I really like the Star Wars universe. Trash and all. Could Disney do better? Yes. Could Lucas Arts have done better? Absolutely. Art is never perfect, but that is what makes the art beautiful. Perfection is boring.

But as someone who used to despise Star Wars, you really need to pay attention to the extended universe(EU) to get a more complete picture. The EU fills in all the holes that the movies/shows create, provide a better view of what the force actually is, and often provides more interesting stories by not focusing on the Skywalker saga.

I now absolutely love Star Wars only because I gave the EU a chance.

First time I see an article with a question where the answer is "yes".

Yes

Yes yes they are. Don't need to look past the sequel trilogy films. Which are essentially:

A happy days reunion special.

Running from set piece to set piece with a mess of a plot

Fuck it let's just bring Palptine back to make it look like we had some grand plan.

Yes. As far as I'm concerned, with notable exceptions of stuff like Andor (this is AMAZING), the real Star Wars story is the pre-Disney EU, which was, contrary to popular refrain, fairly consistent once they got the "keeper of the Holocron" to make sure the stories were relatively cohesive and didn't contradict one-another.

A bunch of the authors even worked to retcon-remove the Dark Empire storyline with the reborn Emperor in their various series by referring to that as "mere rumors" and whatnot.

That's not to say the entire EU was marvelous. But I read the vast majority of it - overall it entirely eclipses what Disney has been doing in terms of quality and depth. Not to mention...Disney, with their tabula rasa, still have stories contradicting one another and introducing inconsistencies...

For me, Disney's Episodes 7-9 never happened. I consume and recognize anything that doesn't materially contradict the prior EU - I'm O.K. with smoothing over, explaining away, and massaging stuff to make it work. But "Kylo Ren" is a dollar store knock-off of Darth Caedus.

They seem like normal movie execs. They don’t understand what works or doesn’t work then they make weird conclusions that they will use as blanket decisions for everything else they do. Then they get confused why everyone isn’t throwing all of their money at them.

Their content is fine. It’s just not great and it certainly never reaches they hype the brand thinks it deserves.

I'm explicitly not a star wars fan, and never really have been. Before the Disney buyout my friends gave me mad shit for preferring the prequel trilogy as movies simply because the OT is just (gonna get ripped for this but idfc I got an A defending my point in film school so) not very good looking or interesting to watch by today's standards, really (and I watch 2001 like yearly so clearly I'm an expert). But, I really liked the concepts the universe had and the expanded universe, and I like how much Mark Hamill loves being Like and that rubbed off on me and I like Luke too.

Then Disney got their hands on it and I watched all the people who used to shit on me slowly turn to my side. Felt like emperor palpetine seeing my Anakins finally come to my side, honestly. So I know they're fucking it up

Even my wife, who much like someone else in this thread isn't really into star wars, had seen the OT recently enough that when Luke showed up in The Mando and started being all not-Luke even she was "who is this and what did he do to my boi", because people have basic story/object permanence?

Disney is bad at an awful lot of things. Why would they be good at Star Wars, of all things?

For this I look to my wife. She is someone who did not grow up with Star Wars so she has no bias or expectations. She also doesn't keep track of lore and "universes". I mean, unless we binge watch, she'll literally forget who main characters are. For her she either likes or dislikes a show on its own merits. Most Disney releases she has outright hated. Unexpectedly, she enjoyed " the one with the red sand" (The Last Jedi). My theory is that she had no hangups with all the lore breaks and such. Expectedly, she loves "baby Yoda", even if she can't remember anything else about the show (honestly, neither can I). I have not shown her Rouge One yet as I am waiting for Andor Season 2 before we binge it all.

My working theory always was: Star Wars is better without lightsabers

The more lightsabering and force using there is it gets worse.

For the most part, yes. Someone needs to make a Star Wars in the spirit of the first Pirates. With everyone double crossing each other except the Jedi

I feel like people just like to shit on literally everything these days.

Star Wars has always been a mixed bag of good and bad products. Plenty of high budgets, scrapped projects and fan backlash on Lucas his content too. And some stuff is simply subjective, not everything is meant for everyone.

This isn't exclusive to Disney, which also delivered good and bad products. Much like what Lucasfilm and LucasArts did back in the days, or did everyone casually forget the insane criticism that the prequels got? Or the big promising games that were in deep stages of development that were scrapped. Or gems like the Holiday Special.

The only difference now is that everyone and their moms can express their opinions online, and it'll get a lot of traction. Negativity is always more likely to make its way to the frontpages. Because it's an easy way to farm clicks, views, likes and whatever else fake internet points are out there to get publicity.

I enjoyed most of Disney's SW content, very similar to enjoying most of Lucasfilm/LucasArts content.

I think you can have in-depth Star Wars feeling/knowledge. If you start out without even a hint of a coherent plan like they did, you will fail.

The article lands on "not actually all that bad, especially from a business perspective, but could be much better," which is kind of unsatisfying, but I did like the opening analogy to the Falcon: "The garbage will do."

One thing they absolutely have to do is get better acting and production values that match the sequels, or at least Mando S1. The Volume should only be used when the scene makes sense for it, so either spaces that are themselves enclosed, or where the actors' blocking reasonably makes sense. Kenobi was particularly egregious with this, especially the airspeeders sequence. Everything is just so slow and small and anything that can't be done in VFX is crowded into a very tight space. When the Acolyte tried to build bigger sets... I dunno... something came off wrong, like they contracted the whole thing out to the Disney teams that make the public spaces in Galaxy's edge, which like all theme parks trade a certain amount authentic screen presence for durability. I doubt the sets are that durable, making it all the worse when they look how they do. BOBF's infamous scooter chase had some other issues, but what locked it in as a blunder was the cheap visuals that screamed, "We can't afford enough set to zoom through it at more than jogging speed!" Somebody needed to tell Robert Rodriguez that this isn't Spy Kids. Andor had a large but not unlimited budget, but the key is (barely greebled AK-47's aside) that they used it wisely and got bang for their bucks; they made choices that fit the story into the budget (they actually made two TIE fighters feel terrifying), and it ended up looking just right for the most part.

Then the acting. All 5 Disney movies did okay with this, and the sheer watchability of the performances an one area where I think they ALL outshone all three PT movies. Star Wars has never been known for "realistic" dialogue, but the OT sold it by having actors with movie star charisma, veteran chops, and a decade of "new Hollywood" naturalistic sensibilities. Then you had a collaborative process that took better takes and excised material that couldn't be made to work. The ST was less organic, but similarly collaborative and while almost cloyingly modern and quippy at times, you don't get the sense that the actors are struggling with the material. I don't want to lean in too hard on overly simplistic narratives here, but the amount of control that Lucas had in the prequels undoubtedly led to an under-emphasis on the parts of filmmaking he finds less interesting, and too much reliance on newfound abilities to "fix it in post." He somehow got awful performances from Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson, and even fairly uneven ones from Ewan McGregor.

The shows, however, have mostly skewed to the worse side of things. Not quite so stilted as the PT, but there is a serious lack of charisma and humanity emanating from them, and it just makes things less fun, and when your dialogue mostly exists to deliver exposition, it leaves us more willing to nitpick details. Andor has a grimmer tone, but there is charisma there. The performances were compelling and I had to watch. You cannot and should not make all Star Wars like Andor, but you could make it all as well-conceived as Andor.

Yes, but it wouldn't be possible without fans that are willing to eat this drivel up.