NeverarGreat said:

Just yesterday I realized more than ever before that Star Wars wasn't the saga George had intended, and indeed it wasn't even the original trilogy. It was and should be a single movie experience, and people like myself and many others on this forum who look at it with an eye to interpreting every aspect of the story are missing the point. For all its detail and worldbuilding, it's actually quite dreamlike. You get caught up in the experience and believe it entirely while it's playing, so making it an intellectual exercise does it a disservice. It affects our collective subconscious in a way that few movies can ever hope to do, and something I never experienced upon first viewing, having seen the VHS on small TV.

So yeah, I agree with y'all!

I think that's what hurts many 'franchises' today, because they are all made KNOWING there will be sequels and possibly prequels.

What made the Star Wars era different (Raiders of the Lost, Back to the Future, Alien, etc) is that the director went all out in each movie because you never knew if there would be another.

I love that Star Wars is a standalone movie and has a beginning, middle and ending despite it can be watched as Part 1 of 3 of the Star Wars Trilogy. How anti-climatic would it have been if the movie ended with Luke, Leia and Han escaping the Death Star and the movie end, AND the battle of Yavin was saved until ROTJ? If Lucas knew he was going to be making a trilogy in 1977, this is the way it would have ended and the Original movie wouldn't have been as good.