Five years ago this week, a Star Wars movie arrived in theaters across the country. No one cared.

Of course, it didn’t help that this Star Wars movie—Episode I: The Phantom Menace—was one that fans had already seen, and largely rejected, a little more than decade earlier. In May 1999, Episode I had arrived in a blizzard of hype for a whole new trilogy of the Star Wars saga, but fans quickly turned on Episode I and its subsequent sequels, which arrived in 2002 and 2005. By 2012, the entrenched wisdom was practically etched in stone: The Star Wars prequels were garbage.

George Lucas didn’t care. This was his story, and he was going to tell it the way he wanted to tell it—and in this case, retell it the way he wanted to tell it. For Episode I’s rerelease, Lucas had the movie converted into 3D—the beachhead in a grand plan to rerelease all six Star Wars movies in 3D. From a purely financial perspective, you can see the logic behind it; in 1997, Lucas had added almost $250 million to the original trilogy’s gross with his "Special Edition" rereleases of Episodes IV, V, and VI in 1997, which also hyped a whole new generation of kids for the prequel trilogy.

But those 1997 Special Edition rereleases also marked the key schism in the Star Wars universe: the moment when Star Wars’ most devoted fans began to openly rail against the man who created it. Relying on cutting-edge technology of the era, Lucas spent millions of his own dollars tinkering with the original Star Wars trilogy. Most changes were benign, or even positive—cleaning up dated special effects to make them look more convincing by modern standards. But Lucas also made a few changes that altered the story—most infamously, the decision to digitally alter the scene in which Han Solo confronted the bounty hunter Greedo by making Greedo shoot at Han and miss, giving the anti-Lucas movement its rallying cry.

Lucas had done dumb shit with the Star Wars franchise before—the Holiday Special, Caravan of Courage, and those Droids and Ewoks cartoons, to name a few—but the missteps had always been easy to ignore. Now, he was messing with Star Wars’ Holy Trinity. Fans—at least the most vocal ones—were furious. But Lucas never wavered from his vision. For the 2004 DVD release of the Star Wars trilogy, he digitally inserted the likeness of Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in Episodes II and III, into the ending of Episode VI as a "Force Ghost" that appears after Darth Vader’s death. No matter how much Star Wars fans hated the prequels, Lucas refused to let them pretend they weren’t just as important in the canon as his original trilogy.