CT Sometimes I think Star Wars should have just been a trilogy

Nope. The Prequels are more Star Wars than the OT is for me.

 

I didn’t mean to suggest that they wouldn’t be considered beloved classics. Only that they would likely be much more of a relic of their time and not so much a visible part of the current pop culture landscape.

But on a side note in response to the OP, I think The Godfather is more of a duology with a coda than a trilogy, and I love the BTTF trilogy, but I don’t think it ever needed to be more than a single film. The Matrix, on the other hand, was always meant to be a trilogy, so like it or not it’s fine by me.

 

Then you are lost!

 

I'm in the same boat. I've liked many of the subsequent movies and TV series we've gotten, but not all of them. So now I have new things to enjoy in this broader tapestry, and the stuff I don't like as much detracts in no way from the stuff I do like, least of all from the originals. And while I may not like certain things, there are certainly many people who do. Why would I take that away from them?

 

Because their tastes differ from mine, ergo, they don't deserve to have nice things.

 

I wonder how many Star Wars fans would exist if the PT TCW show Disney shows or the Disney ST had never existed i would have remained a fan if Star Wars was just a trilogy of movies

 

Probably not as many fans...

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Perhaps. Each new iteration of SW renews it for the current generation of people/kids/audiences.

That said, everything is a "relic of it's time" yet...in this digital age that's less and less of an issue. In fact, it's almost a moot point.

Consider: Today's kids have instant access to (nearly pristine) copies of film/music/shows/etc from decades and decades before they were born. As a teacher, I see my middle schoolers routinely list films like Back to the Future, Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory (original version), Goonies, and Spider-Man (2002), and Wizard of Oz as their favorite films. These films (and others likes it) are consistently/constantly kept in the zeitgeist of pop culture.

On top of that, there is an enormous and continuous stream of merchandise that can always be found online/in stores...this wasn't the case back in the day. Certainly, a kid may be wearing a Ghostbusters shirt in a retro/hip/fashion way. Yet, more often than not, the kid is a fan of the og film. Back in, say 1995, you'd be hard pressed to find a new Ghostbusters t-shirt available for purchase. That's not the case anymore. Fandom has exploded exponentially and kept these films/albums/shows alive in the culture.

With today's easy access to nearly all of said art, and the constant availability to display one's fandom through merch/games/toys/etc, I have a hard time believing that Star Wars would be relegated some kind of niche thing. Even if there was only the OT it would be repackaged/resold to each new generation. We saw this happen with the trilogy in the late 80's and early 90's. Star Wars was BACK dominating pop culture in 1997 and that was when it was still just the OT being repackaged/resold to a new generation.

Great art transcends time. We knows this. The original films stand as a monolith amongst other films. The og Star Wars is a pivotal moment in cinema. They are as transformative as sound or color in pictures. It's not me saying that....film historians say that. The OT remains revolutionary in several ways. It literally transformed the medium of film. As it is with ground breaking musicians like Elvis, The Beatles, and Michael Jackson, etc... each new generation would bring a new group of fans that would discover/love the Star Wars trilogy regardless of when it was released.

 

There are fans who think that only ANH should be canon i like the OT only canon theory better

 

No.

Episodes 1-3 made the classic trilogy considerably better films, and truly told an epic cohesive story that has been shared with multiple generations now. While yes it would have been nice if the ST didn’t exist, or at the very least, had followed the story George had set out, in the end I still have the six part saga to enjoy.

Without TPM, it’s very possible I wouldn’t be a fan, given that it was the first Star Wars movie I ever saw

 

Sometimes i wish Star Wars was just a story about Darth Vader instead of a franchise Lucas once said that Star Wars was the story of Darth Vader and that when he dies the story ends there was nothing before TPM or after ROTJ like Lord of the Rings when Sauron is destroyed the story ends

 

Sometimes I think Star Wars should have just been Star Wars. The whole point is you are dropped into the middle of a serial sci-fi adventure with no context and with an unresolved villain still out there. No sequels, no prequels. It's one movie, that's it, not a saga. It was Lucas basically cramming in as many as his influences as possible into a single shot.

 

Did they? I love the PT, but there are some solid counter arguments to your claim that are worth considering.

1. Aesthetically different.

As visually impressive as the PT is, these films often don't feel like they are in the same universe as the OT. There is a certain grounded/gritty weightiness that the OT has that the PT (by in large) lacks. Due to the evolution of film technology, Lucas created the PT with a visual language that was quite different (aesthetically) than the OT. The OT was lived in. Not so much with large swathes of the PT. As Mark Hamill once narrated, "Maybe they were not of this earth, but they had to seem if they were of some earth somewhere." With the OT films, the galaxy was visceral. It looked like you could reach out and touch it. When you view the PT/OT trilogies side by side, there is an artifice that the PT has that the OT largely avoids.

So, if you dug Star Wars primarily for it's look, feel, production design...the PT just might have left you dissatisfied with it's change in design/direction/aesthetic.

2. The lore expanded....at a price.

Yep, the PT adds a lot of cool background info. Yes, the OT now has a new layer of subtext that wasn't there before the PT. It was cool to see how Palpatine took over. It was cool to see the flourishes of The Clone Wars. It was cool to see the Jedi in their prime, etc. It was cool to see how Anakin became Vader. Personally, I absolutely adore Ewan as Obi-Wan.

Yet, what the OT gained in specific detailed history, it lost in mythology and mystique.

As opposed to making the story larger, the PT actually shrank the galaxy. Anakin becoming the center of the universe as a messiah type figure, Anakin building 3P0, Jango Fett, midichlorians, etc.... all this kind of thing removes a good bit of mystique from the OT. It removes your imagination from the equation.

Before, the OT had the sense of of weighty history and previous mythology...yet does the PT deliver on this? Does it satisfy the imagination of fans and live up to the potential? It depends whom you ask.

3. Incongruity and continuity. These trilogies are not seamlessly connected. They are frankensteined together. I love it, but their are gaps and holes that Lucas simply didn't care about. "Continuity is for wimps" he once declared. Guess what? You can tell. You gotta quint to blur your vision, not care, or head canon your way out of some of these glaring differences.

Don't get me wrong, I love the PT. Yet to boldly declare that the Prequels make the Originals "considerably better" is not necessarily true.

To make a claim like this depends greatly one one's point of view. I find that (in general) those that make such declarations are those that grew up with the PT or didn't live long in a world in which Star Wars was only the original trilogy.

 

I don’t think that one needed to be of the Prequel generation to see that the story is enhanced by them.

But obviously I speak from my point of view

 

Me neither. I agree that the PT enhances the OT. Yet, this is not the same as saying the PT makes the OT "considerably better."

 

The PT makes Battlefront 2(2017) considerably better and that’s what truly matters.

 

I'm so glad Star Wars can be that.

 

I grew up on and love the OT of Star Wars. It is the gold standard for me. I love (some of) the subsequent EU that came out of them like Shadows of the Empire and Rogue Squadron.

While the PT/ST/etc. are a hit or a miss for me in various components. I do wonder ... if hypothetically Star Wars stops at the OT - what happens? Does it survive in video games/books/shows? Does it just officially end at the OT and no new material ever emerges?

I'm not sure how I'd feel about it. Again, there is a lot I dislike from the PT/ST but the expansion of this universe from worlds, to aliens, to ships, to different eras is one of my favorite things. I'd kind of miss that.

 

I think the OT really had become a massive cultural touchstone well before the PT's release, indeed I think you could argue when you look at the ages of a lot of hardcore fans it was actually the period after the original release that attracted a lot of them, viewing the films on VHS and Cable.

That's very much my own experience, Starwars was very popular indeed with children growing up in the late 80's and early 90's.

 

The merchandising machine would have helped to keep Star Wars relevant. The PT, ST etc etc undoubtedly swelled the core fanbase, but Star Wars' seat in the nudge nudge wink wink world of Pop Culture would have remained occupied even without the existence of supplementary media.

The OT's influence across multiple art forms is unquestionable, its cultural relevance is in a perpetual state of homeostasis.

"I bent my wookie" R. Wiggum 1994.

 

I totally agree on those three trilogies. But Star Wars is a different animal entirely. I like what came after in Star Wars but I agree with Satele on the sequel trilogy sucking. What comes before and after the OT is a matter of personal taste.

 

Should've been a duology. Star Wars and a weird cult classic type of sequel kind of like Return to Oz.