Was Star Wars always "cool"?

I seem to remember in the mid 90s, people thought it was rather dated. I think things changed with the prequels.

Yeah after Return of the Jedi I think general audiences were done with it. There wasn’t anything new coming out in theaters and the hype died down. Among true fans the RPG and the Thrawn trilogy started a small revival that endured through books, comics, and video games.

However I don’t think the prequels were ever “cool” at the time. People watched them because they were big budget spectacle and because of the Star Wars name, but I remember that they were not taken seriously. Jar Jar, kid Anakin, then teen Anakin in AotC were heavily mocked. So was the dialogue in all three.

Certain aspects like Darth Maul were definitely cool and had an outsized influence in merchandise. The EU continued booming with books, comics, and video games, but those were still largely limited to true fans and gamers.

I still don’t think it’s necessarily “cool” now. It’s more that it just lingers everywhere and has merchandise everywhere. There’s nothing particularly youthful about it; the same boomers that post minion memes on facebook also post/buy Baby Yoda stuff. There will probably never be the same level of hype there was during 1977.

Star Wars was always for nerds and kids. Even more so in the 1990s when the only people who care were playing TIE Fighter and reading the Thrawn books, like Vladius said. With the prequels it’s harder to say, though I know at least one person who only ever watched TPM and that’s their total knowledge of SW. They hated it and went back to watching sports and crime shows. But with the prequels as a whole it became more a toy selling machine so, again, more a thing for teenage boys.

Cool? no. you got bullied for liking Star Wars, comic books and Star Trek.

If you did anything other than play Football for the school, you were of an unwanted status. That made everyone that was not a jock into an eclectic group of misfits.

Star Wars spoke to me personally, but at that time video games and music were more universal.

Star Wars was like not even a real thing in the middle 1990s unless you read comics, and played the Nintendo games or read the Zahn books.

Then the Special Edition came out and made it more broad to people who did not care for Star Wars for a moment. Because of the anniversary and it was a major event.

Then the prequel happened, and it was for another generation. Explicitly not made for Gen X.

Anything nerdy was not cool that includes reading Marvel comics, reading Tolkien.

My god I mean 60% of my graduating class didn’t even graduate. Like a lost generation and Kurt Cobain was the voice that spoke to us. I’m surprised with all the drug use and widespread desire to escape worse events hadn’t happened.

People got on with life, but this town is the dead center of nowhere. If nowheresville exists, this is pretty much it.

In my experience the “coolness” factor of Star Wars is not so straightforward to pin down. Certainly, one could look at old footage from the time the movies were released in theaters (1977-1983) and come away with the impression that Star Wars was universally considered cool by the general public. The huge lines of movie-goers seemed to be sampled from the general population - including hip 70s teenagers. Star Wars appears to have been a cultural phenomenon with universal appeal. It was certainly cool, and distinct from more niche, “nerdy” sci-fi sub-cultures around shows like Star Trek.

However, all of that was before my time. I grew up in the VHS era of Star Wars in the late 80s and early 90s. In my anecdotal experience, by this point in time (ca. 1985-1995), Star Wars had drifted towards being decidedly LESS cool. Star Wars was still not quite the same level of nerdiness as Star Trek, but let’s just say the majority of Star Wars fans from that time probably wouldn’t appear to have been sampled from those long lines of “cool 70s teenagers” lining up to see Star Wars for the 20th time in the summer of 1977. Rather, a random sample of Star Wars fans in 1985-1995 would probably look similar to a random sample of people attending a Star Trek convention.

Certainly, by the late 90s, being an enthusiastic Star Wars fan while attending an American high school was not exactly the best way to climb the teenage social hierarchy if you had that sort of ambition. Fortunately, I didn’t, and my friends were all hopeless nerds anyway. Nonetheless, Star Wars briefly returned to being universally cool in the mainstream in 1997 when the Special Editions were released in theaters.

TLDR: Star Wars was cool, but only in short bursts, usually corresponding with a theatrical release. In between theatrical releases it was decidedly LESS cool, and dedicated Star Wars fans were viewed as nerdy losers similar to fans of more niche sci-fi like Star Trek.