I watched the entire first season and thought a single episode was good. The Gendy Tarkovsky series is VERY fun, but I guess it's not canon.

After re-watching TPM in 2024 for that re-release, I switched from being a 3/2/1 guy to being a 1/3/2 guy. I actually laughed at a Jar Jar bit? It was weird, man. But it's the only one of the PT that functions as a movie on its own. I also think I simply let go of what a crushing disappointment it was back in '99.

I have always prefered The Phantom Menace over the other two for the Prequels. TPM has the pod race and the Dual of Fates scene. Attack Of The Clones has the big action scene at the end and Yoda bouncing around fighting Dooku. Revenge Of The Sith has nothing good.

Not to rehash a bunch of shit but I do remember the pod race sounding fucking amazing in the theater at the time. It had such cool sound design and was literally shaking the seats. Darth Maul was also really cool but damn, Jar Jar still makes it a tough watch. I even watched a fan edit clearing out most of him and he still stuck out like an annoying sore thumb.

For the CGI Clone Wars series, it got off to a VERY rough start. The "movie" is basically the first few episodes bundled together, and most consider it terrible. The show got better as it went along, Star Wars Rebels acted as an indirect sequel series, with some Clone Wars characters and plots popping up later in the show, while The Bad Batch is a direct sequel to Clone Wars.

There's some viewing guides out there for watching the good/essential Clone Wars episodes while skipping most of the crap. A lot of them end up re-ordering the episode order too, because the show was somewhat episodic, so jumped around a lot and returned to various storylines, or even before other storylines, so some prefer to watch the whole show, or some storylines, in chronological order, which means jumping between episodes and seasons.

This guide looks pretty decent. It starts off with a Season 3 episode, but otherwise is in release order and is only skipping episodes, so when watching you'd mostly just skip forward a few episodes, instead of jumping around a lot.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...g/edit?tab=t.0

This guide has a much crazier viewing order, although it does list all the episodes and storylines and marks the ones to skip, and often gives an explanation of the episodes and why they're being skipped.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/co...star_wars_the/

I believe I used a variant of this infographic (spoilered for size)



That one only went up to season 5, so I ended up watching all of season 6 and then season 7 (which came out in 2020, six years after season 6), but most people recommend watching all of season 7 anyway.

When the prequels came out my ranking of best to worst would be 3,2,1.

Today in 2026 my rankings are 3,1,2.

I think Attack of the Clones has aged the worst and is kind of boring with too much political talk.

AOTC actually works for me as a lot happens and I enjoy the political banter. The Jango Fett stuff, clone army creation, etc. are all great. The ham-fisted love story is dodgy for sure. I love the Dooku/ObiWan discussion about the Sith and Dooku trying to convince ObiWan that he should join him to defeat Sidious. It’s just cool. But, the film has issues too. It feels long because it is.

Still, I agree with your ranking of the three prequels at this stage. 3,1,2 works.

That discussion made no sense at the time. Lucas did a horrible job the the laying out what he was trying to give us. The pieces were filled in later and it makes that discussion even better. The Sifo-Dyas stuff is the same, he just threw out a random name that happened to sound like Sideous. That was developed later too. I think part of the prequels improving is the Clone Wars and the other stuff filling in the stuff Lucas left out.

I just watched Attack of the Clones all the way through for the first time in probably 15-20 years and my biggest take away was that nothing about the movie's plot makes any sense. The bones of an interesting story are there, and it's easy to see what Lucas was going for thematically, but almost all of the specifics are dumb. Just trying to parse out the motivations of the various villains and how they all fit into the grand scheme felt impossible. At this point I suppose there has been decades of ancillary material to fill in the cracks and try to make some sense of it, but for me the movie has got to stand on its own.

As for Sifo-Dyas, wasn't the original intention that the name was Sido-Dyas, an all too obvious alter ego for Sideous? I was all in on the pre-release hype for Ep.II back in 2001-02 and there was definitely a copy of the script that leaked back then and I recall Sido-Dyas being the name in that script.

Oh - I get the Sifo Dyas issue and the lack of developing that story line. The idea behind it all is what I liked. It was thrown in there hap-hazardly and then like the Prophecy story line it was all left for dead.

I wish the prequels fleshed out more & spent more time with the clone wars story lines. I do enjoy SOME of TCW animated show and would have liked more about that in the films. One could argue that the prequels could have been four films versus three. A lot of it was rushed and not fully realized.