I saw the Star Tours at the Smithsonian here in D.C. a long time ago. It was really neat to see catcher's gear painted white and used as leg armor for the sodliers. And the star destroyers were just cannibalized aircraft carrier models. Really neat stuff. And the speeders used in the forest of Endor in ROTJ were made out of lawn mower parts. It all looks very high tech on screen, but up close, it had a certain independent feel and spirit to it. It looked like they went to a junk yard (or their garages), and pulled stuff out and said, hey, this would make a cool gun, or whatever.
This might be what it missing from the newer flicks. There is so much hype that LFL has to go to great extremes to make things interesting. I think that the movies are too micro managed, worrying about whether a character's gun looks right or whether his vehicle is cool enough, etc., and whether the digital eyelashes are real enough instead of whether we like what the guns, and vehicles and characters are doing, saying, shooting, etc.
As much as I love the Star Wars movies (even the latest ones), I have to admit that the CG is a little out of hand. Note that on this latest film, which will take place on five different planets, at least, they did no on location shooting. That means taht all of the environments (100%) will be made from a computer.
When one guy sits in front a computer for 500 hours looking at one scene getting it perfect, sometimes it is too perfect. The parts that I loved about the old Star Wars movies was the fact that the robots DIDN'T work. They mostly stood there, or moved very statically, etc. Now, they move so fluidly as to be unbelievable. I'd prefer practical robots that didn't work to CG ones that did really cool stuff any day of the week. It added to the charm, IMO
