There’s no avoiding it, the prequels are very popular now. Probably more than the original trilogy. However you feel about this, the most annoying part to me is the amount of straight up falsehoods people spread about the movies, what it was like when they came out, and the reasons why they’re more popular now.
Here are some of the tropes I’ve seen on twitter, youtube, and elsewhere:
*The prequels were never unpopular, that was a small minority of angry fans (virgin basement dweller living with mom stereotype etc.) and the vast majority of people loved them
*Love for the original trilogy is just nostalgia and they’re actually bad
*Various copes about the dialogue’s quality: “Lucas is the king of wooden dialogue”, “not all dialogue needs to be naturalistic, it’s more theatrical”, “it’s like Flash Gordon”, “that’s how real teenagers talk”, “the original trilogy was just as bad”
*Millennials and Gen X hated the movies because they love irony and Marvel humor and there’s no one mugging the camera like Jim from The Office, and Gen Z is here to save us with sincerity
*People that don’t like them just don’t understand them, don’t understand politics, don’t understand Anakin’s character, don’t grasp why XY quality is “genius”
*Posting highlights from Duel of the Fates and the Obi Wan/Anakin duel out of context and saying “I can’t believe people saw this in 1999/2005 and thought it sucked???” as though there’s nothing else in the movies, as engagement bait
A lot of this comes from people that weren’t even alive at the time, or were too young to know what actually happened, lecturing everyone else on events well within living memory. (Star Wars is much less serious but I’ve also experienced this with 9/11.)
Even if you’re a huge prequel fan there’s no reason to be delusional about reality or make things up.
The prequels were considered a joke in pop culture for a good while. People enjoyed the lightsaber duels, Obi Wan, Darth Maul, the podrace, and some of the more toyetic design elements like the ships and costumes, but they despised Jar Jar, kid Anakin, and the Anakin/Padme romance. I remember adults talking about them, I remember making fun of them (even as a kid who really liked them generally), I remember seeing and hearing about it on TV and the radio. I was even reading a manga from that era the other day and the author was cracking jokes about Anakin/Padme in the notes. This was everybody including kids, teens, young adults, married couples, and not some kind of broad incel stereotype.
It was not only childhood nostalgia; people that were adults when the original trilogy came out had similar criticisms across the board, from a filmmaking standpoint. As much as I love the ewoks and I’m fine with them, there was a lot of hate for the ewoks and they were seen as a prelude for what came later with the prequels. The original trilogy’s dialogue was seen as cheesy at times, but the banter between Luke, Han, and Leia was considered excellent and well within the quality standards of what people expected. Not to mention extremely memorable lines from Obi Wan, Yoda, Vader, and Palpatine that are quoted still to this day.
The prequels have a lot of lines that are quoted just as often now, but it’s because they’re memes. Even the supposedly sincerity-loving zoomers see the prequels as a nonstop joke fest filled with Hello Theres (not even sure if they know that’s an OT reference) and Darth Plagueis the Wise and Unlimited Powers and I Hate Sands. They aren’t remembered for being profound, they’re remembered for being silly. It isn’t sincerity, it’s just flopping from “I hate this” to “so bad it’s good” to “it’s good because it’s funny.” It’s the most ironic humor you’ll ever get.
There’s also the context of the Special Editions coming out in 1997 just before. Usually this is addressed with videos smugly going “are the changes reeeeeeally that bad?” and pretending some of the changes don’t exist so they can talk up some of the effects shots. But yes, some of the changes really were that bad, hence why this site exists. The added CG and tampering was unnecessary, which is why the prequels coming out right after gave the feeling that the whole series was some kind of tech demo. If you weren’t alive in 97 or 99, and all you’ve known your entire life is almost completely CG movies of wildly varying quality, there’s no way you could fully understand this and what it meant.
How do you guys address this? Do you just ignore it and move on? Do you have any videos you point people to? I’m guessing most of you probably think it’s a fool’s errand and it’s not important, but for everyone else, what’s your take?