The Bogan that was nearly in Star Wars

Readers may have noticed that I rarely use the word "bogan,"  even though I did a couple of posts back when referring to Senator Lambie.  (Seriously, resistance to class-ist forms of insult sometimes just has to crumble in response to overwhelming provocation.)

In any event, this last weekend I learnt something that is hilarious from an Australian point of view.  There's a very lengthy article at Salon about the early drafts of the very first Star Wars movie, and from this we learn something very important:

Their still very human leader is General Darth Vader, still just Sith Knight Valorum’s righthand man. Deak—one of the sons of the Starkiller—makes short work of the Stormtroopers. Deak, a Jedi, uses a blaster, while the Stormtroopers wield laser swords. Vader defeats Deak because he is “strong with the Bogan”—Lucas’s initial name for the Dark Side of the Force.

It gets even more explanation a bit further in:

After a dinner of “thanta sauce” and “bum-bum extract,” Luke embarks on a long-winded, jargon-filled explanation to his younger brothers about the Force of Others. Originally discovered by a holy man called the Skywalker, the Force is divided into the good half, “Ashla,” and the “paraforce,” called the Bogan. To prevent people with “less strength” from discovering the Bogan, the Skywalker only taught it to his children, who passed it on to theirs. And there you have it: as conceived for the first time, the Force was an exclusive, aristocratic cult.

Even better, there's some actual script extract, and I defy any Australian to read this and not laugh (my bold, incidentally):

As they start blasting their way out, Han is overcome by a mysterious attack of depression:

HAN: It’s no use. We’re lost.
LUKE: No, no, there’s a debris chute. It’s the Bogan force making you feel that way. Don’t give up hope. Fight it!
HAN: It’s no use, it’s no use.
LUKE: Well, we’re going anyway. Think of good things. Drive the Bogan from your mind.

It’s astonishing how much the word “Bogan” crops up in this draft: thirty-one times in total, versus ten mentions for the light-side Ashla Force. It’s not hard to picture the depressed writer whiling away the long hours at his door desks, trying to drive the Bogan from his mind.

Maybe Lucas got it right in this part:

 On the ship, it turns out Deak is badly injured. Threepio can’t do anything for him: “These are spiritual wounds,” he explains. “The Bogan arts often run contrary to the ways of science and logic.”

 Another draft and the Bogan started to fade:

 The Ashlan Force is gone in the new draft, but Lucas clung to the name of the evil Bogan force, eager to have us understand it. “Like Bogan weather or Bogan times,” Luke says when he learns about it from Ben Kenobi. “I thought that was just a saying.” The Bogan only crops up eight times in this draft, however.

 Now, to be fair, it would appear from this site that the use of the word in Australia only was becoming common from about the mid 1980's.  Wikipedia suggests it started in the late 70's, and Lucas was apparently writing his very first draft in about 1973.

I suppose it's even possible that the use of Bogan in the actual Star Wars movie may have prevented the rise of the Australian use of the insult.   If the multiverse is true, this is probably the case in an alternative reality.

Still, this reads as extremely amusing in our local universe...