Quote Originally Posted by Paulbot View Post
The amount of time that passes between the prequels and original trilogy never quite made sense to me. It's roughly 20 years, canonically, yet people who are clearly more than 20 years old talk about the Jedi as if they are from the long past, and possibly mythical, rather than in living memory.

But the Imperial officer who says "Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you" was clearly old enough to have seen holovids of the Emperor talking about the assassination attempt on him by the Jedi that birthed the Galatic Empire.

(Same thing happened in TFA, I thought Luke Skywalker was a myth, but 30 years later and coming from a woman orphaned on a desert planet makes more sense.)
While you have a point about the officer, for the general population of the galaxy, Jedi were probably a bit like myths/legends even at the height of the republic. In that time the average galactic citizen would most likely be able to live their life quite easily without ever seeing a jedi. If you live on a peaceful planet, (realitically) giving the jedi no reason to ever go there, you can see how, over time, the jedi would quite quickly and easily fall into myth and obscurity. The nature of their ways also meant that they relegated themselves to the background, seeking neither fame nor attention.

I think it would have been quite easy for Palpatine to convince the populace that the jedi were evil and had attempted a coup. He was a very popular politician. And don't underestimate what popular politicians can get away with