I didn’t quite like the Prequels when they came out, it seemed obvious that Lucas had been given way too much freedom and not enough people were there to rein him in on his stupider ideas. He got a bit lazy and too overly reliant on CGI, but the core idea of the Prequels still seems solid. It’s a story about the fall of the Republic, of the Jedi, of Anakin Skywalker, and of the rise of a dictatorship, of the Empire, all based on a few scraps of dialogue from ANH. It definitely created a distinct era from the OT, which was a hard act to follow for anyone, and it did a far better job than Disney’s drunken reign at the helm.

Lucas just really floundered on the execution of the whole thing, too many people thought he was a genius, and there wasn’t enough people around like Harrison Ford to push back with, “You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it!” I liked one idea somebody had had to replace Naboo with Alderaan, to actually give the audience some sort of background as to what was lost, instead of the silly fish world that drove Sheev Palpatine to become an evil Sith Lord. Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side felt tacked on (much like in Game of Thrones with Daenerys), it’s apparently hard to write good characters turning evil in a believable way.