Actually it is a mistake in Battlestar Galactica as well at least the 78 version which was a star wars clone for tv.
Right down to Dirk Benedicts starbuck being a Han Solo type.
The realistic Galactica and politics nonsense was started by Ronald Moore who had already helped star trek jump the shark, maybe not as bad as Braga or Berman but pretty awful nontheless.
He did not create Galactica and while the remake stayed true to galactica's mythology in the beginning it completely jumped the shark with the cylon subplot and the end of the series was absolutely awful. The guy should never be able to write television again so awful.
Maybe not as Awful as JJ's Abrams Star Trek but still a false Clone of the original series created by Glen Larson.
The one change i actually liked was Starbuck as a kickass female warrior and pilot, and a completely believable character created around that and a backstory. I would venture to give credit to the other writers before ron moore though, he was kind of like the producer more than anything.
As for heroes being unrealistic that have morals and are good hearted people i find that bullshit there were plenty of such heroes who served in World War I and World War II. The American Revolution and the Civil War as well. I would even say there are many young people who are shedding blood right now in the middle east and abroad so we have freedom to talk about silly things like star wars.
Star Wars itself references many Eastern tenets of religion or spirituality. There must always be two opposing forces a yin and a yang, good and evil one cannot exist independently of the other and they have to neutralize each other out for their to be a balance. Though this may be a western oversimplification, not sure but i think this is what i read in some book about star wars.
The idea of absolute evil and absolute good is shown to be incompatible with human experience, people are more a product of their environment and the choices they make as far as phychology is concerned. And Look at the Example given in Return of the Jedi luke makes the choice to throw his lighstaber away rather than become as evil as his father, he renounces the evil temptations of the emporer even if it costs him his life, because he believed in a spark of goodness in his father. Star Wars kind of plays off on the whole idea of destiny vs free will, not sure if the two ideas and concepts always mesh together.
Moral Relativism always leads into discussion of Religion and politics and i would rather not go into that here so i removed any overt reference to such in my post other than the fact that lucas played with the concepts of the two in creating his universe. The fact that their was no moral relativism in the original trilogy says that the prequels are like star wars turned on its head, so they are false and not in canon with the oot.
Lucas came back to star wars and decided to revisit it in the context of the 90's morally ambiguous heroes dark for darkness sake, and anti heroes. Completely out of step with the sources he cribbed for star wars like John Carter of Mars and Flash Gordon, or even the westerns lucas looked to where you had good guys and bad guys, or the swashbuckling films and pirate films of yesteryear.
It seems to me Lucas wanted more to talk about stupid politics Bush and the Iraq war with episode II and III rather than give us a backstory to the trilogy that made any sort of sense.
I wanted a rollicking adventure story where at the end the hero loses everything and goes bad for good reasons a strong and powerful Epic that we were promised. Instead we got Hayden wooden and whiny delivering Bushisms.
Anti heroes may work for the dark knight and watchman, or George RR Martin's fantasy series a song of ice and fire, but they have nothing to do with star wars except maybe in contrast to the hero motif used, as in han solo kind of being an antihero in star wars 77 but then we see he is actually a good dude.
Lucas played Hamill's heroic character of luke who is very straightforward and naive and pure hearted off of the star pirate han solo who is amoral a killer, and a mecernary kind of like the man with no name from sergio leone played by eastwood.
The original trilogy is Luke Centric it is Luke's journey and by co- incidence Hamill bacame a better actor and matured as the series continued in empire and jedi you actually get to see luke grow as a person. These films are very powerful. The prequels should have echoed that better than what we got. Anakin's journey should have been the same prototypical heroes journey as lukes except he was seduced by the darkside and luke held his ground and was tempted but not entirely corrupted, somehow anakin is more weak morally than luke.
Or are things that way just cause its in the script, Anakin had to go dark to get to what is known now as episode IV, so Lucas shoehorned a lot of nonsense together slipshod and lazy like.
When the man has the talent or once did to make a strong moving piece of fiction with plenty of help from the right people of course,lol.
Now if the script sucks, the acting sucks or directing sucks Lucas can overcompensate with more cgi characters and creatures and environments as if those are more interesting to him than the characters and human relationships are. I mean in the prequels and crystal skull there seemed to be a whole lot more going on in the background and the bad cgi than the actors as if the actors were a special effect! The cgi was the main thing, the story and acting took a back seat. Completely ridiculous it as if they put the carriage before the horse. Now i Know Spielberg directed skull but Lucas had a very heavy influence on the final film that he may as well just have directed it.
Basically the star wars special editions and prequels made it very clear to me that Lucas does not understand the mentality of his own creation star wars the oot, or that maybe the originals were a happy accident and he did not know what he had on his hands was a veritable classic beloved of millions, or he knew and still decided to destroy it.
I know everyone is entitled to their own opinion but it is completely crazy that he thinks the special editions and prequels are better than the originals. The very idea is so far off base it is laughable. None of those films will ever be on the afi list either, too bad mr lucas hates his own creation, done with many many other hands to help him. The collaboration of these other artists and minds makes it even more of a crime to art as far as i am concerned that the originals only exist in a non anamorphic dvd from a d1 laserdisc master.