No, the original Star Wars trilogy was and is still great. It was a brilliant mish-mash of old-tyme Flash Gordon serials, Akira Kurasawa samurai films, and WWII movies. It’s also a fantastic bit of world-building, especially given when it came out.
Which is why it’s so shocking that the prequel and sequel movies are so bad. And Rogue One / Andor / The Mandalorean demonstrated it doesn’t have to be.
The Empire Strikes Back is an amazing short film about Hoth, followed by a pretty good training sequence, and also some miscellaneous whatnot that looks pretty cool.
We we thinking about this when we watched III. Pretty horrendous fare for a 10 year old…
To my embarrassment, I woke this morning wondering, “What is Leia a princess of?” Actually looked it up. As best I can see, nowhere explained in the first 6 movies.
I had always assumed she was princess of her home planet that got blown up. After that, much like most of current European continental royalty, she’s still royal for having once been royal. Connections, breeding, wealth, etc.
No, Fozzy Bear!
That was Return of the Jedi.
Empire had the giant space slug that is the size of an aircraft carrier and survives on the few ransom spaceships that fly into it. And it isn’t even good at that! Empire also has Luke losing his lightsaber that somehow turns up two movies later half a galaxy away.
And X-wings have hyperdrive.
Yeah - but her adopted dad was Jimmy Smits - a senator. I never caught that he was married to a queen. And I was confused because she was not supposed to know her birth mother - an elected queen.
Probably her adoptive daddy thought she was special and called her “princess”, like a doting father might. And it stuck.
Or maybe it’s her actual first name? “Princess Leia Organa Just call me Leia. I outgrew Princess. Or you may refer to me as Your Worshipfullness.”
People sometime laugh at the notion of swords in space, but because of this, they actually make sense. Real-world spaceships aren’t all that robust, mechanically, and you really don’t want to be poking holes in them. Or poking holes in any of the on-board equipment. “Not as clumsy or random as a blaster” was actually Obi-Wan’s main point when talking about the lightsaber.
The droids being slaves was absolutely intentional. See also at the cantina, “We don’t serve their kind here”. Lucas fully expected his audience to recognize that.
And the movies might all refer to Artoo and Threepio as “he”, but the webcomic Darths and Droids (if you’re a fan of roleplaying games, check it out!) has Threepio as a “she”. It also manages to make Jar-Jar endearing and Artoo an annoying git.
You don’t need roleplaying games for that! It’s right in the text. Even threepio accuses him of having delusions of grandeur. Ask Artoo and he’ll beep at you that the 9 movies are all about HIM*. In the films he always does what he wants, not what he’s asked, or told, to do.
*(or, her, if you must, but there are what? exactly three women in Star Wars. I don’t think Lucas would make a robot female if he can’t even make one pilot female.).
eta: Now I’m picturing Star Wars series as told from Artoo’s POV and he’s understandable and everyone else sounds like dogs barking.
And he’d be right! He’s the only one in the whole series who consistently knows both what he’s doing, and why he’s doing it. Everyone else mostly just reacts to stuff happening to them or around them, but R2 goes out of his way to make things happen.
Well, Threepio does, and can understand him, so either the gold droid does know (and speaks to/about Artoo appropriately), or he’s been misgendering Artoo for years. 
…or R2 has been messing with him for years, for the lolz. He/she is kind of a jerk, after all.
Sean Connery: “We named the dog Princess”
You’re right, never explained in the movies.
This, though again, it’s not ever covered in the films.
Her adoptive father, Bail Organa (played by Jimmy Smits in the Prequels and other things), was, indeed, a Senator. His wife (Leia’s adoptive mother), Breha Organa (again, never addressed by name in the films) was Alderaan’s queen.
They had no biological children; Leia was their only progeny.
Given Lucas’ mania for backstory, isn’t this a pretty glaring oversight? I can’t believe I’ve been aware of/somewhat familiar with this franchise for 50 years, and I had always just sorta assumed she was the “Princess” of whatever body governed the “good guys.” The way everyone referred to her as “the Princess” always made me think it more significant than a minor royal on a minor planet. I woulda thought he might have added something explicit in III, just tossing off that Jimmy Smits was married to a queen…. (I never really paid enough attention to learn/retain all the governmental intricacies. Just wanted an entertaining story, not a history lesson on the trade federation, etc.)
(And apologies. Ever since LA Law, no matter what role he inhabits, I’ve never been able to think of him as anything other than Jimmy Smits.)
I was 25 and married when the first movie came out. That makes me a full-fledged grownup, who first saw it in a theater full of other full-fledged grownups. We oohed and ahhed when the Falcon jumped into hyperdrive, we cheered when the Death Star blew up and applauded when Luke,m Han and Chewy got their medals (and when The Empire Strikes Back came out, we booed the first moment he appeared on screen, because we already knew he was the main bad guy.)
That’s what kind of movie Star Wars was. Fun. Great fun. Fun with a happy ending. Any attempt to analyze it as sci-fi, or futuristic, or a rip off from Japanese bamboo fighting and the robot from Metropolis completely misses the point.
When you show planets that have elected queens you kinds make the terms meaningless.
More to the point, OK Leia is a literal royal, a princess from some planet, and member of the imperial senate (just like her birth mom). But in the prequesls we say how BIG the senate is. She’s just one more hick small town “royal” that’s no better than every other “important” person there.
“We have dozens of princes, princesses, Kings, Queens, Dukes, Ducks, knights, wizards…stand in line.”
Ehh, maybe. There’s an awful lot of stuff in the movies which gets mentioned in passing, and which is not actually explained well (if at all) in the films; either it was all somewhere in Lucas’s head or notes, or (as more often happened) it got fleshed out by other authors and developers.
All of those funky aliens in the bar on Mos Eisely, and in Jabba’s palace? Each and every one of them has a canonical name, their species have canonical names, etc. Lucas didn’t come up with most of that; during the mid-late 1980s, a game company, West End Games, was developing a Star Wars tabletop role-playing game, and Lucasfilm gave them free rein to flesh all of those things out. (That wouldn’t happen today; Disney/Lucasfilm does all of that themselves now.)
In Leia’s case, I just always assumed, even back in the '70s, that she was a Princess of Alderaan. She and her father were also important members of the Rebellion, even if their roles weren’t explicitly defined. Didn’t need any further explanation for me, though I did quickly become a Star Wars lore nerd.
She was the heir apparent to the throne of a pretty significant planet – but, again, that’s stuff that Lucas didn’t come right out and articulate in the film.
Destroying Alderaan wasn’t just done to torture Leia; it was also done to clearly demonstrate, to the entire galaxy, that the Empire wasn’t fucking around, and would deal harshly with any planet or population which was believed to be sympathetic to the Rebellion – including an important, Core Worlds planet like Alderaan.
That’s the thing to remember, there are multiple levels of government. She’s part of the government, or at least government-adjacent, on Alderaan, while at the same time, being a member of the Imperial Senate, a completely separate job, but one which she was given because of her position on Alderaan.
It’s like someone being a part of the US State Department, but also being appointed as Ambassador to the UN. Related but distinct jobs.