The Endor battle was so hokey -- and anything but spectacular. It seemed, even at the time to a teenager, half assed. You had to have been very young when you first saw this.
RO's climax is as all climaxes should be -- the very best part. And that it is! RO is the Endor battle done right (granted the years and tech are there to achieve it)
Some day you'll come around to RO. Everyone does... or soon will.
You misread what I wrote. I didn't say Endor was thrilling and visually spectacular. I said the RO Scarif battle was thrilling and visually spectacular, and that while it was derivative of the Endor battle in several ways, it stood on its own.
I've said in the past that the Endor similarities aspect actually impacts ROTJ itself, given that Piett must be a total idiot to allow a questionable shuttle to pass to Endor given that the Rebels used the
exact same idea in the
exact same context just a few years earlier on Scarif (though Vader intervenes to allow them to pass in ROTJ, Piett says he was about to clear them anyway.
)
That being said, no one can argue that the Endor battle - amidst goofy Han smirks, matron Leia and dancing/mourning Ewoks - doesn't have some visually spectacular shots and effective moments. It does. To pass the entire sequence off as hokey is just silly - to me, ROTJ has just as much good as bad, like RO. RO just has the huge advantage of early OT story stakes/context (the week of ANH/DS1 no less) and a deliberately (some would argue far too much) gritty tone that is arguably much, much easier to pull off - and please fans - than what ROTJ was trying to do, which was in effect the impossible.
What RO and ROTJ were supposed to be - 180 degrees from one another - makes the two very difficult to compare. One was a nostalgia-fest grafted onto the very best of the OT, the other a bloated attempt to tie up crazy story/character loose ends with an older, creaky cast and characters that for various reasons weren't at all what they had been six years earlier.
ROTJ was like the last season of Lost where all the nutty storylines and "ah ha!" moments had to make sense. RO is like doing a six episode Lost short series today, set between seasons 1 and 2, purely for nostalgic Lost fans that wanted a few small but pressing fan questions explored.
Uh, no, we didn't all like the Ewoks.
And you are so wrong about both those statements in bold. But likely that's how you perceived it being a young child.
Everyone of age -- meaning mid-teenager or older -- pretty much knew Lucas had turned Star Wars into a toy store -- but there was still a lot to love in there. As a young child of course you didn't see or hear those things. The fact that it was 'the last Star Wars" movie to ever be made -- at that time -- we all forgave and loved best we could.
Go back and look up articles from the day talking about the "Muppet Show" that was Jabba's palace or the fact that Lucas created the Ewoks to replace the Teddy Bear on every child's bed. There was plenty of negative discussion about where and what Star Wars had become. Even Gary Kurtz left Lucas before "Jedi" and it showed.
Yeah, as a kid/teen I disliked the Ewoks a lot, though I'd argue it was nothing like JarJar. And no, the Ewok dislike didn't begin years later, at least to me. All of my friends hated the Ewoks even in the 1980's.
And with Jabba's Palace, I'm about 50-50 on the Muppet aspect - some creatures from the Palace I like as much as Greedo or Walrusman (Ree Yees, Amanaman,) whereas some are just the worst of arrogant ILM people who clearly thought everything they created was an instant classic and toy gold.
