...yeah, but who fucking cares? Backstory is something writers put in because they think they need it and audiences hate because they don't. You want backstory? "He fought with your father in the clone wars." DONE. Tolkien put this one to bed succinctly when someone asked him what lay beyond the "distant mountains of Mordor." I don't know the quote exactly, but he essentially said "if I told you, you'd ask what lay beyond that. Know that I know what lies beyond the distant mountains of Mordor, and that is enough." STAR WARS owes its existence to Kurasawa, who basically made Imperial westerns. We're talking Edo-era Japan... yet Kurosawa never once went to Edo.However, I get why so much of episodes 2 and 3 took place in the Senate and in the capital. It's backstory. We are being shown why the rebels fled to the frontier in the first place, and how it is that Palpatine becomes the Emperor. There's no way to take over a government from the frontier
By backstory I mean all of eps 1-3 are backstory for 4-6. Are you saying that 1-3 shouldn't exist? That's definitely a valid thought, IMO. I didn't mind them (well, 2 and 3 anyway), but they aren't in a class with 4-6. I wouldn't feel we were missing out if they didn't exist. And I'm such a sucker that I'll see the (guaranteed to be shitty) Disney Star Wars, too, even though I'm really uninterested.
No, I'm saying that you know so precious, precious little about how our characters became relevant to the overall arc, and because you know so very, very little about how we got to where we are, that the choices Lucas could have made were virtually unlimited. There's no reason 1-3 had to have ANYTHING to do with Luke Skywalker, Obi Wan, or any of the rest of them in anything but the most glancing of ways. It would have been better, in fact. Luke Skywalker matters because he was Everyman. Empire works because holy shit he's Darth Vader's kid. Jedi starts to come apart because it's all in the family... and then the first three basically say "the Skywalkers have always been at the middle of the goddamn universe and everyone else is a prole." Star Wars 1-3 could have had Emperor Palpatine's rise as a back story, Darth Vader as a glancing afterthought and SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT at the core. But that would require imagination, which George Lucas kind of ran out of in '83.Are you saying that 1-3 shouldn't exist?
I get what you're saying. On a related note, I never understood why they tried so hard, torturously hard, to connect so many unconnected characters. Why, why the fuck, why in the name of all that is holy, did Yoda somehow know Chewbacca (in ep 1, I believe). You're right that George ran out of good ideas. I guess he was playing to the "omg I recognize them" crowd for the cheapest of thrills. Chewy has nothing to do with anything besides the millenium falcon.
Ever watched the Star Wars Christmas Special? I saw it when it aired. Until the advent of the Internet I thought I'd imagined it. It's a terrible, horrible, bizarre thing but it starts out by hanging out with the Chewbacca family. That was before Empire. That was 5 years before Jedi. Yet back then, you could see the impending crazy that was Lucas. In retrospect it's obvious, but at the time it was presumed that Lucas had nothing to do with it and the craziness was all network. Not so much.