One of the biggest complaints with the "Star Wars" prequels from the late 90s/early 2000s was that George Lucas and his production team overused computer animation.

Instead of whimsical puppets and droids, most of the characters and scenery were designed in a computer.

A lot of the action was shot in front of green screens, which was a big departure from the physical props and sets used in the original trilogy.

Even the iconic Yoda puppet was replaced with a CGI character. Ugh!

But things sound more promising for old-school Star Wars fans in the upcoming sequel "The Force Awakens."

One of the actors in the movie, Oscar Isaac, told Yahoo News that much of what he saw on set was real. There wasn't much green screen. Isaac plays an X-Wing pilot in the new movie. Here's how he described shooting the scene we saw in last month's teaser trailer to Yahoo's Jordan Zakarin:

It was hard to believe that I was actually sitting in there and doing that. And it’s physical. You have to kind of get in touch with that child again that had a little X-Wing and would fly around his room making crazy sounds, you had to tap into that spirit again and that was a lot fun. There was a lot of practical effects. A lot of the stuff they actually made. There wasn’t a lot of green screen.

The teaser trailer was full of other hints, including this shot that shows a ship full of storm troopers:



They're real people in real costumes! In the prequels, the clone troopers were all CGI. It looked totally bogus:

These are all good signs that director JJ Abrams is going back to the roots of what made the original Star Wars movies so great. Now we just have to hope the story stands up to the original films too.

"The Force Awakens" comes out December 18, 2015.