Regardless of your feelings about Jedis, George Lucas, or J.J. Abrams, the announcement of new Star Wars films is a big deal. Since the release of the first film in 1977, Star Wars has been an unavoidable part of American film culture, not only directly for millions of fans, but more indirectly through its influence as the undisputed godfather of all big-budget special-effects spectacles in the modern cinema. The two Star Wars trilogies — original and prequel — each redefined special effects for their respective eras, but produced strikingly different critical legacies.

The first trilogy has been considered a standard-bearer for thirty years, its Star Destroyer explosions and Speeder Bike chases still astonishing to behold three decades later. The innovative computer-controlled motion photography of John Dykstra’s effects team allowed for more precise use of miniatures and models than ever before, and put Lucasfilm’s visual effects company Industrial Light and Magic on the map as a trailblazer in the world of cinematic illusion. Its achievements throughout the 1980s and 1990s in integrating practical and digital effects techniques produced such lasting images as melting Nazi faces, time-traveling Deloreans, and vicious, clever velociraptors.

The balance between the practical and the digital was always only changing in one direction, though, and by the end of the new millennium, Lucasfilm’s SFX division was ready to tip the scales so dramatically that big-budget movies would never be the same again. And what more appropriate opportunity than a brand new set of films in the franchise that started it all?

The two Star Wars trilogies — original and prequel — each redefined special effects for their respective eras, but each have produced strikingly different critical legacies.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace introduced audiences to a more fully realized world of digital effects than had ever been seen before. Building on the triumphs in character rendering in such films as Terminator 2 and The Mummy, ILM set about constructing spaceships, aliens, and robots almost entirely out of computer animation. But the new suite of images they created, though just as technically innovative as their predecessors, failed to connect with audiences and critics in the same way.

Despite the dazzling visual detail of the digital effects, there was a weightlessness to them, an insubtantiality that permeated the discussion around the film. Although this wouldn’t stop The Phantom Menace from earning over $1 billion in worldwide box office and garnering plenty of loyal fans, there was — and is — a sense among critics and discerning viewers that there was simply something missing from the visual fabric of the prequel trilogy’s universe.