RumblyTumbly
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2018
Both statements are absolutely true.
As far as the EU is concerned, I have read the best of the best and the lowest of the low. However, a bulk of the EU came out prior to even the prequels, and a lot of us were just happy to get Star Wars material at all, so it made the bad stuff a lot more forgivable. Also, it was balanced out with some good stuff. The Jedi Academy Trilogy is an unfocused and ridiculous mess, but its easier to forgive when I have Shadows of the Empire, The Young Jedi Knights Series, and Tales of the Bounty Hunters to fall back on.
Its not like today where we have the movies, which have failed to deliver, and the books and comics have taken a sharp downturn in quality after starting off with some promise (I liked the C-3P0 comic a lot). We're over bloated with content, and hardly any of it is good. There's like no escape. Thankfully, The Mandalorian sounds at least solid.
And yes, the EU could take a side character like Boba Fett and expand on him enough to make him an icon, but where the EU got it right and the current Disney material gets it wrong is that a lot of the stuff that got expanded on in the books stemmed from the richness of the original films.
Look at Boba Fett and The Bounty Hunters, The Emperor's Guards, or the various aliens and monsters at Jabba's Palace and The Cantina. The world just feels like there are a million different stories going on and there are so many interesting looking characters that I can't help but wonder "What's their story?". Or how about characters like Admiral Ackbar, Wedge, and Mon Mothma? They all seemed like characters of some importance, were interesting, and became beloved in their own right, and had some level of authority within the Rebellion, but we never really find out much about them beyond what we see on screen. They serve a small function in the story and make the world seem a little bit richer in the process.
The EU came along and took a lot of those characters and said "Hey! Fans wonder about so and so's story...so lets tell that story!" and more often than not, it was very interesting. Some of my favorite EU books are the "Tales Of" books which expand on the various characters we see in the three films.
The prequels mostly missed the mark on achieving this. Aside from some of the Jedi (Hello Kit Fisto) and maybe a couple of the pod racers, they never really replicated that concept of the rich world with fascinating small characters that we might want to learn more about.
Disney tried to force that with Phasma. The attempt to make her their own Boba Fett was a stunning failure where they designed a cool looking character, slapped her all over the marketing for the movie, and then proceeded to bitch her out, making her feel like the movie promotions lied to us. And once again, they've tried to recreate things like the Cantina, but they have just utterly failed at recreating that feel of the original films.
The only one they've really made is TR-8R (which isn't even his name/number) who completely got over by accident with the fans.
