Star Wars Day lands on a Friday and Ryan O’Donnell has a theory he has been sitting with since he was a kid.

The best peanut butter and jelly sandwich is your recipe. You could have an objectively better sandwich with fancier ingredients and it still would not be your favorite. Ryan O’Donnell applies the same logic to Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back is the better film. Revenge of the Sith is his favorite because it was the one he grew up on. He says the same split runs across every generation that has loved this franchise since 1977.

The darker part of the conversation is what happens when generations collide online. Ryan O’Donnell traces the backlash that followed Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best after the prequel era and calls it what it is: passion curdling into cruelty when a franchise does not deliver what older fans expected. He closed out May the 4th the same way he started loving Star Wars: a new Lego set, a Darth Vader bust, a movie playing, and the online noise tuned out completely.

Topics: Star Wars Day, May the 4th, Star Wars generations, Star Wars online discourse, Revenge of the Sith

Originally aired on2026-05-04