Via Geek.com:

The two existing Star Wars trilogies are interesting objects to compare against each other. George Lucas directed the first Star Wars in 1977 and didn’t direct another installment until 1999’s Star Wars Episode I. The rest of Star Wars’ visual iconography came from Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, though the latter might have been strong armed into certain directorial decisions by an ever-present Lucas. The response of George Lucas once he was in the hot seat for three more installments in his globally popular franchise was to treat Star Wars a little like poetry.
The prequels, the second trilogy of Star Wars movies that ran from 1999’s The Phantom Menace to 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, seemed like a sure thing, marketing wise. Lucas planned to make the story about a young Anakin Skywalker and his fall to the Dark Side and transformation into Darth Vader. The entire Star Wars “saga” would become about the tragedy of Darth Vader, told in episodes, like the epic poems of history that Lucas had used to come up with the plot of the first Star Wars.
As he can be heard saying in the behind the scenes features for The Phantom Menace, the Star Wars series of six films all “rhyme” like poetry, where you can see the repeating patterns of something throughout time. Although plot wise this doesn’t really hold up outside of vague echoes of similar situations (Skywalker males getting their hands cut off) and repeated lines across generations, visually the trilogies do become echoes of one another.
Videographer WhoIsPablo took the time to line up some of these visual echoes across both trilogies and stack them on top of each other so they become super obvious: