Posted By Dan Greenfield on May 4, 2025 | 13 comments

It’s May the Fourth!

By JIM BEARD

Disney has entertained me for nearly six decades now. Its works have been, still are, and always will be part of the fabric of my life. It also owns two of my most-favorite pop culture properties of all time, Marvel Comics and Star Wars.

Disney has had its successes with both, but in the universe of Star Wars also some of its biggest and most virulent critiques and controversies.

That said and this being Star Wars Day (and my birthday) — May the Fourth — I’m here to tell you: Disney is not the Great Satan. It’s OK to like Disney Star Wars.

I love Star Wars myself. I don’t remember much of my life before I saw the first trailer back in January of ’77, but I do know I can’t imagine my life without it now. I have to credit Disney for picking up that torch from the man who created the property, because that man was also the one who, let’s face it, had reached a point in his own life of feeling no personal impetus to continue it. For good or for ill, and I admit there’s an argument there, Disney bought the whole shebang from George Lucas and have, in my opinion, been pretty good caretakers of it.

You can agree with me or not, and I’m good with it either way, but now close to 13 years after the sale (appropriate, huh?), I think it’s time to call out the best of the best of the Disney Star Wars era.

And to celebrate my birthday—and that 12-year-old kid who fell in love with the franchise—here’s my list of the 13 greatest Disney hits in a Galaxy Far, Far Away, ranked. The OG Trilogy will always be the greatest, and the Prequels may finally be getting their due, but the Mouse Droid deserves its day in the twin suns…

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13. Visions – Season One (2021). Heading into this show, I was pretty much watching it because it was Star Wars. I came away being far more entertained than I’d imagined. The diversity of styles and setting are great, and the best part about it is that it’s not alternate visions of the regular characters. You could almost believe every episode happened somewhere in the SW Universe.

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12. Tales of the Jedi (2022). I’ve never watched the classic animated Star Wars shows like Clone Wars and Rebels, so I thought I might be a little lost in this series, but I’m happy to say I loved the Ahsoka episodes as much as the ones about Count Dooku and Mace Windu. I didn’t care as much for the subsequent “season,” Tales of the Empire, but this one hit the sweet spot.

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11. Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022). Full disclosure: I was one of the ones who griped about the miniseries before it was released, about how it was likely to be a story that didn’t need to be told. Instead, I got a fascinating tale that gave us live-action Inquisitors and a young Leia Organa, not to mention a Darth Vader appearance outside the films that was actually good.

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10. The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special (2020). Why is this one on my list, you ask? Some of it’s that it brought back memories of the OG Holiday Special, but it’s also in part because of the rarity of it being set after the events of the Sequel Trilogy… and it’s a darn fun story with some cool anachronistic mashups.

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9. Skeleton Crew (2024). It was a long time coming and when it finally arrived it was the Star Wars miniseries we old-school Star Warriors didn’t know we needed. The show’s virtually the antithesis of Andor, a rollicking tale that gets right back down to the property’s roots—and it made me actually like its kid characters, a wondrous feat indeed.

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8. Biomes (2021). Some of you out there may be asking what this is, and maybe I don’t blame you. This Star Wars short appeared quietly on Disney+ and didn’t make a big splash… which is a shame. Look it up if you’re not familiar with it, and get ready to take a few very brief trips to some of the SW Universe’s most famous locales.

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7. Andor, Season One (2022). Who would ever have thought a thoughtful, highly dramatic, soul-searching-yet-action-packed-at-moments Star Wars TV series could ever have hit as hard as the first season of this one? In some ways, I was saying the same thing about it before it was released that I said about Obi-Wan Kenobi — did we really need it? The answer was yes. Yes, we did. Let’s hope Season Two is just as fascinating and engaging.

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6. Rogue One (2016). Speaking of Cassian Andor, this film surprised a lot of people, I think. Some have gone on record calling it Disney’s best SW movie. I can’t agree with that, but it is one fine film with a lot of great characters and action pieces. If only it didn’t have all that unnecessary Vader stuff.

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5. The Last Jedi (2017). I get it; you may want to stop reading at this point. For me, I will die on this hill and come back as a Force ghost to haunt you: This is a perfectly good SW movie and I love nearly every bit of it. I would never have picked the exact same path for Luke that Rian Johnson did here, but I can’t deny that it’s a valid one with precedent sewn into the OG Trilogy. It’s also Carrie Fisher’s solid last turn as Leia and has some fantastic sequences, despite the dumbness of all that Canto Bight malarkey.

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4. Poe Dameron (2016-18). A Marvel Star Wars comic written by Charles Soule and drawn by Phil Noto that defied my expectations over the course of its issues and made me sit up and take notice of its stories and characters. I’ll say here and now that it remains one of my most favorite SW comics titles of all time.

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3. The Mandalorian, Season Two (2020). C’mon, Season One was great and Season Three was pretty great, but wasn’t Season Two the one you think most fondly of? Wasn’t it where a lot of cool stuff went down and the characters really came into their own? I know you’re out there nodding your heads, agreeing with me because you know it’s true.

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2. The Force Awakens (2015). Put your boxing gloves back on, fanboy — I loved everything about this movie. It was just what I wanted after the long drought following Revenge of the Sith and, listen, it rolled out just the way it should have, in my opinion. It was a new SW film for yet another new generation and if it were done in any other way people would have howled that it didn’t feel like Star Wars. J.J. Abrams and co. knew what they were doing by tapping into all the things that make the property what it is, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

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1. Galaxy’s Edge (2019). Uh-huh, you read that right: A theme park. In my opinion still the very best thing Disney’s done with the property, a complete immersion that my 12-year-old self would never have guessed could be done and that one day I’d be able to go there. Star Wars comes alive in the park and it was every inch what I hoped and dreamed it would be. And I can’t wait to go back. Thank you, House of Mouse.

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MORE

— FRANCO FRIDAYS: Just Call It STAR WARS — Nothing But STAR WARS. Click here.

— Dig These 13 Far Out STAR WARS Characters Found Only in Classic MARVEL COMICS. Click here.

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When JIM BEARD’s not editing and publishing through his two houses, Flinch Books and Becky Books, he’s pounding out adventure fiction with both original and licensed characters. In fact, he’s put words in the mouths of Luke Skywalker, Superman, Fox Mulder, Carl Kolchak, Peter Venkman and the Green Hornet… and lived to tell about it. Check out one of his latest pop culture non-fiction books, Galloping Around the Cosmos: Memories of TV’s Wagon Train to the Stars From Today’s Grown-Up Kids. It’s available here.