Sure I was one of those kids. Kids are stupid. I saw the whole prequel trilogy in theatres and didn’t have a lot of complaints at the time. We hit each other with sticks after the screening, re-enacting TPM after seeing the climactic duel. It’s embarrassing but I was one of those ROTS fans when it came out. But people change and we grow up, some later than others. While something like The Lord of the Rings got better when rewatching, cementing its status as a high point for the genre, the prequel DVDs gathered dust and were eventually cleared out. I’m not being critical just as an OT fan, but as a film fan. All the lofty ideas can’t save them from becoming tedious and badly written.

If you look at it all as one whole, you have to admit that only certain things stick. Is Podracing still a thing? The Clone Wars might not have been so popular without all those TV episodes lifting it up. They made TFA the way it is exactly because of those ‘general audiences’. They are still making enough plastic R2D2 merchandise to destroy the world’s oceans several times over, so the real cultural impact is still 1977 not 1999.