Star Wars is an all-encompassing vision that isn't just the original trilogy, isn't just George's work. Everyone who has played a role in building an impressive tapestry of content, movies and TV-wise, have truly built an incredible unifying, coherent whole. They're to be commended for their work.
Despite what the Internet and the press peddles, Star Wars is beloved and remains beloved, always has been, always will be. And including for what it is now, not just "for what it used to be." Because "what it used to be" is what it always has been, from day one. And no genuflecting at the altar of St. Gary Kurtz can change that, because Kurtz contributed precious little. It was George's vision and George's success in the original and prequel trilogies, and it's been Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson, Gareth Edwards, Ron Howard, Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau, Robert Rodriguez, and yes, Bob Iger's success. Star Wars not only survives, it thrives, and not just in pure dollars and streaming numbers. I look around, and I see warmth and ever-loving affection in the crowds I go with. The average person on street embraces Star Wars, embraces every aspect of it provided as official canon. I've seen this ever since the Special Edition releases back in 1997, I saw it in the joyful crowds at the prequels, and the excited chatter in the Disney era. These people have always gotten and understood what Star Wars is. Just because it's not how YOU understand Star Wars doesn't make it wrong. Because after all, that label was given to George Lucas himself, even though who would understand Star Wars, and the backstory of the prequels, better than the creator himself?
From the start, every word against the series was nothing a vocal minority being amplified by the vultures in the press, building a clickbait-y, revenue-hungry narrative, completely twisting the facts and gaslighting the public. It wasn't enough to say that Jake Lloyd, Hayden Christensen and Ahmed Best were despised, and that Lloyd was being bullied mercilessly; no, they had to go further and make lies of how Natalie Portman was bullied and considered an awful actor, even though her career has been active and flourishing since the release of
The Professional in 1994, and she was getting plenty of work in that time, including
Garden State. It also wasn't enough to say "this is what the perception is NOW,"; it became "this is perception from day one in 1999", which was never the truth. But say a lie enough times, it becomes the truth. And that has been what the media has always loved to do with Star Wars.
But despite that, the public has embraced the series fully. They're the true fans of the series, despite what whiny, entitled people like Simon Pegg say. Same way true fans of the band Kiss support the band not being Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, because Kiss is not Ace, Peter, Gene and Paul; it's the Space Ace, the Catman, the Demon and the Starchild. The true fans of Kiss know this, and they show up at the concerts.
If you want an example of people who truly did what everyone from George to Filoni have been accused of being guilty of, of not understand the source material and ruining it to impose their own vision, look at what Julie Taymor, Bono and The Edge did with the Broadway musical
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. They all admitted they had no intention to truly make a deep dive through the source material or dive much further than the Sam Raimi trilogy, and Taymor insisted on putting forward her vision that "Greek and Roman gods and demigods are the original superheroes." And then to establish this, she put forward this insane, convoluted story that robs Spider-Man of what makes him Spider-Man and takes away his agency. Not to mention that Bono and Edge, whose score was already dull and lifeless and unfit for Broadway, were forced to write a song that even
they thought was garbage, for a scene where the character of Arachne...steals shoes.
Needless to say, there's only one response to this:
This and other reasons contributed to Taymor being fired from her own project, and changes made to the script and score. But the changes didn't make it any better, it just made dull and incredibly boring, and it made the character of Arachne pointless, without her contributing anything of worth. All of this because no one ever cracked the whip to tell either Taymor, "This is pointless, absurd and too expensive," or to even tell Bono and Edge, "These songs suck, start again." (And I'm a very big U2 fan who has long defended Bono from the charges of pretentiousness, but he's not making it easy here!)
THIS is what ruining a mythos to put one's own vision in looks like. Not Lucasfilm.
