What Happened to Star Wars?

I'm currently paying subscriptions to four (4) streaming services, on top of my monthly broadband TV fees. Each of these services has been subscribed because of one, maybe two top titles as well. Viaplay was for Frasier. Prime Video was for The Grand Tour, and later on for Clarkson's Farm. Netflix was for The Crown, and the last service, a domestic one, came with the broadband and the Mrs and I kept it because it carried Vera. But when it comes to taking more advantage of these subscriptions, I really don't. Early 2023 I was on long sick leave, perfect time to binge some Star Wars shows from Disney+, but I just ended up watching Rings of Power from my Prime Video subscription. So, no love for Disney's Star Wars then?

Yes, there's the financial aspect for sure, but also the cold fact that I just don't have much time to watch TV of my own nowadays. I often even have to chop movies into 20 or 30 minute segments, then continue few days later. So, I suppose deep down I had a hunch it would not be worth it. After the somewhat abyssmal Sequel Trilogy, I started to classify all Disney Star Wars gradually slipping further into Expanded Universe realm. Before Disney, Expanded Universe was basically a wide array of different Star Wars stories, books, graphic novels, video games and such, which was not directly considered canon as it was not originated from the creator's, George Lucas' pen. Some of that Expanded Universe was pretty good, such as Knights of the Old Republic RPG video games, but there was a lot of bizarre rubbish involved too. And this seems to be fitting description for the Disney Star Wars too. The movies and especially TV shows, are becoming more and more manifestations of their creators' views and agenda, rather than taking advantage of the rich, already existing background material and lore. Only the new crew seems to have constantly less film making credentials than the crew before. And that's a bit of shame. But in a nutshell, this all sounds like old Expanded Universe to me.

In the Sequel Trilogy, the Episode 7 was made by a team which hated Prequels and pretty much wanted to erase them from the SW universe, but also had to satisfy the demanding fanbase. Resulting in an expensive fan film, which essentially cloned Episode 4. And this was from a crew which had enormous amount of film making expertise. Then Episode 8 crew shoehorned the director's trademark complex storytelling method into SW realm, ending in awful mess the critiques loved, but fans hated. Me being in latter camp. The Episode 9 had to fix that mess, but only made things worse. I can't express enough how disappointed I was with the Sequel Trilogy, and this comes from someone who actually liked Prequels, and doesn't consider himself SW elitist of any kind (person who hates everything else but Empire Strikes Back, basically). I was thrilled to finally see new characters too, but those characters didn't impress me. Rey was Luke, only without personal growth. Kylo Ren, a conflicted villain hiding behind black mask. Now, where did I see that before? Poe? Finn? Why didn't the writers give them any charisma at all? Han? Leia? Luke? Chewie? Droids? Well, they killed almost all of them off. Why?

I know GL inserted a lot of his political views of the time into Prequel trilogy. And that's not completely stranger of a habit for Hollywood either, it's been done in a lot of movies before. Even Tolkien copied geopolitical symbolism of the period, when writing Lord of the Rings. Star Trek TOS was known to pioneer in diversity, equality and inclusion, at the time when it was significantly less easy to get past studio bosses than now. As I read a lot of books and bedtime stories for my 9-yo son, I've noticed a lot of children's books have an alarmingly glaring amount of agenda, not even hidden in the story but in plain obvious sight. Not something the child may notice right away, but there's a clear pattern for sure. I normally don't mind this, as long as the story works and the agenda is not taking it over, but sometimes I can't help wondering why was that detail so important that it had to be rubbed on my face? What importance did it bring to the story? Why was that even mentioned? And if 70% of the roadwork construction workers are women, as one of my son's books would imply, why am I mostly seeing sweaty men in hard hats and hi-vis jackets every freakin' time I drive past a site?

Now, as the only Star Wars TV I have seen from Disney+ was one episode of Mandalorian, I obviously don't have much credentials to critisise the shows. Zero, to be honest. But as I'm reading SO much negative feedback on the Interwebs about the most recent shows (and Star Wars TV shows in general), I'm beginning to sense there's got to be fire if I can see so much smoke. Some of the critisism of the fanbase is harsh, IMO, and even uncalled for, but I can clearly read between the lines how frustrated and disappointed the fans are becoming. Is a good story with good characters too much to ask nowadays? We've had so many great stories and characters (many of them NOT even associated to Skywalker family) in old Expanded Universe, how come it's now so difficult to come up with fresh ideas, aside shoehorning the agenda in by force. Sorry Disney, you're still not getting my money.

But the silver lining here is, even rubbish Star Wars can produce nice and interesting props. And all those expensive subscriptions I'm paying? Good news, the Mrs uses them for watching grim documentaries, where someone gets a rare disease, slowly withers and then finally dies. For some reason, that kind of stuff is almost p*rn for her.