogy, and we still don't know Fin's and Poe's background, regardless of what has been refereed to in either comics or what was said in the movie (especially Fin. All they said was he was taken from his family as a baby. Who were HIS parents and what is his heritage?)