"The Force Awakens" (with SPOILERS)

It was a 100 percent replication of A New Hope. I enjoyed it, but it was the same movie with a cooler looking Death Star

 

If only JK Rowling had written Star Wars, it would have been a unified story and each episode could not have stood on its own, but had multiple threads leading to a satisfying and well written culmination. MCU did a good job in that regard.

Star Wars was never thought out from the beginning. It was a fluke. A great action adventure western and war movie set in space. It struck good and Lucas just made it up as he went along.

 

Lucas first pitched Star Wars as a "Flash Gordon-style space opera." Space opera is literally what he called it.

 

His best stuff always had a strong sense of fun, wonder and surprise - you didn't obsess over how fuel for the spaceships worked because you were too busy just enjoying the ride. That's my biggest issue with the prequels - nobody really gave a shit about how the Galatic Senate worked except the most intense of S'Wars nerds - and the sequel trilogy is often trying to keep so many balls in the air that the action slows down.

 

It wasn't a fluke. Lucas had a gift for world-building and a vision that pushed the limits of special effects at the time. He created iconic characters and put them in interesting environments and situations. No, it wasn't planned out nearly as well as the MCU or Harry Potter. It was a fantastic trilogy that lost a lot when they expanded it into so much more.

 

Major difference between Rowling and Lucas is time and archives.

— Lucas made the preposterous claim that he had some massive saga written out in the 1970s. His own writings do not show that. The early manuscripts have names like Mace windu, valorum, starkiller, etc., but they are not the characters they would later become.
— Rowling came along 20 years after Star Wars. The idea of massive pre-planned out stories was already a thing. Not so much when Lucas came along.

 

Lord of the Rings was originally written in the 1930s and 1940s, before being published all together in 1954, per Wikipedia. Narnia was 1950 to 1956, the Chronicles of Prydain from 1964 to 1968, plus Lucas obviously cribbed from the idea of ongoing serials and comics. Kind of like the "Lost" folks, it seems like Lucas was bragging of having it all figured out, but truth be told it was probably just a rough outline in his head.

 

I knew I would get pummeled on the series thing as soon as I wrote it. I was thinking there was LOTR and Dune, but the rest was stuff like Bond and Flash Gordon that just punched out episodes and books with little cohesion.

Of course, you can note that narnia and the rest you mentioned were book series. Star Wars set the stage for multi media sagas.

 

Hey man, Godfather Part II was 1974!

 

Storm Trooper armor is worse than their aim

 

That reminds me about this

 

In case you're wondering if this exists ... it does.