generalfrevious said:

Alright, he may have not have been a trickster the whole time, but I still think he didn't care about the continuity of the six films at all, and he has contempt for SW being successful from the beginning. Does that opinion make sense?

Not really. I'm going to throw out an alternate explanation that might appeal to you. It's not completely unheard of for someone integrally involved in the creation of a piece of art to completely fail to grasp its popular appeal. To borrow from another fanboy bucket, I've seen interviews with Sarah Michelle Gellar that make me think she just has know clue what Buffy the Vampire Slayer was even about. And yet she still made it come very much alive.

Same with Lucas, really. Maybe Lucas WANTED to make a trashy slapstick derivative space adventure with terrible dialogue and a backstory that's somewhere between inconsistent and incomprehensible. Honestly that DOES describe Buck Rogers, oft-cited as a SW inspiration. Maybe that WAS the "original vision" he's always going on about. But that's not what ultimately got created. I think it goes without saying that the influence of others brought a lot more gravity to at least the first two films, and made them much better movies.

So when Star Wars became a huge phenomenon, Lucas thought it was a validation of his "derivative slapstick" philosophy. He completely failed to grasp that it was the other stuff people liked. It's not a matter of his having hated Star Wars all along, it's a matter of him never comprehending what Star Wars was about to begin with (as far as its fans were concerned). Add to this the fact that he's a serial fiddler (look at the audio mixes for crying out loud), and it's only surprising the trilogy lasted as long as it did before he ran it into the ground.

It's not a pathological drive to destroy art, it's a pathological ego-driven failure to understand its value. The result is the same.