Talya wrote:
(3) Star Wars was never, ever a kids show. It was a movie series with universal appeal - the primary target audience even back in 1977 were 18-35 year olds, but we loved it from ages 4 through 70. This is really the mark of brilliant writing - how universal is the appeal? It's not that you can't make a show inappropriate for children very good, but those old Looney Toons are loved by all ages, and we all laugh at different parts. Pixar and to a lesser extent Disney Studios are also brilliant at this - making incredibly deep shows targeted at kids, but adults get so much more out of them. Star Wars was like this - nearly everyone liked it (except Lenas - I think he has no soul) no matter our ages. Its appeal had no boundaries. The prequels do not have that. Sure, a few adults like them, but most of them end up despising them. It's pretty much the reverse of the originals, for whom a few outliers hated them, but nearly everyone else loved them. The appeal of the prequels is limited to a few outliers.
Whether Star Wars is a "kid's show" is largely irrelevant - no, it's not specifically or exclusively for kids, but kids are the only ones that can look at it with unbiased eyes. A "kids show" is something like the aforementioned Barney - which is not an appropriate comparison. The type of "kids" Star Wars is aimed at are already too old for Barney. Barney-age children will find SW frightening and confusing and won't have a clue what's going on. A 9-year old has been too old for Barney for 5 years or so, and they ARE starting to develop senses of taste, quality, and aesthetics.
As adults, we tend to look at everything in the newer movies through the lens of how awesome IV-VI were when we saw them as kids. Young adults that wedge in there as too young to have seen the originals but who were also entering middle school or a bit older by the time Ep I. came out generally are the ones who really don't know much about and don't care about Star Wars, period. That's because they went through that younger child phase in time when Star Wars was somewhat dormant, before the prequels revived mass awareness and the child-oriented merchandizing such as the LEGO line.
Most adults do not "despise" the prequels either; most adults agree they were overall not as good as the original trilogy. Episode I is the only one that a plurality can generally be said to truly dislike; II gets lukewarm reactions and specific criticism of Anakin in particular (which isn't entirely fair seeing as Anakin is supposed to be a rather traumatized teenager who really has never had the opportunity to socialize normally with peers his own age) and most people think III was overall pretty good. Most of your criticisms of the prequels are over-the-top hyperbole of what the average adult actually thinks.
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(4) Even little kids without preconceived biases can see this difference. My daughter was five or six when I first convinced her to sit down and watch the movies. I didn't give her any ideas of which were better. She watched all six eagerly (and now a few years later still carries a toy lightsaber around a lot) and loved them. However, shortly after watching them, she comes over to me and said, "Mommy, I think the movies with Luke were a lot better than the ones with Anakin." (That's my girl.) Let's not pretend there's any amount of equivalence here. While the prequels (particularly Episode III) had a few exciting moments, the episode number is generally inversely proportional to the sheer amount of shite they are made of (I'd say, Episode I was 90% crap, episode 2 was 60% crap, and Episode 3 was a bit higher than 30% crap). The originals were a non-stop joyride, and had pretty much no moments where you smack the heel of your palm into your forehead and think "That's so **** stupid." The prequels have those moments constantly.
Kids will grow and learn and will eventually come to recognize the weaknesses of the prequels just as they will any movie. As a little kid you won't recognize that somehow the Millenium Falcon was able to travel from Hoth to Anoat to Bespin systems without hyperdrive. As you get older, you'll wonder about that. As you get even older or if you're more of a fan, though, you'll recognize a "plot hole" is not needed to explain this - Either the systems are rather close together and the Millenium Falcon flew a lot of it at relativistic velocity, allowing Luke a few months or years of training with Yoda (both occurring offscreen) or else SW has some other, lesser means of FTL propulsion that we never hear about because its only used in emergencies and most of the time hyperdrive is way better.
A little kid can't really understand why Anakin's teenage interactions with Amidala are so awkward. They might pick up on that later on, but it will never seem as bad, even when they grow up, because if you are 9 when you first see Ep II all you see is the adventure and excitement and that happy memory will always be there. If you were 26 when you first saw it and were cringing at how awkward his lines are, you'll always see it with that first impression in the back of your mind. It's basically "primacy effect".
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