I did once.
It was Black Friday of 2006, a week after the release of the Wii. My friend had to work at a store in the mall in the wee hours of the morning, and he dropped me off to wait at GameStop so I could test my luck. Nintendo has always been infamous for engineered scarcity, and the Wii was no exception, so I was fully prepared to leave with nothing but an interesting story to tell. I had never seen the horrors of Black Friday, and was morbidly curious to experience it for myself at least once.
The experience was pretty tame. At first I waited outside the mall. I had my guide dog with me, and I allowed other people in line to give her pets and scritches as we waited. Not gonna lie, me bringing her was a bit of social engineering. Who’s gonna hit a blind guy? We got to chatting about what the line was for, and I discovered it was for an unrelated promotion. I asked if I could be let in to wait in front of the GameStop in the food court out of the cold, and they let me enter.
I can’t remember if others in the same line came in with me, or if they had already been there, but I ended up behind a dad and his two kids, and they were both getting a Wii. There were only three in stock, so I ended up getting lucky. I even got a copy of Twilight Princess, as well as FF XII on the PS2 as a Christmas gift for my sister.
tl;dr: veni vidi wiici
It was so much worse than that. People had been waiting 16 years to see a proper cinematic continuation of Star Wars. There were some pulp novels, a couple of very weak kids cartoons, a pretty decent tabletop RPG with source materials, a few video games, and that was about it. For a franchise that was still iconic and incredibly popular despite lying fallow like that.
We got a more distilled version of George’s vision, and hoo-boy it just simply wasn’t very good. I still saw that movie six fuckin’ times (the last three at the dollar theater), but while there was plenty to digest and feed my nerdery, the story and acting just never got better.
Surely they were just getting warmed up though, and episode two would be better…
I’m not as much of a SW nerd as my friend, but according to him SW fans are eating good with the massive expansion of the Clone Wars in the past decade.
So the prequel trilogy is really mediocre to be very nice. But seems to me the shows after the Disney acquisition made gold out of that turd.
Far before the Disney acquisition, the Clone Wars tv series was actually really impressive and fleshed out the world SO MUCH. “Rebels” did the same for the original trilogy, but that might have been post-Disney.
The animators used filmmaking prowess with things like animating camera shots as if they were on a real film set, which lent a so-far unseen level of professionalism and production quality for a CG television series.
I felt so stupid avoiding it when it first got big, because I thought it was a kiddie “franchise show.” It blew me away and still inspires me as a 3D artist. The visual style definitely grew on me as well. :)