UPDATE: Some interesting alternate visions of Episode VI that never happened:

 http://www.filmthreat.com/interviews/8/  

and later:

  http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/12/entertainment/la-et-gary-kurtz-20100812

Not sure I want to talk too much about it, but since I've been into the first three films my whole conscious life, from the time when the whole thing started, I've been stacking up a whole host of opinions on the subject from the very beginning.  Rather than type it large and write down every little detail, I'll lay out the basics of how I feel.

(I) The Extended Universe was initially interesting when it first started, "oh, before you were born," but I grew tired of it quickly. This was in the drought between Jedi and the Special Editions, and it was a welcome relief for my pent up Star Wars imagination to see the Zahn novels, and the continuous line of games. Dark Forces (the first one) and TIE Fighter were heavily played and much appreciated. But after a while, I began to realize that the interpretation of the movies' universe didn't extend very far outside the boundaries of what we'd already seen. Same characters, or same archetypes at least, over and over. Bounty hunters this, scoundrels that, Jedi Jedi Jedi. 

(II) Jedi were cool because they were rare and mysterious, and light saber battles were a culmination of rivalries between old space samurai, but then they became ubiquitous. The years go on, and the Jedi multiply like bunny rabbits. If you look at the franchise as starting with A New Hope, and look at it in real-life chronology, there are more light sabers than blades of grass, and they're all cut from the same crystal. If there are any other orders than dark or light, they're woefully underused and desperately needed. The Sith are uninteresting to me, because they're either there to fulfill a distasteful bad-boy fantasy (they don't even try to play the gray area angles, so I sort of ignore them) or they're there as unambiguously boring evil things to eat. And don't get me started on the Jedi Order. The movies, even, got into some subtleties that a lot of the Extended Universe doesn't bother with, which is sort of disturbing. More Distended Universe, really.

(III) When the special editions came out, I thought they were a promotional gimmick, there to revitalize the franchise and rekindle old flames (I didn't know the older versions would be discontinued). New toys came along for the ride, and I remember a contemporary in her 20's buying up a lot of the limited edition space ships in the lead-up to the films. The films themselves had some cool scenes, some really weird ones, ruined jokes, and some very pointless changes. In the end, I liked a lot of the fluff in A New Hope but came to resent some of the slap-dash add-ons and swarm of robots and CGI that added nothing except to make a little backwater burg look like the center of the universe, so much so that I found myself a bit bored by the time they were talking about rescuing the princess. Empire Strikes Back was largely un-messed with, but just about everything they did change just made it feel inferior to the original, even though I was super happy to see all the new, if over-used, Bespin graphics.  I LIKED a lot of the changes to Return of the Jedi, but that was because I wasn't a big fan of Jedi, so anything that maintained my interest helped, and I thought the ending montage was nice.


I don't hide that the prequels disappointed me, and no, I don't believe it was inevitable I would be disappointed. I had hints of that old feeling in the clone labs of Kamino, and in parts of Revenge of the Sith, but too much wasn't working.  I've seen enough re-edits to know something else was going on with the prequels.  I later played KOTOR 2, and felt that bloated feeling again; KOTOR 1 later reminded me that there, at the edges, were still new treasures to be found, but they were too few and far between.

Now we get a perpetual industry of Star Wars spinoffs, and a promised live action show (which, despite any cynicism you might perceive in this post, I'm interested in seeing just to see it). The Old Republic looms on the horizon, and I can't help but imagine playing it, for a little while at least. New generations learn about Star Wars, and I've heard they like it. I'd be interested in trading impressions some day with people who saw Episode I first, and I don't really consider any group superior or inferior to another, even though I'm happy with how my own experiences played out.


(IV) To me, the magic of Star Wars lay in what was only hinted at. There was only one cantina, and it was full of monsters with strange stories to tell, which we would fill in with our imaginations. Show, don't tell, as they say (unless you're making some excellent radio drama).

(V) As the movies progressed so did the mystery, and we learned more about the Force, but were left with more questions. You got to see the characters age, and become a family, something later science fiction epics learned from, adding humanity to characters instead of subtracting, making us relate to them. So when that music swelled, it wasn't trying to play on our sympathies because John Williams is a good composer, it reflected how we felt about the characters, it enhanced what was already there.

(VI) Nothing ends well; it's one of those secrets we try to keep from ourselves for as long as we can. Star Wars has ended several times for me over the course of my life, but I'll always be grateful for the worlds it helped create in my head, and the worlds it encouraged me to make on my own.