"One Droid Looks Like Another I Guess" Why Obi-Wan Doesn't Recognize C-3PO
George Lucas was either a methodical genius…or he kinda just threw it at the wall and it just so happened to stick with audiences around the world. Either way he forever changed the way the movie franchises were made.
Starting smack in the middle of the Skywalker Saga with A New Hope, Lucas was able to give the audience a truly unique experience, but he also created some continuity issues along the way.
When he came around to making the prequel trilogies is when he started running into some of the biggest snags when he tried to implement key characters into the story line.
Primarily the origin of C-3PO and Obi-Wan’s lapse in memory for ever having a droid, which he really seemed to care about in the prequel trilogy.
During an interview Anthony Daniels did address the issue and gave an explanation as to why Obi-Wan Kenobi doesn’t quite seem to remember the golden droid from his past despite being by his side through the fall of the Galactic Republic and the Clone Wars. He told HuffPo that the continuity issues weren’t really something he actually gave a damn about.
“I don’t know, I mean…. one droid looks like another, I guess,” He says, “You’d have to ask a major fan that question.”
Purely put, it’s a major plot hole, and really there’s not a whole lot of discussion about this topic, and Lucasfilm just wanted to keep some of the original trilogy characters, and make some of that sweet, sweet merchandising revenue. More simply put is they pretty much didn’t think it was a loose end they were going to have to tie up, and there’s surely no way of going back and fixing it now.
Granted, with the boom of the modern Star Wars age there is a wider variety of content for fans to consume and ways to circumvent some of these issues. Most notably will be the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi spin-off series that will be coming to Disney+. Which will include a story arc that could fix this plot hole, maybe a mission where his memory has to be wiped for…reasons…and it completely erases any memory of C-3PO.
Star Wars has already placed similar band-aids on the franchise like the story of Darth Maul, who a ton of fans didn’t want to see die so quickly at the end of The Phantom Menace. When they gave Maul a bigger role in the Clone Wars animated series they give him a larger story arc where he goes toe-to-toe with Obi-Wan in an epic battle to the death. This occurs in the timeline before the events of A New Hope and something like this could be an amazing fix to the C-3PO story.
