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It always seemed fishy to me that the PT gets slagged for things the OT had in spades. Corny dialogue? Acting straight from a Mexican soap opera? I also supsected that before so many critics jumped on the bandwagon in 1997, they were indifferent to hostile toward Star Wars. Another thing that set off my bullshit detector was the way so many tried to prove their bona fides as Star Wars fans by singing the praises of the OT (a decade or so late) and finished their hand of Three Card Monty by bleating: "Well I loved the old ones, but the new ones suck."

Well the fine folks at Rotten Tomatoes looked at what the reviews were like when the movies were released -not a decade or so later when self-serving revisionism (and maybe some legitimate nostalgia) kicked in.

The results (60% or more being "FRESH"):

Prequels Tomatometer Scores Based on Current Active Critics:
83% - Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
65% - Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
62% - Star wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Average Tomatometer: 70%


Tomatometer Scores for Original Trilogy During Original Release Dates:
(Click on the links for the archived quotes from Archive.org)
31% - Return of the Jedi
52% - The Empire Strikes Back
79% - Star Wars
Average Tomatometer: 54%

So not only did the prequels fare better, they did so by a wide margin.

What the hell?

How did RotJ get a 31%? And TPM got a better rating than ESB? WTF?

Well I'll be damned.

I don't think it leads exactly to that conclusion, but that's pretty interesting.

Pure Sabacc wrote:What the hell?

How did RotJ get a 31%?

Ewoks. Yub yub.

Pure Sabacc wrote:What the hell?

How did RotJ get a 31%? And TPM got a better rating than ESB? WTF?

Critics tore into ESB rather hard when it was originally released, for what was viewed as a downer of a non-ending.

jmac wrote:

Pure Sabacc wrote:What the hell?

How did RotJ get a 31%?

Ewoks. Yub yub.

Ewoks ruining the whole movie? Right.

Of course I've heard this before, but I get pissed every time I hear it. The presence of Ewoks cancels out the best space battle outside of RotS, the Death Star Duel, Vader's redemption, and everything else? Thats just stupid.

That is interesting although the sample sizes that those stats are based on are fairly small (10-20). It surprises me a little that critics were so quick to reveal ESB's twist:

David Denby wrote:In the end, Luke and Vader duel with lasers wielded like broadswords, and Luke rather chillingly find out who his father is.

Richard Combs wrote:Luke confronts Vader in a laser duel, during which the latter reveals that he is in fact Luke's long-lost Jedi father.

The site is having issues though so its hard to pull up all of the reviews. Comb's article came out in July which is not as bad, but Denby's article was published right away.

It wasn't the Ewoks so much as the fact that Han Solo was made to play second fiddle to them. What they did to Solo in that movie was wretched. In TESB, he was a cross between Errol Flynn's Captain Blood or Robin Hood and Gary Cooper's character in Lives of a Bengal Lancer. In ROTJ he was a goofball. Return of the Jedi has always been the weakest of the series in my book.

Elfdart wrote:It wasn't the Ewoks so much as the fact that Han Solo was made to play second fiddle to them. What they did to Solo in that movie was wretched. In TESB, he was a cross between Errol Flynn's Captain Blood or Robin Hood and Gary Cooper's character in Lives of a Bengal Lancer. In ROTJ he was a goofball. Return of the Jedi has always been the weakest of the series in my book.

I like Han, but for me, the Vader/Luke story is more important (besides, I really dont see whats wrong with the character in RotJ.)

Different priorities, to each his own.

How are they doing their stats anyway? Twelve of the twenty-one ESB reviews are very positive. If you count another review (Hatch's review) that might seem negative from the quote alone at the Rotten Tomatoes archive, over 60% of critics liked ESB:

Robert Hatch / Nation wrote: The first two episodes are without doubt the best space thrillers we have seen.

His review is somewhat negative but I don't think he thought it was a terrible film. It would be nice to read all the reviews though.

The fine folks at Rotten Tomatoes have not bothered to link the reviews correctly and thus its hard to see many of the actual reviews. I am skeptical of the ESB stats just based on the fact that counting the quoted reviews that are obviously very postiive produces a number above %52 as well as the small sample size of reviews. I don't doubt that the film was received with a mixed response but their quoted percentage numbers seem suspect.

Edits: Added last paragraph.

The critics can go to hell for all I care. I don't expect Oscar quality acting and deeply intellectual dialogue out of a popcorn movie. I expect to be entertained. I want, no, demand corny one-liners. The OT gave us
'You came here in this? You're braver than I thought.'
'Either I'm going to kill her or I'm beginning to like her.'
'Would it help if I got out and pushed?'-'It might.'
'Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf-herder.'-'Who's scruffy-looking?'
'I'd sooner kiss a Wookiee.'-'I can arrange that. You could use a good kiss. '
'There was no time to discuss it with a commitee.'-'I am NOT a commitee'.
'You said you wanted to be there when I was wrong'-'I take it back'.
''Don't woory Luke, she'll hold together.*lowers voice*'Hear me baby? Hold together'.
And that's more or less off the top of my head.
The PT (with the possible exception of RotS which I haven't seen yet) gave us-what?

Star Wars is by definition popcorn cinema, nobody in his right mind could deny that.
The point is that the OT was great popcorn cinema while the first two PT movies were mediocre popcorn cinema.

Senh Duong / Rotten Tomatoes wrote: Because those reviews weren’t available online, we OCR-ed them and put them on the web, breaking all kinds of copyright laws in the process. We were quite the rebels back then. However, when we legitimized the company months later, those reviews were the first to go. Thanks to Archive.org, a site that archives the web pages, the quotes are still there but the full text reviews are gone. The results are actually quite surprising.

So is this based on the full reviews (14 for Star Wars / 21 for ESB / 16 for ROTJ) or the quotes? . Based on the obvious positive reviews from the quotes only, I get %32 positive for Return of the Jedi and %57 positive for Empire Strikes Back. This is not counting the following borderline quotes for ROTJ which could swing either way:

A big, exciting comic book for kids of all ages who have been weaned on nothing better!

Let's not pretend we're watching art!

I wouldn't feel comfortable putting either of these two reviews into a fresh or rotten pile based on the quotes alone.

The old Star Wars gang are back doing what they've done before, but this time with a certain evident boredom.

Probably didn't like it but who can tell for sure.

And from ESB:

"Diverting piece of nonsense."

Is it diverting because the reviewer enjoyed it even though it was space fantasy or does this quote refer to something else? Who knows? I wouldn't feel comfortable putting that review into a good or a bad pile based on the quote alone.

For comparision, the PT ratings are based on well over a hundred reviews.

I've found there's a fine line between corny but good one-liners and cringeworthy one-liners.

Oh, and movie critics are full of shit. Who'd have thought?

Joe wrote:Oh, and movie critics are full of shit. Who'd have thought?

It's great work if you can get it. Get paid to sit around and bitch and moan about films we didn't like. Some of us do that here for free.

Elfdart wrote:It wasn't the Ewoks so much as the fact that Han Solo was made to play second fiddle to them. What they did to Solo in that movie was wretched. In TESB, he was a cross between Errol Flynn's Captain Blood or Robin Hood and Gary Cooper's character in Lives of a Bengal Lancer. In ROTJ he was a goofball. Return of the Jedi has always been the weakest of the series in my book.

I never understood why they decided to take Han Solo out of the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon and put him in camo on some piece of shit Forest Moon with teddy bears running around. I think Han's character suffered the most in ROTJ.

How can the original film not even get up to 80%? These guys are just being ridiculous, or they're bitter because they blame SW for the inevitable "blockbuster" stuff.

Hmm, the reviews I remember reading about the films (admittedly, from the 1990's onward) basically LOVE Star Wars, LOVE Empire even more, or about the same, and hate Jedi, or at least put it below the first two.

Phanton Menace they didn't like much, Attack of the Clones some said was better, others said was worse. Everybody loves ROTS.

At the time of release (meaning 1977, 1980 and 1983) did the critics hate each Star Wars movie? I don't know. I'd question those numbers though, they seem awfully low. Are they really taking all the published reviews into account? I mean there must be hundreds and even thousands of reviews of each of those films by now.

I think critics have softened on the old movies, but they still seem to put Jedi last, and Empire first.

Kurgan wrote:At the time of release (meaning 1977, 1980 and 1983) did the critics hate each Star Wars movie? I don't know. I'd question those numbers though, they seem awfully low. Are they really taking all the published reviews into account? I mean there must be hundreds and even thousands of reviews of each of those films by now.

It is based on a small sampling of reviews from fairly prominent publications at that time: LA Times, New York Times, Village Voice, Newsweek,New York Post, The Nation, New Yorker, Christian Science Monitor, The Christian Century, and the Washington Post. The number of reviews vary from a low of 14 for Star Wars to 21 for ESB. It is also hard to tell if the ratings are based on the reviews themselves, or on lifted quotes from the reviews as many of the actual reviews are no longer available on the site.

If you include the entire current critic database, the ratings for the three films increase greatly with a low of around 80% for Jedi and a high of around %98 for ESB.

I lived through that era. Believe me, the critics hated both TESB and ROTJ. This is not a surprise at all. Sure. some critics were positive, but a lot of big-name critics absolutely savaged TESB and ROTJ. Some of them blasted ANH too, but much fewer.

It's the same with the people accusing Star Wars fans of being "dorks" and saying it's "uncool" and blasting George Lucas personally. They did all of that back then too. I've said it before and I'll say again: back then, it was "Saturday Night Fever" that the supposedly "cool" people watched, not "Star Wars".

Star Wars movies do not age as badly as films the "cool" people like.

Darth Wong wrote:I lived through that era. Believe me, the critics hated both TESB and ROTJ. This is not a surprise at all. Sure. some critics were positive, but a lot of big-name critics absolutely savaged TESB and ROTJ. Some of them blasted ANH too, but much fewer.

I have a quick question Darth Wong since I was very small then. In the ESB section, several of the reviewers explicitly tell you that Luke's father is Vader. Was that normal for a review? How quickly did the secret become known from what you remember?

I can say with conviction despite my age that yes, back then critics were much less restrained about revealing and spoiling plot information in their reviews then they are now.

Dangermouse wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:I lived through that era. Believe me, the critics hated both TESB and ROTJ. This is not a surprise at all. Sure. some critics were positive, but a lot of big-name critics absolutely savaged TESB and ROTJ. Some of them blasted ANH too, but much fewer.

I have a quick question Darth Wong since I was very small then. In the ESB section, several of the reviewers explicitly tell you that Luke's father is Vader. Was that normal for a review? How quickly did the secret become known from what you remember?

Most people I knew were absolutely floored by it. Reviewers weren't quite the celebrities they are today, to be honest. Film reviews were not typically found in a news show, for example, whereas CNN now dedicates time even on their "Headline News" channel for showbiz gossip and movie reviews.

Part of this is the Internet, and part of it is the proliferation of TV and cable channels which have to manufacture programming in order to fill airtime. Movie reviews used to be something you tended to find only in the newspaper (Siskel & Ebert being the only TV personalities I recall doing it), and not as many people seemed to slavishly pay attention to what reviewers said, or even bother reading what they said. In fact, most people tended to ignore the snobbier reviewers, who used to live in newspapers but now spew their snobbery across the Internet.

Look at some of the bullshit local newspapers whose reviews people read on Rotten Tomatoes; do you think any of these two-bit no-name clowns would have national and international attention if not for the Internet? Hell, some of them don't even get published in newspapers, and run self-published websites for fuck's sake.

When I was a kid in the 80's they had Siskel & Ebert and two other guys (don't remember their names) on a show called Sneak Previews (IIRC). One of the guys had a moustache, that's all I remember.

The movie reviews I read about the Trilogy were written up in Ebert's review books and Leonard Maltin's Video Movie Guide... both from the late 80's. They seemed to love the Trilogy. But then those are just the views of two critics (I think Maltin's guide at that time reflected the view of at a few other critics who helped him out though).

Kurgan wrote:One of the guys had a moustache, that's all I remember.

The Evil Gene Schalit?

Not sure. Looking at the IMDB.com entry for Sneak Previews I may be thinking of the show once S&E left and got their own show, and the new guys who took over. I just remember on the same night you could watch one program, then the other, so two sets of critics talking about the movies.

I also remember watching "Friday Night Videos."

Back then that's how I got the info on stuff like this. We didn't get TV guide and we didn't have cable.

The "Let's not pretend we're watching art." line comes from pathological Lucas-hater Rex "I swear I don't know how these CDs ended up in my pocket, officer." Reed. I think we can safely assume that one was a pan.

The mustachioed reviewer on Sneak Previews was Michael Medved, who was paired with Jeffrey Lyons. I don't know what became of Lyons, but Medved is now a right-wing disc jockey. I'm younger than Wong, but I remember Star Wars (all of them) being written off as silly kid stuff. I also remember the very same pot shots being taken at them: Lucas can't direct, can't write, blah blah blah. Empire was hated -even by a large number of kids- when it came out. They didn't like the fact that neither Luke nor Han shoots and kills a single bad guy. Girls thought Leia should have gone for Luke instead of Han (before ROTJ, of course).

Most of all, they didn't like the ending and they weren't alone. People accused Lucas of doing the "to be continued... " ending to swindle fans into waiting three years to find out if Vader is Luke's father and if Han would be freed from the giant Hershey Bar-looking thing he was frozen into.

Jedi was slammed even harder. The main differences between then and now are (a) that reviewers back then didn't fall back on nostalgia and (b) writing skills were much better. When they attacked the acting in the OT, they could use adjectives other than "wooden".