See also this excellent rumination on the Star Wars franchise by Brian Tiemann.
excerpt:
I don't expect it to even try to address the gaping plot holes, like C-3PO not remembering he was built by Darth Vader or used to work at Owen's hole in the ground, or R2-D2 getting his rocket-packs removed in a thirty-year downgrade of technology—simply because the textural disagreements with the original movies are vaster still. Remember how in the "first" three movies, the Empire was just the Empire—it was just "there"? There wasn't any politics involved. When I first saw the movies when I was a kid, I got the impression (somehow) that when they talked about the Old Republic being "swept away" and the ancient Jedi Order vanishing and the Clone Wars, they were talking about something that had happened hundreds of years ago, and Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi and such characters had far longer lifespans than normal humans—the events they were talking about just seemed far too distant to have occurred within living memory, because there was no indication that anybody cared. It seemed like the Empire was a fact of life that everyone had just accepted generations ago, and when they spliced in those scenes at the end of the re-released Return of the Jedi with citizens on planets all over the galaxy thronging in the streets and cheering, I was like, the hell? Since when did the people of Coruscant hate Darth Vader or the Emperor? We'd certainly seen no indication that anybody but the Rebels or the occasional incompetent admiral had reason to hate or fear Vader's trachea-crushing grip.Yup. Lucas took an awful lot of evocative and mysterious stuff and just flattened it out. When I was 12 in 1977, Star Wars was it for me. But now the whole thing is just a joke. And I can't just forget about the rest and watch the original as it was in 1977 because Lucas has hatcheted that up, too.
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