Same here. The discussion with my brother and his wife (both teachers) came after we visited two toystores in our hometown (we use my 2 y.o. niece as an excuse to have to go there ) last week while at my parents and I expressed my surprise at how much space the SW toys occupied even in those smaller, fancier non-chain stores.

As for the OT's press reception, I can't say much for ANH personally as I was only 9 and not reading reviews, though AFAIK the technological/spectacular aspect dominated everything (the story/characters were not taken very seriously except by the younger audience). And to me ANH was the best movie ever made and I couldn't conceive at the time that someone might not love it! I have many people over 50 in various social circles (work, mostly), and though they're familiar with the OT enough to follow discussions, it's rather obvious the OT didn't have nearly the same lasting impact on them as it did on people between 35-45 today. They've seen them at the time, like nearly everybody did it seems, but they were not "fans", have not rewatched the movies, don't own copies etc.

For ESB and ROTJ I have scrapbooks. The "bad reviews" are not from famous newspapers but our tabloids and non specialized magazines. And "bad" is relative - reviewers said for e.g. the movies were spectacular and hugely entertaining despite their adolescent plots and characters reminescent of Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon, the bad dialogue and really bad acting etc. More or less, the reception of the francise was extremely similar to that the PT later got (at least around here). The local reviews of TPM were on the whole fairly positive - at least all those that reviewed TPM as a SW movie and a kid movie (with weaknesses they pack at the end, quite conscious they're rather secondary in movies like this, like the acting/dialogue or the vagueness of the background plot).

Storywise, ESB got the worst deal from the local reviewers. They found the story's structure really bizarre, they often found Yoda annoying (one reviewer called it the sanctimonious love child of Kermit and a buddhist monk), but it's mostly through the very positive reviews of ROTJ that you saw many reviewers had not been all that impressed with ESB, and saw ROTJ as a roller-coaster return to form (yes, despite the Ewoks - most reviewers were already seing the movies as being primarly for kids), without attempts at a silly and flat love story, without long stretches of pseudo-buddhist tirades by a puppet getting in the way etc. It took quite a few years before ESB came to be seen by so many fans as the best of the three (cinema pros rather still hold the view that ANH is by a long shot the best movie of the lot) - not that as 11 y.o. we held any of those views at the time. What I remember is that ANH attracted girls our age too - they fought for who would be Leia when we played (the others were stuck being Chewy, Threepio or Stormtroopers!) but with ESB/ROTJ, it's already become a predominantly boy thing (with exceptions).