Obviously he didnt deserve the harassment he got regardless. Like even if he was dogshit he wouldnt have deserved that. But I just rewatched Phantom Menace for the first time in awhile. Young friend of mine are going through the star wars movies because she was a sheltered homeschooled kid and hadnt seen them. Already did the OT, starting on the prequels.
Other than the obvious “oh wow, the racial stereotypes of literally three different alien species in this movie is insane”, the main takeaway my rewatch gave me is “wow ok, Jake LLoyd is average at worst”. He was just like, a regular kid actor? Nothing to write home about like say, young Maise Williams or something. But absolutely fine?
It would have fit everything better to have Anakin be an adult from the start. In ANH when Kenobi says “when I first knew [Anakin], he was the best starfighter pilot in the galaxy,” it really makes it sound like Anakin was an adult who was also a starfighter pilot when Obi Wan met him. And then Obi Wan says “follow old Obi Wan on some damned fool’s idealistic crusade like your father did” to Luke, which seems to imply that running off to fight in the Clone Wars was Obi Wan’s idea, and not some galaxy-spanning conflict that they were conscripted into.
So I’m imagining something kind of like what happened to Darth Revan before KOTOR, where going to the Outer Rim to fight in a war permanently changes Anakin and he becomes Darth Vader. It’d be pretty thematically strong too if he was out fighting for ten years or whatever and came back a fascist and backed the Emperor’s takeover of the Republic.
I feel like so much of the story of the prequels just works better as allusions in the OT.
You get the gist of it.
Yeah if I was transported into Lucas’ body in 1995 I would shop around for a writer/director to adapt the Thrawn trilogy or something like that. The OT actors were all about the right age to do it, too.
that would also match the Roman method of dictatorship from Julius Caesar, who took power after coming back as a embittered war veteran with tons of gripes against the senate