Someone posted a link to this on Twitter this morning. It was posted at People magazine. This 5-minute long trailer features scenes from all of the Star Wars films and was put together over a weekend by actor Topher Grace and a friend:

Grace, the BlacKkKlansman actor and Star Wars super fan, shared his epic trailer — dubbed Star Wars: Always — to YouTube on Tuesday, tweeting out a link to the clip later that day.

“10 movies. 2 nerds. 1 weekend (when our wives were out of town). Enjoy,” Grace, 40, wrote.

I’m not a Star Wars superfan, though I might have still been considered one as late as 1997 when the Special Editions of the original series were shown in theaters. Here’s what I wrote about those revised films and the prequels last year:

When the Special Editions of the original films came out in the 90s, things got much worse. George Lucas had decided to go back and “fix” things he didn’t like in the classic films. That meant adding a bunch of bad CGI characters and making other changes which were less defensible. The best known change was to the moment when Han Solo meets Greedo in the cantina and shoots him. In the revised special edition, Greedo shoots at Han first and somehow misses from 3 feet away. This led to a backlash of people who a) thought the change was awkward and stupid and b) felt Lucas was messing up the arc of one of his best characters. The fans hated it. “Han shot first” became something you saw fans wear on t-shirts.

Then came the prequels and things once again got worse. We were introduced to a young Darth Vader but also to Jar Jar Binks, easily the worst character ever put in any Star Wars film. But it wasn’t just that. Many of you have probably seen Mr. Plinkett’s review of Episode 1…It’s nearly as long as the movie it critiques but is far better in every way. It points out that nothing in the movie makes sense. Not the heroes. Not the villains. Jar Jar is just the tip of the iceberg. And I’m not even going to bring up midi-chlorians! Some say Episode III was the best of the lot but I don’t see it. The prequels were a horrible abuse of the fans who had already taken a beating with the Special Editions.

And now, with episodes 7 and 8 the noise has definitely overwhelmed the signal. There has been so much bad storytelling and so few redeeming moments that I find the existence of fans at this point sort of amazing. With enough money thrown on the screen, it seems you can convince people this is something good when it’s really not good at all.

I say all of that because this trailer edits the whole thing together in such a way that you can almost forget how terrible the majority of Star Wars movies have been at this point. If you just edit the 3 prequels down to about 1 minute of visual backstory for the first film—if you cut out Jar Jar and all the bad plotting, bad characters, and bad dialogue—it’s tolerable. The sequels similarly benefit from being reduced to about a minute completely cut from all the junk that makes up the majority of those films.

You can watch this and almost forget most of these movies are awful. Almost.

Mostly, this makes me think it’s a real shame that a couple of outstanding movies I loved as a kid have been dragged down over the decades by the accumulation of so much inferior product.