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From a toddler to a teenager, I loved Star Wars. I watched the movies continuously, played as many of the video games (usually on friends' consoles or computers) as I could, hunted for the original toys at flea markets, read all the old novels (like, Splinter of the Mind's Eye old), ate up Tim Zahn's books and most of what followed that, etc, etc, etc. An aunt of mine bought me the Star Wars edition of trivial pursuit and no one would play with me after the first game -- "how do you freaking know how many Storm Troopers got shot in that scene???"

And then Phantom Menace came out. I remember being in shock. "It was good ... right, guys? Guys?" And then Attack of the Clones ... it was just indefensible. Luckily, Knights of the Old Republic and Tartakovsky's Clone Wars restored some of my wide-eyed faith in the franchise. And Revenge of the Sith was ... if I say better than the first two prequels combined, I guess that isn't saying much. But even RotS being ... okay compared to JarJar and "your skin is softer than sand, Padme" wasn't enough.

By the time I realized the ship was sinking for me, I was up to my neck. I think the precise moment I realized it was halfway through the first season of the CGI Clone Wars. It just sort of popped into my head that I hadn't really been interested in the show from the start. I was just watching out of obligation and an unconscious hope that Star Wars might be good again. Nowadays, I see Star Wars stuff and it's just like "oh, George must want to put in a new pool on the ranch." I know it's not all crap and I know that other people are still really into it.

But I feel like Stan in that episode of South Park where he looks around and sees gak everywhere. I see a Darth Vader t-shirt and it looks like someone smeared gak on cotton. I see Star Wars Lego sets and it just looks like a pile of gak sprinkled what must have been very painful sharp-corned plastic bricks. Don't even get me started on the latest MMO. They say free to pay and all I can think of is why did anyway pay to rub this gak in their eyes in the first place.

Enter FFG. FFG is a company that doesn't always knock it out of the park but they do their dammedest from release to release. And now they have the Star Wars license. For the first time in years, Star Wars merchandise is looking a little appealing to me. When I see their new X-Wing miniatures, I'm not just seeing a turd impaled on a clear toothpick which is turn glued to a cheap plastic square. It's looking like a badass fighter plane from the future which is somehow also the past ... like in the old days. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.

But this little light of mine is fragile. It's like a match in a hurricane. I gotta be careful with this one. And I hope FFG is trying to be careful. I wonder if they feel the pressure of all the schlock Star Wars has gone through as it's been wrung for every red cent over the last decade or so especially. And I wonder what the rest of you guys think. Are you a diehard fan who never lost faith? Do you not remember a time before the prequels? What do you think about this monumental property and all the ups and downs its been through?

Fellow Sith Lord here!

Love the story.

Took my boyz to Disney World last spring and they had a live action Jedi Training set for young padawans... both boyz "dueled" Darth Vader and Darth Maul... it was all kind of awesome.

Fantasy Flight Games is making X-wing models? Either way link please OP.

I just kinda... ignore the prequels to be honest. I still love Star Wars, the EU is pretty awesome and most of the games are decent. So who needs three more films? My kids if I have some will never know of the "other" Star Wars movies.

The word "padawan" makes me cringe.

As near as I can tell, the definition of "padawan" is "expensive but cheaply made and dumb looking Halloween costume for ages 5 - 10."

When I discovered Star Wars, it was over. It wasn't something any of the kids I went to pre-school had heard of. It wasn't on TV. You couldn't get Star Wars toys or comics unless you found them at garage sales. And yet here was this huge myth cycle complete with fighter planes in space and laser swords. Why didn't anyone else know about this? The people I looked up to as a little kid knew about it. When I asked my dad about Star Wars, it was just like the scene of Obi-wan reminiscing to Luke about the Old Republic.

I grew up in an agnostic home. There were no bible stories, no magical world of prophets and angels and saints. I longed for that as a child -- and there it all was, exciting and timeless in Star Wars. And mysterious! In those days, no one had the slightest clue what a Sith Lord was. It was just some kind of sinister title attached to the impressive figure of Darth Vader, somehow making him even cooler. And the Clone Wars could have been anything; we only knew that those were golden times, times of incredible adventure. Whatever the Clone Wars were about, it was even more exciting than the events of A New Hope.

Watching Star Wars for me in those days was like discovering a lost civilization. And it was also the closest thing I had to the all-important moral cosmology that I am convinced children desperately need (and really should get from Sunday School or the like rather than the movies). Star Wars was my culture. John Williams score was my Mozart and Beethoven and Wagner. Yoda was my spiritual guru. All that pop philosophy on Dagobah meant something real to me.

I have a friend who still loves Star Wars. I asked him how he managed it. He said, "I just don't acknowledge the prequels. I understand that they're out there but in my own private fandom, they don't exist." Somehow, I haven't been able to do that. I remember reading an interview in Wired with George Lucas after RotS came out, where he compared himself to Darth Vader. In the beginning, he had been a good guy fighting against the corporate studio to show us this incredible vision. But looking at the prequels, he said he felt like he had fallen to the Dark Side. Now he was the studio: "I'm not happy that corporations have taken over the film industry, but now I find myself being the head of a corporation, so there's a certain irony there. I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid. That is Darth Vader - he becomes the very thing he was trying to protect himself against."


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KalashnikovMarine wrote:Fantasy Flight Games is making X-wing models?

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=174

Launching this weekend at GenCon.

Jar Jar Binks is my favorite character.

Honestly, I like 4-6, but dislike/have no opinion over almost everything else in it.


I take that back, KoToR was awesome.

Who has read the Books following Return of the Jedi?

You mean according to the in-universe chronology? I read them from Heir to the Empire up through ... uh, maybe Truce at Bakura or The Courtship of Princess Leia.

Yeah, don't be too hard on it. It depends on whose hands the story is in. Of course george is making money off it all, and thus cynicism is easy to embrace, but the fact is that he created this universe where endless tales could be told, and as long as someone is enjoying it, that should be enough. I mean, I'm old-school star wars. I was born the month A New Hope hit the theatres, watched it way too young, and had nightmares of the emperor for years after my mom took me to see RotJ in the theatre. After that, I read some of the comics and some of the novels, but wasn't too serious about them. Went and saw all the re-releases in the theatre, and was totally pumped for the prequels.

Even the prequels were pretty good, I thought. Jar-Jar and the droid army were a small price to pay for Darth Maul, the under-water scenes and the pod race. The other ones had similar cost/benefits. The main problem with them is that george decided he was going to direct them. Why didn't anyone point out to him that A New Hope just wasn't as badass as ESB and RotJ, and that maybe it was because he isn't that great of a director, given that ANH was the only one of the originals that he directed, and to me didn't have the weight of the other two. I think the prequels would have been better in a better director's hands, but they are still pretty awesome movies imo. It's just too bad they weren't less like ANH and more like ESB.

I don't watch much TV anymore, but the few episodes of Clone Wars I've caught have been decent. As for the video games, I've had fun with some over the years, haven't played them all, some have been dumb.

TL/DR: Star Wars is so huge some of it is bound to be cheesy/crappy/dumb, depending on who is telling what story, and who is watching it. Still doesn't take away from the epic awesomeness of much of it.

I read the first three Zahn ones. Actually picked up hardcovers of them in a secondhand book store not long ago.

Good post, Manchu. I had the good fortune of seeing Return of the Jedi in the theater (Empire, too, but I was too young to get it), and the SW stuff was more current when I got into it, but I totally get where you're coming from.

Murdog, it sounds like you're pretty ambivalent about Star Wars and think that what I would call it's 12-year slump is "good enough." I gotta say man, I seriously envy you. I think you have the right attitude.

I personally enjoy the clone series and revenge of the sith. Mainly because of general Grevious though.

Does anyone else remember those five minute animated cut-scenes, does anyone else think those were interesting?

Mannahnin wrote:I read the first three Zahn ones. Actually picked up hardcovers of them in a secondhand book store not long ago.

Have you had the chance to read them again as of yet? If so, what were your impression compared to back in the 90s? Truth be told, I didn't like them much myself. But in the 90s, they were like water in the desert. Dark Empire had yet to come out -- and those comics simply astounded me. To this day, I think Star Wars has only been that good a few times: the first KotOR and Tales of the Jedi, to be precise.


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Mr Nobody wrote:Mainly because of general Grevious though.

I think Grievous had a huge amount of potential. I wish he had been introduced in the first prequel to fight against an adult Anakin. Darth Maul and Count Dooku were pretty unnecessary. Grievous needed more than one movie.


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Mr Nobody wrote:Does anyone else remember those five minute animated cut-scenes, does anyone else think those were interesting?

Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars. I mentioned them in the OP.

Manchu wrote:You mean according to the in-universe chronology? I read them from Heir to the Empire up through ... uh, maybe Truce at Bakura or The Courtship of Princess Leia.

I think I stopped after Chewie died during the Vong series...

One thing that impressed me was that the series' events is strictly enforced. That is, what ever happened in the previous series had to be acknowledge... no retconning was allowed.

As much as I dislike that Gotye song, this pretty much sums things up for me:

I had dropped out before the Yuzhan Vong showed up. Seemed a bit jump-the-shark to me when I heard about it.

Damn, I wish A truce at Bakura could be made into a movie. That was an awesome book.

Really though, I think there will eventually be more star wars movies, though I doubt Lucas will have much to do with them.

A New Hope was very good, TESB is one of the greatest movies ever made, but you could tell with RTJ that Lucas was more interested in marketing ploys (fething Ewoks) than making a high quality film. His ego led to TPM being a terrible film on nearly all counts and AotC being another example of terrible dialogue and wooden acting despite the fact the story was decent and the setting was excellent. RoTS was much better than the rest of the prequels, but still inferior to all of the original trilogy. The cast, acting, dialogue, and story just wasn't there.

As far as the Expanded Universe goes...at least 75% is utter crap. The Thrawn Trilogy and Hand of Thrawn Duology are probably the best EU novels written. The Yuuzhan Vong series was okay and gets a lot of unwarranted criticism even though it was a breath of fresh air. Too much of the EU is repetitive, corny, or uninspired. Anyone who has read Darksaber or Children of the Jedi understands just how poor some of the writing can be.

It's a fascinating and wonderful fictional setting, but Lucas is a poor writer in many regards. Its pretty sad that KotOR and KotOR 2 tell a better story and have more developed and interesting characters than any of the prequel films.


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Manchu wrote:I had dropped out before the Yuzhan Vong showed up. Seemed a bit jump-the-shark to me when I heard about it.

The EU jumped the shark with Dark Empire and the nonsense about the Emperor being reborn into cloned bodies.

I have the OT on VHS tapes that I patently refuse to get rid of. I keep a VHS player around the house, just for those tapes. I didn't get to see the OT in theatres (I was born the year ESB came out.), but growing up in Germany we didn't get a whole lot of understandable TV. I watched our copies of the OT on an almost weekly basis.

Yuzhan Vong was terrible stuff. As bad as the prequel trilogy was, there was definitely a story that could have been told there. Unfortunately, we'll never know what that story was anymore. I do get the Star Wars: Legacy Dark Horse comics, but they're kinda bad. Some of the Clone Wars comics were pretty well done though.

Lego sets are baller beyond words. I wish I had the money to spare to pick up some of the latest sets.

Gendy Clone Wards was good. New Clone Wars is also good, once you get past the first couple episodes and don't have to hear "Ar Tooey" and "Skyguy". Latest episodes are pretty awesome and dark. Strangely enough, many of the best episodes don't even feature the main characters: they focus on the Clone Troopers.

Dark Empire came out in 1991. Along with Heir to the Empire, this is where the EU starts.

Truce At Bakura was a classic!

My favorites are inevitably the X-Wing series by the incredible Michael Stackpole and Aaron Alliston. I, Jedi was also a good one. There's some killer stories in the EU.

Manchu wrote:Dark Empire came out in 1991. Along with Heir to the Empire, this is where the EU starts.

Exactly. It jumped the shark at the very beginning.


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KalashnikovMarine wrote:Truce At Bakura was a classic!

My favorites are inevitably the X-Wing series by the incredible Michael Stackpole and Aaron Alliston. I, Jedi was also a good one. There's some killer stories in the EU.

I, Jedi was one of the better stories out there. Much better handling of the Jedi Academy Trilogy events then the actual trilogy...

Amaya wrote:

Manchu wrote:Dark Empire came out in 1991. Along with Heir to the Empire, this is where the EU starts.

Exactly. It jumped the shark at the very beginning.

I have to disagree. Dark Empire showed us a completely new side of Star Wars that still somehow felt authentic. It was hard to even imagine Ewoks in this world of smugglers' planets and a galaxy with a heart darker than we had ever imagined. The severe inking and surreal watercoloring created a sci-fi fantasy world that was simultaneously gritty and psychedelic. The EU has rarely done as well, been as creative, or taken such risks.

GalacticDefender wrote:Damn, I wish A truce at Bakura could be made into a movie. That was an awesome book.

Really though, I think there will eventually be more star wars movies, though I doubt Lucas will have much to do with them.

It isn't even on my wishlist but I would love to see a KoToR movie. It would give them the chance to do KoToR 2 right.

You're a comic book fan, I'm not. Personally, I thought most of the art for it was crap and overly stylized. Not impressive at all.

C'mon, the entire story was about how the Emperor didn't really die and has actually survived in rapidly decaying clones and is now trying to transfer his essence into Leia's unborn child.
Aside from the fact the story took any ludicrous element already in the OT and upped far past 11 it also was an insult to the ending of RTJ which was supposed to be closure in Vader's rejection of the Emperor and the Dark Side (you could even argue that the Emperor represents the Dark Side). Bringing the Emperor back and having Luke go through Vaderesque mini flirtation with the Emperor and the Dark Side was unnecessary and redundant. Luke had already faced down his personal demons when he refused to strike Vader down at the end of RTJ.

The Thrawn Trilogy managed to successfully continue the story by focusing on the repurcussions of the war and restoration of the Republic. Dark Empire just rehashed a grittier version of the OT.

Amaya wrote:

KalashnikovMarine wrote:Truce At Bakura was a classic!

My favorites are inevitably the X-Wing series by the incredible Michael Stackpole and Aaron Alliston. I, Jedi was also a good one. There's some killer stories in the EU.

I, Jedi was one of the better stories out there. Much better handling of the Jedi Academy Trilogy events then the actual trilogy...

It was a bit of a middle finger and intentional fix fic from what I understand. Either way Corran Horn is fething awesome.

Maybe it's because I love Dark Empire but I feel like there had to have been a lot of emotional fallout from RotJ. Could the Emperor really have conquered the whole galaxy just to be defeated by teddy bears? More importantly, it always concerned me that Luke wore black throughout RotJ. Yes, it showed that he was serious -- a Jedi Knight, although Bib Fortuna might scoff. But it also showed a kind of darkness that he had not dealt with and that Vader's last, rather ambiguous words could not resolve. Vader had sacrificed himself to save his son. Luke was right but the world had only become more complicated as a result. Gone was the relatively simplistic worldview of Obi-Wan and Yoda. The future would be murkier and more difficult to navigate. The rigid code of the Jedi would not be up to the task.

So much I want to say but can't articulate... Star Wars, I love you... but why must you hurt me sometimes... and why do I keep coming back to you knowing I'll just get hurt again...

Star Wars...you're breaking my heart. *force choked*

Amaya wrote:A New Hope was very good, TESB is one of the greatest movies ever made, but you could tell with RTJ that Lucas was more interested in marketing ploys (fething Ewoks) than making a high quality film. His ego led to TPM being a terrible film on nearly all counts and AotC being another example of terrible dialogue and wooden acting despite the fact the story was decent and the setting was excellent. RoTS was much better than the rest of the prequels, but still inferior to all of the original trilogy. The cast, acting, dialogue, and story just wasn't there.

Can you just explain how his ego made it a bad film? I can understand people thinking it was a bad film, despite liking it myself, but I fail to see how Lucas' ego affected the quality of the film.

Answering the original question:
I like Star Wars. I enjoyed all of the films, but cannot really decide which was my overall favourite (ESB for tone and plot, ROTS for sheer spectacle, both of which have a place within the stories in my opinion) I enjoy The Clone Wars when I can, but don't watch it religiously, and I often do not understand the criticism levelled at it, sure it's aimed at kids, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't fit in with the rest of the universe, and doesn't deserve to be on the air. It's cheap, no nonsense fun, and you can watch it for a half hour or so without thinking too much about the intricacies of the plot, or who is going to do what, and what happened in that one episode last season with this character to explain why he's doing what he is now. The plots are simple, but it doesn't mean that they're bad, just that they're simple. And you can enjoy them simply for the universe that they're set in.

Lucas' ego ruined Star Wars in that he thought he was a capable director and script writer. He succeeded only once in that regard with A New Hope. The prequels all would have been better with a legit director and screenwriter.