Okay, so, you are thrown into an alternative reality, year 1983...

Okay, so, you are thrown into an alternative reality, year 1983, Star Wars ep VI just got screened in cinemas - but unlike in our world, no other form of fiction related to the Star Wars universe was released.
And through space magic you are chosen to come up with an idea for prequels. What will you write?

...

Clone Wars is a battle between the Republic, who has to draft billions, against some evil empire who employs cloned warriors.

Anakin isn't a chosen one, but a wise and respected jedi, who revisits his home planet of tatooine and discovers that his mother has died, prompting him to have doubts on the whole no family thing.

He falls in love slowly with the princess of Naboo who is fighting on the frontlines against the clones.

Obi Wan is reckless and dashing, and is actually friends with Anakin.

as the war takes its toll on the galaxy, the chancellor is given more power, the republic army gets bigger, and they finally destroy the clones.

I tell them to scrap the concept because some things just shouldn't be done.

Oh God, so many possibilities. I do know I'd probably try to make the whole series focus on Obi-Wan and Anakin, with the whole 'young, impetuous mentor and apprentice', more like best friends than Master and Student.

Also, the Clone Wars is an incredibly awesome name, but it would make more sense if the Clones were the forces of the bad guys.

In all honesty, I'd rather do the sequel trilogy.

Are the Clone Wars even mentioned in vi?

I too watched the plinkett prequel reviews

EPISODE I - THE GREAT CLONE WAR - circa 40 BBY

GALACTIC INVASION! A race of Clones from the nearby cloud galaxy of Galactica Sekka, in a last-ditch effort to rescue their sterile race, has launched the greatest military campaign in history. A thousand systems at the rim have already been captured by the enemy, and the Galaxy faces its DOOM!

CHANCELLOR BARDA, with the approval of the Senate, has ordered the mobilization of the entire Republican Fleet in response. Conscription has begun, and the remaining ten-thousand systems are hastily raising militias. Over a million ships, and a hundred-million troops are assembling to unleash a counter-attack.

In utmost secrecy, the Jedi Master Yoda has dispatched his two students to race to the rim-world of Massil. There they are to seek out the ROGUE JEDI Benyi Di'vv, responsible for the failure of the diplomat Grofo to establish a treaty with the cloners. A last minute summit might offer a slim hope for the Republic, if only the young Jedi Obi-wan Kenobi and Anakin Vader can arrive in time!

Keep it mostly identical in terms of the plots of each of the movies, but get a better script writer and more invested actors.

Knowing what I do of the Darth Jar Jar meme, push it a little better by having Jar Jar come across as not quite so silly as well as drop a hint or two of the fact that he's actually fundamentally a broken, evil person - but at the same time I want to keep him as a clown in Episode I. Imply a little more about a painful backstory for him (during the droid attack on Naboo he can be injured, revealing artificial limbs, for example).

Ditch Dooku as a character and have Jar Jar be revealed as the one directing the CIS at the end of Episode II. General Grevious is written out so that Jar Jar can be the big bad of most of Episode III until it's time for Palpatine to take center stage. Obi-wan eventually defeats him.

Throw the Rule of Two idea out the window. Sith have as many apprentices needed to get the job done.

Other than Jar Jar wankery, Yoda never uses a lightsaber once in the series (he's more of a Force wizard), and the plot around the Clone Army in Episode II is cleaned up a bit to have it make more sense.

But overall the story would be the same. Whatever critical reviews they may have, these were very successful movies at the box office, so clearly they were doing something right. They just need to do, y'know, MORE right, by having better writers and more invested actors.

>Clone Wars is a battle between the Republic, who has to draft billions, against some evil empire who employs cloned warriors.
This. Or at least, the clones are the antagonists to the Jedi/Republic in some other capacity.

Anakin is the same age as Obi Wan, but is a huge, strong, jolly dude, the big broad-chested hero to his more cunning, optimistic buddy.

They were mentioned all the way back in A New Hope, man. When Obi Wan is telling Luke about his father.

>This. Or at least, the clones are the antagonists to the Jedi/Republic in some other capacity.
But the clone army and how it served the Republic was easily the most interesting concept put forward in the prequels.

Why do you want to take Delta Squad from us, user?

>these were very successful movies at the box office, so clearly they were doing something right.

If you don't actually know what it is that they were doing right, then this statement is meaningless.

Why do you think the actors and directors weren't invested in the first place?
Nobody enjoys having to polish a turd.

Oh, one other idea I had, though it might be a VERY dangerous one...

Remember Finnis Valorum, the previous Chancellor? In the Rough Draft version of Star Wars, Finnis Valorum was a Knight of Sith and the primary antagonist of the Jedi Bendu, Darth Vader being a noncombatant and more of a Tarkin analogue.

I might want to have Chancellor Valorum be revealed to be the true Dark Lord of the Sith. Everything points to Palpatine, but it turns out that Valorum's original plan was thrown off-kilter when Palpatine became Chancellor, but he played some speed-chess and ended up manipulating Palpatine before eventually body-hopping into him - the Dark Side is so strong in Valorum that his body actually rots, so he needs to grab a new one every now and then.

The reason why this is dangerous is because it sort of means that Emperor Palpatine wasn't ever actually Emperor Palpatine, but rather Valorum wearing Palpatine's body (and probably intending to eventually hop into Luke's).

I just think I'd like the reaction from the audience. It would be a nice "I am your father" moment, an out-of-nowhere revelation that NO ONE saw coming, only this one with dark implications for the franchise as a whole - since it directly means that the Emperor at the end of VI might not have actually died, just been forced into Force Ghost form until he can find a new body.

Delta aren't cool just because they're all clones. The Republic can have its own functioning military that still hits all the "here are our sci-fi spec-ops hardasses" notes. And, of course, even if the clones are the bad dudes, there's room for defectors and stories about "the good clones".

Remember we're just talking about writing prequel movies here though, not the expanded canon around them, like the OP says.

Becausse they make no sense. The point of the Clone Army was to drag out the war with the CIS so that Palpatine could get more and more emergency powers and eventually make himself Emperor. They were never meant to actually be any good at their jobs.

Fundamentally what they were "doing right" was just being Star Wars. Everything after that is window dressing; all the people really want is more Star Wars.

>dark implications for the franchise as a whole - since it directly means that the Emperor at the end of VI might not have actually died, just been forced into Force Ghost form until he can find a new body.
This actually happened in the EU though, unfortunately. Like, twice.

Exactly. So why keep some tacky, poorly written window-dressing? Make the window dressing fucking beautiful.

Yeah, but not in this alternate timeline as per OP. Plus it would be direct on-screen evidence.

So...we're just casually ignoring the fact that I mentioned I want better writers, then?

Fundamentally there's nothing wrong with the basic plots of the extant Prequel Trilogy, although Clone Wars gets a bit confusing. The only real problem is clunky dialogue and an over-dependence on CGI instead of practical effects. There's no need to completely re-write everything from the ground up, just take what's there and make it better.

But then I'm in the most minor of minorities. I LIKE Episode I. I actually hold Episode II to be the worst of the Prequel Trilogy.

>They were never meant to actually be any good at their jobs.

I mean, they were tasked with shooting the entire Jedi order in the back.

Which doesn't require them to be especially good since it's a stab out of nowhere after 2 years of fighting alongside the Jedi and after the Emperor has been gaining so much power in the Force that he is compromising the Jedi's ability to perceive the future.

>Clone Wars
is never mentioned in Return of the Jedi.

No, but it's mentioned in A New Hope, dingus. "Years ago you helped my father during the Clone Wars..."

I always thought it would be more interesting if Palpatine wasn't a Sith, and was instead just some politician who happened to be a Sith fanboy who built his powers unnoticed by the Jedi because they were preoccupied with the schemes of the actual Sith.

Although for this thread
>but... no other form of fiction related to the Star Wars universe was released.
Given that the term 'Sith' only existed in supplemental materials (and even then, I believe it was only applied to Vader, not the Emperor), and wasn't mentioned once in-movies, it's possible OP's scenario might completely preclude their involvement, and it would be more focused on just the Clone Wars and Anakin's slow, tragic fall to the dark side, without any ancient evil helping him along the way. Might have been better that way, come to think of it.

I was assuming from the way OP was worded that nothing is released AFTER Episode VI until (you) come along. This would mean that supplemental materials released before VI would still be in play, such as the novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Those supplemental materials would definitely identify at least Vader as a Sith, and I think Palpatine as well, although I'm not certain.

The clones are like the clones in Akumetsu where they use the cloning technology to pass years of experience into expendable troops that have no bottom well. I would make the technology a part of some unexplored section of people and completely unrelated to the empire itself, possibly a threat from the Mandalorians or some enemy of the Republic that was old and ongoing. Clones would be more diverse, but the same person would basically be reloaded into their clone as a better soldier than before.

Then I would make the republic start off easily winning the conflicts against clones, but suddenly on one of the most active war fronts the Republic is not just losing but losing badly and there are strange reports of people not dying.

The immortal soldier rumors draws the Jedi to investigate, having heard of Sith experiments with immortality and the risks to the force. Leading the investigation is Anakin and Obi-wan.

Knights of the old republic, just find replace Revan to Anakin, and do the dark side ending. That would pretty much be all that is needed.

However, the prequels were always a bad idea and would still be a bad idea in your hypothetical. It's a story people didn't really care about with an ending everyone knows already, and even if you did it well, it still undermines the original films by explicitly showing events that were meant to be warped by perception.

>it would make more sense if the Clones were the forces of the bad guys.
I think in the Zahn novels they offhandedly mentioned that the clone wars involved a group of insane clones who wanted to take over the galaxy. To this day, I am amazed Lucas didn't just go with that way cooler idea.

But I guess he was just committed to shifting on the expanded universe as a whole.

>Anakin is the same age as Obi Wan, but is a huge, strong, jolly dude, the big broad-chested hero to his more cunning, optimistic buddy.
So like Raistlin and his brother, but its the brother who is corrupted because of his naivete and blind heroism? That's not bad.

>The only real problem is clunky dialogue and an over-dependence on CGI
Well, the story is also full of unneeded complexity and plot holes. Palpatine's plot is so convoluted, and relies on so much luck and so many unpredictable events, that it comes off as absurd. It could be altered to be simpler and take up way less screen time which could be devoted to character development and action.

Also midichlorions.

That’s Episode 4. OP says 6 is the only Star Wars media

Well of course the midichlorians are going away and won't be mentioned again. I thought that went without saying.

Or it was his universe and his story and he wanted to tell it the way he wanted to tell it. Which turns out to have not been very good, but the point is that Lucas doesn't necessarily have to have had malicious intent towards the EU.

Is keep things mostly the same.

I’d speed up the plot of phantom menace a great deal, make it ambiguous that Obi-Wan Kenobi was the Palawan until after the Darth Maul fight, make Darth Maul more of a presence, make Anakin like 13 instead of 8, focus on party antics and adventure in addition to political intrigue to keep the plot lively.

Clone wars: have a sith assassin ala Assajj Ventress be the primary antogonist working with Jango Fett.

Obi-Wan Kenobi be the main character. Anakin Skywalker is a sort of rival to him. Eventually become buds, but there's still a bit of cagey rivalry.

Republic isn't using clones. Clones are bad guys from a dangerous, unexplored region of the galaxy. Starts with reports of planets being attacked whlie jedi do jedi shit. Eventually becomes a big deal, Repubic has to organize a counter-offensive. Clone Wars start at the end of the first movie.

Second movie would be villains and bad guys and shit.

Third movie would be pretty close to RotS, but not shit and weird. Cut the final battle down to 10 minutes, freeing up an extra hour to, y'know, actually set it up. Order 66 would stay, but would be use to kill all the Jedi characters that were built up during the previous 2 movies that can't exist in ANH.

Jedi aren't all robe-wearing monks. They'd be more like pic related.

That's the long and short of it anyway.

>Or it was his universe and his story and he wanted to tell it the way he wanted to tell it.
Sure, yeah, fair enough. But for people like me, who spent their entire childhood, hundreds of dollars of my parents money, and thousands of hours of my life consuming these stories, to have their originator turn around and just go, "nah, lol, that's all bullshit I've decided, was pretty infuriating to me, and I imagine it probably was and still is to a lot of other people. It's far worse now, of course, with Disney, although I no longer care as much, but these sort of things still felt like betrayal. I'm sure plenty of people will say that's stupid, but I can't help but feel like it's disrespectful the way Lucas absorbed millions of dollars from his fans and then just blew off the things they had paid him to care about.

Alternatively: You can't expect the movies to be held to the limitations put on them by every single EU novel. Especially when so many of those novels linked into stuff from other novels...and there was plenty of people who'd never read the EU so would need to somehow find out what all this stuff is.

No one paid him anything, and I'm pretty sure that there had always been a deliberate moratorium on describing the Clone Wars or anything from about 40 BBY forward precisely because Lucas wanted to do it his own way one day.

If some authors decided to sneak in their own stuff in spite of that and managed to get away with it, fine, but they knew full well that they were making shit up that could get erased at any time.

>No one paid him anything

Let me clarify: no one had paid Lucas to CARE about anything.

OP says 4-6 only.

I'm pretty sure this is what the background info in the WEG Star Wars RPG consisted of.

George always held the EU as secondary to his own works, it was always its own universe. He openly stated several times that the way things happened in the EU was not how he would have done it.

That he actually liked enough of the EU to incorporate aspects of it into the prequels (and the special editions of the OT) speaks enough to his respect of that body of work.

But he was never, ever going to translate the EU to film, nor was he ever of any obligation to do so, regardless of how much money you and others like you spent on it.