Q&As About 'Star Wars': Do you like the Star Wars Prequels?

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Seen on Quora today: 

Do you like the Star Wars Prequels?

Do I like the Star Wars Prequels?

Sure. They’re not my favorite Episodes in the Star Wars Saga; that honor goes to the Original Trilogy.

After all, I’m a Generation 1977 fan, albeit one who waffled about going to see Star Wars for five months during its original theatrical release. The movie premiered in Miami in late May of that year, and if it had only had modest success instead of becoming a phenomenon as it did, I probably would have missed it altogether. Luckily for me, in those last pre-home video days, hit movies sometimes had their runs extended, and Star Wars had an unusually long one - it was still in theaters in July of ’78 before 20th Century Fox finally said, “Okay, that’s it. We’re taking Star Wars out of theaters. “ That is, until the summer of ‘79, when Fox brought it back to theaters.

The point I’m trying to make is this. I’m not a fan whose first exposure was The Phantom Menace as a nine, 10, or 11-year-old kid. I was 14 and going on 15 when I saw Star Wars (aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope) for the first time. I’d seen the movies from the Original Trilogy at least 100 times in theaters and on VHS by the time Lucasfilm and Fox released Episode I on May 19, 1999.

Not only did I see The Phantom Menace on Opening Day, but I also already owned the novelization (in hardcover) by Terry Brooks. I also had the Sony Classical soundtrack album. (Both were out almost a month before the film hit theaters.) So I knew, as did many others who (a) had bought the same stuff I had or (b) had Internet access, more or less what the film was going to be about. (Oh, yeah…I also had the Illustrated Screenplay.)

Did I like everything about The Phantom Menace? Well, no. I didn’t mind that Anakin was a kid, nor did I think that Jake Lloyd did a bad job in the role. But I thought (having read TPM in both novel and script formats) that it would have been better to have kept Anakin’s run-in with a young Greedo rather than to leave it out of the final film. Seeing Anakin show anger - and act on it - would have foreshadowed one of his alter ego Darth Vader’s most prominent character flaws. I also disliked the use of “Ani” as a diminutive for “Anakin.” (The novelizations’ version is worse: Annie. No wonder he was so easily seduced by the Dark Side; he hated being called “Annie!”)

I’m not going to list all of my peeves with the Prequel Trilogy. We’d be here all night (or day), and neither you nor I have that much time to spend on this topic. Let’s just say that I know the Prequels aren’t perfect and that some of their plots and secondary characters aren’t ones that I would have written. Or, if I had, I wouldn’t have written them the way Lucas did.

Again, not as much as I love the 1977–1983 Original Trilogy, but I like them enough to have bought them on DVD and Blu-ray.

But for all that, I enjoy the Prequels. I like the Prequels.

Oh, and before you ask, I also like the new post-George movies.