Anchorhead said:
To me, after having read a myriad of interviews with Lucas and the people involved with the original film, it seems as though he never really understood why the first film was such a phenomenon. Looking at the crawls, it seems he still didn't understand it twenty-two years later.
We started with a princess trying to save the galaxy in her starship to a dispute over republic taxation? Yeah, that's an adventure.
I still remember that a mother who was sitting nearby me in the cinema, was reading the 'scroll' aloud to her youngster. But I knew by the time she read out the 'taxation of trade routes' nonsense, that the kid would *really* be confused as to what the hell was meant to be going on...and I recall thinking it wasn't a great start to the show compared to the chapter wording in the 'ANH', 'ESB', and 'ROTJ' scrolls.
Thing is, during the few years leading up to the 'Phantom Menace' release, the dictator Sadaam Hussein had constantly been the subject of troublesome stories in the news...and I imagined that Lucas was possibly cooking up a prequel trilogy that was going to be somewhat timely and pertinent to the real-life events at the time...which perhaps involved the 'Emperor' as an already-established dictator that was causing all kinds of problems for the galaxy...and that this would possibly explain how the 'clone wars' came about originally...
I still wish I'd been right about that notion, but I guess Lucas thought that 'business matters' was more interesting as a mcguffin for his saga set-up than anything else at the time.
It's previously been suggested by some that 'slavery' could have been used as a main issue in the movie's storyline instead...and that's one possibility that would have made for a more satisfying 'boo, hiss' factor, if the 'Emperor' had been written to be behind that kind of thing.
However, considering the iconic establishing scene that kicked off the original trilogy, I was then looking forward to seeing what kind of imagery Lucas had conjured up to kickstart the very beginning of his overall 'saga'...only to get a straightforward panning shot of the red Ambassador ship, and a fairly bland introduction to things overall.
I guess I expected too much right from the off...but yeah, the alarm bells began to ring for me by what was being described in that initial 'scroll' wording.