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That point has been raised earlier and I recognize it. Without wishing to get too far astray from the main topic:

1. Those two sentences from Obi Wan are the ONLY things in the OT linking Anakin Skywalker to Tatooine. Given the actual result of the prequels, if you can construct three movies and only contradict two sentences, that's not bad.

2. If you haven't noticed, other parts of Obi Wan's account gets contradicted in the OT itself. Like the part about Vader killing Anakin. This account really shouldn't be taken as gospel.

3. The larger plot hole is why hide Luke on Tattoine in the first place? I posited three different solutions, two of which make Tattoine Anakin Skywalker's home planet. All three have difficulties, but that is why this is a pretty serious plot hole in the first place.

The point is to go back to the OT and to try to make sense of the backstory. Once you do that, of course there are other contradictions and you have to make sense of those. Gradually you start working your way into pretty interesting story, that can be used for the prequels.

Lucas had a story to tell, and seems to have ignored the backstory or tried to paper it over. He really should have some format other than movies linked to an existing trilogy instead. If he had lost interest in the OT movies, it would have been better to leave them alone.

To respond about Tatooine, Obi Wan and Yoda make the decision to hide Luke from Vader on Tatooine, with Vader's relatives, under the name "Skywalker". They put Leia with a different family on a different planet.

This is a really stupid decision. Why run all those risks of Vader finding out like that? Yoda could have taken Luke to Dagobah. When the rebellion started, Luke could have been moved to the care of the rebels, instead of waiting until stormtroopers were headed to the farm. Owen probably would have been glad to get rid of him.

With some thought and effort, Lucas before starting the prequels could have avoided this. Maybe Anakin Skywalker isn't from Tatooine. Maybe its Vader who gave Luke to Obi Wan to be hidden from the Emperor, and he knows where Luke is all along. Or maybe Obi Wan doesn't know that Anakin Skywalker and Vader are the same person, he sees Anakin disappear when he was one of the good guys then Vader turns up, so he assumes Vader killed Anakin. He doesn't find out what really happened until he becomes one with the Force (ie becomes a ghost).

But that wasn't the point I was making. The reason I'm making a big deal of this is that if Lucas sat down and made sense of this apparent contradiction, he could have come up with at least three different but compelling directions to take the prequels, as I outlined above. They would have unfolded naturally, and in harmony with the OT. Instead, he pretty much made up an unrelated story for the "Prequels", then came up with half-assed explanations for the inevitable contradictions that arose with the OT because he decided to use some OT settings and characters.

On another thread I pointed out that Asimov, who is a much better scifi writer than Lucas did something different. Late in life he wrote four "Foundation" books when he really wasn't interested in the "Foundation" anymore. So the four books are really sequels to the "Robots" series, that have "Foundation" in the title, and have a Foundation character and some settings. Not surprisingly, there is alot there that contradicts the original "Foundation" series and not surprisingly most fans of the original series don't have a high opinion of them.

I agree with Azerty about the orginal "Star Wars". At the end of the day, this movie changed moviemaking, in both good and bad ways, is always enjoyable to watch, and really is a classic. You can watch it without having to watch the other movies. You can't say that about "Empire Strikes Back", which I like and which I realize is the popular favorite.

In some ways the original "Star Wars" is the odd movie out in the series. The storyarc of the series is Anakin Skywalker/ Vader, his starting a family, his fall and his redemption, both triggered by family members. The original "Star Wars" is mainly about the rebellion and its destruction of the empire's ultimate weapon, and about Luke leaving his farm to join Obi Wan and the rebellion. Vader has an important part, but its entirely as the Emperor's henchman. His only interaction with Luke is in fighter combat and there is no hint of any family relationship with Luke. The "Empire Strikes Back" collapses the story from a war between the rebels and the empire to a family drama.

Maybe you could watch the five movies in sequence and skip ANH, and have the plot make sense. So we see the Death Star under construction at the end of ROTS, then a Death Star under construction appears in ROTJ. Yoda and Palpatine don't appear at all in ANH. Vader's character doesn't change. You basically miss the introduction of Luke, Leia, and Han Solo, but they all appear as rebel leaders on Hoth at the beginning of ESB, and maybe someone who never saw ANH or knew the story will accept that. At the end of ESB we suddenly find out that Luke was the baby handed to Owen and Beru, I think that would work fine. I think the only real disconuity is Obi Wan going into exile then showing up as a ghost later, without the audience seeing his death. On the other hand, the series would gain without two Death Stars, without having to explain how people forgot about the Jedis' existence, without the strong hints of a Luke-Leia romance throughout ANH (you would just get one scene in ESB instead), and especially without Obi Wan's telling the backstory to Luke in a way that was completely contradicted by all five other movies.

On that note, you could lose AOTC as well, which is both the worst crafted of the movies and does little to advance the story. There are OK parts in both TPM and ROTS, though dislike both movies on the whole, so a TPM -ROTS -ESB -ROTJ quartet would be interesting and tell a coherent story. Most of the discontinuities between the OT and the Prequels are really about stuff that occurs in ANH.

My personal order of preference is the original Star Wars, then after a gap ESB then ROTJ, then after a big gap TPM and ROTS, then another big gap and AOTC brings up the rear. I put ROTS so far down because I think the silliness of the Palpatine -Yoda duel, the lava surfing, and the suddeness of Anakin's conversion, let alone the yell at the end, outweights the equivalent cheese that you get in ROTJ and TPM.

There is a parellel with Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. The original three books (actually six half-books) is considered to be one of the greatest science fiction series ever, in many ways good and bad it set the tone for what people think of as science fiction. Asimov grew to hate the trilogy halfway through, and never properly finished it. We never get to find out which, if any, of the two Foundations reestablishes the Galactic Empire, and how, and whether that is a good thing.

In his old age, Asimov was coaxed into writing sequels to the trilogy. But he still plainly had problems with the series. The first two thirds of the first sequel are a great read, in the style of the original trilogy, then the whole thing veers off into an enormous tangent, then is wrapped up in the second sequel in a literal deus ex machina. The second sequel is more of a sequel to the later Robot series than the Foundation series, it really has next to nothing that relates to the original trilogy. Then he wrote two prequels, both of which are quite good in parts, but both of which blantantly contradict much of the backstory as explained in the original trilogy.

In other words, somewhat like the Star Wars prequels, except not as bad. The first prequel is a good book, but its probably more enjoyable if you've never been exposed to the original Foundation trilogy. The best way to compare the later four books with the Star Wars prequels is that the quality of the storytelling is better, but the contradictions with the plot of the original books is more blatant. And it seems that when people refer to the "Foundation" series, they mostly refer to the original three books, and only to the original three books.

Are the non-tampered with, non-Special editions first three Star Wars movies still available? If so, they will be rediscovered some day and reappreciated. If not, then Lucas really did ruin the franchise.

I think the biggest problem with the prequels is bad dialog, bad acting on the part of the lead actor, overuse of special effects, too many scenes that look like video games, and Jar Jar Binks. I don't think its the plot holes. If you removed these items and kept the same plot, I think most people would be willing to overlook or explain away the plot holes.

However, there are two big plot problems with the entire Star Wars saga, which start with the Empire Strikes Back (though confirmed in Return of the Jedi). They could be ignored in the OT, but had to be addressed in the prequels, when describing the backstory, for the whole thing to be believable.

Both stem from the idea that Darth Vadar is Anakin Skywalker, and claimed by Vader and confirmed by Yoda. This of course drives the OT from the second half of ESB. And Lucas needed some sort of compelling scene to keep things going.

First, if Vadar is Anakin Skywalker, then he must to know that his brother is raising his son, under his own name, on his home planet. But he doesn't do anything, until two droids carrying plans to the Death Star escape to that planet, and stormtroopers wipe out his family. OK, so why doesn't he do anything? Why doesn't he react to the escape of the droids to Tatooine? Or maybe Tatooine isn't his home planet, after all. The prequels never address this, except to confirm that Tatooine is in fact Anakin Skywalker's home planet (I realize Obi Wan indicates this, vaguely, but do you really believe anything Obi Wan says about Vader's background?). If a writer who took the backstory seriously really tried to unravel this or find a solution to the mess, you would start filling in alot of information about where Vader comes from and what motivates him.

Second, Anakin Skywalker is a "good man". We know this because its worth redeeming him at the end of ROTJ (otherwise that movie makes no sense at all, neither do the last few scenes in ESB). But he chooses to serve the Emperor. In fact, so does much of the Galaxy. Is the Emperor really that evil? If so, what is his hold on Vader? This really gets to the heart of the prequels, and Lucas does answer the question. Unfortunately, the answer is really lame and scarcely believable. He does a little better on how the Emperor rallies the galaxy against the Jedi, but not much. He also takes too much time in answering this, it really should have been settled by the end of the Attack of the Clones.

Again, maybe if the non-plot portions of the prequels had been up to the standards of the first two Star Wars movies, people would ignored the fact that Lucas never addressed the first plot problem, and came up with a weak solution to the second. But the backstory really should be more carefully plotted than the original trilogy, there already is a good deal of plot out there, and anything extra really has to fit in with it.