Before you throw hate at me, just know that I'm a huge fan and have been since I was in 3rd grade. But my last two viewings of A New Hope got me thinking about this. After watching Rogue One, my parents wanted to know what happened next, so I popped in A New Hope and we continued from where that movie left off. Now I don't know if it was because I'd seen the movie so many times, but geez the movie just felt so slow the entire time we were on Tatooine. So yeah, I thought to myself "maybe it's just because I'd seen this movie so many times." But a couple of weeks later, I had some kids (ages 7, 10, and 12) over who had only seen The Force Awakens. I thought to myself "they'd never seen any other Star Wars movie other than TFA. I should show them the other films in release order." So I showed them A New Hope, and they were into it.........just for the opening Tantive IV scenes. I could tell they were bored and uninterested for a majority of the movie and didn't get back into it until a bit after the trash compactor scene. I don't know what it was that got us fans hooked onto these movies when we were younger, but these kids just were not into it, and it almost makes me hesitant to show them Empire Strikes Back because I know when I was their age I didn't like it because "it was the most boring of all six films," and I didn't appreciate it until I was in high school. It just makes me wonder, did we overhype these movies to the point that non-fans and newcomers might be disappointed when they watch the Original Trilogy for their first time?
First film was a campy spaghetti western set in space, with revolutionary visual effects-by 70s standards-. The quality of the film itself is not what makes Star Wars great, it's the concepts and the fantasy surrounding the story. Nostalgia helps, but if those kids had already been introduced to the universe, anh's purpose was already fulfilled.
I noticed the same, when I showed my best friend Star Wars and she had never seen it before. Her comment after watching these was "I liked the Ewoks" But movies were like this back then. When I watch an old movie, I have never seen before, I just can't get into it. They are so slow, not much happens, camera perspective is always the same for a long time, etc. I get bored and have a hard time watching the whole movie. Our attention span got too short over the decades. Probably the same reason why I want to sleep all the time at work, no matter how much I slept. I'm just bored Back then it was the story that made us fans and everything in this universe. We did not need it to be cut fast and all this stuff. We are just not used to these kind of movies anymore. If we had never seen the original trilogy and would it watch nowadays, we probably couldn't get into it as well. But back then all movies were like that and Star Wars stood out. That's the difference. We know how it was, when nothing else was better. It's the same with G1. Back then it was top of the game. There were not really much cartoons that were better. Today it's different, you can't judge old media in context of new media.
For what it's worth, A New Hope was my favourite Star Wars movie when i was young. My younger brother also says that ANH is his favourite, even if he acknowledged it's not the best. While i think both of the new Star Wars films are fantastic and well-deserving of their current popularity, the franchise has reached a point of oversaturation and hype where it will be inevitably bound to disappoint some newcomers no matter what.
People have shorter attention spans now. They can't take a slow build. They can't take any slowness at all. That's why we get so much mindless tripe now. Everything has to be exploding all the time or people will start checking their phones.
Youtube generation, the attantion span of nanoseconds. But it's not just star wars, every thing 20+ years old stops seeming innovative and revolutionary at certain point, especially to a newer generation. I mean, you're gonna have a hard time convincing a kid that the original national lampoon vacation is a more funny than the one from a couple of years ago.
I think it's a combination of oversaturation (which is the one downside of Disney taking over the franchise, for my money) AND the ADHD generation, to be perfectly blunt about it.
I mean, I partially see this in my friends. They keep forgetting things in short periods of time and if you describe something to them, they often can't keep track of all the information. But I started to refuse repeating myself. People gotta learn to use their own heads and memories. If people straight out refuse to try just using their head like a normal human being, they will never be able to do it. It only gets worse.
I love Star Wars too, but yes, we've overhyped it. It was always campy. It was never perfect. There were people who found it boring all the way back in 1977. It's first and foremost a series of kids' movies. Fans like to deny it, but we have that from the crew, and the press, and George Lucas himself since the very beginning. The original point of it was to be an homage to old space operas and all of the other things Lucas loved as a child and as a teenager (after he failed to get the Flash Gordon license) to sort of pass those things along to new generations of kids. In doing that, he also wanted to convey a moral (and subversively political) message about good resisting evil. He wanted to infuse it with a sense of classical myth, and his syncretic Buddhist-Christian spiritual beliefs. All of that has helped to build it into something bigger in our collective psyches than the film itself (and its sequels, prequels, and spinoffs, for that matter) can really actually contain. Importantly to the current fan perception of Star Wars, he noticed that the Flash Gordon films he loved as a kid seemed cheap and crappy when he watched them as an adult. So he made sure that although Star Wars was a kids' movie, it would still be watchable by adults who grew up watching it. So he and his crew put in the effort normally reserved for grown audiences. They didn't "talk down" to the viewer. Lucas also brought his avant-garde, art school, experimental film sensibilities with him. Maybe most importantly, there was just nothing else like it that could possibly compete for our attention. Of course it's also true that cultural tastes have changed. The entertainment space in general has changed too. We have inflated Star Wars in our minds into more than the films themselves ever have been, but it isn't just that. And the OT isn't just slow compared to newer movies. It's also not as slick as modern movies, and the action isn't as stylized, choreographed, or intense. In RotJ you can actually see the trend of increasing movie spectacle (which Star Wars started) feeding back into Star Wars itself. The pace is faster. It's far more colorful. The action is more over the top. We've been heading this direction for a long time. You might hate me for this, but I'm curious how it would go if you have them start over with Episode I instead.
Yes it's over hyped but then you have to look at the history. These days big movies full of special effects are a dime a dozen. We have such a flood of massive movies that we can just shrug our shoulders and go eh whatever when a big special effects driven movie doesn't blow us out of the water. But long long ago when Star Wars hit the theaters for the very first time we had never seen anything like it before. It took the world by surprise and everyone started scrambling to come up with TV shows and movies that could somehow cash in on the phenomenon. A movie that helped to change entertainment as we knew it. Plus we lived in a world where you could nicely break things into good guys and bad guys. The US and it's allies could call themselves the good guys the Soviets and their allies were seen as the bad guys, World War II with Allies and Axis wasn't such a distant memory, so our entertainment had easy lines of good guys and bad guys. Now those lines aren't as clear so entertainment with clear good guys and clear bad guys seems rather old fashioned. I think the films hold up in that they used a lot of universal themes from the history of story telling and just set them in space. But Star Wars isn't the be all end all that we think as fans when we get all hyped up about the next big thing in the Star Wars story. It's also kind of bad to judge a movie by kids at the moment. Just look at the films you discovered as an adult that you wouldn't have gotten into as a kid or a teen.
Thats why I'm not like so many and actually like Star Wars, when my parents showed them to me as a kid I found them boring as hell and was not interested in them. I mean I will admit I found the prequels to be better then the original trilogy but that was more for the effects and the fight scenes. It wasn't till Force Awakens came around that I found any respect for Star Wars and actually look forward to things like The Last Jedi.
Ah, but therein lies the subversive aspect of Star Wars. The Empire and the Rebel Alliance were both remnants of the same fallen Republic, not foreign enemies. The Empire represented the authoritarian Nixon administration and the military-industrial complex, while the rebels represented the '60s and '70s counterculture, campus protest movements, and related cultural resistance. Not gonna go into the politics themselves, of course. Just pointing out that they're baked into the movie and disguised as a more conventional "our tribe = good guys, their tribe = bad guys" story.
I debated with myself for the longest time as to what order I should show them. They're old enough to know some of the pop culture references and the whole "No I am your father" thing so I thought there'd be no harm in showing it chronologically since they already knew the twists. But I ultimately went with release order because when I was their age, I grew up on the Prequels and I thought those movies were infinitely better than the OT to the point where I my ranking at the time was III, I, II, VI, IV, V simply because I thought the OT was boring since there wasn't a lot of action scenes. I thought it was because my first Trilogy was the Prequels, it might've influenced how I viewed the OT, so maybe if I showed these kids the OT first, they might think better of it. But seeing their initial reaction to A New Hope almost makes me regret doing it this way, and I almost wish I started them with Episode I. Now I'm debating if I should continue with release order or do the machete order.
Definitely two different overhypes being mentioned here. The first is in regards to the OT being overhyped being that the industry and the technics used today have long moved past it. The second being the franchise after the OT living off of the OT's hype and nostalgia rather than ever bringing something new to the table.
ANH has always been campy and as kids we certainly are far more tolerable of crap. Was ANH crap? No. I don't want to get into a trend of "oh kids today are too impatient" and whatever. Movies are just made differently today than they were in the 70's and kids always can usually lap up crap, myself certainly included. And we can still enjoy said crap. I personally love ANH, but I admit it feels like it's dragging sometimes. However, chief among them for me is the Battle of Yavin. I really have never cared for space battles and dog fights, and it felt like a lot of dead air during the finale until of course Vader personally tangles with Luke. Back to the question of whether Star Wars is overhyped... well I'm sure it's inevitable. I think the late 2000's and early 2010's before the Lucasfilm purchase was a time of that. The prequels kinda did a number on the franchise's rep, no new movies seemed to be coming, and we were getting stuff like that Kinect game that kinda made the franchise "deader than disco". I dunno. Star Wars is THE franchise of the world.
Was it the Special Edition? One of my problems with the Special Edition of A New Hope is that it slows down the pace of the movie quite a bit at the extended Mos Eisley scenes.
I tried an experiment where I showed my younger cousin all of the main saga films and TCW in chronological order. She enjoyed the prequel movies and the show a lot more than the OT. Her favourite characters were Jar Jar, Anakin, Padme and the clones from TCW. She was pretty indifferent about the characters from the OT, and thinks the main trio are ugly looking...
