Basically 80% of the video was just seething about the fact that people like the prequels now, and when I say "people" I'm not referring to the general audience who always liked the prequels, but the people online who consider themselves intelligent movie watchers and either talk about them online or listen to other people do so, or in other words RLM's own former fans. The reason why he is so peeved about the prequels is that Darth Vader being a naive child, or even worse a petulant teenager, is the same for OG Star Wars manchildren as Luke in TLJ was for the general audience. Star Wars is eternally ruined and there's no reason to care anymore, this is the reason why Mike can't view the newer Disney schlock as being as bad as it really is, and why he's most offended about the cheap nostalgia baiting in them. It has in a way made him appreciate the prequels more, since despite his disappointment, they had a clear and deep respect for the originals, while Disney at best has respect for the originals as a seedbed for quarterly profits.
This extends to his hatred of the people who sincerely like the prequels, which he views as "corny, melodramatic, serial, sci-fi schlock", where he feels the need to very transparently cherry pick the dumbest defenses of the prequels and what he views as the dumbest criticisms of the new stuff to make everyone who isn't an OG manchild look like an idiot. Of course, Mike probably justifies this to himself as being okay because he's just playing a character and you aren't supposed to take anything Plinkett says seriously, but this video is Mike's way of publishing his real views on these things. If you want an intelligent defense of the prequels you don't need to look any further than the fairly well known video by
Rick Worley, which is a video which should be especially insulting to Mike because he views himself as a real filmmaker and film connoisseur, (the part about dumb critics was
published separately)
The most embarrassing part of his video was when he pretended to not know what "woke" means because he thought it would make the people he's mocking look stupid, and of course who could forget to mention that he only talked about the Acolyte in the first place because he wanted to complain about zoomers (and millennials but I think he wants to pretend they hate the prequels) rewriting the consensus on the prequels, but his point is so transparently stupid both because people actually need to watch something in the first place in order to like it, and because he genuinely believes there is nothing worthwhile in the prequels, so he can only view it as arbitrary nostalgia and so of course gay nigger communism the Disney+ series that will probably be delisted within the decade will be loved in 20 years. Add an honorable mention when he for some reason refers to hippy dippy neopaganism but literally Star Wars because Wicca needed to be gayer as fascism.
Anyway, if TLJ never happened, and Disney Star Wars had been exclusively TFA, a carbon copy of Empire, and ROS people would have recognized that it sucked, but it wouldn't have destroyed the franchise. Also, people never remember the worst part of the rise of skywalker, a crucial scene, Palpatine's message to the galaxy, was exclusive to Fortnite.
