General Star Wars Animated Series

Fully completed episodes being sold =/= almost completed ones not being finished. Even if "most of the expense" was left, a serious portion was already spent on voice acting, and animation.

They would have been completed if disney hadn't bought out lucasfilm, it's as simple as that. Work was stopped upon the purchase.

edited 22nd Mar '15 4:45:49 PM by Joesolo

That sounds... dark. I was always interested to see if they would ever bring up the concept of refugees in TCW especially since they could do allegories of how poorly they often get treated as in the real word, but a straight up massacre sounds just brutal. The Jedi deciding they have to resort to assassination is also pretty freaking dark - it actually caught me off guard at first. I guess it's another example of showing the Jedi losing themselves to the war. This also seems to confirm that Ventress and Vos are going to have some sort of romance subplot - not sure how to feel about that. Overall sounds like this could be interesting (especially since this will actually be adapting 8 episodes instead of 4 - something further confirmed by Golden on Twitter), though from what I've heard Golden isn't exactly a popular author among Star Wars fans.

Also, question regarding both The Clone Wars and Rebels based on one of the big debates here: who do you think is more competent, the battle droids in TCW or the stormtroopers in Rebels? Both seem to cause fans to cringe at how hopeless they can be (even in the movies), but they occasionally get their moments of competence. On one hand the droids seem to be helpless against the Jedi and even clones, though they at least seem to be able to aim based on how jedi deflect their fire (though I'm not so sure about the clones...). The stormtroopers might seem more competent, but we haven't seen much of them fighting Jedi so it's hard to say (and of course they can't hit anything), and many people feel like they're treated like buffoons in Rebels like the droids in TCW.

edited 22nd Mar '15 8:25:31 PM by Tyrannotitan

The battle droids, I'd say, based on how utterly nonthreatening they are. Virtually every time TCW needed to put the heroes in even mild danger, it brought on more advanced droid models or other types of mooks. And if it ever looks even slightly like they're going to seem threatening, they start up with the lame jokes. They're so thoroughly harmless that you could almost feel sorry for them - if there had ever been an actual reason to find them sympathetic, anyway.

As of right now, Droids, no question. They were at least treated as a threat and some variants (especially droidekas) usually required special care to engage. Storm troopers in rebels thus far, while not completely un-threatening, are a bit TOO incompetent for my liking. I subscribed to the idea that most of their incompetence in the movies can be explained, and they actually handled themselves well in true battles most of the time. On both Hoth and Endor they did pretty well. Endor only got them derailed when the entire local population rose up and joined forces with the rebels.

Hmm, looks like I read the question as "more incompetent". The stormtroopers aren't really that dangerous, but the battle droids (and I mean the basic B1 type) just aren't portrayed as threatening at all.

Really the only difference is that the droids in TCW had hordes of Faceless Goons to shoot at, whereas the stormtroopers are dealing with a small band, which is essetianlly the same as whenever TCW pitted Anakin against a bunch of battledroids.

That always went well

edited 25th Mar '15 6:16:30 AM by yellowturtle

Indeed it did, for Anakin

I'm still going through the Clone Wars series. It's amazing how much more likable Animated Anakin is compared to Live Action Anakin.

edited 24th Mar '15 6:04:22 PM by BigMadDraco

This series made Anakin one of, if not the, personal favorite character from Star Wars. I even got a friend who didn't like the prequels into it, and they went from hating Jar Jar to liking him.

The Clone Wars (and more specifically, Seasons 5 & 6) does an amazing job of showing why Anakin is the way he is during Episode III - and makes the Order 66 sequence infinitely more painful. I fucking broke down when I re-watched Rot S after finishing The Clone Wars.

edited 24th Mar '15 9:28:31 PM by TheAirman

I won't say I like Jar-Jar now, but if he were to have a whoopsie accident in Rebels, I'd feel a 'bit' bad for him, more than after JUST watching the prequels.

I did not like the prequel Anakin. He was arrogant and, well, just not-likable to me. I think it may have had something to do with *cough a certain actor's *cough portration of him.

I think TCW 'defined' the prequels. It added way more depth to the story leading up to Anakin ditching the Order, and before I believe it was a little 'unconnected', but after you can understand that more. Another thing the prequels didn't really do is give us Anakin and Obi-Wan's relationship. Thanks TCW, you really delivered the burn on that one.

You know what, I'll just say TCW made the prequels infinitely better in the story, since the connecting elements were there before, in the prequels, but TCW really helped get us there with the story it provided.

edited 25th Mar '15 6:26:25 AM by yellowturtle

Agreed

I don't know if this is the best place for this, but, I have to ask; people have said that Luke Skywalker was naive, bratty, whiny, and in need of someone to teach him a thing or two. But, to be honest, i didn't see that. Luke just came off as someone who wanted a chance to do something different, a chance to show what he could do.

He wanted more, but he still did what his aunt and uncle told him and was willing to turn down Ob-Wan's offer to take him off of Tatooine based on the work they had for him to do. Thus implying that he believed that there was little he could do to fight the Empire. He didn't start that fight at the Cantina, he was pretty much just minding his own business while Obi-Wan was taking care of things, wild stuff just happened to him at random while he was in that Bar, that's not his fault. He was also smart enough to see that Han Solo was trying to milk the situation in his favor by overcharging them, i don't someone who was naive would be able to pick up on that.

The General Star Wars thread in Live Action Film forum would probably be more appropriate for that, but this isn't a bad place for it. It opens up things like comparisons to Ezra's character.

Every point you made makes sense, so I don't see anything else I can add.

People's perceptions of characters don't always match how they are presented. For example; in TCW and movies, Obi-Wan is presented as not always having the best thought out plans, being a bit arrogant sometimes, having a flashy style, and being sass master supreme before the events of Rot S left him a depressed hermit. Somehow, he ends up interpreted in a lot of EU books and fanfics as a reserved, wise, extremely caring and compassionate Jedi with a lot of self doubt, especially during the prequel era. This is the same guy who's dismissive towards droids, calls Jar Jar 'another pathetic lifeform', and sasses everyone. I love Obi-Wan, but he's not the perfect Jedi everyone tries to portray him as, at least not in the prequel era.

Part of that characterization is from the 'higher-level' EU works, so to speak, in particular the ROTS novelization by Matthew Stover. As a novelization of the actual movie script—or an earlier iteration of it at the least—it's very tempting to accept it as second in canon only to the movies themselves (and later TCW and Rebels). That made it damn influential.

And it's a little at odds with the film itself. So while the novelization preserves most of Obi-wan's failings, it does play up how he is the ideal Jedi of the era, at least at heart. It's most noticeable when he faces Grievous, as Stover details how Obi-wan is the perfect counter to such a feared Jedi-killer, and when Stover compares and contrasts him with Anakin.

It's ultimately a consequence of the novelization being written before TCW, where we get lots and lots of widely available characterization. Before that, you'd need to go digging in EU sources, whereas a movie novelization (especially for something as widely anticipated as ROTS was) is much more accessible to fans. So it shaped a lot of thought in the fandom pre-TCW.

edited 26th Mar '15 2:27:14 AM by Renewal

The insecurity thing feels like a logical speculation, at least. The big question in the fandom has always been "if Qui-Gon hadn't died, would he have made a better master for Anakin?" It's not implausible to imagine Obi-Wan wondering the same thing.

Agree that the insecurity is a logical assumption to make. I also feel that to an extent, Obi-Wan's role/portrayal as the (apparently) ideal Jedi is a strength but also a flaw, in that his unwavering belief that the Jedi follow the will of the Force and therefore know best and will always be proven right is outdated and completely incorrect - the novel has Yoda reach the same conclusion, that the Jedi just aren't what the Galaxy needed anymore in their current stagnated form. Hence Obi-Wan goes into exile with his entire belief system rocked.

I feel like Obi-Wan grew out of that insecurity long before Aot C, though. In that movie he seems pretty confident about his advice to Anakin, and that what Anakin's doing is correct. And while Obi-Wan is portrayed as believing in the Council's wisdom 100%, he also is shown as reckless in his own way (jumping out of a window in Aot C, the fact that his plan in the opening of Rot S was to fly on the ship and find the Chancellor instead of anything more detailed, and in TCW such moments as taking an assassin droid to see who it doesn't react to). I'd include things like the fight with Anakin and Maul, which exemplify his rashness, but some of that can be attributed to overwhelming emotions.

New Rebels mobile game:

http://toucharcade.com/2015/03/27/toucharcade-game-of-the-week-star-wars-rebels-recon-missions/

A lot of the weirdness of Obi-Wan's portrayals is probably due to people always thinking of Alec Guinness when they write him rather than who Obi-Wan is at the moment. He gets hit with a lot of "he's quintessential 'venerable old master' archetype in science fiction, so he's got to keep that vibe even when he's younger."

Essentially, his older self is so iconic that it colors the way people characterize him even when it's set before he should have that characterization, to an extent it shouldn't. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens enough to be noticeable.

Anakin gets that a lot too: "he's one of the most iconic film villains ever, so clearly as a kid he needs to already be Obviously Evil and Vader-y."

Which doesn't really work, because it paints the Jedi Order as a bunch of dipshits who let someone with Antichrist written on his forehead be trained in the Force and expected him to do good with it.

Well, when it was just the original trilogy, the Jedi Order wasn't really around to give a different impression. Casual viewers would probably assume something was wrong with them, considering they were wiped out.

I hope there's someone around in the New EU to tell Luke that while yes the Jedi order needs to be rebuilt,he should probably not rebuild it exactly as it was before. Any organization,especially one that can sense things and mind read, that fails to detect it's archnemensis constantly hiding under it's nose needs to be reformed.