I wanted something new.I wanted to see the Clone Wars.I wanted to see Anakin's story and his fall.That was what always intrigued me about the mystery backstory that was alluded to in the OT but never fully explained.I wanted to SEE the old republic before the dark times,before the empire!Primarily though I just wanted Anakin's story.I love Anakin's story and his eventual redemption.Hope for us all,eh?

I was hoping to see Anakin & Ben Kenobi portrayed as great friends that get torn apart by their diverging reactions to the war around them. I imagined the final duel to take place on top of a volcano. I imagined (& hoped) the clones would be real Mandalorians in mandalorian armor. I imagined that the clone wars would be about the Mandalorian warrior race trying to conquer the republic. B/c they come from only one planet, they clone themselves in order to have a large enough army to take on the Republic. I imagined the Republic, with no standing army, relied on the Jedi & volunteer forces from various planets to fight the Mandalorians. When these proved unsuccessful, i imagined the Republic resorting to the controversial tactic of cloning the Jedi to combat the Mandalorians. This would begin tearing apart both the Republic & the Jedi order due to the strong reactions regarding the ethics of all this. The cloning Jedi thing would've tied in nicely the the whole C'baoth thing from the Thrawn trilogy, which i had just read at the time. I also remember reading something somewhere suggesting that Obi-wan might actually be "OB1" which stood for "Old Ben 1", inferring that the Ben Kenobi who teaches Luke might actually be the first clone of ben kenobi left over from the clone wars. I thought it would be really cool if the new trilogy addressed that possibility, but left it open-ended so that we never know for sure whether we're watching a clone or the real mccoy in A New Hope. I of course, assumed the Emperor would play a major part & use the events around him to rise to power. I also imagined it would look & feel like the classic trilogy & blend seemlessly together, visually speaking. I hoped they would use practical effects, makeup, puppets, and model work whenever possible, & treat CGI as a last resort for the most difficult effects. I hoped GL would only direct the first one as he had originally planned.

Looking back, i still wish we had gotten most of those things instead of what we did (maybe with the exception of Obi-wan in ANH possibly being a clone...)

I bailed on the series after seeing ROTJ in 1983. I had already started to loose interest after ESB. So for me, the Star Wars universe was the first film only. Because of all that, I expected absolutely nothing from the prequels. I'd also seen still shots of the SEs and knew Lucas' new ideas were nothing that interested me.

More than anything, I went to see the first of the prequels out of curiosity. I figured there was a remote chance it might be a return to form - or at least interesting, deep, well acted, etc. It ended up being none of those things. It was infinitely worse than ROTJ. It was everything I feared it might be. I've not seen the last two.

The drama preceeding each prequel film is worthy of its own film in my opinion. We were and probably still are insane, Yes, i think we can lay claim to being the most insane fans in the entire history of anything.

For me, I just innocently began using the internet to go to starwars.com back in 1998, and later got more into it for TPM news. I was a youngster, new to star wars, but in love with it just as much as any oldbie, I'm sure. The clone wars cartoon and the story elements in the battlefront game for ps2 are EXACTLY all I really expected or wanted from the PT. Instead I got Jar jar, Yipee, a ridiculously boring story, and empty pockets after spending all my money on new star wars junk.

Online, let me tell you... it was hell. Those with brains in their heads condemned lucas for creating jar jar, but that was just the beginning. Everybody split into two camps, basher and gusher. No room for middle ground. It was war. I'm glad it's over now for the most part because discussing star wars online was becoming retarded. Nobody listened, just insulted each other until everyone was just pissed, not really enjoying anything.

Oldies....oh,lord.I do feel past it now.I suppose you qualify for "oldie" if you saw all three OT's in the cinema then?
Oldies....you kids...why I oughtta....

LOL

I remember being excited about two things:

First, the clone wars. There was just that one mention by Obi Wan in the first movie, and I didn't really pay much attention to it. After reading Zahn's trilogy, the clone wars held a bigger place in my mind. When the PT was announced, someone mentioned it should chronicle the clone wars, and I was on fire. The thought of that large scale, galactic battle with fighting jedi and space battles was very exciting for me. Like the space battle of Return of the Jedi on a larger and repeated scale.

The second was the thought of turning the original trilogy on its head. The OT was really about Luke, about his development, inner struggle, and eventual victory. If you went to that museum show of the Myth and Magic of Star Wars, they really delved into that angle. The whole Luke thing added a personal access point to the larger story of the rebellion and the empire. Vader, then, was a tool or an obstacle in Luke's development, something he had to face and overcome. As such, Vader supported the story of Luke.

With the PT, I realized that that would reverse, suddenly the focus would be on Vader, on his fall and redemption, and LUKE would become the tool and support to the story of VADER. Having what I consider one of the best told stories of cinema supporting a larger story, I thought, would provide layers of meaning and emotion and be quite an experience.

I watched the Episode I trailer and got quite excited. At the beginning of the crawl, I think that's the only time I've ever involuntarily screamed. I kept going back, looking for what I was expecting, figuring I had missed it somehow, but I never found it.

I never expected them to be as good as the OT, but I thought they would be great movies anyway. Also for some reason I had really expected them to mirror the OT, only with everything going wrong instead of right like it does in the OT.

I expected Episode One would be about the Clone Wars, already in full swing or perhaps their beginning. Jedi Knight Obi-Wan meeting young man named Anakin and to begin training him in the ways of the force, and Anakin proving himself to be a great hero by braving some impossible desperate battle, much like his son did in Ep. 4.

I expected Episode Two to have been about a little more desperate than the first one, kind of mirroring ESB. Anakin would be with his wife by now, during the big and desperate crisis we would have a dramatic Darth vs. Luke Bespin like fight, but this time instead of like Luke choosing death rather than the dark side, Anakin would be intrigued and want to learn more and would be corrupted. I thought the film would climax with Obi-Wan discovering his friend had turned to the dark side. Much like ESB ended with the heros preparing a search for Han, this would end with Obi-Wan's preparation to bring his friend back to the light, even though he has been told it is impossible, he is sure his friend still has good in him.

I always thought Episode Three would focus on Obi's trying to bring his friend back, and ultimately ending in disappointment and realization that his old friend was lost and nothing could be done to bring him back. I thought Obi-Wan would realize his friend was dead, perhaps after seeing how he is capable of slaughtering his old Jedi friends as he hunted them down one by one. I figured this would end with the famous battle with Obi-Wan that ended in Anakin falling into the lava/acid, but ultimately escaping.

OB3X, you follow a similar thought pattern to me. You remind me of the pacing I was anticipating - Anakin falling partway through thre trilogy, or at least definitively dabbling on the border, to the point where he was an enemy of the Jedi. By the end of 3 he would be an established bad guy, rather than a new-born one. I thought the Jedi hunt would be a slow, one on one, personal thing that slowly spanned the trilogy rather than one that filled 15 minutes of Star Wars time, 2 minutes of cinema time.

AFTER seeing Phantom Menace, I did envision Anakin's first steps to the dark side being an act of revenge for his Mother. However, I imagined him murdering Watto for something (like failing to take care of her or working her to death or something), having the first real act be much more personal and heinous than just killing a bunch of bad guys.

Last thing, and perhaps this was just my Star Wars ignorance, but I expected Anakin to get his injuries from the Emporer. I expected a similar scene to Luke V. Emporer, but Anakin would give in. Having already turned to the dark side and being an established bad guy, the Emporer would do something like kill Anakin's wife. They would fight and Anakin would lose, in essence finally submitting to his master. However, he would do so just with the desire to gain enough power to kill the emporer, driven by hate. In time, he would get lost in the seductiveness of power, losing sight of his original hatred until Luke brings it out in him in the end. It would provide another layer of emotion in that final ROTJ battle and provide context to his redemption.

Trying to remember what I thought and how I felt back then is actually kind of exciting. It makes me remember what growing up with Star Wars felt like

When I was growing up the talk in the schoolyard was always that Vader became Vader after a duel with Obi-Wan.For me,personally,seeing the hellish Mustafar and that final duel was a dream come true.While parts of Eps 1 & 2 certainly disappopinted a friend asked me when I was coming out of the first night of ROTS "What did you think?" and I said "It was everything I wanted it to be" and I still think that about ROTS.

I know this thread will go wherever people want it to, but since we already have a wealth of "what did you like/not like about the PT" threads I'm still hoping to keep it:

"What did you imagine/envision for the PT before you saw it?"

You're welcome to hate it as much as you like as is your perfect right to do so.
I,on the other hand,am also well within my rights to love it.
So,well,I don't know....bite me.

Not really sure why you want me to bite you, but I am going to politely decline. Thanks anyway man.

I certainly think people have every right to like them or hate them. Yeah, it is truly a shame so many SW fans complain about the PT, because keystrokes save lives. Those keystrokes could have been used to feed countless starving children in the world. Those keystrokes could have been digging wells in South Africa.

I think people have plenty of right to hate them too. I grew up acting out the prequels with my action figures. My Return of the Jedi Luke with the one gloved hand always played the part of Anakin as he hunted down and killed various other figures who I pretended to be Jedi, since at that time there were only a hand full of Jedi. You would be amazed how many times my Luke figure killed my Sebastian Shaw figure (who was often choosen to play randon jedi). Back then there was only one lightsaber and that was my black handed Luke's green one. So I made other sabers out of colored paper clips, this way I could twist them around the figure hand so they could hold it.

So in other words, the prequels were played out millions of times with my figures, I dreamed of the prequels for years and had way too high expectations for them. After 1997 my expectation fell considerably, so you would have thought I would have been well prepared. I feel I have every right to dislike them. It is not that they didn't turn out to be the exact movies I played out with my SW toys when I was a kid, I never expected them to match the stories I had imagined up. It is that I have never waited so long for or invested as much interest in any up coming movie before, after all of that the prequels didn't only not live up to expectations, they were not only a let down, not only not as good as the originals, they SUCKED! They were magical world of disney or made for TV movie kind of quality.

It is not the point of "what better things would I have done with the 6+ hours spent watching them" but rather the extremely long wait for something followed by disappointment. It is that these are movies I REALLY wanted to like. Even if they were bad I REALLY wanted to like them. But they are SO bad I cannot justify liking them at all. It is pretty obvious what they really are, a squeezing of the teats of the cash cow till they are raw and nothing more, they were never intended to be anything more than just that.