by eabaker » Wed Feb 06, 2013 5:05 pm
I kinda missed a part of this conversation that interested me, but I'll throw in my belated pair of pennies.
The reason that I don't feel like Star Wars has been ruined, like the stupid stuff in the prequels doesn't have to be applied to the original trilogy, is that the original trilogy was part of a more-or-less continuous cultural moment. Those three movies flowed organically from Lucas and his team without a significant break in the creative process.
By taking a decade and a half away from the project, Lucas broke that continuous creative flow. The George Lucas who wrote the prequels may have shared a broader continuity of consciousness with the George Lucas of 1977-1983, but he was very much a different man, informed by a wealth of experiences in the interim, and revisiting his earlier work from a totally new perspective, for a new world, with the continuity of creative output completely broken.
So, as part of a different creative burst, I do not consider the prequels as something that must now be taken into account in viewing and interpreting the original trilogy.
Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world.