Wait...the 'Phantom Menace' was a reference to Palpatine?

I have tons of reading to do tonight, but since I'm already not getting any sleep this week and will probably be up tonight until kingdom come, I figured I would open up a new debate. I have a feeling that we're going to have a hard time staying classy with this one. The question:

Did anything positive whatsoever come out of the Star Wars prequels?

There are about a million facets to this, but I'd like to touch on just a few. Before that, though, I'll tell you that my answer to the question is...yes.



Don't hurt me. I can rationalize the shit out of this. Or at least try.

First and foremost, I would like to think that George Lucas got to just get a whole bunch of ridiculous shit out of his system. It had been building up for a decade, folks. We can probably assume that after Star Wars was over, he didn't go with the norm and shove all of his typewritten screenplay pages, sketches, letters from fans, and nude photographs of Mark Hamill into a closet in the back of his office (which, by the way, is a 4,700 acre plot of land in Marin County, CA, aptly named Skywalker Ranch). No, indeed. Lucas most likely spent everyday taking a boat out on Ewok Lake (if you think I'm kidding, you didn't read the whole page) and obsessing over how he could bring all of the magic back. As. Soon. As. Possible.

All things considered, the turnaround was pretty fast. Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, and The Phantom Menace was released in May 1999. The man had had the prequel stories planned out since 1976, and by 1994, he had begun to write them. He wanted this to happen so fucking badly that a mid-life crisis and his own better judgment could not stop him. So, happen it did, and here we are. But back to my original point. I fear that, had Lucas let the crazy build up inside of him any longer, he may have either exploded or started releasing the films during the Bush presidency. The former would have been extremely upsetting, and the latter would have resulted in suicide on a mass scale because of the general population's inability to psychologically cope with two unholy events of such magnitude occurring at the same time.

We should just be thankful that he got it out of his system. After the end of the prequel trilogy, George Lucas was clearly finally satisfied and thus ready to retire the lightsaber for good.



Fuck.