Most of us generally have better things to do – especially as we get to around middle age, or thereabouts – to waste time on nostalgia. Life goes on, things change, and there is little point in worrying about what could or should have been. So it is with “Star Wars Day”, a fake holiday that once held a sort of meaning for nerds and geeks everywhere.
Back in the day, it was a reminder of how great – if goofy, campy, and flawed – the original STAR WARS trilogy was. STAR WARS Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back remains, to this day, the best film in the entire series of 6 films. (Like most old-school fans of the series, I flatly REFUSE to acknowledge the existence or canonicity of the “sequel trilogy”, which as far as I am concerned, is not even in the same cinematic universe.)
Today, though, it is a sad reminder of how far and how fast the franchise has collapsed.
Back when the House of the Devil Mouse bought out LucasFilm for the considerable sum of US$4.4B or thereabouts, many thought Jabba the Lucas had probably settled for way less than the franchise was worth, given its merchandising potential and rabid, deep, cult-like fan-base. But Disney’s total and complete mismanagement of the most valuable IP in cinema, has shown that Lucas actually got a great deal.
Queen Karen Kennedy’s totally cocked-up approach to the franchise, along with her idiotic insistence on injecting all manner of woketardery into it, destroyed all the value the franchise had. The first film in the so-called “sequel trilogy”, was nothing more than a bad, high-octane remix of the very first film from 1977. The second film was so appallingly awful that, to this day, I have never seen it, and I almost surely never will. The third film was, as far as I can tell, a long series of deus ex machinae that had no semblance of a plot or storyline, and tried desperately to undo the enormous damage done to the franchise by The Last Jedi – but failed.
And here we are today, where basically no one cares about STAR WARS anymore, and should not care, either.
In fact, it is illustrative to compare the best of the “prequel” films, with any of the “sequels”, to see how bad things have become. Our drunken Scotch friend did precisely that:
Comparison is highly instructive and revealing. It does not take much comparison to show that even Jabba the Lucas, for all his flaws – and they are huge – could do a better job while half-arsing things, than an entire squad of supposed “talent” hired by the House of the Devil Mouse ever managed.
If, therefore, you must celebrate so-called “Star Wars Day”, then celebrate what was great about the old films – and never again make the mistake of shelling out your hard-earned money to the people who desecrated their cultural legacy.
1 Comment
The thing that I have the hardest time fathoming is how Disney f***ed up the Star Wars experience in the parks so badly, especially since I just came back from a day at Epic Universe which is going to eat Disney’s lunch when it opens. They already had a great blueprint in Star Tours, which is consistently one of the most popular rides at Hollywood Studios. They could have made an entire Star Wars park with themes based on the different planets in the universe. Hell, they could have even split it up between prequel, OT, and sequel areas, and it would have been a license to print money.
Instead, Kathleen Kennedy talked Bob Iger into ignore everything else in the IP they paid $4 billion to acquire and go all-in on her (terrible) sequels, and the rest is history.