Star Wars is a fantastic story and is made up of some wonderful movies, but it's not a religion. There was a period of time after ROTJ where Star Wars faded. Even with the mighty power of the classic trilogy on it's own, there were almost 10 years where nothing new aside from the occasional EU book was produced. The action figure line had all but vanished.
Actually, the action figure line was revived in 1995, over a year before the Special Editions were released, and they did quite well. There was a huge re-kindling of Star Wars at the end of that year, and that was all because the original movies were being released again. Oh, yeah, and we were told it would be the last time they would be...