the finale to the star wars saga, if you were alive for it and you went to see it back then, flaws and all, was it the single greatest cinematic event to have been alive for?
shareEwoks?
Hell no. Empire Strike Back was the greatest cinematic event to be alive for. Everyone knows Empire was the best.
Jedi was just a bunch of teddy bears running around.
The final act of Return of the Jedi was the beginning of the decline of Star Wars. It starts out really dark and grim with Jabba's Palace and then it ends with all these carebears running around in a forest. It was a joke when it came out to a lot of fans , apart from all the other good parts of the film, the Tatooine sequence, the final showdown with Vader and the Emperor. But the Ewoks were stupid. The Ewoks were almost as hated as the prequels, until they came out. George Lucas only did the Ewoks because he had kids at the time and wanted to appeal to young audiences. That's why he made Jar Jar too.
Return of the Jedi was good, but.. not even the best of the Trilogy. Empire and A New Hope are both better.
I would say the release of the original “Star Wars” in 1977 was more of a watershed moment that cannot ever be replicated, it was something that reinvented pop culture. Or maybe films like Jaws, Exorcist, Clockwork Orange or The Godfather that were the first real blockbusters with people lining up around the block.
shareConsidering that this was the first movie I remember seeing in the movie theater and I was maybe 3-4 years old at the time, I don't remember anything about the hype other than the huge toy push running up to the film (and sticking around for years afterward). It seems Star Wars has sort of backed off of toy hype in recent years but then again I'm not as focused on the toy market as much at the age of 44 as I was at 4.
I do remember the THE PHANTOM MENACE had rabid fandom and anticipation, even just for the trailers of the film. This was an entirely new phenomenon to me as I'd never heard of anyone seeing a movie just to see a TRAILER for another film. There was even a fake trailer someone edited together with shots from various scifi movies like DUNE and even that got a bunch of hype for a day before everyone realized it was fake. The result was certainly more mixed. I hated MENACE and fell asleep in the packed theater watching it during the Tatooine scenes while a bunch of my friends and cousins were obsessed with the film, as though they wanted to like it so much that they successfully rewired their brain to do so. Thankfully over the decades more people have come to my line of thinking over it.
JEDI was highly regarded when it came out but I think was segued into Ewok-Star Wars for the 80's. There were two movies and a TV show focused on Ewoks so that's what Star Wars was after JEDI. It sort of turned into a somewhat obscure cult franchise during the 90's so it took the 1997 re-issues of the films to re-ignite the fandom, and it seems to have definitely worked as the hype for MENACE was so extreme compared to JEDI.