10 Things That Annoy You About New Star Wars That Didn't Bother Original Trilogy Fans
Why does every Star Wars character need a complex backstory?
Six years and four movies after spending a massive $4 billion on acquiring Lucasfilm (and with it the rights to Star Wars), Disney have handed Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy a new three year contract that will allow her to oversee the rest of the sequel trilogy and the beginning of whatever comes after.
Of course, given the enormity of the property, some backlash against the Disney Star Wars films was as inevitable as Disney not taking too long to earn that 4 billion back. Nevertheless, the scale of the negativity that some Star Wars fans have toward the Disney Star Wars films, The Last Jedi in particular, has been surprising.
Surprising because so much of the anger directed towards the new Star Wars films made under Disney and Kennedy is predicated on the idea that the new films are screwing things up by making plot and character decisions that would have no place in the original trilogy. That, though, is simply not true.
Kennedy may have thrown out George Lucas' story treatments for the sequel trilogy and banished the confusing mess of the multi-media extended universe to non-canonical status, but the creator's insistence that elements of the prequels and sequels should rhyme with and reflect on their predecessors remains.
Yes, there are some things that seem really to infuriate fans about the Star Wars films getting released today that also featured in the beloved original trilogy to very little negative response.
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.