PT Would Star Wars be a "Dead Franchise" Had Lucas not made the PT?

I cannot believe someone actually wrote all this in a serious tone (or was it sarcasm and I totally missed it?). It's a movie, you could nitpick the OT just as much, and even then I still probably wouldn't agree with the criticisms. And then the article has the gall to claim they speak for all of fandom?

 

It certainly helped to bring it back in to the public eye.

 

I think I went with a different set of people for each Ep 4, 5 and 6 SE theater run. Somehow it would come up in conversation that Star Wars was back in the theater, I'd say "let's go" and we'd be watching it later that night. It is (was) harder to find somebody that didn't like Star Wars in the mid 90s than somebody that did.

 

I don't think it would be "dead" per se but much less people would be talking about it for sure. And that's not even talking about all the fans the TV series/books/comics/games brought into the fandom.

 

I'd say no, but it would not be nearly as popular when Disney bought it and would only be continued because of the EU. Disney might not have even thought about buying it.

 

I think Star Wars would still be fairly popular, but a lot of younger people would be unfamiliar with it.

 

Do you mean to say no PT as we know it AND nothing else whatsoever in its place? If that's the case, I'm not sure. It would be interesting to speculate.

I think overall in this trend of nerd stuff being popular again it would most certainly have been resurrected by this point regardless. It would be one of those big elephant in the room franchises if it wasn't.

 

There would have been no Clone Wars series without the prequels, and the topics in Star Wars would be more limited. That goes for EU and games as well.

 

Star Wars would still have some popularity, especially among those who were children in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps it would have become a 'cult classic'. But nothing like the mass following it has today.
Without SEs, PT and TCW when the modern craze with digging up old franchises got to Star Wars we would have got a straight up re-boot movie, instead of movies that continued and expanded upon existing storylines like TFA and Rogue One.

 

No. I'd imagine that even had Lucas not created the PT, future EU works would have covered the PT era. So instead of seeing the Clone Wars, Anakin's fall, Palpatine's rise, etc on the big screen, some kind of prequel story would have played out in novel/comic form. Would it have been different? Yes! But still existent.

 

I'm sure if Mr. Lucas decided not to make the PT, SW would be far from dead. Despite the critics the OT SE was very successful & in the alternative world (one of the first online viral videos was Lucas writing the first draft of TPM in November of 1994) of no PT ever, we most likely would of gotten a Live Action TV show circa fall 2000 similar to TYIJC.

GL always wanted to bring live action SW to the small screen.

 

The SEs happened to test the waters of the PT. If Lucas had no interest in the PT, odds are he wouldn't have moved forward with the SEs. The two really go hand in hand.

 

Look at the messages boards for the Lord of the Rings movies at TheOneRing. It's a ghost town. That franchise just came off a huge new trilogy of movies with the Hobbit - it's rather shocking that the follow up to the beloved Lord of the Rings movie series could leave such a small cultural impact behind. It's just a little over a year since the last Extended Edition for the Hobbit: The Battle of Three Armies came out on home video and is anyone still talking about those movies at all?

Yet here we are 18 years later still talking about Episode 1 and the prequels with as much heated passion as ever.

Love them or hate them - everyone saw the prequels and everyone has an opinion. There was this huge buildup of popularity for Star Wars in 90s from nostalgia that peaked with the Special Editions. After that the unified love from the original Star Wars kids started to fracture. Even if it didn't, Nostalgia can only go so far.

The prequels opened things up. That's when Star Wars became a multi-generational myth in America. And really it hasn't stopped since the Prequels. We went right into the Clone Wars and now the Sequels.

Definitely the prequels are what set all of this up both for the fan base and by expanding the Star Wars universe.

 

I became a Star Wars fan when the Star Wars Customizable Card Game released in 1995. I collected most of the series and continued to collect it until the game was cancelled (although I was dead broke in the late '90s/early 2000s so could never really get into the Phantom Menace cardsets). I also began reading the books around that time, beginning with the Courtship of Princess Leia and then reading the Thrawn Trilogy. I guess that makes me a kind of strange kid. I was born a month after Return of the Jedi released, so I missed all of the original films, yet I was already a teenager by the time TPM came out in 1999. I remember seeing the three Special Editions fondly and also remember enjoying all three prequel films, although by the third film I had become very suspicious of the trilogy and was mostly watching it because I really didn't have much of a choice. I mean, it was potentially the last cinematic Star Wars film ever (except possible re-releases). But they never really enthralled me the way the Original Trilogy did. I guess I was a self-raised Star Wars fan, so I came to accept the Original Trilogy for what it was without putting too many expectations on it. In contrast, I expected a lot out of the PT and I got seriously let down by the results. Most of my friends in my generation (though not all of them) agree with me. I regularly rank the films from best to worst TESB, ROTJ, ANH, TPM, ROTS, and AOTC. The reason for this is that Lucas had a formula of visiting roughly three planets/space stations per film (he fudged a little on TESB with the asteroid field running concurrently with Dagobah). TPM follows this pattern the closest, and ROTS mostly does, although it deviates a few times. But AOTC just feels all over the place and the cause-and-effect are not always clear, which is why I really don't like it.

Anyway, just wanted to register my two cents coming from a person who missed the OT but was possibly too old to become enamoured by the PT. It's a strange place to be, but that's where I sit.

 

My parents were adults when the OT came out and they were enamoured with it. The PT, not so much. My generation is typically thought of as being "apologist fanboys" and I do like the prequels in general, but I don't aim to excuse their mistakes. How good they are however, is irrelevant to how canon they are.

As for if it would be dead, I think it would have been as popular as it was in the early 90s up until 2012, then we would have experienced a hype like we did between 96 and 99, when most of the so called "apologist" generation was born. I grew up when the prequels were popular, mostly because they were new rather than their quality. After 2015, star wars would emerge back into the public consciousness fully like it did in 1999, for better or worse. The sequels may have been less popular,for reasons that the prequels were, without previous movies to make people miss the OT.

 

I agree that without the PT films, the old EU would have filled in the cannon gap, but this material would most likely have fallen in the Great Cannon Massacre of 2014, like the post-ROTJ stuff did.
At that point, though without the additional lore added to/officially made part of the Star Wars mythos by the PT and TCW ( Palpatine's rise to power, fall of the Old Republic and the Jedi Order, political mechanics of the Clone Wars and the origin of the Clone Troopers. As well as Ye Olde Republic stuff like Darth Bane and the Rule of 2.) I was wondering whether given the well documented similarities between TFA and ANH, Disney wouldn't have simply opted to jettison the existing cannon entirely and start with an actual reboot of ANH. As opposed to making their new movies have to fit with a pre-established timeline?


Jedi_Sith_Smuggler_Droid Surprising. I would have thought a franchise like Lord of the Rings would have bigger legs than that?

 

I mean, fundamentally, would SW be dead? Of ****ing course not. There a dozens of irrelevant movies being kept alive by merchandise and smaller franchises still kicking too. But would SW be ANYWHERE near the phenomenon and franchise it is now without the PT? Seriously doubt it. Even if ROTJ was the last film and TFA came out in 2015 without any SW films in between, would the general and casual public care? Now, TFA probably wouldn't bomb but no way in hell would it make the money it did. The PT expanded the lore so much that even anti-PT YouTubers who talk about SW can't completely exclude PT, TCW, Clone Wars, Coruscant, Anakin, Obi-Wan, etc. The PT revitalized SW for a new generation in the millennials and it helped bridge the gap between the OT and ST generations. The PT generation are the torch bearers for the next gen of TCW/ST fans and SW was kept in the public eye in the late 90s and 2000s thanks to the PT.

 

Is this a JOKE??? Of course the franchise was not DEAD without the PT. I was a kid in the 90s and I burned through the Original Trilogy vhs tapes as did most of my friends. Star Wars was a huge part of culture decades after the OT was in theaters. The re-releases and special editions actually reinvigorated the franchise more than the prequels did imo. The Phantom Menace became a gigantic cultural phenomena at the time but the next films petered out.

Ultimately, IF the prequels had never been made Disney would have still been salivating to buy out Star Wars, would it have been for 4 Billion? Prob about half that but still a big buy.

 

I wouldn't say it was a dead franchise but it's probably safe to say that it was headed in that direction. The Special Edition helped someone like me (born in the late 80's) get into Star Wars but the PT helped me become the fan I am today. I'm sure that's the same with most fans as well.

 

Not dead but 35+ years without a new movie is a long time. No new movies means the tie-in merchandise automatically has a smaller footprint. No PT frees Lucas up for over a decade. Maybe he does nothing. Maybe he does something entirely different that further puts Star Wars out of mind. And even if someone gains control of the property and releases a fourth movie around 2015 or so, the release circumstances would be very different than what we saw in reality. There would be no "back to the old ways" marketing. More like "70/80s property reborn for modern audiences!" Star Wars 4 probably looks and feels like John Carter with Star Wars stuff thrown in. Probably performs decently, but not well enough to guarantee an ongoing cinematic universe.

 

I actually thought ROTS was way more off base with the planet organization than AOTC was. It is one of my few gripes with ROTS. When you include the order 66 sequence there is something like 11 planets in the film. Im also surprised Lucas would do that since he seems so self conscious of how different the planets are and the overall color scheme of the movie.

 

From Wikipedia, citing The Secret History of Star Wars

"In the early 1990s, Star Wars saw a resurgence in popularity in the wake of Dark Horse's comic line and Timothy Zahn's trilogy of novels. Lucas saw there was still a large audience for his idea of a prequel trilogy and with the development of special effects generated with computer-generated imagery (CGI), Lucas considered returning to his saga and directing the film"

Just saying...
"

 

The PT created an entire new generation of Star Wars fanatics. It's as simple as that. The OT, PT together made Star Wars multi-generational. (Actually, I think there's a dip in the fandom in the age range just below 40 -- either too young or too old to see Star Wars in the theaters as kids, prime age for SW indoctrination!) Star Wars is now something that kids can share with their parents, and sometimes their grandparents. (That's why releasing SW films during the holidays is a great idea. That's thought of as a family time of year and Star Wars has become sort of a tradition.)

If TFA was released now without the release of the PT, the audience most interested in it would be 40+ year-old men, sort of like Trek but for a slightly younger group. Original Trekkies are 50+.

Well, the new Trek films were aimed at creating a new audience and were well-received (though I didn't like them), and they only grossed $200-250 million domestically.

I imagine that a TFA without the PT/TWC would gross around $400-500 million since Star Wars had a larger fan base and because their original fans are younger.

On the other hand, Trek has been always been around in one version or another since 1980 -- tv series or films -- so it's not as if it totally fell out of the public consciousness.

So, maybe I'm being generous in my estimate. 35 years is a long time.

Gone with the Wind was absolutely gigantic in 1939. How good would a well-done sequel of it been received in 1975?

 

Whaleyland - I hear what you're saying about the galaxy jumping in Attack of the Clones. That's why it feels the most like an actual sci-fi serial to me and closest to Star Wars roots. The problem with that is -- Star Wars is leagues better than what it's based on. Still I like the spirit of Attack of the Clone and as a big Clone Wars Fan - Episode 2 feels the most like that series.

Zannah Sith'ari - I agree with Wikipedia and you. Star Wars was dead and gone... Or so people thought by the close of the 80s. That's when the kids who loved Star Wars were becoming Young Adults who loved Star Wars and they had disposable income and gobbled up every scrap of Star Wars we could still find. It took a little while for companies and the meie to see how popular it still was. They needed sign. The first new Star Wars book in probably 8 year -- instant #1 best seller. Heir to the Empire was a big wakeup call that there was still money in Star Wars and people loved it.

What was nice about this time was the fans led the companies selling them Star Wars products as much as any company pushed it on us. All that led to the Special Editions which paid for the Prequels. The success of the Thrawn Trilogy set all that in motion.

 

Wikipedia is not a source, and The Secret History of Star Wars is not a source either. It's a fan made book that mixes fact, personal interpretation and speculation.

There's no source that corroborates the statement that Zahn's trilogy had any influence on George's decision to do the prequel trilogy or the Special Edition for that matter. Quite the contrary. The Special Edition project was made at 20th Century Fox's suggestion to celebrate ANH 30th anniversary. Since the movies were being restored for this theatrical re-release, Lucas took the opportunity to make the changes and improvements he always wanted while at the same time testing the technology and what could be done in preparation for the PT.