Clone Wars
For those of you like myself, who were disappointed (and let’s face it, a little hurt) by the heavy suckage of the three new Star Wars movies, I highly recommend that you go out and pick up seasons 1 and 2 of Star Wars: Clone Wars on DVD.
Like many people, I tried to watch this animated show on the Cartoon Network when it was presented in indigestible 5 minute episodes over the course of a few weeks. I quickly gave up. My attention span is too long for that shit.
However, my buddy Matt (AKA Vexmachine, AKA the Suckytarian) gave his word that watching the entire run in one sitting is a whole different vibe. Good call, Sucky.
Written and directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, the mastermind behind the AWESOME CN cartoon Samurai Jack, these shows really cover a lot of ground, giving you all the nonstop jedi ass-kicking Lucas teased you with but always failed to deliver (at least, not without spoiling it by constant cutaways to gungans or some other douchebags you don’t care about when there’s a lightsaber fight going on), while still managing to capture all the emotion and character development that the movies… also failed to deliver.
It’s really kind of sad, when you think about it. This Cartoon Network show, which probably only cost like a million bucks in total to produce and flew almost entirely under the mass public radar, managed to capture all the joy I experience playing with my Star Wars toys as a kid, while the three movies, which cost like 600 million, failed miserably in that regard.
The characters are more believeable in the cartoon. How sorry a Director is Lucas that he can’t manage, with an unlimited budget and an all-star cast, to capture more convincing emotions from his cast on film than Tartakovsky can with stylized anime and a bunch of no-name voice actors?
It also annoys me, because I didn’t realize how directly these cartoons tie in to the Revenge of the Sith. CW Season 2 ends with the kidnapping of Palpatine, which is how RotS opens. I wish I had know that.
Not to mention how very, very bad ass they make General Grevious out to be in the cartoon. In the movie, he’s this random coughing robot douchebag, up until his one fight scene. If I had seen this cartoon, I would have thought more of him in the movie.
There are also some GREAT scenes of Mace Windu whooping SERIOUS ass with his light saber and the force. I felt he was never really shown to be all that impressive in the movies, which made the climactic scene with him and the Emperor and Anakin ring kind of hollow to me. The ‘toon really makes him out to be something to be reckoned with.
This, however, does not excuse those failings in the movie. In making a huge epic fil like this, it is unfair of Lucas to expect that we have to get all our background from a cartoon first. A better director could have made the movie work anyway.
Still, go get the cartoon. It does a lot to wash the filth of Episodes I-III off your skin, and get the stench out of your hair.