Lucas was at his best when he had people to tell him “no”
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Or, in the case of Harrison Ford, just ignored his script and ad-libbed several lines of dialogue.
Anyway, I feel honour-bound to blow this thread up:
I like Jar Jar Binks
Sorry/not sorry.
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You sick little monkey!
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Has anyone here seen The Phantom Edit? I still don’t think it makes The Phantom Menace a good movie, but it makes it a much better movie than what it was in Lucas’ hands.
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I just flat-out love Star Wars. It literally has to be Holiday-Special-level bad before I reject it. I like originals, sequels, prequels, animated series, Disney+ shows, novelizations, video games. You name it. It’s impossible for me not to have fun in the Star Wars Universe. (Except, again, the holiday special, which goes out of its way to make the universe as dull as possible.)
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I’ve never really disliked Jar-Jar, but one thing that’s gotten me to soften on him more over the years is knowing how hard it was on Ahmed Best that everyone hated the character.
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it’s not that guys fault. at best, all he did was work on a job he was hired for. he may or may not have even come up with the ’ questionable’ accent. That’s why I feel sorry for him and people like jake lloyd. no reason to be nasty to someone just because you don’t like a character they played.
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Jar Jar’s problem was that he was over-used in The Phantom Menace. When he used him less in the other two movies, he was fine. Going back to The Phantom Edit, he minimizes Jar Jar in the film and removes a lot of the unnecessary slapstick and he’s a tolerable character.
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Oh, I don’t know.
I experienced the OT in real-time, over 6 years. To me, it felt (and still does) like he had everything pretty tightly scripted until just about the point that the oven-mitt space slug comes out of the asteroid, and after that he had some mental sketches, and that’s about it. He pulled “I am your father” out of his butt, and ROTJ feels like it was mailed in for the sake of his kids.
Ep. 4 and half of 5 work for me in the same way that Raiders works for me, non-stop fun.
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I’ll be the one - I actually kind of like the holiday special, if only for how gonzo insane it is. Let’s show an in universe cooking segment! Bea Arthur inexplicably running the cantina! Itchy watching what sure seems to be wookiee porn!
…okay, it’s not good, but I enjoy parts of it despite that.
You know, the fact that my first real exposure to Star Wars was early morning reruns of the Droids and Ewoks cartoons on Sci-Fi might have colored how I relate to the franchise.
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I like the Holiday Special for the same reason I like Plan 9 From Outer Space. It’s a spectacular disaster of epic proportions. It’s absolutely hilarious.
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I loaned my copy of the Holiday Special ** which I totally don’t have a bootleg copy of** to a work buddy. I handed it to him, making him promise he’d watch the whole thing. He had an eager smile when he said okay.
The next day he hands me back the disc with a thousand-yard stare and a shocked expression on his face. “I couldn’t last ten minutes,” he mumbled.
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My favorite part about The Holiday Special is how little it explains any of Life Day and how it’s celebrated.
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Even the merchandise Disney sold this year for it seemed…well, cult-ish. Glowing orbs! Plushies of Chewbacca in red robes!
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A friend of mine perfectly crystalized her misgivings with the prequel trilogy by pointing out how similar it is to fan fiction. She cited such tropes as the need to explain (in exhaustive detail) things that didn’t need further development, strange rituals, making women alien/unapproachable, focusing on bureaucracy (and its workings) as a main plot point, etc. “In A New Hope,” she said, “boy saves girl, and then the galaxy. That’s the story, from A to B. What’s the story of Phantom Menace?” Trade negotiations are pretty much the only real self-contained plot going on. Everything else is window dressing or a set up for another story we’ve already seen.
Given that, though, I’ve come around a bit on my dislike of latter-day Lucas. My charitable read is that, in the mid-90s, he went onto the internet to see what it was Star Wars fans wanted. And at that time, the internet fan content was almost entirely fan fiction or discussions of minutiae. I now believe that Lucas made the prequel trilogy as something he honestly thought the fans wanted, because when viewed through the lens of obsessive fan fiction, it ticks every single box. (I’m still never going to watch Revenge of the Sith, though I’ll acknowledge it probably did what was intended).
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For whatever it’s worth, Revenge is easily the best of the prequel trilogy, IMO.
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My take was always that Lucas was more interested in building worlds than telling stories in them. (Kinda like Tolkien.) Lucas is the creator of probably the most fun playground ever to tell stories in. He just wasn’t super-good at telling stories himself. But you can see how in every nook and cranny he leaves little holes that scream, “Something interesting probably happened here! Tell that story, storytellers!” That’s why Clone Wars almost single-handedly redeemed the prequels.
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That’s exactly what my sister says (she’s been trying to get me to watch it forever). But when I ask if the best of the prequel trilogy means it’s good, she changes the subject.
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I don’t delve much into behind-the-scenes stuff but I feel like the entire prequel trilogy could’ve benefited from one experienced actor of a similar ability and caliber to Ford coaching his/her young castmates on how to deliver lines. Or come up with different lines altogether 
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