10 Things That Annoy You About New Star Wars That Didn't Bother Original Trilogy Fans

10. C-3PO's Differently Coloured Limb Is Given No Explanation

A relatively minor point this, but one that is a microcosm of the difference in demands and expectations from Star Wars audiences in 2018 compared to 1977.

Perennially panicked protocol droid C-3PO had little part to play in the action of The Force Awakens, but what scenes he did appear in showed him sporting a red left arm, the origins of which went totally unexplained. By his even briefer appearance in The Last Jedi the arm had reverted to its classic shiny gold form (indeed, eagle-eyed viewers can probably spot it already back to gold in the final parts of The Force Awakens).

Critics of the new movies latched onto the lack of explanation of C-3PO's red arm as an example of new Star Wars creating mysteries that it annoyingly never solved. Few such criticisms were leveled at the original trilogy, though, which saw an all-gold C-3PO apart from his right leg which was silver. (Nor are those annoyed by the red arm asking when did Threepio, whose silver leg is still apparent on Endor in Return Of The Jedi, get his original leg back).

Back then, the silver leg (if anybody noticed it, its reflective surface making it kind of hard to tell apart from the gold one) served not as some mysterious detail in the droid's past. Instead, it was part of the movie's whole "used future" aesthetic in which we were given a sci-fi environment in which technology was not new and shiny, but dented, damaged and repaired with spare parts.

Rather than some great mystery, the red arm (which is explained anyway in the new set of expanded non-movie media that make up the Disney canon) is a continuation of this concept. It is simply there to say that these characters' lives and adventures have continued between Episode VI and VII, they do not remain in stasis when not on screen. Nothing more than that.