I love movies. I love movies of all sorts. Books too. Books can be so much better. Can be. Often they aren’t. I have read my share of Star Wars books. I read the Thrawn trilogy and man of the other early EU books. What I’ve found is that it doesn’t matter if they win awards or not, some stories are awesome, some are terrible. I’ve encountered some terrible stories and when you compare the PT to them, the PT aren’t terrible. What I see on this site is a lot of people who don’t like the choices GL made. They see some of the flaws as fatal when in the scheme of things such flaws are pretty common in movies. Books too. The PT are not great by any means, but that does not mean that they didn’t manage to capture the magic of Star Wars for a particular generation. This site is devoted to the OOT. We tend to ignore some of the stupidness of them. It is there, just to a smaller degree. GL had plenty of help on the OT and didn’t get much on the PT. I see that as their fatal flaw. So many of the complaints could have been dealt with had he hired a good screenwriter to fix his scripts. He should have hired Carrie Fisher.
So for some of us, the OOT remains a gold standard. We are not crazy because the original 77 film is on the AFI top 100 list and has been since it was created. The PT can never equal that in pure cinematic quality, but they can end up being some people’s introduction to Star Wars and in many ways they have a similar, but unique magic, that is no less Star Wars for those who see it.
I personally think that GL was going for a 30’s vibe to the films. The art deco of the Corucsant. The truncated love story in what is basically an action movie. And I think he wanted both Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christiansen to channel James Earl Jones and his delivery. Sounds great with that booming voice. Sounds horrible coming from the others. Just listen to how David Prowse sounded deliving those same lines. Jar Jar was a mistake. Too comic and a needless accent. Though I loved Boss Nass (a slight addiction to Brian Blessed and anything he does). In the end the films failed to live up to what OT fans expected of them. As I look at them further, I see the biggest failing in AOTC. That should have been the film where we see the great bond between Obi-wan and Anakin. There is something there, but you don’t get that “good friend” vibe. I think that destroys the entire trilogy, but I think it can be fixed because most of it comes from lines that can be cut.
So I think the PT are indeed cool to one group of people. They have that right. We don’t have to agree with them, but it helps if we can step back from our own biases and see what they are talking about. I’ve watched a lot of 30’s films. Some are great, some not so much. I think GL hit his goal, but he failed to bring it up to the level of the good ones. Really it was a bad decade for films because the studios made so many B pictures and GL probably saw way too many B pictures. That is what the story of the PT feels like to me. A B picture compared to the A pictures of the OOT. Some people like those old B pictures.