It is one of the few franchises that spans generations. My kids enjoy it, just as my wife and I enjoyed it before them. We have fun playing the games together. I imagine my parents felt the same way with Star Wars.

I didn't watch/play anything pokemon as a kid, I think I was just a little too old for it when it came out. My son got into it and we learned to play the card game, started going to a local game store, etc... I have fallen in love with it. Yes, the characters are cute/cuddly/goofy but if you get into the actual card game it is a deep strategy game with so many fun ways to play. My son still likes it but has moved on from it as his favorite, I now enjoy it and play it more than he does.

my wife and i were just musing to ourselves this morning about whether it was strange that the franchise hasn't died yet.

that conversation went somewhere along the lines of: "surely kids aren't interested in what their parents were/are interested in" (oh didn't we hate our parents' style) -- and then I remembered that I really wanted to see Speed Racer, which was what my dad was into in the late sixties. i still thought that the animation was about as impressive as pokemon at the time (funny how they animated more frames than one punch man these days!!!)

i think kids these days complain that their fat old parents are wearing (ostensibly 'millennial') graphic tees in public so there is plenty of generational rejection. but it's really weird how the internet hasn't developed more obvious generational 'coding' (except in language), and hasn't rejected things like pokemon entirely.

or is it pretty easy to code us? lol

their rejection of us aside (which is an evolutionary and biological thing) i wonder if our parents felt 'as connected' to us generationally speaking as we 'feel' we are to the next (socioeconomically and socio-digitally)?

Few franchises that span generations?

The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.

Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.

Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.

Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.

One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.

Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.

It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.

I don't think your parents will enjoy the current crop of Star Wars IP.