The biggest problem Star Wars has is not quantity but coherence. The TV series is contradicting the recent movies and everything contradicts the novels. At this point, I like the TV series so I'm just letting it decide on canon.
This.
And besides... live action Star Wars movies are expensive. Sure, they make a ton, but it might be because they aren't coming out every three years for 20 years...
There's plenty of Star Wars....
The Star Wars prequels cost less than the recent Spider-Man, Pirates Of The Caribbean and Harry Potter movies yet they contiinue to make more of them.
If Lucasfilm were a publicly owned company with the usual profit imperative, no doubt we'd be seeing all sorts of Star Wars movies on a regular basis. And they might make the PT look like Citizen Kane by comparison.
I watched Revenge again recently for the first time since Clone Wars, but Anakin's interaction with the rest of the Jedi seems a bit basic since CW - the series has allowed the characters to grow a bit. Look at his hissy fit when Paps places him on the council, but he's not addressed as a Master. I can't imagine the Clone Wars Anakin doing that.
Anakin's personality is
totally different in TCW. He's headstrong and impulsive but in a heroic, charming way. He isn't an off-putting, immature creepy little twerp. They're simply two different characters. I think of Anakin as the TCW guy, not the PT guy, and I wonder if the PT guy was ever supposed to exist.
I suspect even Lucas would know better than to expect an audience to want to watch the story of an off-putting, immature creepy little twerp, and he just wasn't paying attention as a director to what Hayden Christensen was doing with the role. Christensen probably didn't have a clue what he was supposed to be doing (he's an actor, not a psychic), so he was just winging it, and the result was a train wreck.
All you need to do is watch the videos of Lucas on the set, sitting on his ass rather than interacting with the actors and
directing them, to understand how that train wreck was inevitable.
the politics are still a silly mess.
Did you see the episode where they introduced Separatists who have valid motives, as well as the episodes (which weren't as good as stories, but got the point across) that establish that the Republic is definitely corrupt? Together these episodes imply that the Seppys might be right to drop-kick the Republic, which changes the interpretation of a whole lot of stuff in the PT that just seemed underdeveloped or dumb.
It hasn't been until S3 that they've gotten to work on shaping up the political angle. And they do still have a ways to go with it, but they're on the right track. If the Republic is corrupt, maybe Anakin is right not to want to stay a Jedi and fight for it along with all the other Jedi chumps. If the Separatists have valid reasons for starting the war (presumably it was they who started the war, not Sidious or the Trade Federation), then it wouldn't look suspicious that the war happened in the first place, so the Jedi and the good guys in the Senate are off the hook for looking as stupid as they did in the PT.
I still have no idea what the Separatists really want--well, ok, to be separate. But why? What drove them to that?
The Republic is corrupt, and may be unsalvageably so. That was the upshot of those rather boring political episodes we had to suffer thru earlier this season. (And that was enough for me - at this point, I'll take their word for it, the Republic is corrupt, gotcha, please don't do more episodes trying to convince us.
) It's a judgment call - do you stick with a possibly unsalvageable Republic or stick around and try to solve its problems? Maybe the Seppys did work hard to try to solve those problems and finally got fed up.
And why does the Republic care? What risk all of these lives to get worlds back?
Because it's a judgment call - why allow the Seppys to run off with valuable worlds if you think they're wrong, everyone can work together and work their problems out? That's what Padme was trying to do with the friend she contacted, and why wouldn't intelligent people who want to best for everyone try to do that?
Padme and the other good guys probably realize the Trade Federation is just taking advantage of the chaos opportunistically. There's not much they can do about that other than try to do an end run around them. What nobody knows so far, or can know, is that a Sith is also manipulating things behind the scenes. The legit Seppys change the tone of the story from a stupid story to a tragic one.
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