Quote Originally Posted by Mordar View Post
How is it more or less generic/specific than Star Trek? Blade Runner's future?
Star Trek includes certain elements of generic utopian futurism, but it is also very specifically Gene Roddenberry's take on what such a future would look like, and Mr. Roddenberry had strong views. Similarly, Blade Runner is based on a Phillip K. **** novel, and Phillip K **** was, to be frank, a deeply disturbed individual who also had a serious drug problem. Those works very much bear the distinctive stamps of their creators in a way Star Wars, which was deliberately attempting to deconstruct down to archetypes based on George Lucas' fascination with Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin
Star Was is by design pretty generic, it's just a generic version of a genre of sci-fi that, outside of Star Wars itself, hasn't really existed in 50 years.
I wouldn't go quite that far. Pop-based space fantasy has existed since Star Wars, it's just not been a big feature of live action films. For example, the Transformers franchise is a pop space fantasy and has been for decades (the 1986 Transformers: the Movie introduced the planet-eating Unicron, it would be hard to get more space fantasy than that), and anime has carried the generic space fantasy torch in a similar fashion throughout that time - with major franchises such as Gundam being big movers in the zone. There's also substantial activity in the video game space - the links between Star Wars and Mass Effect are vast and obvious. There's also been a number of novel franchises that do big space fantasy in this way that have reached fairly high levels of popularity.

The real problem is cost. Space is expensive to put onscreen, especially in live action. It's just the nature of the beast. Lucas wanted to do live action Star Wars TV for decades, and even got so far as shooting a bunch of test footage for 1138, but could never figure out a way to do it without setting a giant pile of money on fire. As such, space fantasy has been rare in film unless attached to pre-existing well-known IP.

Really, one of the reasons I think Disney has struggled to get Star Wars to feel like Star Wars is that it doesn't have this genre in recent memory to draw upon. Rather, the only reference text for Star Wars is... Star Wars. Which is why it feels like the franchise is disappearing up its own sphincter, there's just nothing else around Star Wars like Star Wars so Star Wars just copies Star Wars in a self referential loop as Star Wars is slowly stripped of all meaning by Star Wars Star Wars Star Wars Star Wars Star Wars.
Nah, Disney's struggles in this region are primarily traceable to specific writer choices. JJ Abrams is a massive hack, and a number of the YA-based writers they allowed to write Disney canon novels are similar because the modern YA space is a hack-zone that trend chases brutally (don't believe me? watch Divergent some time). Rian Johnson, by contrast, is not a hack, but he also has no respect for pre-existing franchise material. Dave Filoni, by contrast, has neither problem, he simply is not a very good episode-to-episode writer (he's an excellent project manager) and he's also far too busy at the moment to give all his projects the attention they need - Ahsoka's problem isn't that it doesn't feel like Star Wars, it's just badly written.

Note that there's plenty of well-written Disney-controlled Star Wars outside of the big shows, especially in the comics, and Tony Gilroy handled Rogue One and Andor quite deftly.