"In the Star Wars galaxy, every day can be an adventure."
— Narrator
Star Wars: Galaxy of Adventures is a Lucasfilm animated web series with shorts revisiting key scenes from the films, introducing characters, and explaining the Star Wars universe to a younger audience. Unlike Star Wars: Forces of Destiny, this series recycles dialogue from the original films, reediting them and presenting them as animated shorts.
The series debuted on the Disney YouTube channel in November 2018. The preview can be seen here
. The whole series to date can be found here.
Tropes in this series include:
- 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: All the characters are traditionally animated, but most of the space dogfights and flight scenes are done with cel-shaded CGI spaceships, similar to the art style for Resistance.
- Action Girl: Princess Leia's confrontation with Darth Vader from A New Hope is shown intercut with scenes of her leading Alderaanian soldiers in the defense of the Tantine IV as Leia goes so far as to go hand-to-hand with an unfortunate Storm Trooper, further highlighting the Blatant Lies of her claim that Vader had attacked and captured a consular ship on a diplomatic mission.
- Actor Allusion: Yoda's duel with Count Dooku has the latter looking even more vampiric than the actual film (complete with Creepy Shadowed Undereyes) as a reference to Sir Christopher Lee's long and illustrious career playing Dracula.
- Adaptational Badass: Luke in the "Join Me" short puts up a much better fight against Vader compared to The Empire Strikes Back where Luke could only dish out a Curb Stomp Cushion before ultimately being disarmed and defeated. Here, he skillfully evades most of Vader's attacks and actually manages to match him blow-for-blow despite still being outmatched.
- Adapted Out:
- Luke's doomed copilot Dak Ralter doesn't appear in "Luke vs. Imperial Walkers", presumably to avoid showing his corpse getting stepped on by an AT-AT.
- The Ghost and her crew aren't in "Darth Vader vs. the Rebel Fleet". Consequently, the resulting "battle" is even more lopsided than it was in the source material, ending in a complete massacre of the Rebel forces without Vader getting so much as a scratch.
- Amusing Injuries: Chewie, Leia, and Threepio being violently thrown around the cabin of the Falcon by Han's piloting during the asteroid chase from The Empire Strikes Back.
- Animesque: Some of the shorts, especially the staging of the lightsaber duels, are very deliberately heightened and exaggerated for effect in a way that closely resembles many anime fight scenes. Luke's character design in particular is very anime-styled. Han, by contrast, is draw with a languid smirk that heavily resembles Lupin III or Spike Spiegel.
- Battle Couple: Briefly shown when Han Solo and Princess Leia stand shoulder-to-shoulder, firing at Stormtroopers at the Battle of Endor.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: One of the shorts features Luke's encounter with the Wampa on Hoth.
- Blatant Lies: Princess Leia's insistence that the Tantine IV is a consular ship on a diplomatic mission is intercut with scenes of her leading Rebel soldiers in combat against the Imperial Storm Troopers and handing the Death Star plans off to R2-D2. Darth Vader, of course, doesn't buy it, but also doesn't realize that he's been outsmarted.
- Bodyguarding a Badass: The Alderaanian soldiers are presumably there to protect the Princess. She makes it clear in her short that she is quite capable in a fight, leading from the front.
- Bowdlerize: But not by much! The franchise's more violent moments and constant limb removal are usually kept offscreen. Vader slaughtering the Rebel soldiers in Rogue One doesn't include the poor bastard who gets sliced in half on the ceiling, but is otherwise basically the same.
- In a non-violence related example, "the hell" has been removed from Han and Leia's famous "What the hell are you doing?"/"Somebody has to save our skins!" exchange in A New Hope.
- Broad Strokes: How the series keeps itself fresh while reenacting scenes from the movies. Rather than going for shot-for-shot accuracy, the sequences use the original scenes as a guide while re-presenting them in it's own style. For example, Vader does entirely new tricks in the Rogue One rampage scene, such as boomeranging his lightsaber and telekinetically slamming rebels around until it comes back. It also seems to take place on the Tantive IV rather than the Profundity.
- "Darth Vader vs. the Rebel Fleet" does this for the second season premiere of Rebels, the primary difference being that in the retelling, Vader leaves no survivors.
- “Rey and Friends vs. The First Order” goes even further by depicting an original scene that never occurred in canon, that being her, Poe, Finn, Chewie, and BB stealing a data tape from Starkiller Base. Portions of it loosely adapt the chase on Pasaana in Episode IX and BB-8’s encounter with BB-9E in Episode VIII.
- The Cameo: Captain Rex appears in "Han Solo - Smuggler to General" at the Battle of Endor, finally confirming the long-running fan theory that he was the old soldier in Han Solo's strike team in Return of the Jedi.
- Canon Welding:
- Several of the shorts blend together elements of the new and old movies, with Palpatine's speech to Luke on Return of the Jedi flashing back to his actions in the prequel trilogy, and Han Solo's introduction to Luke and Obi-Wan includes the Kessel Run from Solo while he's telling the others about it. Visually speaking, Obi-Wan in A New Hope is drawn with a mixture of facial features from both Sir Alec Guiness and Ewan McGregor, rather than just the former.
- "Darth Vader vs the Rebel Fleet" is the first short to use voice clips from a non-movie source, taking lines from Star Wars Rebels.
- Rex appears in his rebel garb as a part of Han's team at the Battle of Endor, finally confirming that this is the case, as
Word of God played coy as to whether or not Rex was at Endor until it was confirmed at the end of Rebels and if he participated in the main assault.
- The Chessmaster: In a very clever twist, Palpatine's confrontation with Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi also includes flashbacks to his machinations in the prequel trilogy, an effective reminder of just how long Palpatine's been playing the game.
- A Day in the Limelight: In the first short that doesn't focus on one of the major characters from the movies, "Stormtroopers vs. Rebels" is, naturally, shown from the perspective of Stormtroopers across the galaxy.
- Evil Chancellor: In the Emperor's short, we see a flashback of him filling this role with Queen Amidala, using her as an Unwitting Pawn in his plans for galactic domination, and manipulating the Jedi Order and the Galactic Senate so that he is given the reigns voluntarily.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: Why yes, we do get the infamous hallway massacre from Rogue One, complete with Rebel troopers screaming in agony as Vader carves them up like a cake!
- "Darth Vader vs. the Rebel Fleet" is actually even darker than the scene it's adapting. While Vader slaughtered the Rebel starfighters with just as much impunity in the original, he was temporarily distracted long enough for the remaining Rebel fleet to limp away with their tails tucked between their legs. The short adaptation is shot in nightmarish black-and-orange lighting like the fires of Hell as Vader destroys the rebels one by one, and he flies away victorious with the Rebel flagship a smoldering ruin and apparently not a single Rebel survivor.
- "Boba Fett - Bounty Hunter" shows Boba disintegrating someone on screen.
- "Kylo Ren vs. Resistance Rebels" is, if anything, even more brutal than Vader's videos, with at least once clear scene of a Resistance trooper impaled on Ren's Lightsaber.
- Go-Go Enslavement: The scene of Princess Leia strangling Jabba in her slave outfit is depicted, which is interesting if only because the show is meant to appeal to kids above all else, and the fact the episode was otherwise highlighting her Action Girl tendencies.
- Info Dump: Some of the segments simply explain various aspects of the universe, as opposed to others which are dramatic shorts.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Played With: While Palpatine being the Emperor is given away in his short, the shorts are very careful not to reveal the relationship between Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader, even in the Info Dump segment explaining Darth Vader and his history or the segment recreating Luke and Vader's duel from The Empire Strikes Back, the scene where the revelation originally took place.
- Match Cut: Frequently used to shift between different periods of galactic history. "Jedi vs. Sith" does this to jaw-dropping, chillingly good effect, transitioning from Obi-Wan and Anakin fighting Count Dooku to fighting each other, and Luke Skywalker dueling his father on the Second Death Star to him meeting Rey at the temple on Ahch-To.
- Mood Dissonance: Dante Basco's cheerful narration can be a rather jarring contrast to the violence onscreen, like the opening of "Luke vs. Imperial Walkers", where the voiceover describes a "galaxy of adventures" at the exact moment a rebel gunner is blown to smithereens by AT-ATs.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Luke gets a glorious one when fighting Darth Vader on Bespin. All the more noteworthy for how confident he was at the start of the fight until Darth Vader began levitating and smacking Luke around with a torrent of telekinetically-launched debris. He goes from Wide-Eyed Idealist to just wide-eyed with terror shortly before being launched through a window.
- During his fight with Yoda, Dooku reacts appropriately to the diminutive Jedi master ending up perched on his shoulders during their duel. Good thing for Dooku that Yoda wasn't in a beheading mood.
- The Oner: "Stormtrooper vs. Rebels" is animated as an uninterrupted shot following the path of a stormtrooper through battle, with a Match Cut each time the field of battle changes along with the trooper, going from stormtroopers on Scarif, to snowtroopers on Hoth, to sandtroopers on Jedha, and so on.
- Rank Scales with Asskicking: Princess Leia leads Alderaanian soldiers in battle against the Imperial Storm Troopers. Darth Vader, meanwhile, is a One-Man Army capable of taking down a dozen enemies as easily as walking down the hallway.
- Scooby-Dooby Doors: When Han and Chewie are trying to repair the hyperdrive, we can see the both of them popping in and out of different access panels.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Jabba the Hutt's episode features a raucous cover of "Lapti Nek" - while Jabba is crushing and eating small animals and dropping some poor bastard into the Rancor pit.
