Star Wars' Anthony Daniels Felt C-3PO Was Neglected In The Franchise's Early Days
It's tough being a droid in the "Star Wars" universe. You can casually be blown up at any moment, and people can have your memory wiped for any particular reason. While R2-D2 seems to have taken great joy with his station in life, C-3PO, in particular, has had a rough go of it. He's regularly forced into dangerous situations he wants no part of, and everyone tells him to shut up when he voices his concerns.
For Anthony Daniels, who played C-3PO throughout the whole "Star Wars" saga so far, the disrespect goes even further than what we see on screen. Despite playing a major role in "A New Hope," with C-3PO being the first significant character with a speaking role the audience could latch onto, he wasn't included in a lot of the promotion for the film. And when C-3PO was included in the promotion (rarely with any prominence), there seemed to be little mention of Daniels himself. The studio wanted to maintain the illusion that C-3PO was really a robot, not a guy in a suit, and perhaps showing Daniels' face would've undermined that effort.
"I was not allowed to be a part of it and it took me many, many years to begin to feel a part," Daniels said in a 2019 interview. "Now I end feeling a part. So there is a journey there." While things certainly improved, and both Daniels and his character eventually got more recognition, the damage was still done to at least some extent: When recalling the characters, fans will often give a whole list of the humans in the series before they think to mention C-3PO and R2-D2. Despite the two droids' key roles in the original trilogy, they were never considered key players. What's up with that?
The Mystery Inc Effect
While we can't speak on behalf of Daniels' treatment off-screen, it seems clear that the character C-3PO's sidelining has a lot to do with audiences' unconscious bias against non-human characters. When it comes to characters who aren't treated as human by the narrative, audiences may come to love them, but they also tend to forget them quickly. There are the "real" characters (Luke, Leia, Han, Obi-Wan Kenobi) and then there are the bonus characters like R2-D2 and C-3PO. The fact that those robots have more screen time in the first movie than Kenobi doesn't change this perception.
It's not just robots affected by this bias, as made clear by the popular observation (first on Tumblr, then everywhere) that it kind of feels like the Scooby gang is missing a member. "Every time I look at the mystery gang I have this visceral feeling that someone is missing. But nobody ever is. Who are they? What happened to them?" goes the original post that started this debate. "Something deep within my lizard brain is telling me there's a sixth member that has been, for unknown reasons, banished from this timeline and our collective memory as a species."
The answer, many speculate, is that we instinctively don't see Scooby as a full person. We look at the picture of Mystery Inc. and conclude we're looking at four people and their dog, not five individuals. The fact that our brain knows it's five characters but our gut thinks it's four may be what creates the feeling that someone's missing here. If they did add a sixth member, and Mystery Inc. became widely known as a six-person group, there'd probably still be posts out there about how it feels like there's a secret seventh character we're all forgetting about.
C-3PO won in the end though
Sure enough, C-3PO, R2-D2, and even Chewbacca seem to have suffered from this unconscious bias; fans of the original trilogy often describe the movies as having a main trio, Luke/Leia/Han, despite the three non-human characters right next to them the whole time. For R2, the neglect makes the most sense; he's the least human-looking, and he speaks in beeps and whistles. Chewbacca also makes some sense, as he speaks in roars and doesn't have much of a character arc. But C-3PO? He's just as human as the rest of the humans in the cast. He feels a wide range of genuine emotions, learns from his experiences, and gets something meaningful to do in all three original movies.
But despite being ignored at first, C-3PO has gotten the last laugh through the sheer power of time and consistency. Because "Star Wars" is now a multi-generational story, this means C-3PO and R2-D2 are the only two characters who appeared in all nine movies of the Skywalker Saga. Humans come and go, but as it turns out, some robots stick around forever. By the time C-3PO needs to have his memory erased in "The Rise of Skywalker," it seems clear that the movies have indeed come to think of him as a full person; the loss of his memory is treated as basically his death. Compared to the comedic, callous way C-3PO's memory wipe was handled at the end of "Revenge of the Sith," the genuine interest "Rise of Skywalker" takes in C-3PO's memory loss is a breath of fresh air. It may have taken nine movies (some of them less than stellar), but C-3PO is now being treated with the humanity he deserves.