re: Rian Johnson: As a kid I hated Empire Strikes Back but now it's my favorite Star Wars film

ESB was my favorite as a kid because of three factors:
-Han Solo flying the Falcon through some crazy shite
-AT-AT walkers
-The whole backstory of the bounty hunters competition to find Solo (the story was in the books, but it made the movie that much more appealing to me)

Also, frick Rian

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Oh, right. You're a kid. Duh.

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Not sure what this is supposed to mean.

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Look, man, same about you, we were in our twenties when the Prequels came out. I remember the Prequels, that acrimony of the prequels. I think people forget exactly the tenor of the danger. We remember because we were in the thick of it. So, I mean, I don’t know. I think that anything with a passionate following always has a passionate following and Star Wars is that, even more so. You can’t be angry at one side of it when it’s also the reason the positive is so passionate, you know? It’s all part of the same thing and it always was like this basic thing. That’s why I love it.

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I don’t know what he’s trying to say here

I wore out a VHS bootleg of ESB that taped off of Showtime. I was only 8. I watched it at least twice every day. It was by far my favorite of the Star Wars movies and still is. It's a real film. The others, not so much, but minus the prequels and the Last Jedi, still very enjoyable.

RobbBobb: As a kid I adored Star Wars, but now I hate it because of Rian Johnson

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No one is making that up. We all pretend that everyone loved Empire when it came out, but that isn't reality. Now we're trying to do the same thing with the PT and TFA, but those movies actually did suck arse.

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retardedbuckeye strikes again!

Nice melt bro.

I disagree with the direction he took Star Wars with his film.

That said, I can understand disliking ESB as a kid when it came out.

I was 9 when I saw Star Wars, and it was glorious. Opened up a fantastic universe for my young imagination, and I read the comic strip, the comic books, and the novels that came out after (but before ESB).
Almost all of them, as well as my own imagining, had Luke and Leia hooking up, doing adventures as Luke slowly figured out how to use the Force on his own, pursued by Darth Vader.
Han and Chewie went off on their own a lot, doing smuggler things (think: Firefly, but on steroids). Occasionally the gang would reunite. And you'd also occasionally get the tension of Han-Leia-Luke, like they did in the first Star Wars.

And there were the toys. My God, the toys... tons of little action figures that you could world-build with, but beyond that, those spacecraft. And what was so awesome, was that Battlestar Galactica came out the next year, and then those toys hit the market too... and the fighters were to scale. Remember, we at that age were primed with Army Men, toy tanks and playsets like from Guns of Navarone... suddenly WW2 (the Hollywood version ) got transported into space. Star Wars was Europe and the Nazis, BSG was the Pacific with the carrier groups. And of course if you had them all, they crossed over, X-Wings vs Cylon Raiders, Vipers vs TIE Fighters, Battlestars squaring off against Imperial Star Destroyers.

2-3 years of unchecked space war fantasy for the preteen boy.
Of course, Empire wrecked 99% of that, it had to by necessity. Just like the prequels wrecked Darth Vader, the imagined Old Republic, the Jedi Knights, etc for lots of people. Just like the fate of Han and Luke in the sequels wreck things again (and to be clear, ANY fate would wipe out most people's preferred ideas).
Because we wanted more Star Wars, but we don't want storylines being affected, we want action adventure episodes starring our heroes.

To this day, I can appreciate Empire as a well-made film, and the advancements they made in effects over the original; but it doesn't hold the same spot in my heart Star Wars does. But at the very least, I'll give it this- it stayed rather serious along the veins of an old WW2 adventure film. SW didn't get infected with the Cutesies until the Ewoks and ROTJ.