The original films were all about good battling evil, and they managed to do it, for the most part, without weighting the film down with a whole political sideshow. Just look at the gravitas of the scenes with Vader and the Emperor trying to pervert Luke to the Dark Side. Pretty good action, lots of cackling by the bad guy, Vader being Vader, and it worked because it was done economically. It helped that the filmgoer could relate to Luke, who was played as a likable fellow by Hamill, as opposed to Anakin, played by Hayden Christensen, an actor with the charisma of a block of wood. Frankly, I didn't care at all about Anakin, whereas Mark Hamill's Luke was someone I could like, care about, feel the tension as he fights his darker half, and then cheer at is final rejection of evil.

I agree absolutely. Even the best EU books are mediocre at best, and the worst are worse than fan fiction. There was no way Disney was going to take this franchise it had spent a bazillion dollars and hang it on the EU series'. No one in their right minds would.

I don't agree. Star Trek The Motion Picture largely worked, and I've come to appreciate it far more over the years. In fact, the the ST:TOS films did a pretty damned good job all in all of moving the franchise from the 1960s TV series into the film world, and set the stage for the franchise's later successes. The key to TOS, television series and films, was that the characters were so sufficiently defined that you could literally hang any damned story you wanted on them and make it work.

I remember watching RotJ ad intensely disliking the Ewok scenes. They still seem absurd, pointless and jarring, and are one of the reasons RotJ is the lesser of the original three films. Yoda, on the other hand, was one of the breakout characters of the whole franchise; wise, powerful and a bit cranky, pretty much a kung fu master transplanted into a galaxy far far away.

But Jar Jar was a whole other level of awful. First of all, he was, whether Lucas intended it or not, a horrible racial caricature, but even if you look beyond that, he literally serves no purpose. As a comic foil, which C3PO was so successfully in the first films, he just stunk. Lucas clearly didn't like him, as he spent a good deal of script space having the other characters abuse him, culminating in Jar Jar selling out the whole bloody Republic by recommending to the Senate that they give Palpatine unlimited powers. C3PO and R2D2 may have been comic foils, much as the characters they were based on from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, but they were still, by and large, loyal and trusted companions. Jar Jar was a pathetic idiot intensely disliked by everyone.

I can't imagine anything worse than making a Stargate sequel that references SG-1, Atlantis and all the other dreck they pumped out. A sequel to the movie, now that would be cool.

If air support has been part of battle in the real world for a hundred years now, one would think that the Trade Federation would have invested in some jet aircraft. Review that final battle on Naboo, and tell me that some fighter jets wouldn't have obliterated the entire Gungan army in very short order indeed.

But Lucas's ground battle scenes have never made sense. The Hoth and Endor ground battles had ludicrous hardware. If they were itching to beat the Rebels on Endor, why didn't they just go Tet Offensive; burn the forest to the ground. We're talking about a bunch of teddy bears and a very small number of Rebels with little more than blasters. I get that the first squad was taken by surprise, but once they realized Death Star II's shield generator was about to be compromised, why fuck around at all? What, they don't have napalm in a galaxy far far away?

But the Gungan-Trade Federation final battle was really silly.

Wait for the dupes.

Anything but the Borg... Please! Incredibly cool the first few times, but if there's an entry in the dictionary for overused villains, the Borg are the primary entry.

The whole point was that the original trilogy was very much a whiz-bang adventure story with cool looking aliens (well, providing you exclude the cantina scene from A New Hope). Things were goofy, lots of knockoffs of Golden Age B film serials, but it was all a great deal of fun. Even when things got a bit more serious in Empire and RotJ, there was still that goofiness; Yoda was funny and cool all at once, the Emperor was spooky and just over the top enough that a Nazi SS uniform wouldn't have been out of place.

And then you get the prequels, filled with a late middle aged Lucas's political angst, his desire to make these big expensive films that would make some sort of point beyond just being some crazy action sequences interrupted by a little green guy spewing Zen-like metaphysical phrases. Oh no, it had to be about THE FALL OF DEMOCRACY AND THE RISE OF TYRANNY, and everything that actually made Star Wars a silly and fun experience was tossed out the window.

Too bad Lucas didn't review that whole section of Empire before creating the concept of midichlorians. I tend to think of the Prequels as prequels to a film trilogy that vaguely resembles Episodes IV-VI, but populated by wooden, semi-coherent beings that need some bacteria to make them walk or talk at all.

5. for the love of god make sure the villains aren't Vader/Emperor retreads...and PLEASE don't find some half asses way to resurrect the them!

You mean like how Zahn did with the Emperor's ghost and clone?

I read Zahn's books. While certainly better than the other trash to be found in the Expanded Universe, they were pretty bad.

Many? How many? Just by Surface pro sales thus far (or at least what we can divine), the number of people is exceedingly small. And really, you're just rehashing the same arguments that Microsoft has been making for two years now, with little to show for it. Android and iOS devices still dominate the tablet and smartphone world, and Microsoft is still dumping boatloads of money into platforms that have few actual consumers.

But that's largely impossible, as it is clear that Disney intended on having the main heroes from the original trilogy reappear. It would be one thing if you were telling the stories of other characters in the Expanded Universe, but I'd argue even that would be a mistake. If Star Wars is going to be a functioning film franchise again, it has to link directly to the previous films. It can't be simply "it happens in the same universe...", for them to refire the franchise, they need to have major crossover; that means, Han, Luke and Leia, even if only in a more secondary role. Since pretty much every move those three characters make for decades after RotJ is mapped out by the Expanded Universe, I can't see how it could be done, or why one would even try. Once they get the franchise up, then they can make their other "in the same universe" films, but the first film out of the gates has to be a direct sequel to RotJ, and Abrams and the writers cannot bind themselves down like Lucas was to the prequels.

I'll be blunt, the Expanded Universe fans are only a small subset of the potential ticket and merchandise buyers that Disney needs to convince to spend money. I get that the fans of the Expanded Universe are feeling let down, but they don't have the numbers to make or break the franchise, and Disney isn't going to worry its head off about maybe a few tens of thousands of readers when it wants to go after a billion+ theater-goers, toy buyers and McHappy Meal eaters.

The midichlorians were so absolutely unnecessary, and in many respects made no sense to the way the Force had been explained before. In the original films, Vader could sense Luke was strong with the force. Everything was predicated on the Force being this all-encompassing field that everyone, even rocks, had (remember Yoda explaining the Force to Luke in Empire... "the rock, your ship"). They did nothing to enhance the viewer's knowledge of the Force, and rendered much of the original Dagobah scenes', where Luke is receiving his tutelage, just plain wrong. It's baffling why they are in the prequels.

The problem with the prequels was that, for all the incredible CGI techniques, they were just dull fucking films. You have that pod race that is the major mid-film set piece, and, it's absolutely a snoozer compared to the speeder chase at the middle of RotJ, even though in every way the pod racer scenes are miles more sophisticated from a visual point of view than the pretty brief speeder bike scenes.

I think one could look at why the chase scenes in RotJ worked, and why the pod racer bit didn't, and I sometimes wonder if the all-too-perfect effects in some ways made the Phantom Menace seem more like watching a video game over one someone else's shoulder.