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The New Generation of Star Wars Fans

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I stumbled across this letter (just the first one and the response, the rest of the article is different) that really shows the polarizing difference between we, the "Old Guard" and the newer generation that either has never seen the OT, or grew up with the PT and saw the OT later.

The article writer's heart is in the right place, even though a lot of his "facts" aren't, but I'm curious as to what OT.com thinks about the new generation of Star Wars fans that, regardless of preserving film history and restoring the OT and whatnot, prefers the PT to the OT.

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

END OF LINE

(It hasn’t happened yet)

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To each their own. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion.

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Chewbacca = Jar Jar?! WTF!? The only OT character that even comes close to being like Jar Jar is the CG Sy Snootles from the ROTJ SE.

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 (Edited)

Few of the "young guard" have actually seen a single actual Star Wars movie. They've only seen the PT and the SE's, and if they have an opinion on those, yippee for them I guess, but it doesn't actually reflect on the Star Wars trilogy.

The only tragedy is that, for the few who actually do finally see Star Wars, they can't help but see it as just an altered form of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: Special Edition: 2011 Edition. Since the latter is a fairly mediocre film at best, it's hard for them not to feel that the whole story, even if told in a different, considerably better film, is still mediocre.

So again, those "young guards" who saw the SE's first had their well poisoned, and I actually understand how they came to not like the OT very much. By the time they saw Star Wars (if they ever saw it), it wasn't the underpinning of the whole Star Wars universe, it was merely an interesting alternate version of a ho-hum film and historical artifact.

That said, even the SE trilogy is better then the PT in my opinion (with the exception of Jedi: SE, which flat-out blows), but since they're both disastrous in so many ways, I'm not sure it's really surprising that there's some difference of opinion.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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It's great if young people like them better. But this idea that it's this big generational divide feels phony, like a lazy, easy leap to make in the tiny echo chamber of internet star warsies and especially the people who need to create content to write about. Pop culture is youth driven and a small handful of bitter old guys cant make it seem like I-III are mostly a punchline. They don't have that power, it never happens that way. 

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Well there might be another generation in-between. I grew up with 1997 SE. However I did watch the "original" versions shortly after I first saw 1997 OT. While I appreciate the original versions and I support the struggle to get them released in HD, I just prefer 1997. I am very sensitive to visual aspects and quite frankly most of the original Tatooine scenes in ANH are unsatisfactory and below my standards.

On the other hand, I dislike PT as much as most of the older fans. even if we forget about the extremely annoying main character, stupid concepts (clones, droids, midichlorians etc.) and mediocre dialogue, the PT could have never come close to OT. The way I see it, OT really is something special and unique.

真実

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 (Edited)

Whenever someone says "A New Hope" I just assume that they aren't talking about the amazing multiple Oscar award winning film called Star Wars and check out of the conversation.  How can you have a conversation about a specific movie with someone who hasn't seen it?   

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 (Edited)

Imperialscum brings up a good point--unless you're part of the old guard, it's unlikely you've seen a version of the Star Wars trilogy with impressive visuals. Relying on home video releases alone, the deck is stacked in favor of the SE's, even for those who see the originals first, simply because those were given such poor home video transfers compared to the SE's.  For the old guard, we can see the unsatisfactory GOUT transfer and it still brings back pleasant memories of how the film really looked.  For the younger crowd, it just looks unsatisfactory.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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I watched the OOT years before I ever see the SE, but for some reason or another -- probably childhood naivete combined with hero worship of Lucas, the creator (so I thought) of Star Wars -- I bought into the whole "the SE is better than the OOT because these are the films as they were always meant to be" schtick and came to see the OOT as a hopelessly underdone prototype.

Thank God the shock of how bad the PT was combined with a more mature post-adolescent mind roused me from that delusion, though.

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I probably fall into the age range of the wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn SW fans, but I was raised on stories of my mom working at the Game Palace Theater and Arcade when Star Wars came out. She had to give me 'the talk' about how Vader could be Luke's father when Obi-Wan told Luke that Vader killed him ('Jedi lie and Sith tell the truth' is a lasting lesson from my childhood). She took me to see the prequels because I wasn't old enough to drive, but she raised me on the OT.

For reasons unknown to science, my mother likes Jar-Jar.

I don't know what to make of that.

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DuracellEnergizer said:

I watched the OOT years before I ever see the SE, but for some reason or another -- probably childhood naivete combined with hero worship of Lucas, the creator (so I thought) of Star Wars -- I bought into the whole "the SE is better than the OOT because these are the films as they were always meant to be" schtick and came to see the OOT as a hopelessly underdone prototype.

Thank God the shock of how bad the PT was combined with a more mature post-adolescent mind roused me from that delusion, though.

My experience was very similar to this.

While I never thought of the OOT as bad—I'd seen it far too many times as a kid to ever dislike it even a little—I did buy into the hype of the SE's as being better, and for several years only ever watched them instead.  I even tried to like the prequels when they came out, not quite knowing why something always felt a bit off.  It wasn't until the horror of the 2004 DVD's that I realized something was seriously wrong in SW-land (as a sound guy, it was the terrible audio remix that ultimately ruined it for me), causing me to go back and revisit the OOT for the first time since 1996.

Seeing them again was like meeing old friends I used to be really close with, but had later abandoned to fit in with the popular crowd.  Fortunately, we were able to reconnect immediately: they looked the way I remembered, they sounded the way I remembered, everything was just as it had been when I'd fallen in love with them in the first place.  The shock of this caused me to go back and question everything I'd taken for granted, and with a more mature mindset I came to perceive clearly what quality movie-making is really about.

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Unfortunately, I was one of those who saw the prequels first, then the special editions. Because I was a little kid (actually, I was already eight the first time I saw a Star Wars movie) I liked the prequels better. I watched very few movies (and they were usually older or cartoons) in my early childhood, so I loved all the cool special effects and aliens and the like. I wasn't into the actual story of Star Wars, so the OT held little for me at the time. As I matured, I realized how stupid Jar Jar was, how terrible the dialogue was in the PT, how many plotholes it had, and that the OT really was Star Wars, not the PT. The PT was kind of cool, but it wasn't Star Wars. It was its own thing. Because I saw the PT first, that was Star Wars to me. When I saw the OT, it seemed to contradict the PT and I thought that was silly. I wondered why the problems in the OT weren't fixed so it matched up with the prequels. Also, I had come to have high expectations in terms of special effects, so I missed that in the OT. Now I enjoy a movie more for the story and acting than for the special effects and cool action scenes, so it seems obvious to me that the OT is better.

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As an OT fan that does like the prequels also, for the most part, I think the kid has a point about the characters.  You may say Anakin is whiny sure but there is at least abit of depth to him as compared to say Han Solo.  Its interesting that Han was my favorite character as a kid and now I can see what Harrison Ford was talking about in that he had no history or real point to the story past ESB.  All we know about him is that he rescued Chewy from slavery and that's in the backstory novels that you had to read besides seeing the movies if thats even Canon.

The Prequels also have a large scale epic quality to them in terms of scope (large armies assembled etc) that makes the OT seem abit smaller in scale.  I think to a kid growing up now who is used to CG movies, the OT's smaller scale will definitely make an impact on what they prefer.  And to be honest those large assembled armies were in Lucas' original draft (which is why I like that epic scope the prequels do bring).

Now that Disney is basically retconning out the prequels (its shocking they are letting the remaining Clone Wars episodes out there) we're going to see more of these types of fans come out and get vocal about the prequels and what they find good about them.

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Did we need to know Han's history in order to like him? The original film gave us all we really needed to know.

Look what happened with Boba Fett. Sometimes, less is more. ;)

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Where were you in '77?

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ratpack1961 said: Disney is basically retconning out the prequels

Isn't that just a rumor on Latino Review?

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darklordoftech said:

ratpack1961 said: Disney is basically retconning out the prequels

Isn't that just a rumor on Latino Review?

 

Its a guess on my part really but I have a feeling its going that way.  We're not getting Rinzler's Making of Episode I for instance.  I know they want to concentrate on ep. 7 but really those books are for hardcore fans.  They really want to put the prequels behind them.  I bet there are a few winks and nods in ep. 7 that the prequels didn't happen or things happened differently "from a certain point of view"

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I'd heard they were planning on dropping a lot of the EU, but the prequel films aren't exactly EU. They're half of the canon films.

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ratpack1961 said:

darklordoftech said:

ratpack1961 said: Disney is basically retconning out the prequels

Isn't that just a rumor on Latino Review?

 

Its a guess on my part really but I have a feeling its going that way.  We're not getting Rinzler's Making of Episode I for instance.  I know they want to concentrate on ep. 7 but really those books are for hardcore fans.  They really want to put the prequels behind them.  I bet there are a few winks and nods in ep. 7 that the prequels didn't happen or things happened differently "from a certain point of view"

The Rinzler thing could be because he's busy working on an Episode VII book.

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Shifting focus away from being prequel-centric to the classic era does not equate to retconning them away. The main villain of Rebels being a species introduced in ROTS attests to that.

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Sadako said:

I'd heard they were planning on dropping a lot of the EU, but the prequel films aren't exactly EU. They're half of the canon films.

 

Plans change.

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It's Snake Plissken in his war hero days! ;)

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Where were you in '77?

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Snake Plissken?.....I thought he was dead.

Oh come on!   You were all thinking it. ;-)

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That was the single most perfect possible image response. I have been enlightened.