Since (as Enhydra Lutis pointed out) this is Star Wars Day, May the 4th be with you, I thought I'd try to put Star Wars to bed here, at least for awhile.

George Lucas made, of course, three space-fantasy movies in the Seventies and Eighties, "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back," and "Return of the Jedi." His movies often have a certain soapiness to them, and so the Star Wars original trilogy has that too, like what you would see with American Grafitti or Indiana Jones. The entirety of Lucas' success is based on these movies. You can look at those films and see some of the discussion about them confirmed: Lucas wanted to create movies celebrating space opera, Joseph Campbell, and Akira Kurosawa, and Lucas mixes those three elements together in what is basically light entertainment.

There were of course the three prequels, which came out beginning sixteen years after the conclusion of the original trilogy. You had fans waiting a very long time. You can tell from the prequel movies that their purpose is to give George Lucas the opportunity to tell the backstory of the character Anakin Skywalker, all the way up to the point where he becomes Darth Vader, the primary villain of the original trilogy. So this is a story of decline and fall, from hero to villain. I don't know, like Phillippe Petain, except much younger? These movies have been unfairly maligned in my opinion. So what if Jake Lloyd sucked as the young Anakin, or if Jar Jar Binks sucked, or if the "romance" between Anakin and Padme Amidala is the vehicle for the most wooden piece of bad acting ever? These are gaudy movies, meant to show off moviemaking technology, produced for a relatively trivial, if seemingly necessary, purpose. They had to exist, for the same reason that footnotes and in-text citations typically adorn pieces of published research. Fans would have been even more pissed off had Lucas not made the prequels at all.

What of course does not need to exist are the Star Wars sequel trilogy movies. Perhaps they reveal the delusions of the movie-makers, and the repeated obsession of the movie-makers to rehash old Star Wars features while depriving said features of any meaning whatsoever. "We can make profitable movies without any legitimate purpose!" I'm sure the executives were saying. Yeah, whatever. A lot of written material, before Lucas' sale of the Star Wars franchise, was relegated to the trash-bin of "legends" so that Disney, the current owner of the Star Wars franchise, could hire idiot-savants to make these movies. I don't care about any of it.

There are three cartoon series worthy of note, beginning with: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and Star Wars: Rebels. These are reasonably entertaining, as long as you can bring yourself to understand that you are watching 1) stuff made for children and 2) footnotes to the original six movies. And I suppose there is also Star Wars: The Bad Batch, which has as its primary merit (as with Andor and Rogue One in live-action) depictions of the imaginary universe after the primary villain Darth Sidious has destroyed the Jedi Knights and established his totalitarian rule over what portion of the imaginary galaxy he was able to control. It's grim stuff. We may get live-action totalitarianism at some point.

At any rate, those are products of Dave Filoni, who only now has control over the franchise. They do not amount to much, though they are all entertaining on first viewing. Generally, though, with Disney Star Wars you have the phenomenon of a franchise that was sold to a big corporation by its original author, and has now been taken over by people with different ideas of what to do with it. Some of those people have no idea what they are doing, and are putting out garbage. In the old days such people would have been genuine free-lance fantasy writers. Today, however, Disney has a lot of money and can pay them to write things that are far worse than what they would otherwise write if they were forced to create their own universes.

Something should be said here about the limitations of the Star Wars universe.

The Star Wars universe, "the Galaxy," is a place where physical laws don't really apply, as there is supposedly faster-than-light travel connecting the stars, but it is basically an imaginary place where some people have magical powers because they are sensitive to an imaginary property called "The Force." What this suggests is that human beings and "aliens" (which are basically humans) have elites among them, against which the ordinary people are powerless because said ordinary folk are not "Force-sensitive." There's only so much one can do in the world of fiction-writing with such an imaginary place because, frankly, it's an unpleasant place. You'll notice that Lucas himself stopped after telling the stories of Anakin and of Luke Skywalker. Being "Force-sensitive" looks to me like another invitation to catastrophic irresponsibility, and not being "Force-sensitive" looks like being a victim, and there's enough of those two things in the regular universe. I certainly would not want to live in the imaginary Star Wars universe.

It would have been best, then, had Lucas not sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney, if he had kept the concept for himself and retired it. There was a preponderance of space opera written in the Fifties and Sixties that the corporate executives at Disney could have paid to dramatize, and so for instance they could have chosen to dramatize any of Poul Anderson's fiction, the present-day equivalent of Timothy Dalton (or Diego Luna?) in the role of Dominic Flandry for instance. Instead, however, they chose to do a lot of Star Wars spinoffs, because they thought there was money in it. What happened was Gresham's Law: bad money driving out good.

At any rate, the transformation to Darth Vader is probably the most important moment of the entire project.

What Americans need now, of course, in this moment of impending economic collapse, is to wake up and to realize that they are trapped in perpetually-uncomfortable suits of armor and that they are the villains in the present-day global drama, they are little Darth Vaders obeying Israeli Zionist Darth Sidiouses while the global masses are crushed. Who will be crushed by The Force next?