I'd honestly be curious to see what someone with zero familiarity with Star Wars thinks of Andor.
Without the backdrop, it would most likely feel UNDER-developed. Creating and characterizing a society in short order is complicated. Someone with zero Star Wars knowledge would also have zero interest. Someone that's never seen any Star Wars has made a decision that's not likely to be undone by a "Yeah, but you don't need to know anything about Star Wars to appreciate THIS Star Wars thing" argument.
You'd be better off not telling them it's Star Wars at all, let them get through both seasons and give them Rogue One, and have them reach the end and go "Wait a f***ing minute! You tricked me! Now I have to watch those damn space samurai movies." Then you get all excited and start talking about the trilogy of trilogies and Machete Order and all that nonsense and they punch you in the nose and never talk to you again.
And that's whether they watch it or not, because watching the whole damn thing just isn't worth it. I'm not even sure if including the shows in a chronological telling of the thing makes it better or worse. It's kind of a slog either way because of the neverending inconsistency.
I disagree that the OT is lean on world building. World building is one of the areas that Star Wars excels at.
In a trilogy that's showing you universes, they were good a building the intimate and insular world the stories actually depict. They show you glimpses of this massive thing but it rarely feels that grand in scope.
Kinda like the Thor movies. In 4 movies they showed us the world of Asgard plenty. And were it not for a couple of zoomed-out shots of big crowds, Asgard always feels like a pretty small place populated by about 200 people.
It's not fair to "blame" A New Hope and Empire for not building a foundation onto which you can drop 40+ years of continuity. They're telling you a pretty intimate story in the OT that happens to turn on larger concepts that never feel as large as described. They phoned it in at the end of Jedi, so it landed with a bit of a thud, but they did a decent job overall. The OT is plenty of fun.
I admit my overall feeling includes the benefit of hindsight. It should have been easy to expound upon the OT in instantly fulfilling ways, but Lucas wasn't the writer for that stunt. He was clumsier in the second trilogy than he was in the first. And the many swings at it since then have illustrated that the OT wasn't that sturdy a foundation.
You don't jump to Chapter 4 for no reason. You jump to Chapter 4 when you've thought a lot about Chapters 1-3 and feel like they're no fun. And he just thought a lot about them. He didn't actually, fully know what those building blocks even were.
Perhaps more importantly, I don't think it's "white hat vs black hat" is ham fisted at all in the OT.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this point. If you're going to make it an argument between simple good vs. evil stories and the popularity of moral complexity these days, then you have to concede that the OT tried to have it both ways. You get the full tragedy of Anakin from the end of Empire through Jedi, and it's massively rushed, underdone, and fails to land. Nothing illustrates the fact that George Lucas was a novice writer more than that.
He did too much of his writing in retrospect. Major elements of the plot were clearly revisions. I agree that there's nothing wrong with a *good* white hat/black hat story. I'm a John Wayne fan. But the OT isn't that. Jedi completely subverts that notion in the end, which would be okay (even great) if he pulled it off. But instead it lands like an improvised switcheroo.
Part of it was probably circumstance. He made the first one on a shoestring and it ended up being the biggest surprise smash ever, before or since. Then he had to make two more, stumbled upon some narrative contradictions, and probably didn't have the backing he needed for the truly necessary fourth installment, whether it was the cast wanting out or whatever else. But if that was the case, then there was truly no excuse for Jedi. Assuming the script was completely written before production, someone should have but a stop to it and either gotten him some help or just given him more notes and time.
So there were probably reasons, but the OT -- while very entertaining and certainly worthy of many of its accolades -- was riddled with narrative flaws.
Looking at all the SW content that's out now, I honestly hope I'm alive when/if someone great reboots it. If someone did a Peter Jackson LotR job on the Star Wars saga -- distilling it down to its best elements and faithfully bringing them to the screen in epic fashion -- I'd be first in line. There's a great story in there, you just have to find it and burn the rest.
