Spartacus01 said:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to attack you or anything. But I think that you are being guilty of the same extremism you are criticizing. You said: “You can look at them as pieces of pop entertainment or as serious films or both, but you don’t have to go to extremes either way”, which is totally correct. But then, when it comes to the history of the movies and their appreciation by the fandom, you did the same thing you are preaching against: generalizing. Sure, I’m one of those millennials who were not around at the time, I became a Star Wars fan in 2018. But I don’t think that saying that everyone hated the movies is fair. I think that it is more fair to say that the fanbase felt very divided about them. I have known a lot of people who liked them from the beginning, just as I have known a lot of people who disliked them from the beginning. There were a lot of fans who liked the Prequels in the 2000s, just as there were a lot of fans who hated them in the same time period. Saying that everyone hated the movies is unfair to the people who always liked them. And they exist, denying their existence is unfair too. Furthermore, I have known a lot of people who became fans of the Saga only in recent years, watched the Prequels as adults, and liked them a lot. I’m one of them. So, to say that they became popular in recent years only because of nostalgia and the memes is a bit unfair too. I liked them when I first watched them. And I was already 18 when I watched them, so I didn’t have any nostalgia for them.
I was a teenager when TPM came out in 1999. I wouldn’t say everyone hated the Prequels initially at the time. But it would be hard to be alive during 1999 thru 2005 and not conclude that, in general, on average, people did not like these movies. These were not to be new classics, like the OT. They were instead the endless punch line of jokes across pop culture (e.g. the Southpark episode mocking Jar Jar, etc.) I never actually met anyone at the time (in my circle of friends or outside it) who actually thought these movies were genuinely good. At best, you had people saying that ROTS was good but the others sucked.
Now - of course, the whole paragraph I just typed is nothing but anecdotal evidence. It proves nothing. And of course, there were also many Prequel fans in 1999-2005 as well who passionately defended these films (just look at theforce.net). To get a truly accurate sense of general public or average fan opinion at the time these movies were released, you would need to have conducted properly-worded opinion polls that randomly sampled some cross section of movie-goers. Unfortunately, such comprehensive scientific polls were not conducted as far as I know. So the only thing I have is my anecdotal impression from having lived through that time. My conjecture, based on anecdotal evidence, is something like 60% to 70% of Star Wars fans (provided we could agree on the definition of “Star Wars fan”) had a negative opinion of two or more of these films. But again, I certainly cannot prove this, and I admit that negative opinions are likely to be voiced more loudly than positive opinions, potentially biasing my impression.
A bit more objectively, I can say that the media at least was more hostile to the Prequels than they were to the first two Disney films, which may have affected fan opinion. If I were inclined to devote time to it, I could probably prove this assertion by randomly sampling popular Internet or print publications or opinion pieces discussing the Prequels from 1999 through 2005. This would probably produce something like 65% negative, 35% positive sentiment, averaged across the three films, in my estimate (again a conjecture). Maybe closer to 60% negative, 40% positive right after ROTS. I could be wildly off, but I would be very surprised.
What I can say for sure is that nowadays there are a lot of ideas about the Prequels floating around the Internet that are blatant revisionist history. These ideas include things like “everyone loved the Prequels until those Plinkett reviews came out in 2009”. This is certainly false. Almost every single criticism made in those videos was typical stuff discussed between friends and pre-social media Internet forums long before Plinkett. (For fun, here’s a 1999 review of TPM that essentially makes the same points found in your typical anti-Prequel youtube video nowadays).
Also, remember that in 1999, TPM was hyped as this monumental, Earth-shattering event - with Lucas descending once again from Mount Sinai Skywalker Ranch to deliver unto us a New Testament from a Galaxy far far away. I lived through both the hype of Phantom Menace and the hype of Force Awakens, and the hype for Force Awakens was nothing compared to what happened in 1999. Remember, at this time, the fanbase was mostly unified, and viewed George Lucas as this master storyteller of unparalleled creative genius who could do no wrong (except Howard the Duck). This environment certainly did not help when the movies came out and not only failed to live up to the hype, but seemed to be just weirdly mediocre movies in general.