So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

[Shrapnel]

I would love to see a Star Trek/Wars crossover. Throw in Doctor Who and you'll have the Big Three of Sci-Fi nerd-dom. I'd watch the shit outta that.

[phlapjackage]

I think you can do a fine Star Wars movie without Jedi or rebellions or anything. Making a Star Wars movie about dealing with the Jabba crime syndicate could be fun; making a movie about ace fighter pilots could be cool.

There's plenty of Star Wars books they could adapt for movies too, like the Rogue Squadron series. They don't even have to come up with original ideas

[SeekritLurker]

Apropos of nothing -

Star Wars is the only major franchise where the "real true fans" haven't liked anything new since 1980.

[Mord]

Apropos of nothing -

Star Wars is the only major franchise where the "real true fans" haven't liked anything new since 1980.

I think most franchises, especially those that are revived after a period of dormancy, suffer from infestations of Real True Fans. Look at Doctor Who, to pull an example from three posts up; when it came back swinging for LGBT there were plenty of Old Who fans who got up in arms about it (we forget it now because they were largely silenced by David Tennant being amazing). Or, D&D.

I'd expect it to be pretty rare for an established fandom to wholeheartedly embrace a revival without there being at least a vocal minority of Real True Fans hating the new stuff. That's not to say that the Star Wars grognards are wrong to think the sequel and prequel trilogies are wet farts. The sequel and prequel trilogies are factually wet farts.

It's just, I don't find it at all surprising that there would be a vocal segment of people whose love of Star Wars was formed prior to 1999 or 2015 disliking the newer stuff, even if nearly every Star Wars thing made after 1999 wasn't fucking garbage.

[erik]

Yes. I was super excited for new Star Wars stuff and phantom menace was so bad that it changed how I approached movies as an entire genre. Nothing got a free enthusiasm pass anymore. Like I thought the matrix was awesome but if they ever make a second matrix movie I’ll wait and see if it’s well received before proceeding to acknowledge it as being worth watching.

[phlapjackage]

Like I thought the matrix was awesome but if they ever make a second matrix movie I’ll wait and see if it’s well received before proceeding to acknowledge it as being worth watching.

Not if anymore

[Lago PARANOIA]

I hold the position that The Phantom Menace is bad not because of Jar Jar and Anakin, but because the movie tried to do TOO MUCH SHIT for its running time.

Let's review the plot points, shall we?
[*] The Trade Federation has blockaded a peaceful planet.
[*] The Republic is breaking down and can't defend its borders on Naboo or Tatooine, so lawlessness reigns.
[*] The Gungans and surface dwellers need to be united to drive out the invaders but the person capable of uniting the factions is exiled.
[*] The Jedi need to infiltrate the Naboo palace and rescue the government-in-exile until they can organize a counter-attack.
[*] A faction of evil wizards is coming back and is interfering with the Jedi's plans.
[*] The Jedi need to come up with a way to rescue The Chosen One and escape the planet despite having few resources and time.
[*] Anakin needs to prove his worth to be the next Chosen One.
[*] The queen of Naboo is doing a Mark Twain-style role swap with a body double to become a wiser ruler.

Now, just TWO of them would be enough to make a movie. If you look at the summaries of classic, widely-beloved movies like The Godfather and Jaws and The Matrix they have at most two or three plot points (Vito tries to navigate changing mafia politics in the drug trade, Vito and his successor Sonny are whittled down by rivals, the white sheep of the family picks up the reigns and is more ruthless than both) and they connect to each other pretty seamlessly.

The Phantom Menace has a bunch of plot points and not all of them connect to each other very well. It's certainly not impossible to connect any three on the list and make it coherent, but EIGHT? Impossible in just one movie.

[deaddmwalking]

I hold the position that The Phantom Menace is bad not because of Jar Jar and Anakin, but because the movie tried to do TOO MUCH SHIT for its running time.

I disagree with your premise - Phantom Menace sucks for reasons unrelated to how much they tired to cram in.

The original Star Wars had:

- A desperate princess entrusting a plea for help and a critical missive to a droid
- Droids searching the endless desert wastes of a backwater planet for the one person who can help them.
- A dirt farmer who must confront his destiny
- A rogue with a checkered past in serious debt to a mobster
- An attempt to infiltrate a battle fortress to rescue the princess
- The old master confronting his student
- An escape from the battle station
- The successful delivery of the missive to the rebel alliance
- An attack on the same battle station they just escaped from

The prequels were handicapped in part because we already knew how the story ends - it's the story of how Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader.

The thing is, unlike Han Solo who BECOMES an interesting character in IV A NEW HOPE because he turns his back on pragmatism and instead throws in with a ridiculous cause for ideological reasons [Han's character arc mirrors Humphrey Bogart's from Casablanca in a lot of ways], Darth Vader was ALREADY an interesting character when he shows up. There is a lot of ground to cover where Darth Vader does Darth Vader shit in an unrepentant evil way, and we, the audience would have eaten it up. So instead of getting to Darth Vader and then seeing Darth Vader stuff like you would in any Super Hero movie (35 minute origin, 1 hour badass) they decided to make the ENTIRE TRILOGY the origin.

If you recognize that the prequel is primarily an origin story for Darth Vader, you identify the problems with that pretty easily. Most people complain about how long the 'origin' part takes - nobody wants to spend a lot of time with dweeby Peter Parker before he becomes Spider Man. Even more importantly, nobody wants to spend the entirety of Iron Man 1 with 10 year old Tony Stark. There's a reason they started the movie with him as an adult billionaire playboy and turned him into a superhero right away. Since Vader's story is 'the Fall' you can actually start with him as a badass Jedi knight standing for law and order.

What the prequels should have been was:

Episode I - Anakin and Kenobi buddy up and deal with some awful stuff. They win, the world looks like it's going to be great.
Episode II - The victory becomes tainted. Perhaps the Jedi aren't as enlightened as they seem or perhaps Anakin's idealism is too unrelenting and he doesn't feel the cause is upheld enough. Or maybe the Jedi order is nearly eliminated by well-meaning people that don't trust super-soldiers and Anakin thinks that the Jedi should fight more. Whatever the arc, this is the low point - it's clear that Anakin's side is losing and it will take great effort - beyond what is considered socially acceptable - to win.
Episode III - Anakin does the terrible thing that he shouldn't do. It works but at a terrible price. He's gone full on dark beyond the point of redemption.

In any case, there was never a need for boy Anakin. There are a lot of parallels in Anakin's story to Jesus, but even the gospels basically skip 30 years. The Matrix also starts with Neo as a grown up, not all the 'he was born special' stuff.

If you thought of the movies that way, adult Anakin and Obi-Wan travel to Naboo, not Qui-Gon Jin. Anakin rescues the Princess, they fall in love end movie. Then in the second movie the Jedi order decides that the 'government in exile' should be deposed. Anakin doesn't agree because the government is good and he loves the Princess - the political reasons that this was decided on were not based on pure idealism and he is disillusioned. These themes play out as he fulfills duties of a Jedi in exciting and action-packed ways. In the third movie he decides to save the government in exile and declares war on the Jedi. Probably everyone he loves is (apparently) killed and he barely survives, becoming the Darth Vader we know and love. Perhaps that is when he meets the Emperor who channels all his anger and hate toward revenge. Then we can have a 4th movie where he kills Mace Windu. Or redivide those plot points into just 3 movies where the 2nd one ends with him turning against the order to defend what he thinks is right about.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I disagree with your premise - Phantom Menace sucks for reasons unrelated to how much they tired to cram in.

No, it sucks exactly for that reason. Most of your list can be compressed. For example, the plot of 'infiltrate the Death Star and escape with the plans' are really one plot point. A lot of those things aren't even plot points, they're just themes -- which are related but different.

Three things on your list would not be enough meat for a 90-minute movie, which means that you need to compress your points more. Or to summarize, a New Hope is this: The resistance leader requests aid from a space wizard hermit and gets captured and has her message intercepted. The interceptor finds the space wizard and convince an anti-hero to infiltate the superweapon to rescue her. After the resistance leader gets rescued, the survivors of the infiltration lead a desperate attack against the superweapon.

All three of those plot points flow naturally from each other. Mostly because there's only three of them so the movie can properly set up the transition between the acts.

The Phantom Menace's plot points? No such luck. While there is a (surprisingly pretty good) explanation if you look at the movies as a whole: what does the Sith coming back have to do with Gungan and Naboo teaming up to expel the invaders? What does Jar-Jar's exile and redemption have to do with the Jedi finding the chosen one?

[Stahlseele]

Know how Darth Vader probably could have been avoided?
FUCKING GO BACK AND RESCUE HIS MOTHER FROM SLAVERY YOU DIPSHITS!
Or don't leave without her in the first place?
No money to buy her?
WHO THE FUCK CARES!
There's Slavery and there are Slavers and there are lightsabers which can be activated after the handle has been put into interesting places damn it!
Slaver is resistant to your mind trickery? Is he resistant to being force lifted several hundred feet and force dropped? No? Did not think so.
Slaver is in a racing-pit with dangerous running turbine engines?
Oops, i force pushed him in instead of pulling him away from the danger.
Fucking hypocrites.

[Username17]

It is genuinely true that Lucas tried to braid a lot of different climaxes into the prequels. In the Phantom Menace there's the battle in the throne room with Padme, the battle in the wilderness with the Gungans, the Jedi sword fight next to the inexplicable pit, and the comic relief space ship flight where Anakin accidentally blows up the mother ship. This was a deliberate attempt to "one up" the three part braided climax of Return of the Jedi (Ewok fight, space fight, throne room confrontation).

There's a couple of failure points. The first and most obvious is that Lucas simply attempted to pull off a really difficult directorial feat and his skills just weren't up to it at all. That's storytelling on hard mode, and examples of that succeeding are few and far between. I mean, some of the Ocean's Eleven movies pull that off, but that's a series that dedicates the entirety of its movies to setting up that sort of thing and really only Eleven and Eight are genuinely good movies - the other two are just OK despite having fucking amazing casts and an established premise. Lucas attempting something genuinely incredibly difficult because he over estimated his own abilities

But let's not downplay how big an issue it is that the Anakin and Jar Jar stuff is fucking awful. It's a four part braided climax, with the comic relief space battle being bad, the frog people Warhammer game being bad, and the throne room fight with Padme being just OK. The Jedi knife fight is genuinely pretty cool, but it's such a fucking slog because the action is cut through with three other main goings-on that are between substantially and catastrophically worse.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

The thing is, the problem with Anakin having a creepy Freudian romance and Watto being a Jewish stereotype and the ridiculous YIPPEE space battle and Jar-Jar being Jar-Jar are aesthetic problems. The fixes to these things are obvious to the point of being boring, so they don't interest me.

But even if you did fix those things, the movie fails on a structural level. Not only does it have multiple independent climaxes but it also has a lot of plot points that are irrelevant to the internal structure to the movie. Palpatine pushing the Trade Federation to create a conflict on Naboo so he can launch his Senate career with Jar-Jar and Padme as his pawns is actually quite brilliant in hindsight. But until the later two movies tie that together you're just left wondering 'what the fuck does the Gungan rebellion have to do with Darth Maul'.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Know how Darth Vader probably could have been avoided?
FUCKING GO BACK AND RESCUE HIS MOTHER FROM SLAVERY YOU DIPSHITS!

I'm fine with this from a metafictional perspective. A big plot point of the prequel trilogy is that the Republic is corrupt and ineffectual, and the mystery cult enforcement arm of the Republic being apathetic about slavery brings the point home a lot more strongly and coherently than Yoda falling ass-first into Dooku's conspiracy or tax disputes.

I am sympathetic though to people who hated this. The fact is, The Phantom Menace does not exist in a vacuum and there have been 20 years of people turning Luke and Ben and other EU Jedi into folk heroes. There's no way to get that plot point across without offending a lot of people and while from a structural perspective there's nothing wrong with it, from a cultural perspective I would've definitely done something different than having fucking Obi-Wan being indifferent to slavery.

[Foxwarrior]

the comic relief space battle being bad, the frog people Warhammer game being bad, and the throne room fight with Padme being just OK. The Jedi knife fight is genuinely pretty cool

It probably suggests something about the nature of just OK things, that after all this time, I remember all of those fights except the throne room one.

[Kaelik]

Know how Darth Vader probably could have been avoided?
FUCKING GO BACK AND RESCUE HIS MOTHER FROM SLAVERY YOU DIPSHITS!

I'm fine with this from a metafictional perspective. A big plot point of the prequel trilogy is that the Republic is corrupt and ineffectual, and the mystery cult enforcement arm of the Republic being apathetic about slavery brings the point home a lot more strongly and coherently than Yoda falling ass-first into Dooku's conspiracy or tax disputes.

I am sympathetic though to people who hated this. The fact is, The Phantom Menace does not exist in a vacuum and there have been 20 years of people turning Luke and Ben and other EU Jedi into folk heroes. There's no way to get that plot point across without offending a lot of people and while from a structural perspective there's nothing wrong with it, from a cultural perspective I would've definitely done something different than having fucking Obi-Wan being indifferent to slavery.

I think it almost was. They literally had Obi-Wan as a padawan, and Yoda was kind of a dick, and there really wasn't much EU stuff about Obi Wan and Yoda so they had free reign.

They easily could have just been like "Yeah, Slavery is bad, the republic was bad, the jedi where bad" and just had Obi-Wan be a stubborn dick about it and be mad and get overruled by Qui-Gon.

But while if you look at it in the broad scope you can sort of see the problems with the republic and the jedi, the movie isn't really FRAMING that, so either Lucas didn't mean it that much, or he sucked at directing which... I mean people can get worse at things they used to be good at?

[Lago PARANOIA]

But while if you look at it in the broad scope you can sort of see the problems with the republic and the jedi, the movie isn't really FRAMING that, so either Lucas didn't mean it that much, or he sucked at directing which... I mean people can get worse at things they used to be good at?

My opinion is that he sucks at directing. A lot of the more WTF moments in TPM only make more sense in light of the later movies or knowing what changes he made to the stories. I really do think that George Lucas intended to tell the story of 'while the Empire is much worse, the Jedi and the Republic were corrupt and weak and deserved to fall' all along, especially with what happens in RotS and AotC.

[Dean]

To have any discussion about the prequels sucking one has to assume the Redlettermedia material has already been consumed by all parties present and move forward with those points accepted.

With that put forward a few additional details are relevant. It is inarguable that in the 70's a filmmaking genius by the name of Lucas nearly single-handedly made New Hope one of the greatest films of all time. The unfortunate truth is that that Lucas was Marcia. Marcia Lucas was considered by the likes of Stephen Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Scorsese to be one of the most talented filmmakers of the generation with Scorsese even calling her "The best director I've ever known". Marcia Lucas famously restructured the entire film basically from the ground up in the editing bay. Including rewriting the entire third act and making it about having to destroy the death star before it could destroy another planet and virtually constructing most details and dialog in the trench run scene from B-roll and sound clips she personally recorded with select actors afterwards. Marcia Lucas was George's golden goose and when he was with her he could make good films and his separation from her corresponds almost exactly with him not being able to make good films anymore.

George Lucas, never a very good director, wrote the Phantom Menace as a first draft that was never revised thereafter. Without Marcia he had also lost the person who famously said no to things like Luke Skywalker being a bug-man or Han being killed off or a lengthy opening comedy segment to New Hope where Luke has a slapstick scene with a droid (which was even filmed before being cut by Marcia Lucas).

The more you read and learn about Lucas the more a picture begins to take place of a man surrounded by talented people that was never particularly talented himself. Star Wars was lightning in a bottle in many ways. It's Marcia Lucas at her best. It's John Williams a relative newcomer to scoring films, doing the best work of his life. It's Harrison Ford, a total no name, at his best and I'll be damned if Han Solo doesn't just about make that movie. The movie was made with some of the most famous directors in the world today (like Spielberg) giving consistent behind the scenes advice and help.

If you gave any director out of film school the kind of all star team and bottom up structural support George Lucas had in 1976 it's probable that just about anyone could make a good movie. George happened to make a great one, good for him. But his record post Marcia does not speak to his ability to have done it on his own or to ever do it again.

With all of that said I would also say that the largest problem the prequels face that seems to slip by people is that it makes a number of assumptions about the Star Wars universe that are at odds with the Star Wars universe we had seen. The one that immediately comes to mind is making everything high tech and densely populated. The Star Wars universe has a vibe that's pretty central to its charm and that's as a sci-fi palette swap on pulp adventures. So sure people use blasters instead of six shooters and the pirates their ships blast use laser cannons instead of regular cannons but the setting isn't really sci-fi. It's actually shockingly important to the Star Wars franchise to be low population and not be super advanced technologically and they've never figured that out.

A Star Wars world with a million populated planets with billions of people apiece couldn't look anything like the original series. The assembled might of the entire Imperial Navy ambushing the rebels is like 20 Star Destroyers. Now don't get me wrong that looks like a lot of Star Destroyers to my stupid monkey brain but even on our shitty single planet of earth our naval battles can have hundreds of huge ships a side. Even if you counted each tie fighter separately and then assumed each destroyer and big rebel ship had like a thousand people on them apiece it's still super small potatoes. It might seem like silly number crunching but it's actually not and important to the vibe of the series. When Han Solo meets a random kid in a bar that kids dad is Darth Vader. When Darth Vader randomly hires like 5 bounty hunters to find his kid one of them has personal beef with Solo. When Boba captures Solo he goes back to sell him to the crime lord from Darth Vaders kid's hometown. It's a fucking small universe. Everyone knows everyone else or is one kevin bacon degree from them at most. Society operates on Old West rules and logic and the tech does too. It's a universe where every farm boy can diagnose and fix spacecraft with a welder and a spanner cause this shit isn't Star Trek and stuff works more like tractors and old dinghy's than it does like spaceships from other series.

If you make a movie where there's a war between a trillion people on each side and your intrigue plots on the ground happen on a city that looks like this...

Coruscant, apparently. You may remember it from the prequels with one billion ships flying overhead simultaneously.

You will never hit the Star Wars vibe you want. Not even an amazing director could make that feel like Star Wars for the same reason you couldn't make a Western where a trillion cowboys must defeat the trillion Indians laying siege to New York City. The elements are present but the formula is wrong.

[Username17]

The lesson of the Marvel movies, or heck the original trilogy of Star Wars is that there's functionally unlimited room for fan service and continuity porn shout outs.

That is to say that referencing trade disputes and princess body doubles and senate paralysis and shit takes almost no screen time and the amount of that shit you can throw in to foreshadow future movies or be tie ins for obsessive fans to go deep on "the lore" is extremely large. The Phantom Menace has a pacing problem because it devotes too much screen time to shit that isn't relevant to anything. The pod racing scene takes over ten fucking minutes despite not being about anything and being extremely tenuously connected to the rest of the film.

The core problem of course is that Lucas had all the money and no one could tell him "No." Many of the ideas in The Phantom Menace could have been made good with a substantial amount of reworking and many of the ideas were just obviously bad and people should have said No. Lucas' ego was fucking planet sized and he has Big Things To Say about Christianity and Democracy and he attempts to outdo Return of the Jedi and Bladerunner and it's all a mess. It's unfocused. It takes way too long developing tangents that do not go anywhere. It needed to be streamlined into a functional space samurai movie with all the continuity porn relegated to cameos and background events rather than repeatedly derailing the main plot. For fuck's sake, Darth Maul doesn't even have any dialog with Obi Wan because there isn't any time left in the movie to develop a relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist.

But also too a lot of the ideas in TPM are just bad and someone should have stopped them. There should have been a continuity steward that could overrule Lucas any time he wrote shit like The Force being caused by micro organisms detectable via a blood test that was incompatible with the original trilogy. And also too there should have been someone with common sense and enough power to nix characters literally being named "Elan Sleazebaggano" because what the actual fuck?

-Username17

[Dogbert]

I would love to see a Star Trek/Wars crossover. Throw in Doctor Who and you'll have the Big Three of Sci-Fi nerd-dom. I'd watch the shit outta that.

So... Kingdom Hearts 4?

[Stahlseele]

Trek VS Wars would not work, too different in ship combat style.
Wars Versus Galactica would be closer, as both make heavy use of small fighter craft and missles / rapid fire weapons rather than capital ships for their combats.
Also, Trek and Wars / Jedi would try to out autofellate themselves competitevly to see who has more sun shining out of their collective arses . .

Also, i do not think Dr.Who should be in there anywere at all . .
Rather get Babylon 5 into it.

[Mord]

To have any discussion about the prequels sucking one has to assume the Redlettermedia material has already been consumed by all parties present and move forward with those points accepted.

With that put forward a few additional details are relevant. It is inarguable that in the 70's a filmmaking genius by the name of Lucas nearly single-handedly made New Hope one of the greatest films of all time. The unfortunate truth is that that Lucas was Marcia. Marcia Lucas was considered by the likes of Stephen Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Scorsese to be one of the most talented filmmakers of the generation with Scorsese even calling her "The best director I've ever known". Marcia Lucas famously restructured the entire film basically from the ground up in the editing bay. Including rewriting the entire third act and making it about having to destroy the death star before it could destroy another planet and virtually constructing most details and dialog in the trench run scene from B-roll and sound clips she personally recorded with select actors afterwards. Marcia Lucas was George's golden goose and when he was with her he could make good films and his separation from her corresponds almost exactly with him not being able to make good films anymore.

Marcia Lucas: A million billion times yes. The popular narrative gives her none of the credit she rightfully deserves for making Star Wars happen. She's not even demonized as George's bitter ex-wife who took half his cash after Return of the Jedi; she's just completely forgotten.

I first learned about her pivotal role from the book The Secret History of Star Wars, then within the last couple of years this excellent YouTube video "How Star Wars was saved in the edit" came out and might as well be called "Why You Should Fall Down And Kiss Marcia Lucas' Feet" or possibly "Why George Is Not Fit To Touch The Hem of Marcia's Garment." Anything I can say about the true value of Marcia Lucas' contributions to the film has already been said in the video, so carve 20 minutes out of your day to watch it, even if you have to cut into the time you have blocked out for jerking it to catgirl doujin.

Lest we forget, Star Wars won six Academy Awards and zero of these went to George:

Best Art Direction-Set Decoration: John Barry, Norman Reynolds, Leslie Dilley, Roger Christian
Best Costume Design: John Mollo
Best Sound: Don MacDougall, Ray West, Bob Minkler, Derek Ball
Best Film Editing: Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas Peace Be Upon Her, Richard Chew
Best Effects, Visual Effects: John Stears, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Grant McCune, Robert Blalack
Best Music, Original Score: John Williams

If you make a movie where there's a war between a trillion people on each side and your intrigue plots on the ground happen on a city that looks like this...

You will never hit the Star Wars vibe you want. Not even an amazing director could make that feel like Star Wars for the same reason you couldn't make a Western where a trillion cowboys must defeat the trillion Indians laying siege to New York City. The elements are present but the formula is wrong.

You lost me here. Yes, it's super dumb and lazy that Jabba the Hutt just happens to live on the planet where Luke is from, and even dumber and lazier that Anakin was born on that same planet, but none of that has anything to do with the population density of the galaxy.

There is no reason you can't have space opera against the backdrop of a huge and vibrant sci-fi city. The Fifth Element did it almost exactly on Coruscant. An ecumenopolis is just one more fantastical and strange backdrop against which to set your pulpy action. If you are telling me that the opening scene of Attack of the Clones, where the silver spaceship parks on the hovering landing pad with multiple layers of Coruscant air traffic whizzing by in the background, with impossible skyscrapers jutting up from a distant ground, is intrinsically incompatible with space opera, you are wrong.

The fact that packing too much fucking shit into one shot is a mistake from a visual filmmaking perspective does not imply or require that you can't have a setting in which you communicate to the audience that there is a lot of shit happening off-camera. It just so happens that the films we factually got that feature an ecumenopolis setting in which all kinds of shit is going on in the world are also shitty films in which too much fucking garbage is onscreen at any given time.



As an example, let's talk space battles. Whether your effects are digital or practical, too much shit on screen is almost always bad. The Battle of Endor is visually confusing enough, even though there are never more than two or three capital ships on screen at once. The Battle of Coruscant takes it a step further into absolute unintelligible visual chaos, where you have dozens of ships duking it out simultaneously.

What makes either of these scenes remotely watchable is that most of the time the action is focused specifically on individual characters occasionally broken up by shots of the battle surrounding them to keep the stakes high. The Battle of Endor is mostly closeups on Ackbar and Lando, while the Battle of Coruscant is mostly Anakin and Obi-Wan. In both cases, you get a few seconds to see that all hell is breaking loose in the background, then the focus shifts to something on a scale your primitive chimpanzee brain can engage with.

I don't think it's intrinsically worse or less Star Wars that the Battle of Coruscant has dozens of ships in the background whereas the Battle of Endor only has a couple. The key is keeping the main focus on individuals and using the wide shots sparingly.

[Shrapnel]

Trek VS Wars would not work, too different in ship combat style.
Wars Versus Galactica would be closer, as both make heavy use of small fighter craft and missles / rapid fire weapons rather than capital ships for their combats.
Also, Trek and Wars / Jedi would try to out autofellate themselves competitevly to see who has more sun shining out of their collective arses . .

Also, i do not think Dr.Who should be in there anywere at all . .
Rather get Babylon 5 into it.

All other arguments about compatibility aside, Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who are the three biggest, most popular and culturally significant sci-fi franchises in the world. Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica do not even begin to approach the zuggernaut levels those three have.

Also, there's already been a Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover courtesy of IDW, so we've gotten partway there already.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

That sounds almost as stupid as a Fallout and MLP crossover.

[Shrapnel]

What, the Trek/Who comic? It was dumb, but in a good way. Unlike, say... Star Wars Crossovers.

[Iduno]

I hold the position that The Phantom Menace is bad not because of Jar Jar and Anakin, but because the movie tried to do TOO MUCH SHIT for its running time.

It can be 2 things. As the saying goes, there's plenty of blame to go around.