Believe me, because I was around for it - when the prequels were new, Star Wars fanboards were mostly populated by millennials (because Zoomers were not around yet and Gen X and older hadn't really gravitated to those sorts of social forums in large numbers) and they generally fucking hated them. Only the youngest of the millennial contingent, who were still children at the time, seemed to look upon them with any degree of positivity, something that the Zoomers that came after them echoed. I noticed that opinions of the prequels started improving maybe 5-10 years ago, which is when the Zoomers who grew up with the prequels and saw them as children were old enough to opine on them.
To the contrary, part of the problem was that he took himself *too* seriously. He started listening to his own propaganda and forgot that a good executive of any kind builds a team that can tell him when he's stepping out of line.
Whimsical subject matter like a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy collapsing into violent civil war that ultimately results in a fascist dictatorship coming to power and instigating a genocide against its political opponents?
You have an odd definition of the word "whimsical".
I don't disagree, the sequels (except for Episode VII, which was deliberately aping Lucas's style) certainly don't feel like Star Wars, but I would rather have something that doesn't feel like Star Wars but is still good (like Rogue One) than something that does feel like Star Wars but is terrible (like AotC).
Not every Star Wars movie is Lucasean. Not every Star Wars movie needs to be.
Well, if you *really* want to fix the prequel scripts, you do that by feeding them into a paper shredder and starting over. Yes, you could rip out the Jedi council, you could remove Qui-Gon, you could delete the entirety of Episode I and start over with a plot that focuses on the Clone Wars (which always should have been the case - it was ridiculous not to kick off the principle conflict of the trilogy until the end of the second movie, then conclude it less than half a movie later)... but at that point you're not really "fixing" the prequels, you're completely rewriting them.
My hypothetical was "how do you improve the movies the most while changing the least"?
okay, the internet message boards especially back then were a minority opinion. Most millennials like me (born in 1993) loved them.
I cant prove that George Lucas did not take the prequels too serious but it feels to me like he just wanted them to be fun movies.
whimsical as in space, lasers, aliens etc. I wasnt talking thematically.