The story of how George Lucas drew from unlikely sources to name the greatest screen villain of all time.

This month, to celebrate the release of Rogue One, we’re going to take a deep dive into the secrets and stories surrounding the creation of Darth Vader, starting with a look at the four elements that make up this iconic villain — the name, the look, the body and the voice.

The name ‘Darth Vader’ goes all the way back to George Lucas’ rough draft summary of The Star Wars, completed in May of 1974. In fact, elements of Vader can be found in four separate characters from that draft.

General Darth Vader, of the Royal Space Fleet, was a “tall, grim looking humanoid”. Lucas has indulged in a little bit of self-mythologising and revisionist history over the years, claiming that he always intended Vader to be Luke Skywalker’s father and that the name meant ‘Dark Father’, but the reality isn’t that straight-forward.

While ‘Vader’ does mean ‘Father’ in Dutch, it’s pronounced very differently (‘fah-der’). ‘Vater’, the German word for ‘Father’, is pronounced more like ‘Vader’, however. ‘Darth’ doesn’t mean anything in Dutch or German, although it does, of course, sound a bit like ‘Dark’.

But Vader, as initially conceived in the rough draft, was a fairly minor character, and it seems extremely unlikely that he was intended to be related to the hero of the story — especially because, in the rough draft, the hero’s father was still alive and was a different character altogether.

At the time, Lucas said the name “sort of appeared in my head one day. I had lots of Darth this and Darth that, and Dark Lord of the Sith. The early name was actually Dark Water. Then I added lots of last names, Vaders and Wilsons and Smiths, and I just came up with the combination of Darth and Vader.”

We can assume ‘Darth’ was chosen for its phonetic similarity with ‘Dark’, then, but that still leaves a question mark around ‘Vader’ — could anyone really just casually throw around a great last name like ‘Vader’ with generic last names like ‘Wilson’ and ‘Smith’, as Lucas describes above?

Well, you probably could if you went to school with one.

George Lucas went to Downey High School in Modesto, California with Gary Vader, a football player who was one year older than him.

Here’s Gary Vader in the 1960 Downey High School yearbook with a few of his gridiron teammates.