Let’s start with something a bit less egregious. It’s hard to poke many holes in the first season of “The Mandalorian,” which is rightfully viewed by many “Star Wars” fans as one of the true highlights since the Disney acquisition. It’s a tight, focused, a visually stunning run of episodes, with only one notable exception — the Blurrg that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) has to ride in some early scenes. 

The creature just never looks quite right. Maybe it’s the big eyes. Maybe it’s the weird way the combined effects interface with a physical actor, especially during the riding. Maybe it’s the insistence to stay true to a creature design first created for — no joke — the 1985 live-action TV movie “Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.” The bulbous, fish-like Blurrgs actually don’t look half bad in that film, as their design matches the rubbery monster suits demanded by the era. In CGI, 35 years later? The Blurrg just looks a little out of place.

Still, all told, this is a pretty minor instance of questionable CGI. We have to start out small, because “The Mandalorian” gets a lot worse with this stuff later on, and it is far from the worst culprit among the “Star Wars” Disney+ shows.

Leapfrogging over “The Mandalorian” season 2 and straight to season 3, we get a much more egregious CGI faux pas than the Blurrg. In the season’s second episode, “The Mines of Mandalore,” Din and Grogu venture to the Mandalorian home world. There, Din can bathe in the cleansing waters below the planet’s surface and be absolved of the high crime of revealing his face to another. This was a pretty exciting moment for “Star Wars” fans, given the huge amount of time spent on an animated Mandalore in “Clone Wars” animated series. Sadly, the live-action version of the planet, and its capital city Sundari, were a disappointment. 

“The Mandalorian” is where the Volume — the massive LED soundstage used in various “Star Wars” and Marvel projects since — proved itself as a groundbreaking method for filming alien landscapes. By projecting pre-rendered CGI backdrops around the actors in a scene, the set allowed for more realistic lighting and some great depth of illusion. Unfortunately, Lucasfilm only took a few years to push the Volume to its limits, which is showcased painfully in “The Mines of Mandalore.”

From the moment Din and Grogu land, the whole planet feels tiny. An agonizing amount of time is spent running back and forth across their landing area, which turns the sprawling wasteland of Mandalore into a tiny diorama with some egregiously fake rocks. Things only get worse when they go underground, with an environment dark enough to confuse you as to what’s happening but still bright enough to show that the CGI backdrops are hardly convincing. This is season 3’s first big miss, but certainly not its last.

The “Ahsoka” series lands somewhere in the middle of the “Star Wars” Disney+ landscape in terms of visuals. There are some great miniature model space battles, strong lightsaber fights, and a magical flashback episode that, while heavily reliant on literal smoke and figurative mirrors, still manages to generate some iconic shots. Overall, though, “Ahsoka” is a show that comes out looking just fine, though it doesn’t make it all the way through season 1 without a couple of glaringly bad CGI moments.

The most infamous of these within the fandom comes late in the season, when Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) takes a daring leap out of Huyang’s Jedi shuttle onto the surface of the planet Peridea in episode 7, “Dreams and Madness”. The ramp of the ship mid-flight leads to an awkward sort of slide into midair, followed by what can only be described as a bounce as the CGI Ahsoka becomes a real person again on the ground.

It’s an especially unfortunate moment given that it directly leads to a pretty great lightsaber remix between Ahsoka and Baylon Skoll (Ray Stevenson). All told, this one is more just goofy than embarrassingly bad.

Enough build-up: It’s time to talk about the decidedly mixed bag that was “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. Easily the biggest Star Wars CGI perpetrator on Disney+ and arguably the worst of all the recent live-action Star Wars shows, “Obi-Wan” is a baffling medley of cheap effects, awkward Easter eggs, and a story that spends a whole lot of time going nowhere. There’s still plenty to like here — even the worst Star Wars shows have their redeeming moments — with Ewan McGregor putting himself at the top of that list with an excellent lead performance. Hayden Christensen is also great as both Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader, but the CGI-de-aging used in the flashbacks is often not good, to put it charitably.

It’s easy to understand the idea here. Wouldn’t it be great to get a new scene of Anakin and Obi-Wan sparring at the Jedi Temple as master and apprentice? It sounds cool in theory, but neither actor convinces as a younger version of themselves. Christensen looks especially awkward in the CGI youth mask and padawan braid.

“Ahsoka” would later do a much better job on the de-aged Anakin idea, with an accompanying lightsaber fight that’s much more compelling, if still a bit questionable. However, this scene isn’t the worst CGI moment in “Obi-Wan Kenobi” — far from it.

Most “Star Wars” fans would agree that episode 4 is the weakest part of “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” While it’s cool to see Fortress Inquisitorious imagined in live action, every other part of this episode is baffling. It’s a strange side quest in a show that has both too much time to kill and not enough time to go in-depth into anything. Obi-Wan escapes by hiding Princess Leia (Vivien Lyra Blair) under his coat in one of the most unintentionally hilarious escape scenes in “Star Wars” history. Then, to put a perfect cap on a perfect storm, the actual getaway features some T-47 airspeeders — better known as snowspeeders for their famous role in the Battle of Hoth. The composition of this scene, however, is far from convincing.

This whole sequence is pretty silly. First, a pair of T-47s fly into the fortress hangar at high speed, practically on a collision course with the back wall. The camera conveniently cuts away, and we don’t see them at all as Obi-Wan and company make a break for it. Then, one of the two airspeeders swoops down from on high, outside the hangar yet again, for a rescue run. Then to wrap things up, the second speeder slows to a stop in midair, giving you a solid look at its unconvincing appearance. There’s a brief standoff with Reva (Moses Ingram) that’s also highly suspect. Down to the end, it just doesn’t look like these actors and the speeders are remotely in the same place.

No, we’re not done with “Obi-Wan Kenobi” yet. After getting off familiar “Star Wars” planets like Tatooine and Alderaan, the show moves to a new one — the obviously Hong Kong-inspired cyberpunk world of Daiyu. On paper, this should be a great aesthetic fit for “Star Wars”, and one that the franchise has indulged in less than you’d think. In practice, it’s yet another instance of the Volume, and all of the CGI effects around it, falling flat.

There’s a tiny market square where the walls of the soundstage are practically visible, thanks to the amount of time spent running back and forth through it. Then there’s Reva’s rooftop pursuit of Obi-Wan, with a sprawling view of the metropolis that does little to convince viewers that it’s real. As in other moments of the show (we’ll get there), Daiyu is so dark and ill-defined beyond the massive neon lights that there’s not much to even spark the imagination.

These streets don’t feel real, but instead like sets augmented by derivative effects. The action that takes place on Daiyu is awkwardly stilted as a result, with Obi-Wan and Leia trying their best to run in short enough loops so that they didn’t smack into the door to the soundstage’s access stairwell.

There are several particularly silly episodes in “The Mandalorian” season 3, and we’re not just talking about the disappointing finale. There’s the Jack Black and Lizzo episode, the aforementioned lackluster dive into the mines of Mandalore, and then there’s episode 4, “The Foundling,” in which a nasty kid in Din’s Mandalorian covert gets abducted by a “Star Wars”-style pterodactyl stand-in called a shriek-hawk.

The show’s greatest episode it is not, but it’s a mostly fine romp as the adult members of the clan make the journey to the creature’s nest to save the child. The actual confrontation with the shriek-hawk, however, is certainly one of the show’s less impressive CGI moments. Is it the worst looking CGI beastie in “Star Wars”? Certainly not. But some combination of a forgettable design, awkward staging, and season 3’s signature mid-tier effects makes the creature feel far less imposing than other monsters Din and Grogu face.

Jabba the Hutt is the subject of one of the most infamous instances of bad “Star Wars” special effects. When making edits and additions to the original 1977 film for its 1997 re-release, George Lucas took an old, deleted scene of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) talking to Jabba on Tatooine and juiced it up with a primitive CGI version of the giant slug. Later revisions gave Jabba a much more detailed look, but that 1997 pass remains iconic for all the wrong reasons.

Decades later, the CGI Hutt dilemma struck again, though admittedly with less cataclysmic effect. “The Book of Boba Fett” features a pair of Hutt twins carried around on a massive litter. Unfortunately, they look more awkward and out of place in their CGI renderings than intimidating or memorable. From the way they move to the texture of the their skin, none of it really works. There’s some rough CGI later in the show, too, including in the final battle, but at least all of that is contributing toward some big, fun action figure showdown. The Hutts here just feel half-baked.

Of all the visual faux pas in “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” this is the most disappointing — not because it’s the most egregious (it’s not), but because this moment could have been incredible.

Despite how much fans might love the idea of Obi-Wan and Darth Vader having a another lightsaber duel between their fights in “Revenge of the Sith” and “A New Hope”, it’s not really logical. Such a duel was never mentioned before, and we all knew before the show even came out that nothing was going to change. No matter who “won,” Obi-Wan would wind up back on Tatooine safe from Imperial prying eyes, and Vader would still be an evil murderer. But just ignore that for a minute. This was a new duel between Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen! It had plenty of potential, even with the narrative awkwardness.

Sadly, you can barely see what’s happening. The dark, rocky terrain where the two battle it out is not only entirely nondescript and unforgettable, but it’s nearly impossible to parse. The combination of bad lighting and nauseating camera movements make the glow from the lightsabers more sickening than cool. And that’s all before Obi-Wan hits his old padawan with some flying rocks, which is maybe the silliest part of the whole sequence.

The choreography is forgettable, and it’s nearly impossible to even follow it. Christensen gets a nice character moment at the end, and both actors are clearly giving it their all despite the unfortunate circumstances. But even that beat gets undercut by the fact that it already happened years ago on “Star Wars Rebels” between Vader and Ahsoka, after a much better fight.

We arrive now to the biggest Disney “Star Wars” CGI sin of them all. The damage done to the franchise by a vocal minority of fans screaming and crying about “The Last Jedi” is hard to quantify. The myriad problems with “The Rise of Skywalker” are the most obvious effects, but that backlash — much of it directed at Rian Johnson’s depiction of old-man Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) — also worked its way onto Disney+.

When Luke shows up at the end of “The Mandalorian” season 2, it was fine — great, even. The X-wing? The music swell? Watching a true Jedi Master version of Luke carve his way through a shipload of the most dangerous droids in the Imperial Remnant? We can all indulge in some fan service now and then. Then he pulled his hood down, and things were less awesome. But hey, it was a natural ending to Grogu’s arc with Din. Plus, we didn’t have to look at that expressionless, Muppetlike CGI deepfake version of Luke’s face for all that long, even though it was indicative of how Disney+ keeps missing the mark with the character.

But then Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau did something truly baffling. They brought that Muppet face back, in “The book of Boba Fett” of all places, and gave him multiple lines of dialogue. These scenes on Ossus are wildly out of place in a series supposedly about bounty hunter reform and local Tatooine politics. Not only that, but they present a pitiful version of Luke absent any real emotion or character traits. Plus, they just look plain bad. It’s a sad turn for a beloved character that most fans would rather forget entirely, and it perpetuated the ongoing disastrous Disney “Star Wars” tendency of being too petrified to simply recast old roles when necessary.