James Earl Jones has died – but as the voice of Darth Vader, he will live forever

AP Photo by Dan Golding, Swinburne University of Technology It is difficult to imagine a world of pop culture villains without Darth Vader. The masked and cloaked figure now casts perhaps the longest shadow of any film character on popular culture. When Vader first appeared on screen in 1977, audiences recognized something elemental, and reportedly did something that hadn’t been done since the days of Vaudeville and silent cinema: instinctively, they hissed. One look at Vader and you recognize a cinematic villain. Beyond the visual, every element of Vader builds the perfect bad guy. There’s that voice, provided by James Earl Jones, who died yesterday at age 93. There are the lines – “I am your father”. Then there’s that theme tune by John Williams, a piece of music so well loved that it’s often forgotten that it wasn’t written until the second Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. & George Lucas created Darth Vader in the earliest drafts of the original Star Wars script, after completing American Graffiti in the early 1970s, describing him as a “a tall, grim-looking general”. Lucas was inspired by comic books and the serial shorts of the 1940s like Flash Gordon and...