TCW made me resent the OT. Dont get me wrong I still love ANH and ESB as films. But I resent the fact that Lucas made the OT first and wrote the story into a corner. The Republic and the Jedi Order and that whole universe was a ****ing massive and awesome scifi and fantasy world. I want to see that universe continue. I want to see Jedi Master Anakin and Obiwan and Ahsoka and Rex continuing to fight bad guys and go on adventures and grow old and die as warriors and heroes. But because Lucas made 3 films decades ago all this wonderful stuff has to end. It has to be wrecked. It's just so damn frustrating. And frankly I'd be entirely fine with Disney doing an Elseworld canon in which Sidious's plan failed, the Republic won the war, and Anakin never fell to the dark side.
And to be even more frank, I just dont think the OT and the ST era has turned out to be even half as interesting as the Republic era. The OT and ST just feels so small scale and underdeveloped. It's all stories happening on backwater unimportant worlds. Theres no Jedi Order. No deep exploration of the government or civilization. And the Rebellion and the Resistance just pale in comparison to the Grand Army of the Republic and its war against the Separatists.
Very interesting that you say this, and I'm glad I stumbled upon it.
One thing that really struck a chord with me a few weeks ago when the movies were all running on cable over a weekend, was a realization of how 'small' and simple of a story and the universe of the OT really is in the grand scheme of things. It really is a very intimate set of stories in what feels like a fairly sparsely populated universe, with maybe the ROTJ battle pushing outside that box a bit. I mean heck, ESB is actually a very very small story, I remember at some points over the past 40 years not really liking it and thinking (outside the battle of hoth) that it was kinda boring. As a kid when I saw it I loved it, but I remember in my teen years not having the best view of it.
And yes.. there were "Legends"/EU stuff out there, that grew the universe quite avbit, but I wasn't a big consumer of it.
Once the PT came about there was such an expansion in scope of... everything, vastly bigger universe than we'd seen, all the political machinations, all the Jedi Order stuff, the Chosen One stuff. It actually makes the OT seem even smaller.
I'm almost to the point where I don't know if I have a favorite movie, because I so much enjoy the overall arch of what's happened. Or well.. I did up to the ST. That was just such a huge letdown to me, because, in it's effort to rekindle the 'magic' of the OT, it went "small" again and totally forgot about everything that had been opened up with PT.
But yeah individual movies, to me, are almost like just chapters in a book...and you typically don't have a favorite chapter in a book. It's just that I see them as part of this larger story. And as it turns out the wheels fell off at the end of that larger story, where I'd had such high hopes that we'd get closure on the themes and have gained an understanding of how The Force works within this Galaxy far Far Away.... thus just setting up context for any other stories they'd want to explore in the universe's past or future.
And yes I know there's a group of fandom that wouldn't have liked that... they prefer the mysteriousness of the force. I get that.
I also think there are so many different facets of the fandom now, that it's impossible to make everyone happy. Some people are into the Force aspects, some are into the OT characters only, some are into the space battles, others like the lightsaber stuff... others into the bounty hunters/smuggling side of things.... we've got folks that grew up on the OT, the PT, TCW, and now the ST.. everyone is going to have a different perspectie.
