Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Honestly, I really like Anakin in Clone Wars, especially his dynamic with Obi-wan and how that developed. When Obi-wan says 'You were my brother, Anakin' on Mustafar, it means nothing going by the films because aside from the first 10 minutes of ROTS you never see any evidence of that comradeship or bond, they just tell is it's there. But throw in a few series of Clone Wars and you can see what he means, they really are friends and brothers by the end of it, and trust each other completely.

Likewise, at times in CW you get to see Anakin as the real hero we're told he can be, and particularly in some of his scenes with Ashoka you get the feeling that he genuinely is on the path to becoming an older, wiser Jedi worthy of the role of Master. It makes the betrayal in ROTS actually mean something and become tragic, which the films spectacularly fail to do. You can see the path he's on already as well, while in ROTS it's just 'bam, you're angry so you're a Sith now'.

 chromedog wrote:
It's not Bo Katan, either.

Her name was mentioned in one of the BTS interviews on starwars.com, and it wasn't that one. I believe it was

Spoiler:

Rook Kast

The Satine/Sabine name thing is a pure coincidence. No amount of fannish wishlisting will change it.

Welp hopefully I'll get to see how that whole Mandalore disaster works out either way (seriously that planet is a mess XD)

Yup.

I've long said the main issue with the prequels is that, quality aside, they wasted too much time on Episode 1, leaving far too much to be compressed into Episode 3.

Clone Wars if not outright rectifies that, it certainly mitigates it pretty well.

You also get a much better sense of just how much work Palpatine put into his plans. I mean.....wow. Machiavellian doesn't even scratch it.

And when he has that showdown with Maul? Just superb!

I like Rebels far more than Clone wars as Rebels is a lot darker and there are less 'kiddy' moments and it isn't dragging its feet as much. My only major complaint about Rebels is that Ashoka SHOULD have died but instead is now living as a shape shifting space owl...thing. Who died and made her the Sorceress from MOTU?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Silly question, but do you know which season you tried?

First season, I tried to endure the first 3-4 episodes but it was really bad. I know that Clone Wars took a bit to warm up a bit both with the writing and animation, but I could at least sit through the early episodes and it had some redeeming qualities, with Rebels I didn't find anything enjoyable in the slightest. Whoever did the character design and visual direction for the show needs a serious beating.

Do try the second half of the season. I promise you the stories improve quite noticeably

Also, Chopper is the best Astromech ever, and you'll have to watch it to find out why :p

I love just about everything Star Wars and it should't take effort for me to enjoy something in that setting, Battle for Endor was pretty bad... but Rebels is one of the two great disappointments of my fandom, eclipsed only by the Star Wars Christmas Special and that's some serious gak.

Fair enough.

But if you get the chance to watch 'The Siege of Lothal', definitely do so

 chromedog wrote:

 Galef wrote:


Side note: most of the "Rey's parents" theories come from the Clone Wars/Rebels shows.
My favorite is the one in which Obi-wan has a child 9that he doesn't know about) with Satine of Mandalore who turns out to be Sabine from Rebels.

It's been very soundly confirmed by the story group that Sabine is not the daughter of Satine (it's just coincidence that their names sound similar).
Her mother shows up in a couple of episodes' time, when Sabine returns to Mandalore WITH the darksaber - she is not Satine, because Satine is very clearly still dead (see clone wars for this arc) and her mother is clearly NOT a pacifist.

Yeah, because Luke always knew his father was Darth Vader. Just sayin'
It is entirely possible that Satine gave up her daughter because A) she couldn't tell Obi-wan about her & B) she needed to focus on her political stuff
So Sabine's "mother" we see in Rebels may not really be her actual mother, just the woman who raised her.

But I grant you, Sabine is the weakest part of the theory. And she really doesn't look like Rey, or rather Rey doesn't look genetically related to Sabine, nor does Sabine look related to either Satine or Obi-wan (brown eyes and dark complexion) but that could easily be because of the animation style.
It would still be cool if Rey was somehow connected to both Obi-wan & Luke, and not just another "chosen one"

Back onto Rebels, I am wondering if we actually will get a final showdown between Obi-wan & Maul, or if time has changed Maul. I am not sure how I feel about the 2 of them just sitting by the fire chatting.

-

I'm finally up to day with Rebels!

So, some things. Ok, so, the initial season. Well, yeah, it starts off really pretty darned poor, including typical 80's cartoons comic relief bumbling villains. However, relatively quickly, the show figures out what it wants to be and those bumbling comic relief villains are... How we shall we say? Resolved as a problem. Permanently.

From there, it gets better and better. And it makes me very happy in a lot of ways that they're bringing back a revised and refined EU into canon. Whether it's THRAWN or even Malachor from Knights of the Old Republic 2.

I cheered a little bit when I saw the TIE Defender pop up. If they introduce Captain Pallaeon and Admiral Zaarin, I'll be very happy. - It'd also be a way to exit the series for Thrawn. Zaarin makes a break for it (helped by the rebels) with the TIE Defenders, and Thrawn leaves to track Zaarin down.

Oh, and Kyle Katarn and Jan Ors...

And Mara Jade. And Talon Karrde. And Coran Horn.

Ok, I think that's me... Bring all that into canon and the rest of the EU can go hang.

 chromedog wrote:

Maul is even voiced by the same actor from TCW - Sam Witwer, who also did the voice for Starkiller in the Force unleashed games.
Clancy Brown also turns up here and there in the series (not voicing Savage, Maul's brother, but another character, the former governor of Lothal).

Damn, really, ol'Pruneface voices Maul? Turns out when he's not doing that single screwed-up-face expression he calls acting and sticks to voice work he has some actual range

 Paradigm wrote:
Honestly, I really like Anakin in Clone Wars, especially his dynamic with Obi-wan and how that developed. When Obi-wan says 'You were my brother, Anakin' on Mustafar, it means nothing going by the films because aside from the first 10 minutes of ROTS you never see any evidence of that comradeship or bond, they just tell is it's there. But throw in a few series of Clone Wars and you can see what he means, they really are friends and brothers by the end of it, and trust each other completely.

Likewise, at times in CW you get to see Anakin as the real hero we're told he can be, and particularly in some of his scenes with Ashoka you get the feeling that he genuinely is on the path to becoming an older, wiser Jedi worthy of the role of Master. It makes the betrayal in ROTS actually mean something and become tragic, which the films spectacularly fail to do. You can see the path he's on already as well, while in ROTS it's just 'bam, you're angry so you're a Sith now'.

Agreed. His interactions with his Clone battalion and Rex in particular also help flesh Anakin out into something resembling an actual human character with a mix of positives and flaws(or positives which can become flaws in the right circumstances).

Rebels is pretty decent. To be honest I wish it focused a little more on the actual rebels and their rebellion, but then Disney couldn't sell spinning-double-bladed lightsaber toys, and I suppose the standard "whiny teen wrestles with selfishness then becomes a better person" narrative that all kid/family show protagonists have to go through does make more sense in the context of a pseudo-Padawan wrestling with the Dark Side than it would for a non-Force user(or at least, it can be covered in a way that isn't quite so grim, since when you think about it without the Force angle Rebels would be a story about mentor figures using child soldiers to conduct terror attacks ).

Well, to be honest, the "whiny teen wrestles" thing WAS a staple for the prequels and the original trilogy, too.

(Both Luke and Anakin were very whiny teens).

Fwiw, Season 2 and early Season 3 bring in the wider Rebellion rather significantly. Season 1 is really the only one that makes the series feel like some silly 1 ship vs the Empire thing.

Yup, and as shown by the B-wing, Bail/Leia and the Hammerheads and the Wedge/Hobbie defection stories, they aren't afraid to take what was EU stuff and modify it to fit the new story.

Season 3 isn't too bad. Thrawn isn't much to speak of to start with (the EU one people remember is 30+ years older, after the Empire has fallen. This one is newly promoted to Grand Admiral, and the Empire is still at its peak.). He's yet to show what a "masterful" tactician he is, although there have been clues that he IS playing "the long game".

When he was introduced, though, they did include a nice callback to the old EU Thrawn. There was a shot of him standing in front of an artwork, with lizard creatures in it - and the composition of the shot made it look like the lizards were sitting on his shoulders (the way his Ysalamiri did in those books). That was about the only callback to that version of the character.

The actor who voices him (Lars Mikkelson) is the brother of Mads Mikkelson who played Galen Erso in R1.

I wasn't really into it at the start as it did feel a bit too sugar coated and kid friendly but as it's progressed I've really started to enjoy it. It's really begun to come into it's own.

I've been trying to watch Rebels for ages. This has probably been answered before but is it worth watching? And is the Lucas level of sugar coating kept to a minimum?

Definitely worth giving a go, it's very much in the spirit of the original trilogy aesthetically and thematically, the writing is consistently good and the cast are all cool characters. Animation is very slick, especially from series 2 onwards, and if you ever watched Clone Wars there's plenty of continuing arcs and characters from that.

If you can't get on with the start of the first series, skip ahead to around episode 6, it really picks up from there onwards and by series 2 has really hit its stride.

I agree Star Wars Rebels has had some good stuff. Except one thing.

http://i.imgur.com/Z7apJGL.gifv

Those stupid inquisitor lightsabers. I thought it was great to see someone using a regular lightsaber but with a different style of combat, more akin to fencing. It was a dynamic way of differentiating a character without resorting to a lightsaber gimmick, and then they gave them to worst gimmick I've ever seen in Star Wars.

 Mr Nobody wrote:
I agree Star Wars Rebels has had some good stuff. Except one thing.

http://i.imgur.com/Z7apJGL.gifv

Those stupid inquisitor lightsabers. I thought it was great to see someone using a regular lightsaber but with a different style of combat, more akin to fencing. It was a dynamic way of differentiating a character without resorting to a lightsaber gimmick, and then they gave them to worst gimmick I've ever seen in Star Wars.

That lightsabre is...not a good start.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
That lightsabre is...not a good start.

The show is aimed at children after all. It was the same with Clone Wars. They move towards more interesting stories and there's always the kid friendly theme floating around (stuff doesn't get too dark, the dilemmas are usually less complex, and the dialogue stays on the simple side) but you can still enjoy it quite often even if it's supposed to be for kids. It's not like the rest of Star Wars is that intellectually demanding.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
That lightsabre is...not a good start.

Yeah, it wasn't a good start. Spinny death helicopter sabers. About as ridiculous as Grievous' spinning lightsaber arms in ep3.
The inquisitors were also not Sith (as some fans seemed to erroneously believe - because they worked for the empire and had red bladed sabers) and though they were tasked with hunting down remaining jedi, against any reasonably competent force-wielder, they were going to come a-cropper (but stealing force-aware babies was more their speed) because they all had too much ego to work together properly.
Ahsoka wasn't technically ever more than a padawan (she never got to do her trials, let alone pass them) but had enough skill to show this. They were just Vader subcontracting because he couldn't be everywhere.

Looking forward to the darksaber/mandalore story coming up, though.
And the Maul/Kenobi resolution ( and we know sorta how that's going to end, and it's not going to be with Kenobi glowing all blue-white and transparent).

 Future War Cultist wrote:
That lightsabre is...not a good start.

You're going to love the part where they can use them as a set of helicopter blades and fly/hover using them.


That said.... don't judge the show solely on the blades. It looked as if that was in part for disney marketing as they wanted to release a new version of the "Build your own Lightsaber kit" that was just the previous one with a different paint job or slightly different moulds.

Helicoptering aside, the Inquisitor's lightsabers being able to spin like that does make some amount of sense. Given that they lack the reflexes of a Jedi/Sith, having the blades spin gives them a reliable way to deflect incoming saber/blaster attacks without really having to be that proficient at any of the traditional saber forms.

Though to be fair, the Inquisitors in series 2 that actually do the flying thing are a bit of a joke anyway, as soon as they come up against someone reasonable competent in lightsaber combat it doesn't go well and really they are classic bumbling cartoon villains. The Grand Inquisitor in series 1 is brilliant though, party down to Jason Issacs' voice work but also because they managed to take a setting where Vader is a thing and still make a guy who isn't Vader just as threatening and terrifying. Much like Thrawn, you have an Imperial who is competent, dangerous and genuinely more powerful than the good guys he's facing down, which is a nice change from the string of useless governers, admirals and captains we're used to.

Yeah, Rebels does villains really well for the most part.

Spinny death also gives a Jedi more to concentrate on - and arguably one they like as not won't have specific training in?

Caught up with Ghosts of Geonosis this morning.

It's a cracker, and really builds on Saw's character, doing over the double episodes 40 minutes what Rogue One simply couldn't.

I'm kind of hoping we might get similar cameos from other Rogue One peeps

I still haven't seen Rogue One - I must catch it sometime...

I did catch Trials of the Darksaber today. I enjoyed it a lot, but there seems to be a single scene that was meant to be a lot larger, but was cut out due to time restrictions.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Caught up with Ghosts of Geonosis this morning.

It's a cracker, and really builds on Saw's character, doing over the double episodes 40 minutes what Rogue One simply couldn't.

I'm kind of hoping we might get similar cameos from other Rogue One peeps

Oh, Mon Mothma and Leia have shown up already (as has Bail Organa). There will be more crossover stuff to come. The LSG (at least Matt Martin, Leland Chee and Pablo Hidalgo ) said as much in an interview on Starwars.com a couple of days ago. It was ostensibly to talk about the "easter eggs" they put into Rogue 1, but they did mention there was stuff in it that resulted from seeds planted in both TCW and Rebels years ago and that we can expect to see more of that.

Saw and Jyn had been separated for about 5 years at the point of Ghosts of geonosis.

That Sabine episode was fantastic. I think she had more lines in that episode than Season 1 and 2 combined.

'Bout damned time too, as Sabine has been the most underused wall-paper-y character the show has had.

And the music! Kevin Kiner needs to be doing SW movies. He just gets it.

Sadly I'm a few episodes behind, as I'm watching via an iTunes subscription, so get them as they release them.

But Sabine has been consistently ace, unlike Zeb.