To most die-hard and old-school Star Wars fans, the past several years have been seriously disheartening. The beloved franchises is one of the most famous of all time, perhaps the MOST famous, and when Disney bought the rights to it a lot of us who have been here as fans from the start were worried. I expected them to go crazy with it but I wasn't fully prepared for how badly Disney was going to slaughter it.
I was one of the people that when this series was released, I genuinely tried to find anything that I could as a redeeming factor for it. I think this was out of some sense of loyalty or wishful thinking rather than me actually thinking it was good. However, even though I tried to find merit in it, I could only convince myself of this for a few episodes...then the sadness kicked in.
If you were to go from end to end of season one of this slop-house and point out all the problems, it could be a semester long college course. I'll stick to some of the basics though that in many cases don't just violate all that George Lucas and previous films established but violate basic science as well.
When they were promoting this film, the focused heavily in the fact that Carrie-Anne Moss was "starring" in it as a powerful and well-established Jedi Master. She seemed perfect for the role and we were all excited to see what the Matrix star could do in such a role. Only that is not what we got at all because she is rather unceremoniously and easily dispatched by the main character "Osha", who is not a Jedi and has no business defeating one. If you know anything about Jedi from basically all the materials EVER up to this point, the Jedi are almost unstoppable. That is unless you are a near teenage POC that has undefined magic that doesn't make any sense in the Star Wars Universe.
I'll leave that alone before I get too worked up.
Next up we have open flames outside of a spacecraft in space
You don't have to be a Star Wars fan to have this annoy you. You don't even have to be very smart to know that open flames in space are not possible. This isn't the only time we would deal with "fantasy fire" though.
A bit later on in the series, someone throws a lantern on the ground and manages to burn down a gigantic castle that is made of stone and metal. That's just wonderful isn't it? I recall all the out-of-control stone and metal fires that have plagued the world in my life, don't you?
There was a lot of talk about the producer and leader of the overall direction of the show Leslye Headland deciding to insert her own political and life-views into the story and if you learn just a bit about her you don't have to look very far in order to see that this is definitely the case.
The "space witches" that have never so much as been referenced in any previous Star Wars installation of any sort come front and center in this one and they have no men in their group and do not need them. They are able to have children based on magical powers or something... I don't remember, I was too busy groaning and rolling my eyes.
Leslye (the producer) is a lesbian and this decision was primarily hers to put into the show. The space witches also have a wonderful ability to resist any sort of Force powers, which honestly, kind of deteriorates the immense power of Jedis that has been built up over the past 40 years. The fact that everyone is POC and has an alternative lifestyle, was definitely Leslye's call and while I don't necessarily have a problem with that, I don't need it shoved down my throat constantly and it is just annoying to see this put into a show that is supposed to be entertaining. Leslye is trying to "educate" the audience here, not entertain, and when fans responded with criticism of the show, she immediately wrote everyone off as being a racist-bigot-homophobe.
Southpark was one of the only far-reaching productions that gave an honest review of all that Disney is doing
At no point in time did Disney or Leslye ever admit that maybe they made a few mistakes taking something beloved and turning it on its head, sometimes appearing to be intentionally dissing the fanbase sort of in an act of antagonizing them.
The Force is Female they cried and I guess they expected that new fans were going to emerge to replace the old ones that they chased off with this series, and many of the other things as well.
The media and professional reviewers did everything they could to try to protect this show and prop it up but it didn't take a lot of research to show that the fake influencers and bogus reviews were precisely that. This is one of the hugest disparities between professional rating and public ratings that has ever existed for any show or movie. I no longer trust any reviews for anything that Disney does because they are big enough that the people reviewing it must feel as though they have to say nice things or their career can get ended in a flash by the largest entertainment company in the world. Regular Joe users though, don't feel this fear.
I was quite happy when I saw that season 2 of this show was cancelled and this was made official in recent weeks.
I think the worst part about all of this is that everyone involved and their friends and partners, refuse to admit that they did this one really wrong. Even now, the searches about "why was Acolyte cancelled" are not being forthcoming. They state "high production costs" as the number one reason which is just a bunch of crap. Disney has never been concerned about high production costs but maybe they should start to be. The way it is now is that people have a difficult time getting excited about anything that is Star Wars anymore because it is just presumed that it is going to be trash.
Disney has a ton of power. Of all the articles I have seen written about it, they all have comments disabled but in some of them, they invite comments, the comment section didn't go the way that they hoped it would, so they deactivated them and then forgot that the article still invites people to participate in the now non-existent comment section.
I wonder if Disney is going to learn from any of this. Nearly everything that they have released has been disappointing to fans, especially this one and perhaps Obi-Wan as well. It's difficult to understand how Disney makes money with the series side of things but they do seem to not be using this brand that they paid so much money for in a very efficient way. Disney is extremely powerful, but I think they are starting to turn a corner and realize that they actually do have to make something entertaining in order to get people to continue to watch it.
In the case of The Acolyte, there simply wan't enough interest in it continuing to exist for them to bother doing so.
Good riddance I say! Now let's see if Disney makes any real changes to try to rectify this sinking ship that is the Star Wars Universe.