Yeah it is easy as shit in 2020 to say "George Lucas's just a man, it was obvious he was going to fuck up the prequels, anyone with eyes could see that" but it just makes me assume the prequels were your first taste of star wars. Because if you were a star wars fan before 2005 you would know that Lucas was considered by everyone to be the living incarnation of the Buddha and Jesus rolled into one. He built an entire universe from the ground up based on the monomyth and Jungian archetypes and he wrote nine movies in a single sitting and decided to start filming with the fourth film to reflect on the inherent truths told in old space serials. People wrote doctoral theses on that shit. People told the census they were jedis and they meant it. The plinkett reviews were a direct response to that, they had to be overly harsh on George because they were fighting against perpetual deification.
Also 'It wasn't groundbreaking cinema, just fun entertainment.' - pure cope. That's what they were downgraded to when the prequels came out and didn't live up to the OT. You only think it's valid because you didn't go through the OT hype.
Yeah, no.
I watched the OT right before the Prequels came out. And as I watched through ANH and ESB, it was groundbreaking and exciting. But after watching ROTJ, I began to see cracks in the armor where it was obvious that the guy making them was just a man. He was getting tired, he was rushing to finish off this great epic, and he was making more than a few mistakes here and there. ROTJ was good, but wasn't as well-thought-out as the last two movies, and it seemed to pander more to the kids' audience, especially with those Ewoks actually helping the Rebels win the fight when in reality, they should have taken 5 minutes to massacre for the Empire before the Imps slaughtered the Rebels too. And as someone who saw many other science fiction series on the subject, Star Wars wasn't my first love when it came to sci-fi. Fuck, I saw anime series and played video games BEFORE watching the OT, so Star Wars wasn't necessarily having a monopoly on science fiction in my mind.
And I checked the reaction on Star Wars. Yes, there were people who deified George. Yes, there were people who did nothing but Star Wars. But you know what? Most people who saw Star Wars weren't like those guys. Those were the SW equivalent of people who read Lord of the Rings and thought the wizards and elf leaders were gods, even though Tolkien wrote the story as a Christian storyline meant to parallel lessons from the faith. Those were the SW equivalent of Trekkies who barked at people in Klingon instead of just enjoying the show. People who deified Lucas and checked off "Jedi" as their religion didn't get the lessons of the franchise or notice that the main character was named after one of the four Gospel authors, and the main lesson of the OT when taken as a whole in the end was the Christian lesson of forgiveness and redemption. Vader represented fallen humanity corrupted by sin, Luke represented the servants of God stretching their hands out to try and redeem said fallen man, and Lucas even went on record to call the Emperor the fucking Space Devil later on. The fact that two out of three of the original Indiana Jones films would fit well in Bible Camp (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Last Crusade) due to their focus being on Biblical artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail further solidify Lucas' Christian credentials and made me roll my eyes even more at people who deified him and the Jedi Way.
Then the Prequels came out and I watched them, which once again, furthered the idea that the Jedi Way isn't meant to be deified, and that again, the films were religious lessons like LOTR hiding in fantasy/sci-fi format. Lucas compares the Emperor to Satan, the Jedi make mistakes like flawed human beings, and even Order 66 was a callback to the Number of the Beast, 666. I loved them, I watched them again and again as I did the OT, but in the back of my mind, I saw them for the silly little movies that they were, since outside EPIII, the other two didn't get close to how good the first two OT films were, but I was fine with that since I was already seeing cracks at the third OT movie.
And again, as critics, RLM SUCKS. All their criticisms boiled down to "WAAAAH, IT'S NOT LIKE THE ORIGINALS!" but you know what? People have a right to experiment in their own film franchises and try different things. Even the OT movies weren't all alike: ANH was a space cowboy/fortress escape epic, ESB was a gritty war film, and ROTJ was more of a fun romp wrapping up the story from the other two movies. This was Lucas' playground, he had every right to play with his toys and try new shit. And while it led to EPI and EPII being not as good as the OT films, it did give fertile ground for the creation of Expanded Universe works that were as good as the OT films or even surpassed them, as the case was with the two KOTOR games which took a lot of inspiration not just from the OT but from the Prequels as well. And EPIII reached levels close to ESB in quality, since they were both grittier and darker than the other four SW films. Plus, RLM's criticisms rang hollow when they shat all over the PT but gave EPVII some slack, even though the PT never damaged the OT the way TFA did.
So no, I wasn't covering for the Prequels at all. In fact, I was open about how they were just popcorn eye candy 2/3rds of the way. But unlike RLM and many whiners who bitched that "George Lucas raped my childhood!" I was keeping things in perspective and didn't treat it that seriously. It was just another sci-fi franchise, and the cracks were already opening in ROTJ, so Lucas having a dip in quality in Episodes I and II was predictable considering how he wrapped up Episode VI. Star Wars was one of my core experiences as a kid growing up, but I saw it the same way Lucas wanted people to see it, the same way Tolkien would want to see LOTR: as another parable for morals that were far more eternal than science fiction and fantasy franchises, as another vehicle that combined faith and entertainment. That's what made these films magical in the first place, and that's what gave them their iconography and the strength of their stories, by appealing to something embedded deep within the human soul.
More than that, the EU Shadows of the Empire had a big media push, and all the books and comics that had come out and were really good. So for Lucas to have ignored all that for the Prequels....well that means the Prequels were going to be even better than the post-RotJ eU, right? I mean, all the principal cast is still alive, so we're getting a whole different setting because its better, that's just obvious. And its going to be about Vader? Oh man this going be so epic. There is no way someone as talented as Lucas would disrepect his loyal fanbase by ignoring that and telling us a hacky slog of a story staring a nine year old having some cringy flirting with an older girl and the dumbest thing since Ewoks, right?
Right?
RIGHT?
The backlash against the prequels, which indeed have many flaws, was less about their quality and more about the quality that was expected, the qualify that people felt COULD have been.
Episode One could have practically been episode VII, with Luke as Qi Gon, with little alteration.
The further away from the release you get, the less that slap in the face stings, and the more you can look at things more objectively.
Except the Prequels took a lot from the EU to begin with. In fact, they were shot with the intent that the EU was canon. Many things from the EU, from double-bladed lightsabers, the Jedi Council, Coruscant, Battle Meditation, droid armies, cloning, and more made it to the big screen. If this was about quality, people would have declared a fatwa on ROTJ, and people would have hated TPM when it came out. Newsflash: they didn't. TPM was well-loved by audiences when it first came out, and it was as big as Pokemon at the time, and Pokemon in the late 90s was a fucking juggernaut. AOTC had some naysayers, but most people fell back in line when Yoda started fighting like a gremlin on crack and the massive war began before their very eyes. And ROTJ was considered a somber, but satisfying epic by most audiences.
Most people reacted to the Prequels upon release either with fan love and devotion, and/or mild criticism, which is why I compared them to the Michael Bay Transformers films which also had the same reaction from most audiences upon release. It was only later when dipshit critics got louder and louder did people turn against the Prequels in a really ugly way, (and by extension, the Bayformers films too) and that was more driven by an internet movement of critics, both from official sites and underground like RLM. And now the very same underground criticism has turned on them, with official media sites citing Prequel hate as an early example of unreliable fandom judgement and idiocy(all the while ignoring their part in the criticism of the Prequels), while RLM's criticisms of the Prequels and other Prequel-bashers are about as popular as Dengue Fever is in Manila among the SW fanbase right now, with sites like Anomaly INC tearing their criticisms apart.
So no, this argument of "the prequels were hated upon release but were judged more objectively afterwards" is false, especially since during the Prequels' release, people actually ate that stuff up and came back for seconds, and there was a merchandise craze where people bought comics, novels, and games about bit characters that barely even showed up in those films.
Remember the massive war of autistism that me and Cyril Sneer were having? That whole Jedi/Sith vs. Mandalorian crap? They were over bit characters in the Expanded Universe that barely showed up in the films, not even close to the main conflict of the saga, which is Light vs Dark. And yet people loved that shit back in the Prequel era because they loved the Prequels and wanted to learn more about guys like Jango Fett, Aayla Secura, Shaak Ti, General Grievous, Count Dooku, and other characters who BARELY even showed up in those films at all, so they bought up all sorts of merchandise from those characters, be they action figures, comics, novels, games, or even the Tartakovsky Clone Wars animated show that was more of a film chopped up into small bite-sized pieces. The Prequels were actually loved upon release. I know, because I lived through that era and watched throngs of people clap at even the most unpopular Prequel movies whenever they showed something awesome on the screen, and the audiences went back home with smiles on their faces, since they had fun and they got their money's worth when they paid for the tickets to the films. They weren't perfect, none of the SW films were, but people still had fun and had an all around good time.