Full Series Official "The Clone Wars" Series Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

I still can't believe that they just ended TCW as they did. How hard would it have been to say, "hey guys, you get one more season, wrap everything up!"

Or even "hey guys, we're not going to renew the series for another season, but we'll give you an hour or two block of time for a TV special (or series of specials) to wrap everything up and lead into ROTS."

Instead they went with "Surprise! You're cancelled and we're moving onto something else, and we'll release part of an incomplete season as 'bonus content.'"

 

Agreed 100%

 

I'm pretty sure the abrupt cancellation had more to do with the sale to Disney and the contractual issues that it created with Cartoon Network's affiliation with Warner Bros. than a kick in the face to the fans. The show couldn't continue on as The Clone Wars, which is why any future content will be billed as "Bonus Content". I wouldn't be surprised if breaking the contract LFL had with Cartoon Network didn't come with some kind of legal moratorium specifying a certain amount of time before the show could be reprised on any other network. This probably caused LFL to just move on to something else rather than wait so many years and then try to crank up the series again. We should all probably be thankful we're getting anything else released at all.

 

Well then why can't they be upfront about it and say "look, fans, we know you liked the show, but unfortunately it's just fallen into Rights Management Hell between Disney, Warner and CN, and as a result it's coming to an end, and being replaced with a fully in house show"

Why all this cloak and dagger routine?

 

You have a valid point there, it certainly would have helped them save face a bit in the eyes of the fans. Perhaps it was a combination of the legal B.S. and a feeling from the higher ups that the show had pretty well run it's course anyway. I kind of felt anything beyond S6 would have been pushing the envelope a bit anyway. The show did deal with a very finite amount of time after all. We'll probably never know the truth, especially since Filoni is in the fold for Rebels.

 

To a certain extent TCW may have been the victim of its own success, or rather, the success of one of its own characters. In the beginning it was kinda freewheeling and not wrapped around any one character. But in the last two seasons they built the show heavily around, and invested it heavily in, one character, to the point where said character's sudden exit at the end of season 5 might have led to a viewer drop heading into season 6. Not a massive one, but a significant one, and as good an excuse as any to nix the show, if they already would have liked it out of the way to make way for Rebels.

 

Good to hear!
Thanks for the update!

As Cut would say: To each, his own!
There were better episodes, but we all have our opinions.
And that Savage thing... I can go for hours explaining everything wrong with that character and his death. Again... just my humble opinion.

It still pains me to think of how it all went down... Sad times... sad times...

That would have been a nice and logical way to say it to the fans, but then Disney would look like they are trying to pin it on others and not just themselves. They would have looked ever more bad in the public business eye.

The whole thing (I know it is like kicking a dead horse by this point) feels like the whole Disney-Sony-"Spectacular Spider-Man" disaster.

 

Tell me about it. It annoys me to no end that we couldn't have anymore episodes that focused on Luminara, Mace, Barriss (and no, season five's final arc doesn't count), Kit Fisto, Vos, Aayla's boobs-er . . . Aayla's character! TCW shouldn't have just been the Anakin/Obi Wan/Ahsoka show.

 

That is something we can both definitely agree on. I'm definitely not an Ahsoka hater, but I never felt the show should have centered around her. The show was called "The Clone Wars" and it did seem to drift away from depicting what I always imagined that to be; the Jedi leading their clone troops into combat. To me the Umbara arc, the Geonosis arc, the Ryloth arc, and the Malevolence arc exemplified the best of this type of action. Ahsoka was present in some episodes of these arcs, but they didn't revolve around her. She was just another Jedi going to war. More arcs like these would have been better.

 

Yeah, I have to agree with you on that. First season was best for me, before the show really started trying to appeal to my intelligence. Especially the Ryloth durolgy with Mace WIndu and Ambush with Yoda, which is still my favorite episode.

Yay 400 posts

 

The sad part is that they failed on purpose. Lucas did not want to do stories about the secondary characters after Season One. That really pissed me off too...
It was a great opportunity. Some people over the years tried to defend Lucas's vision by saying that if he focused mainly on secondary Jedi and characters in general then less and less people would watch.
Something I totally do not agree with and never will. Some of the best episodes of the first 3 seasons are about secondary Jedi like "Ambush", "Lair of Grievous" or "Liberty on Ryloth".


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Indeed. Not only that the different Jedi's POV made the galaxy look bigger, but it was also interesting to see how different Jedi would handle different battles and problems that were caused by the Separatists.
No offense to any fans of Anakin, Obi-Wan or Ahsoka... but when every big battle like Kamino and Umbara and Onderon start with almost the same line of heroes around a hologram, it becomes very repetative...
There were some different people in the back, but it felt like the same start to a story every time. Not having the main cast there and replacing them with somebody new or secondary would have made it a little more diverse.

 

I know you're trying to prove a point but all those pictures are doing is making me miss the show.

 

While the series shouldn't have revolved around Ahsoka, I did feel the show should showcase (for the most part) the adventures of Obi-Wan and Anakin. I felt there could have been more involvement of the other Jedi and their interactions with them, however. The limitations the animation dealt with in the earlier episodes was probably more to blame for the lack of this than anything, but there doesn't seem to be much of an excuse for the storylines delving into the likes of the R2/3PO, droid, and young jedi arcs from the later seasons. Then we had episodes like the Mortis arc, Nightsister arc, and Maul arcs (all of which I really enjoyed BTW) that further took the action away from the focus on Jedi fighting in the Clone Wars.

 

I felt like the show should have been more serialized, with one arc leading into the next rather than "here's a story about younglings," "here's a story about the droids going on an adventure that doesn't matter," "here's more of Maul which has nothing to do with the previous two arcs," etc.

I felt like one should lead into the next. And I felt like Obi-Wan and Anakin should have been central characters, but still leaving room for other characters. Like the Mon Cala arc could have been strictly Kit Fisto's domain, but there could be consequences of that arc which lead into another that stars Obi-Wan. So even though Kit Fisto isn't in the following arc, the effects of what happened in his arc would still matter and have consequences.

One episode that I thought was sorely missing consequences was Lair of Grievous.

Some fans were complaining that Grievous lost all the time and Filoni blamed Lucas for that turn of the character and Lair of Grievous seemed like an in universe acknowledgement that the big bad CIS general actually kind of sucked. So he gets put into a situation to test his abilities and prove himself, yet the results weren't really decisive and Grievous goes right back to being disappointing, IMO.

I felt like Lair of Grievous could have been the perfect opportunity to turn things around. Acknowledge that Dooku is unhappy with Grievous and that Dooku puts Grievous in a "prove yourself or die" situation, and we should have seen decisive results in which Grievous succeeds and then from that point on we actually see improvement and consequences to that episode.

 

The show was like how you say you wish it was when Dave Filoni was in more direct control, then it got more focused on A/A/O when GL got more involved.

 

Based on what I've read in the past my guess is that GL said do a block of episodes about x but the kind of level of detail it sounds like you're talking about could have come from DF or one of the writers.

 

The idea of watching the series in a serialized format was why I was so interested in the "Chronicling the Clone Wars" blog posts by Pablo HIdalgo and then the Clone Wars episode guide that was released later. I spent a lot of time trying to piece together the actual order of the episodes. I still haven't had a chance to watch the episodes in order (my Blu ray complete series set had some "problems") but I very much look forward to doing so to see how the episodes flow when watched concurrently.

 

I love how everyone acts like they should have been put in charge of TCW because they know how to make a better tv show...

 

I love how apologists throw around the, "LOL, let's see U do betterz!" In order to try and deflect legitimate criticism.

 

That's like saying that I have to appreciate all paintings, no matter how little talent the artist has, just because I have less talent. Or that because I don't know how much work goes into making a movie or TV show, that I have to appreciate it and am disqualified from pointing out any flaws.

I could never do Filoni's job as a director.

But the writers.... I honestly do think I could have done a better job in SOME cases. Maybe not in any kind of objective sense, but I could write something that gets a better reception than plots of poisoned tea or the misadventures of a frog-slug and his droid crew. I don't think those were stories that many Star Wars fans thought to themselves "golly, I sure do wish they would some story with a delightfully annoying pit droid as the lead and a crotchety little slug colonel!"

Though unfortunately for the writers, it seems like in many cases they were forced into such terrible story ideas by Lucas.

 

So I'm an apologist because I like the Clone Wars? That's rich. Your quote, "LOL, let's see U do betterz!", is nothing but a weak derivative of an argument you clearly don't understand. I don't believe legitimate criticism is being portrayed here.