SpilkaBilka said:

Given ROTJ, should we really have expected anything good from episodes I-III?

I think alot of us felt that Lucas had slipped a little....that he was just lazy with the last installment of the trilogy....it happens in many film franchises...even when they manage to hold on to the magical formula for a second film the third one usually deviates and ends up being crap (Robocop comes to mind). Budget also often comes into play in this type of situation....sometimes what made a film great is that on a lesser budget it becomes necessary to make a character film instead of a special effects film.....when you get to number 2 or 3, the success of the first one makes it so that more money is being thrown around and this changes the feel of things greatly.

What we had no way of knowing was that ROTJ was what a SW film would look like if George was totally hands on, controlling all aspects.....he wasn't lazy, quite the contrary, he probably worked himself to exhaustion...controlling everything and thus making a less interesting film (in that it had fewer influences and individual visions behind it). Hindsight is 20/20....but we had no way of knowing without first having seen TPM.....it was then that it started to dawn on people that George had lost what made him great all those years ago (and only later that we started to get snippets of info that made it seem like the first 2 films were only successful because of some of the other people that were around to temper George's raw visions into workable scripts, scenes, shots, etc.