[SilverElfin]

Disney removed a lot of the earlier IP from the official Star Wars storyline shortly after acquiring it. That IP was much better than the complete mess and politicization of Star Wars that happened in the sequels. Sure they are trying to squeeze money out of it - and maybe some of the TV shows are tolerable - but they killed the brand and its best content in the process.

[wredcoll]

Good point, Star Wars was famously not about politics. Very apolitical.

[teddyh]

The politics of the original trilogy Star Wars was essentially “dictators and fascists with big armies are bad”. It was naïve and simplistic; a simple storytelling device, nothing more. There was no conscious choice behind it. If it had been made 40 years earlier, the enemies would have been savage indigenous people, as was the style at the time. The politics of modern Star Wars are… specific. Pointed. Winking at the camera. I suspect they may not age well.

[hobofan]

The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.

[teddyh]

What Viet Cong parallels? Whatever you mean, it can’t have been very visible to the audience, since clear Viet Cong sympathies would not have gone over well (at least not universally) in 1977-1983.

[slg]

This 3 minute clip of a conversation between George Lucas and James Cameron might help.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Jq_mCJEo

[teddyh]

“Not available in your country.”

But what George Lucas claims to have thought (now many years later), is essentially irrelevant. What matters is how audiences interpret the movies when watching them, both at the time and now. If, as I strongly suspect, essentially nobody saw clear Viet Cong sympathies in the original trilogy, then the modern Star Wars differs significantly.

And this is my point. The politics of the original trilogy was cookie-cutter, incidental, and unimportant, whereas much of the modern Star Wars has political creeds, obvious symbolism and grandstanding all over the place, front and center. You may (or may not) agree with the politics of the new Star Wars, but you can’t deny that they are different.

[mholm]

Content quality and content monetization are very different. The EU had exceptionally low monetization and brand recognition.

[SilverElfin]

They removed a lot of first party content too like the video games. But it almost doesn’t matter what was removed. The sequels and many of the shows were worse than all of it.