@lain @hfaust Hindsight and the sequel triology make me look more kindly upon the prequel trilogy.

Good media is often like a good potage. You take a bunch of ingredients that work well together, treat them right and blend them together, but not too much that it loses all texture. Take fantasy, sci fi, samurai/western and blend it together and bam, you got a Star Wars. Take that, add a few drama croutons and bam, you got an Empire. Reblend it all together, and you lose the texture of the croutons, add a bit of children appeal character in the Ewoks and you get a still serviceable though maybe a bit less iconic Return.

Now the prequel trilogy, Lucas added more things. He tweaked the recipe. Added ingredients the fans didn't like. Put less samurai/western, add some political intrigue, add slapstick cartoon rabbits, children action-adventure. The fans were older and did not want these ingredients. He kept tweaking that recipe for the rest of the prequel trilogy. I can't say it's my favorite, but by the time of Revenge it was edible enough for me.

But as disappointing as that was, that the recipe changed, Disney's answer was much worse. They found an old batch of moldy Star Wars potage in the back of a freezer, put that in a blender on "crush ice" and let it blend until it was all even and disgusting. Their only additions were some divisive current day culture wars politics, kind of like adding blue cheese to food; some people will love it, some people will fucking throw up at the smell.

And ultimately, I think the reason I enjoyed The Mandalorian (season 1 and 2) so much is because Jon Favreau made a new fresh batch of mostly original recipe Star Wars, heavier on my favorite ingredient of the original recipe, the western/samurai (but it's fresh western that was not already in the OG recipe, not rehashing the old western elements that were already in).