How come star wars IV: a new Hope, came out before star wars I: the phantom menace?
To get to the real answer for this you have to wade through all the different interviews given by Lucas & his constant “revisionist history” way of doing things. If you look at all the things he has said over the years you start to see what really happened. When Lucas first put pencil to paper writing his story outline for SW he ended up with a massive mega saga with 12 parts. He wanted to tell the story in the same way that the old Flash Gordon serials were told but soon realized that wouldn’t work. The book titled “The Secret History Of Star Wars” by Michael Kaminski sheds a lot of light on how the story started, how it changed and why things changed. There is a lot of evidence that points to what we now know as ep IV actually starting out as ep I. Kaminski shows undeniable proof that the first working title for what we now know as ep V was in fact titled “2 of 12”. Much of the confusion results from the fact that Lucas didn’t write “scripts” for all the episodes of the movies … he
