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Soundwave said:
Mandalore76 said:

The success of the Star Wars franchise is a fluke that only happened because of the way the climax to Empire was written?  LOL!  Star Wars was a smash hit well before Empire.  The merchandising, which George Lucas negotiating sole rights to (I guess this must have been a fluke too!) was already off the charts.  They had to issue IOU's for the first wave of figures because of the demand.  If anything, the prequels prove that Lucas knew exactly what he was doing.  There is a very good reason why "A New Hope" starts off in medias res.  Lucas had a blueprint in his head for the Fall of the Republic, The Clone Wars, etc, but he was smart enough to know that the bits of the story that would most engage the general public came halfway through his planned story arc.  Everyone who sh*ts on Lucas because they didn't like the prequels conveniently forgets that he consciously made that decision.  They also ignore the fact that he created Indiana Jones (another successful and highly regarded series) and gave it to his friend Steven Spielberg, because he was too busy with Star Wars to film it.

Without the "twist" in Empire, the story would've been fairly vanilla and you would've gotten Star Wars 2/3/4 type sequels, that plot twist made the story far more interesting than just a generic "good vs evil Flash Gordon for the 70s!" thing. 

George didn't have the blue print for any of this shit in his head, he had a one page outline of back story maybe at best and it was painfully obvious with the prequels he didn't plan out most of this stuff ("when I first knew your father he was already a great pilot" ... lol, that is a real stretch George). 

It's an overrated franchise that got put on a pedestal because it was the only really big franchise in the 70s/80s marketed/merchandised etc. that way. Without CGI things like Marvel and LOTR really couldn't have been done then, since the advent of CGI it's easy to make fantasy/sci-fi and now that Star Wars has to compete against like 50 other things, it's no longer that special, and they will never be able to top that story twist from Empire. 

That some pretty big revisionist history you've got worked up in your head:

This is from an interview back in 1980:
Alan Arnold: Tell me more about the overall concept of the Star Wars saga.

George Lucas: There are essentially nine films in a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy is about the young Ben Kenobi and the early life of Luke's father when Luke was a little boy. This trilogy takes place some twenty years before the second trilogy which includes Star Wars and Empire. About a year or two passes between each story of the trilogy and about twenty years pass between the trilogies. The entire saga spans about fifty-five years.

AA: How much is written?

GL: I have story treatments on all nine. I also have voluminous notes, histories, and other material I've developed for various purposes. Some of it will be used, some not. Originally, when I wrote Star Wars, it developed into an epic on the scale of War and Peace, so big I couldn't possibly make it into a movie. So I cut it in half, but it was still too big, so I cut each half into three parts. I then had material for six movies. After the success of Star Wars I added another trilogy but stopped there, primarily because reality took over. After all, it takes three years to prepare and make a Star Wars picture. How many years are left? So I'm still left with three trilogies of nine films. At two hours each, that's about eighteen hours of film!