How would you feel about a prequel reboot?

[Lord Darth Hunter]

Oddly enough even though ESB is considered by most aficionados as the best of the saga, kids find that one the most boring. There is a big battle in the beginning and lightsabers in the end. Nothing of action happens in between. You have Jedi training and a budding romance. In this day and age what kid wants to sit through that?

[The Choc]

I agree, Empire was my least favorite until my late teens.

[Pong Messiah]

It was always my favorite, but I was quite advanced and had superior taste for my age.

[DANA-kin Skywalker]

ROTJ was my favorite growing up when I was a little kid. It was probably because:

The good guys all win

Cute little teddy bears

I loved the color green

Metal bikini boobies

[Jacen123]

When I was little, ROTJ was my favorite one. This was almost certainly partly due to all of the aliens and battles and partly due to my kindergarten class having an ROTJ picture book in the room (which ties into said aliens and battles) even though I hadn't seen anything SW before that.

 

Empire was my least favorite, but that could also be due to the strange order I first witnessed SW. First, there was that book I mentioned above. Then I saw Spaceballs, which was followed by Empire. I had no context as to why anything was happening and was horribly confused why Luke wouldn't go join his father and why the movie just sort of ended where it did. Then I saw Jedi, which I now had some context for. I rewatched these many times and only then saw ANH, which made everything make much more sense! So, in a way, ANH was sort of a "prequel" for me (at least in terms of how the damn media abuses that term now).

 

It was always my favorite, but I was quite advanced and had superior taste for my age.

Tsk. Sad that didn't last, isn't it?

[Pong Messiah]

Tsk. Sad that didn't last, isn't it?

HOW RUDE

[Jacen123]

Echuta!

[Lord Darth Hunter]

ROTJ was my favorite growing up when I was a little kid. It was probably because:
The good guys all win

I never realized it until you now mention this. But I believe you're right. I believe this would be a major reason why ROTJ was a lot of people's favorite when growing up. The 80's were all about good triumphing over evil. The good guys always won in the end. Back then there was no such thing as thinking the villain was "cooler." The villain was just a villain and you wanted him to get his comeuppance.

 

So yes, as a kid my favorite was also ROTJ. I loved it because of the battles in the end. My 80's kid senses were on overdrive with the ground battle, space battle and the duel all going on simultaneously. They all involved major characters, all were important to the story, and all were very easy to understand (I'm always amazed when I watch dogfights in films post-ROTJ and no matter how good the effects have gotten, it's still a confusing mess where you can't follow anything, i.e. Independence Day.) And as mentioned above, the good guys triumphed.

 

Funny now how the one we considered our favorite as a kid is now the one we consider the weak link of the OT with its burp jokes, Flashdance histrionics, Ewoks and goofy lighthearted scenes. (Luke screams out during the meeting to attack the Death Star, "I'm with you too." Cue John Williams happy music motif, the heroes hug it out and the meeting breaks up like this for no apparent reason. This is how the Rebels conduct military operations? No wonder the Empire wiped the floor with them in ESB.)

[DANA-kin Skywalker]

Luke screams out during the meeting to attack the Death Star, "I'm with you too." Cue John Williams happy music motif, the heroes hug it out and the meeting breaks up like this for no apparent reason. This is how the Rebels conduct military operations? No wonder the Empire wiped the floor with them in ESB.)

 

How would you like to be one of those other guys in the meeting, sitting in the back, wanting to shout: "if it's okay with the A-team over there, can we all get on with this critical battle plan?"

[Justus]

Rebooting a bloated mess of a series serves no purpose. The heart of that story was covered in a couple of lines in ANH & ROTJ, with no complaints.

[Justus]

 

The 80's were all about good triumphing over evil.

 

 

Your avatar does not agree.

[Brett]

I'd still like to see the story done well. I think it could be a great tragedy. Just leave out the space Jesus stuff.

[Dark Wader]

I think the problem is even if they did do it, no one could make prequels that satisfy everyone. I think the majority of us already had our own backstory for the saga before the prequels came out, and nothing will live up to that. Even if Lucas managed to make them great movies, I still doubt they'd be considered classic like the originals.

 

And at the end of the day, regardless of the many issues with the prequels, they would still be considered the definitive versions. Someone else can reinterpret it but what Lucas wrote will always be the actual story, purely because Lucas wrote it. That'd be similar to me re-writing Return of the King and claiming it was now the final book in the Lord of the Rings & to forget the Tolkien version.

 

As others said, plenty of other stories in the Star Wars universe, they should never need to re-make a Star Wars movie.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

I think the problem is even if they did do it, no one could make prequels that satisfy everyone. I think the majority of us already had our own backstory for the saga before the prequels came out, and nothing will live up to that. Even if Lucas managed to make them great movies, I still doubt they'd be considered classic like the originals.

 

 

Yep, very true. In the 16 years in between ROTJ and TPM, I personally did have my own imaginings of what the Clone Wars was, what the Jedi order was like (I expected more along the lines of Teutonic knights, or King Arthur's round table, than some celibate monastic order more like Kung Fu's Shaolin preists), who the clones were in the Clone Wars (I thought Jedi could have been cloned, as well as Stormtroopers) who the Mandolorians were (I thought they were the main antagonists of the Clone Wars with Boba Fett one of the few survivors, rather than the droid army), etc, and the ANH novel, Marvel Star Wars comics, theThrawn trilogy and Dark Horse comics of the early 1990s further muddied waters. The PT ended up being quite different than what I thought it would be, some good, some bad. So a reboot of the PT would be unsatisfying to those who lived through the first version of the PT, and confusing to new fans, because not only do we have a lot of speculation on what it might be like (or what we fans personally believe it might be like), but we have 3 films that already exist, that could be compared to any PT remakes.

 

 

And at the end of the day, regardless of the many issues with the prequels, they would still be considered the definitive versions. Someone else can reinterpret it but what Lucas wrote will always be the actual story, purely because Lucas wrote it. That'd be similar to me re-writing Return of the King and claiming it was now the final book in the Lord of the Rings & to forget the Tolkien version.

 

Yeah, I have a lot of issues with the PT, but unlike some here, I don't hate them. In fact, I like them a lot, just not as much as the OT. I think in the grand scheme of things, the PT got a lot more right than wrong, and my main complaint is really the handling of Anakin Skywalker, particularly AOTC (really, he wasn't so bad in ROTS, was he?). But nothing so bad that warrants a reboot.

 

I think I could get on board with re-edits of the PT films, though. How ironic that GL spent so much time editing the OT, when all he really needed to do is some minor re-editing and maybe adding a scene or three here and there with the PT films, particularly AOTC, and they might have been improved very greatly.

 

As others said, plenty of other stories in the Star Wars universe, they should never need to re-make a Star Wars movie.

There literally is a 5000 year span in which Star Wars has existed thus far, and really, the Abrams Wars (or AT-Abrams Trilogy? Disney trilogy? Post Lucas Trilogy? What do we call them?) will be a soft reboot of sorts, in their own right. I suspect that Abrams Wars will be akin to how Star Trek 2009 had Nimoy hand off Star Trek to the new cast, but on a larger scale.

 

People may be excited that the big 3 are in it, and are assuming Abrams Wars is a continuation of their stories, but I think they will basically be just the torch passers, and end up just being the Old Spocks of Abrams Wars. For example, look at the rumors we have so far: a Ben Kenobi-like Luke not appearing until the very end of TFA, Leia being a Mon Mothma-like character (how much did we see Mon Mothma?), and Han Solo rumored to die (in fact, I would be surprised if any of the big three survive the upcoming trilogy). Sounds to me more like the big three will have bit parts, and the movies will be more about the new cast, which in effect, is a soft reboot.

 

Also, if done even remotely like Star Trek 2009, a plethora of references to past films and Easter eggs will surely be present, but the original actors will be used sparingly and their main function will be to set the films up for the new cast to take over for not just Episodes 7-9, but spin offs as well. And given how much the post ROTJ EU focused on Luke, Leia, and Han, not only do I think will EU fans be pissed, but I think people who assumed there were many "Adventures of Luke Skywalker," will also be let down. So, with that in mind, people will complain about this trilogy too, and I reserve the right to be one of them.

[ShadowDog]

I've always realized that was part of the reason the PT was so hated. Yeah it had its issues, Jar Jar Binks especially. But the other people was it wasn't the story we had in our heads. NO movies could have ever combated that issue. We grew up thinking what we wanted for too long. There was no getting over that.

 

Back to watching the movies in order, sure you lose some surprises like Vadar is Anikan but you gain others. For instance, in IV the whole time Vadar is talking to and torturing Leia you're thinking "Does he know that's his own daughter? Does she know that's her father? How player is that?" It adds an entirely new dynamic to those scenes. Likewise, the entire time Ben is talking to Luke you're calling him a liar and you can't wait for Luke to find out the truth and see that confrontation, which pays off in the third movie. In the second and third movies you can't believe how old and tired Yoda is now. He's a shell of his former self and you realize how much the fight with the Emperor took out of him. Luke's youthful optimism is a stark contrast to a Yoda who has almost given up hope. And of course in Yoda's first scene with Luke you realize Yoda is just trolling him, making that scene even more awesome.

 

And so on and so on. For everything you lose you gain something.

[Mara Jade Skywalker]

 

Luke screams out during the meeting to attack the Death Star, "I'm with you too." Cue John Williams happy music motif, the heroes hug it out and the meeting breaks up like this for no apparent reason. This is how the Rebels conduct military operations? No wonder the Empire wiped the floor with them in ESB.)

How would you like to be one of those other guys in the meeting, sitting in the back, wanting to shout: "if it's okay with the A-team over there, can we all get on with this critical battle plan?"

 

[Darth Krawlie]

Why was he already wearing his pilot's uniform, anyway? This was a strategic meeting--he wasn't going to jump right into his ship and leave immediately. Unless he lived in his X-Wing the way bums lives in vans.

 

That's why Dennis Lawson didn't come back for TFA. He didn't want to be a bum.

[DANA-kin Skywalker]

I think the general problem with the PT had less to do with fans expectations and more to do with the challenges of doing a prequel versus a sequel, and Lucas's failure to execute. Writing a story backwards is harder than doing it forwards because you have more creative limitations. Lucas had to dance around all the dialogue from the OT to avoid being contradictory, and had to fit a specific timeline since he was reusing characters. He had to do all that, and fit it within three movies, requiring more planning of all three movies before completing just one. He had to consider what was to be shown on screen, and what was better left only vaguely explained in the opening crawls. It was going to get harder and harder with each movie as it got closer and closer to the final bridge between trilogies.

 

TPM was a colossal failure in that regards. It accomplished nothing and contributed little to the overall story. It didn't even introduce the characters well. You barely saw Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon was unnecessary and dies anyways, Anakin was only ten and unrelatable as a character (and is later recast, basically becoming a completely different character), Maul was disposable, Padme's character was very strange, and looked and sounded even stranger. Palpatine's promotion to supreme chancellor brings him closer to emperor, so that was good, but the whole story revolved around that and it didn't make any logical sense at all. Plus I thought it was very boring.

 

AOTC sets off to accomplish what TPM fails to do in terms of character introduction in a minute long elevator ride conversation between Obi-Wan and Anakin. The Kamino/Syfo Dias whodunnit plot point about Jango Fett and the clones was interesting, but was basically abandoned, probably because he was running out of movie screen time; he only had a movie and a half left and so much needed to still be done, because he squandered time in the TPM. The love story was creepy but it accomplished at least that, I guess. It tried to begin Anakin's dark side decent, but it just made him look like a serial killer in the making, and the fact the Jedi just roll with it is baffling. The clone wars began at the very end, so that was accomplished, plus we got to see an army of Jedi throw down which was cool.

 

ROTS was like cramming for a final exam the night before. A lot had to happen, characters had to die, switch sides and fall to the dark-side, people had to get pregnant, all while wrapping up a huge intergalactic war. It could have been great, but everyhing was rushed, to accommodate a very long lightsaber fight, which was the focus of this movie. It was very good, although clearly some sequences were shot for style points rather than functionality, but that aside I enjoyed it. It ended kind of badly, but not nearly as poorly as the fights in the first two. Everything was just rushed.

[Guest]

To answer the question in the title:

 

Bored. I'm done with it. Move on.

 

The movies weren't great, they weren't that awful. Lucas shouldn't have done everything, but it sounds like nobody wanted to work with him.

[Lord Darth Hunter]

He had to do all that, and fit it within three movies, requiring more planning of all three movies before completing just one.

 

I thought Lucas' biggest mistake in making the PT was that he didn't plan all three out together. He made one, then wrote the next and made that one and so on. Had he written out all three at the same time, I think it would have made for better execution. In AOTC we learn Dooku was once a Jedi who left the Order, there is a deleted scene that shows Obi Wan in the archives looking at a bust of Dooku as part of the Lost Twenty. If Lucas had been planning this character of Dooku all along, wouldn't it have been better served to have seen Dooku in TPM? He should've been in all those Council scenes in TPM, throwing in his two cents about what he thinks is going on. A scene between him and Qui Gon would've been powerful as well considering in AOTC Dooku talks about missing Qui Gon and he and Obi Wan differ on what they think Qui Gon would've done had he learned about the Sith controlling the Senate.

 

This is just one example of how the execution was flawed due to the fact Lucas didn't have all three planned out together.

[DANA-kin Skywalker]

Yep. That was my point all along. He wasn't up to the challenges of doing a prequel trilogy.

 

What he did successful, however, was merchandise the hell out of the movies. Tons of toys, pod racing video games, action figures, etc. He did that so well, and the story so poorly, that I can conclude but one thing from that: it was his primary motivation. He bled the first three movies dry by the 1990s so he needed some new ones. He sold his fans on the notion that he had the first three movies all polished up sitting on his desk, just waiting for the right time to start them. I think he just had some notes he had jotted down on a notepad one day, probably done in crayon.

 

And here we are again, ten years later, only this time instead of making three more movies, and dealing with the effort to creating them, and the negative publicity towards the way he might create them, Lucas found out he could make more money by selling Star Wars to a large, ambitious company like Disney, who in turn thought they could make more money than Lucas would be able to. Disney did announce that they discarded Lucas's draft of the movies that came with the purchase. Whether or not that actually happened or not is irrelevant, but the purpose of that announcement is clearly a sales pitch that they won't screw up these movies the way the fans say Lucas did the PT.

 

The difference is, hopefully, Disney has the right people for the jobs required, instead of Lucas doing most of it without anyone really challenging him on his questionable decisions, making not only a more profitable end product, but a better one as well. Only time will tell.

 

LOL so, yeah, back to reboots. Sure why not? We're in the money! We're in the money! $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[Quetzalcoatl]

Shadowdog,

 

Yeah, you make a good point. To be fair, I will agree that the PT does enhance the OT in some respects. Aside from the examples you mentioned, I always thought the prequels makes the ANH dual between Obi-Wan and Vader better. I've heard a lot of complaints over the years about how it looks lame now compared to the lightsaber duals the prequels gave us, but I feel that the prequels made that scene more powerful having shown us the friendship between the two, and then Anakin's betrayal. That awkward moment before the dual when the two just stare at one another is awesome now. I can really feel the tension in air when I watch that scene now, in a way that I couldn't before the PT existed.

[DANA-kin Skywalker]

It does enhance it in some ways I will give you that, but it does the opposite effect in so many other ways, IMO.

 

For instance, In the OT the force was more powerful than the lightsaber. Luke and Obi-Wan only used it when absolutely necessary. In fact that was a prominent theme of the OT, it was a defining characteristic of what it meant to be a Jedi, and it was what Yoda tried to teach Luke. In the PT, the Jedi couldn't go five minutes without igniting a damn lightsaber. In AOTC Dooku fought Yoda with the force for a minute before deciding "it's obvious this contest couldn't be decided by there knowledge of the force". So...throwing rocks and shooting lightning...that's it? Not going to try anything else? Two things borrowed from the OT; what...couldn't come up with anything new? All the overusage of the lightsaber in the prequels trivializes the force, making it less special and tainting the OT.

 

I guess the same could be said of the emperor and Yoda both having lightsabers. In the OT they just had the force because that's all they needed they were so strong. I'm not a fan of these two using them obviously, but when Yoda confronts the emperor in his office after knocking out the guards with LOLs, what does he do? He ignites his lightsaber and asks Palpatine "if he's so powerful, why leave?" Yoda failed his own damn test, the very same test he gave to Luke in TESB. The whole thing taints the OT.

 

Yoda training the younglings with the lightsaber + training sphere thingies in AOTC. Borrowed from ANH obviously, but I always thought that was Obi-Wans ingenuity with a makeshift training exercise for Luke from things he found on the Falcon. He grabbed a helmet off the shelf, and a floating sphere. Chewie and Artoo were playing a game so I figured the sphere was like a game or something, too. The OT reused that idea and turned it a standard-issue training exercise for Jedi babies. If that's the case...why would Obi Wan have one in ANH in the first place, and why did he decide to take it with him to Alderaan? It was just BETTER when it was only a make-shift training exercise Ob-wan put together on the fly.

 

lightsaber color and cylinder style brought meaning to them and the characters in the OT. Anakin's (Luke's) saber in ANH looked similar to Vader's because the same person made both; Vader's was blacker signifying his fall to the dark side. Obi-Wans was different from Anakin's because they had different personalities, but both were blue signifying similar alignment, and their friendship. Vader's was red signifying his alignment change to the Sith. Luke models his very own in ROTJ and it looks similar to Obi-WANs because that was his mentor. His color was green...for technical reasons but it worked perfectly for the story because it made him different and special...and he was. It set Luke apart from the typical old republic Jedi, because he was an atypical Jedi, from what we knew of them from the OT. What the PT did was make a rule, Jedi only have blue and green, Sith have only red, and Samuel L Jackson gets purple because Lucas didn't have the stones to say no to him. By making such a rule, and then breaking that rule for an actor with a big box office draw, it trivializes it's meaning, sullying both PT and OT. If you were going to give him a purple one, other people should have had different colors too, giving them all a sense of individuality and meaning.

 

I've already said how shoehorning Jabba in TPM detracts from ROTJ. I could go on, but this post is long enough and I will stop here.

[The Choc]

Geezus christ, they are just movies. Taints the OT? Get over it. My goodness.

 

The stuff about the lightsabers is just silly. I mean what in the OT suggests that a red lightsaber affiliated you with the Sith? I'll tell ya what, nothing. What rule are you talking about anyway? Luke had a green saber because it worked better against the blue screen they used for the scenes on Tatooine. Thats it, no special meaning. There is one bad guy with a red saber, maybe other bad guys have like orange or yellow or maybe even swirl, who the hell knows. It was one guy. The fact is Jackson asked for a purple saber, Lucas said yes. He said yes simply because the color of a friggin light saber doesn't mean crap.

 

The whole "using the saber often" detracts from the OT is just as dumb. Obi Wan uses it to cut off some guys arm for threatening Luke. This was some major emergency where the only option was a lightsaber? Moments earlier we saw him use the Jedi Mind Trick on storm troopers. This couldn't have worked here?

[The Choc]

And I actually think you are missing a big point in the PT. You are right, the Jedi go against alot of what they try to teach to Luke in the OT. Thats kind of the point. They are continually pushed into doing things that are against their core values. Windu says in TPM they can;t fight a war, they end up fighting a war. They end up deciding they'd have to take over the government. These are things the Jedi don't want to do, know they shouldn't do. But Palpatine has pushed things to a point where the Jedi are doing things they don't really want to do. It's part of why they lost.