I just watched ROTJ for the first time in years, and the worst over-the-top-ridiculous parts remind me of the worst over-the-top ridiculous parts in TFA and R1.

I think it’s the ridiculousness level that turns me off these films. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back just felt so much more real. Sure, there are moments in both films where certain concepts or situations are silly (the protagonists sneaking around the Death Star and the Asteroid Field, for instance) but the actors and filmmakers approached each of those scenes with a very real, lifelike mentality. The films were able to be fun without stopping to blatantly acknowledge the silliness of the situation.

In ROTJ, however, there are scenes where you can kind of see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull stuff going on. The Ewok stealing the bike speeder, for instance, and leading the stormtroopers on a chase into the woods. Chewie doing a Tarzan impression during the Battle of Endor. You would just never ever see these things in Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back, but they started showing up in Return of the Jedi (mixed in between very powerful scenes) and then they became ubiquitous in all of the rest of the Star Wars movies.