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Not to the same extent as now, IMO. The prequels have their haters, but they have just as many fans. The sequels are so bad that even some prequel haters have softened their stance and talk about how at least Lucas had a vision, even if it was imperfect. The sequels do have fans, to be sure, but they are by far in the minority whereas opinion on the prequels was much more evenly split.
I'm an Old School Star Wars fan (I saw A New Hope in theaters when it was just a little SF flick starting to get buzz).
I think you're forgetting just how much fans loathed the prequels when they first came out. Well, loathed is a strong term. They still went to see them. Fans had been waiting for 16 years after Return of the Jedi, the hype was overwhelming, and while A Phantom Menace was of course a box office success, hardcore SW fans were trashing it and the rest of the prequels almost immediately. Today maybe the backlash against Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd's acting seems overdone, but at the time those prequels felt like a huge let-down, as pretty as they were. The plot went in weird directions, the characters weren't what people were expecting, and of course over a decade of EU content and fan speculation got blown away. The prequels were really... not good, and the consensus was that George Lucas was a good visual director but hugely overrated as a writer.
Of course, then the sequels came out and made the prequels look like golden age SF by comparison.
I'm not forgetting that at all. But I think your argument is missing that there was not only the group of fans who loathed the prequels. There were also fans who enjoyed them quite a bit. I remember going to see Phantom Menace as a teenager with my friends, and we all came out of that movie stoked about how cool it was to see the Old Republic and the Jedi order at its peak, things we had only imagined before. I fully acknowledge that there were fans who very vocally and bitterly hated the prequels, but they were not even close to unanimous among the fan base.
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the prequels were (mostly) fine as movies, particularly The Phantom Menace. They weren't fine as Star Wars movies.
I think my take is best summed up by the midichlorian scene. In a different setting, this is a fine scene! Sure, you can measure the space magic capabilities of someone with a blood test. That's fine! If it was in Star Trek, sure, or if it was measuring for bionic strength in Mass Effect, for instance. It is, however, completely wrong for Star Wars and The Force.
Exactly. Star Trek is (or was) hard(ish) science, the technobabble was at least a pretence at 'based on current understanding of scientific principles'. Star Wars is space fantasy, so blood tests for midichlorians sits very uneasily alongside 'I got spontaneously pregnant without having sex'. Going back to the original movies, the Force and the Jedi etc. are regarded as 'hokey ancient religions' and mysticism, not Based On True Science.
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How much of this is just a function of people who saw the prequels as kids imprinting on the films at an early age, and enjoying them despite their uneven quality? Similar to all the people who love Disney direct-to-video sequels because they grew up with them.
If that's the true explanation, then just as the prequels started to be rehabilitated in the public eye as people who saw them as kids grew up and started making video essays about why the prequels were great, I wonder if we won't see the same thing happen as the kids who grew up with the sequels grow up?
I think some of that is "I thought the prequels were shit, then I saw what they did with the newer ones, man I didn't know when I had it good" (same as with Jackson's Hobbit movies against Rings of Power). Did anyone really want Kylo Ren, man-boy rebel without a clue? Or the 'mystery' around Rey: her parents abandoned her and ran away! No, they will come back for her one day! No, they were junkies who sold her and crashed their ship and died! No, she in fact has a secret destiny as the descendant of Palpatine which is why her parents hid her!
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This is an open question, and certainly it's nonzero, but my anecdotal experience is that, even among the younger viewers, respect for the prequels (mostly undeserved, IMHO) seems more driven by how much better they are than the sequels than by nostalgia. I've seen a number of completely new young fans who never watched the prequels or the sequels (or the originals) until recently express the opinion that the prequels are much better than the sequels.
We should be able to detect this pretty soon, if not now. The Force Awakens came out 11 years ago, which is less than the 16 years between The Phantom Menace and that film, but still plenty of time for then-10-year-olds to become influential in the social medias to shape the overall public view of it.
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Partly that.
But part of it may be that but a lot of it is just that the term "prequels hate" can mean the films or the setting.
A lot of people hated the films for the way they handled certain characters and plots or because they felt the CGI was overdone. But that is not the same as hating them as settings.
Many fans were willing to take the bit of the films they didn't like in exchange for a living Republic and Jedi Order and Republic and all the stories you could tell with them
So a lot of people have more fondness for the "prequel era" because that stuff also included Republic Commando, The Clone Wars, etc.
That audience is younger and so has gained more power and influence over time. Especially since the attempt to mainly cater to the OT-setting fans after the LucasArts sale was a huge disaster, partly because they confused Prequel Film Hate for New Worldbuilding Hate.
We might. The problem I see is that there's almost no consistent throughline in these movies and their setting is basically the OT setting but worse. But maybe the books are cool. I couldn't bring myself to check.
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The prequels were disappointing to fans because they weren't what we had been waiting all this time for, it barely "looked" like Star Wars but they were Lucas's new vision, something new cooked fresh with new base ingredients. Now it turns out I'm allergic to slapstick cartoon rabbits in my space operas, but that recipe can have its fans. The sequels were exactly what the fans had been waiting for, it looks like Star Wars from front to back, but they ultimately served us an old batch of og Star Wars that had been wasting in Lucasfilm's vault with moldy rotten ingredients; yes it's the original recipe but the quality and freshness isn't there anymore.
What would have satisfied fans is doing what Jon Favreau did with seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian. The original recipe for Star Wars is samurai/western + pulp sci-fi setting, The Mandalorian (seasons 1 and 2, it got bad after) was adapting new or different samurai/western stories in the setting. Same recipe, fresh ingredients.
Given that Disney owns both now, I've been thinking a spiritual successor to Firefly would fit well in the Star Wars universe. But I wouldn't trust the company blindly to produce a good show these days.
Andor was good, though. Same idea; new characters and setting.
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