Same, I could have sworn this was the case.

The power converters line has been memed to death by the fandom. But that said, the campiness and over-the-top nature of the dialogue and the acting is the point. It was intended to be reminiscent of pulp fiction serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

> Yeah, these looneys existed in the past, but they weren't as common as they are now. They were rare, and now they are not. Tell me how that's a good thing?

I don't know, man. We fought an entire Civil War against these looneys, and they came back in the form of the Klan and Jim Crow. We had vaccine denialism, anti-maskers, creationists, and conspiracy theorists all over the joint since well before the Internet as well. We had Nazis holding huge rallies in Madison Square Garden in the 1930s, xenophobic immigration laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act, people were teaching quack science like phrenology in universities. Every time a new medium rises it presents challenges. Everything we are seeing has happened before and will happen again.

I don't think we're regressing so much as we're realizing just how much we never really progressed in the first place.

> conspiracy theories weren't common, there was no such thing as mass manipulation by companies, nobody had to worry about nations like China seriously spying on them, bigotry was on the decline.

I'm sorry, but all of this is bullshit hyperbole. The Internet and social media hasn't made things worse, it just made the worst aspects of human nature a lot more easy to see than ever. That's not to say they don't represent challenges to us that we have no exact precedents for, but the "everything was so great before computers crowd" are just remembering a simpler time where they didn't have as many responsibilities and didn't have a broader understanding of the world beyond their own spheres of experience.

I disagree. Say what you will about the stories of the newer films, but they look spectacular. Rogue One especially.