Comscan No. 5: How The Prequel Fans Won

Plus acting performances ranked and a "Thrawn" poll update

My wife, 24 years ago.

My favorite Star Wars–related thought experiment is, If the first thing Disney had released after the Lucasfilm acquisition was [non–Force Awakens project], how would it have affected the franchise?

My second-favorite Star Wars–related thought experiment is, How would people regard the prequels if there was no original trilogy?

The latter question requires some presuppositions. The prequels wouldn’t exist in their full unhinged glory if George Lucas couldn’t self-fund them. The original trilogy made him incredibly rich and it put him in control of an industry-standard effects house. In the late ’90s, Lucas roamed the halls of his namesake company like King Midas in flannel. Every time he opened his mouth with a new idea—“four-armed frog man running a 1950s diner”—millions of dollars poured forth to make it real.

But, for the sake of argument, imagine if George Lucas had become a billionaire making American Graffiti and Indiana Jones movies and then indulged his Flash Gordon fantasies for the first time in his 50s. Blockbusters would exist, albeit not exactly in the mold of Star Wars (1977), which never came out. Then here comes The Phantom Menace, a big-budget swing at the moribund science fiction genre.

If Jar Jar Binks didn’t run smack into the expectations of Baby Boomer Boba Fett collectors, would anyone have complained? Would Episode I be remembered as a beloved, harmless children’s movie, like Spy Kids? Would Revenge of the Sith be the biggest cult flick since Blade Runner?

I wonder because the prequel fans have clearly won. Episodes I–III have nearly eclipsed IV-VI in influence on the series. Despite its various problems, Ahsoka maintained viewer enthusiasm with Hayden Christensen fan service. It’s hard to explain to people born in the 21st century how bizarre that last sentence is.

After all—and here’s where the first thought experiment comes in—Disney was paying millions of dollars to undo the prequels as recently as eight years ago. The sequels begin with Max von Sydow saying, “This will begin to make things right.” All that’s missing was a big wink at the camera. J.J. Abrams toyed with the idea of putting Jar Jar’s skeleton in the sands of Jakku. Now live-action clone troopers have appeared in four different shows.

If you expand the horizon a little, the turnaround is even more stark. For the 2004 DVD release of Return of the Jedi, George Lucas replaced Sebastian Shaw’s force ghost with Hayden Christensen. Fans went berserk and called the swap everything short of a war crime. In 2023, Hayden Christensen appears as a spirit at the end of the Ahsoka to raucous applause.

Why did this happen? Were the prequels always severely underrated? Have the kids of that era grown up and started voting with their wallets? Maybe both are true.

But the real story is that George Lucas kept pouring money into developing the Clone Wars lore a decade after the backlash to Phantom Menace began. He didn’t hire Dave Filoni to create a mea culpa animated series following Luke, Han, and Leia on swashbuckling romps. They went deeper on the fall of the Galactic Republic.

There’s a theory in politics that it’s worthwhile to push through an unpopular social welfare policy because it creates its own constituency—the people who come to rely on it will vote to preserve it in the future. Well my granny always said what’s true for Swedish domestic politics is true for children’s cartoons set in space. Lucasfilm kept putting out Republic-era content until it had its own fanbase demanding more.

Disney tucked tail on the sequel era when those movies proved even slightly controversial. Lucas powered through. Now there’s a vacuum and guess which trilogy boasts the battle-tested fans and most of the series’ lore?

I’m not sure The Revenge of the Millennials is good for the franchise. The sequels were right to try to recapture aspects of the original films that the prequels had whiffed on. But I can at least appreciate how drastically things can change.

This Week’s Soundtrack

Random Ranking: My 10 Favorite Acting Performances

In my Disney-stooge era!

1. Adam Driver in The Last Jedi

2. Ian McDiarmid in Revenge of the Sith

3. Alec Guinness in A New Hope

4. Daisy Ridley in The Force Awakens

5. Mark Hamill in The Last Jedi

6. Harrison Ford in The Empire Strikes Back

7. John Boyega in The Force Awakens

8. Fiona Shaw in Andor

9. Ewan McGregor in Revenge of the Sith

10. Alden Ehrenreich in Solo

“Thrawn” Character Poll Update

I posted this graphic on Instagram, but I wanted to write a little bit about the response to the Thrawn novel character poll, which has been great. The only wrinkle so far is how many people thought they didn’t (or couldn’t) vote for Thrawn himself. But I’m fine with him not being No. 1. Get your ballots in!

End Credits: Genndy Tartakovsky’s Episode IV

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