I thought it would be about both sides of a conflict cloning their armies to save the originals live and throwing the clones at each other in endless waves of cannon fodder. It could have raised some interesting questions about the value of life; is a clone just a copy or a living individual with their own soul: how far do you compromise your morals to win a war, etc. Coming out in '99 to '05 with our own country (and others as well) wrestling with some of these topics in light of the advent of animal cloning; genetic modification of food; stem cell research, etc., it could have been fascinating instead of the relatively boring republic to empire transition we did get.

Also, I agree that the most interesting Star Wars stories being told are the ones outside of the Ep. I-VI timeline/characters. With the amount of crap that been written about Luke and Han and Leia it's like every single stinkin' day of their lives they have to face some new galactic threat/crisis or another. They take leading busy lives to a whole new level!

Han & Leia's marriage and children and the introduction of Mara Jade are all early major status quo changes, btw.

I argue that Thrawn is a Grand Moff Tarkin type...Tarkin in the movie doesn't show any real genius, either as a leader of men or of military. Thrawn was written as a character who had the author's notes.

I also think you simply things to support your premise. Evil wizards, fallen heroes, crime lords, evil military leaders. That's pretty much going to be your types of villains. You can mix and match, and perhaps add "crazy" to any of the categories, but really no matter if it's Star Wars or Avengers, that's what you got. (maybe natural disasters...but in space opera, that winds up not working so well...look at Star Trek's Nexus ribbon or Genesis Wave).

The problem isn't so much engine failure as driver failure. Formula proved successful. Zahn's epic novels sold...let's have similar epics. Comic Dark Empire with the reborn Empire sold like pancakes? Let's do 2 more!!! This is a problem with Dark Horse comics...look at what Marvel did with Star Wars...lots of differnt adventures...they just repeated movies...Look at their Terminator line...NOW did all sorts of stories, like Burning Earth featuring the future world (and Alex Ross's earliest work, or almost). Dark Horse did mini after mini of Terminators going back in time to kill Sarah Connor (or her parents or Sara Coner or etc). 90's era Dark Horse lived by the motto rinse and repeat.

(BTW, Dark Empire was actually a Marvel Epic book designed to relaunch Marvel's Star Wars line after the monthly fizzed out, but it was eventually cancelled. The Star Wars renaisace caused by Zahn led to it being revived)

The final books in the pre NJO series was the Zahn's Fist of Thrawn duology. There's literally a scene where it's mentioned there's no more lost Imperial warlords or Moffs secretly building Death Stars or Giant space weapons etc. Later, Luke looks out into the distance and see's something coming "Lookee there....what the heck is that?" ..seriously.

I’d always pictured it as both sides were cloning Jedi’s or something, and if it was filmed, it’d be like Braveheart or Gladiator, but with Jedi’s.
Boy was I disappointed.

Dude, no joke, I thought of it exactly as you did, and like you, I was sorely disappointed.

One other "villian" from the movies was, of course, the Death Star itself. And, like the others, it was repeatedly replicated in the followup media with Sun Crushers and Darksabers and the giant Von Neumen mega-star-destroyer in Dark Empire, and so forth...

Once you've got a bunch of Jedi wielding the most powerful force in the universe, the only worthy antagonist is someone who either negates that power or someone wielding it on the other side.

The biggest clue that Lucas didn't have it all planned was the prologue to the novelization of Star Wars (I don't refer to it as episode 4 or A New Hope). It clearly portrayed Palpatine as something of a puppet ruler, not a scheming Sith Lord. Later, the novelization of Empire referred to Boba Fett's armor as a remnant of what the clone enemies of the Jedi wore during the Clone Wars. Also, wars are usually named for the opponent, not the soldiers fighting on your side. It would be more likely be referred to as a Civil War or Secessionist War.

And the "the prequels failed to live up to fan expectations" is an interesting thing, because kids - untempered by those expectations - generally ate the prequels up with a spoon, which is why the Clone Wars CGI project was green-lit and why the Lego Star Wars games sold so well (far more than Lego Indy did). Star Wars is really a kids' series that older fans jumped on in the genre film vacuum that was the late-70s and turned it into something other than what it was, and then were suprised when the material didn't age with them.

Oh, man, you really need to try John Ostrander's writings on Star Wars: Republic and Star Wars: Legacy. Both series do have villains (Republic had a few Sith wannabes and occassionally fleshed-out Dooku, and Republic has the insane Darth Krayt), but they're not really the focus of the series. The common thread in both series is that the hero IS the villain, metaphorically speaking--that is, the protagonist acts as his own antagonist.

Republic gave us Quinlan Vos, a jedi who lost his memory and found himself a character with immense force powers, but no Jedi morals to use them properly. Later, Vos gets his memory back, but he's assigned to join Dooku's forces between Episodes II and III to take Dooku down from within. He finds himself struggling between pretending to be a Sith and actually joining them.

Legacy similarly deals with Cade Skywalker, Luke's descendant. He's a wreck of a former Jedi who's addicted to drugs and is more interested in being self-serving than in serving others. Still, he's haunted by none other than Luke Skywalker's ghost, who keeps pushing him to do the right thing.

The similarities between Republic and Legacy end there; both series have completely different casts and are set in very different eras. However, I loved the common theme that both deal more with the hero's internal struggle than with confronting some external, villainous threat. (To some extent, this is similar to Luke Skywalker's heroic journey in Episodes IV to VI, but you lose some of that sense beneath all the muppets.) Please do check them out.

For example, as a kid, I loved trying to imagine what the “Clone Wars” were after they were mentioned in a couple throwaway lines of dialogue from Ben Kenobi. Now that I know, I find myself kind of disappointed and wishing i didn’t know as the explanation seemed very lacking…

I'm in the same boat there!

I'd always pictured it as both sides were cloning Jedi's or something, and if it was filmed, it'd be like Braveheart or Gladiator, but with Jedi's.
Boy was I disappointed.

But your comment about how Lucas never created a storytelling engine is spot on. That explains a lot of what was wrong with Episodes 1-3. They were mostly exercises in "Let's fill in all the random details I hinted at in episodes 4-6 but never intended to actually explain!" For example, as a kid, I loved trying to imagine what the "Clone Wars" were after they were mentioned in a couple throwaway lines of dialogue from Ben Kenobi. Now that I know, I find myself kind of disappointed and wishing i didn't know as the explanation seemed very lacking...

If the Empire is still going strong, it devalues the “and they all lived happily ever after” ending of Return of the Jedi

Any more after that ending really defeats that ending.

lucas is not consistent in his plans.

He doesn't care about Star Wars at all - it just makes him money.
He's pretty much said that several times.
His main interests seem to be pushing film making technology, also a money maker, and experimental films - which he keeps claiming he's going to get back into.

. . . And the fact that Episodes I-III suck.

Many of the best Star Wars stories come from not just pre-Episode IV, but pre-Episode I, territory much less charted out even before the prequels came out. Those are often the least derivative stories in the mythos, because they are allowed to be so different.

It's also worth mentioning that even stories taking place post-Return of the Jedi weren't all derivative. The X-Wing series of books and comics, for example, didn't really have any of those villain archetypes. They may have had OTHER villain archetypes, but generally they focused on ground-level military stories that used a very different storytelling engine than do most Star Wars stories. Even Stackpole's X-Wing spinoff I, Jedi had more in common with the X-Wing books and comics than it did with any traditional Jedi story, or with the Jedi Academy Trilogy, which it also tied into.